by Lauren Elkin
Sophomore year I moved to New York, where I lived in a dorm on 121st and Amsterdam, and fell in love with the Upper West Side. Up and down the length of those avenues I went walking, Broadway, Amsterdam, Riverside, which turned into West End Avenue, down to 110th Street and across to Central Park, down Central Park West to the Museum of Natural History. I gaped at the gargantuan ornate apartment buildings, the wide boulevards, Zabar’s, H&H Bagels, the Hungarian Pastry Shop with its sticky glazed croissants, the men selling books on folding tables on Broadway. To sit in a restaurant on Broadway with the world walking by and the cars and the taxis and the noise was like finally being let in to the centre of the universe, after peering in at it for so long.
I fantasised about my life after graduation. I would live in an apartment, and not a house. A musty book-filled one on Riverside Drive or West End Avenue, in the kind of building with an awning that extended out onto the sidewalk. I didn’t much care about the doorman, but I wanted the awning. And I would have built-in bookshelves, and Turkish rugs, and my psychoanalyst friends would come over and we would drink lapsang souchong while talking about the books we were writing and the affairs we were pursuing. It was a fantasy cobbled together from Woody Allen films, a few visits to professors’ homes, and someone’s great-aunt’s apartment.
Let loose in the city, I would walk down 116th Street, past the curved buildings, to Riverside Park and sit on a bench and feel so lucky, so lucky to be able to get up and go someplace like that whenever I wanted to. That was the definition of freedom. Not just the time and not just the transit: being able to do that in an environment that felt created for people, not machines, shaped and sustained by some kind of belief in having nice places for people to be, together, in public.
There was something haunting the city then, the ghost of Dorothy Parker or Edith Wharton or someone I hadn’t read yet. It lived in the buildings lopsided with age on Barrow Street, in the brownstones in Murray Hill coming up from the Midtown Tunnel. It was in those book-stuffed apartments on West End Avenue. It was in the square tiles in their beat-up bathrooms. I wanted to capture it in my writing; I wanted to be it. A woman who interviewed me to be her research assistant took me for a drink at the Algonquin and I thought: This. This is making it.
* * *
At Barnard I learned to think critically, and I turned this new power on the suburbs. I became suspicious of an entirely vehicle-based culture; a culture that does not walk is bad for women. It makes a kind of authoritarian sense; a woman who doesn’t wonder – what it all adds up to, what her needs are, if they’re being met – won’t wander off from the family. The layout of the suburbs reinforces her boundaries: the neat grid, the nearby shopping centre, the endless loops of parkways, where the American adventure of the open road is tamed by the American dream. Think of all the rebellious suburban women killed off in literature, from Madame Bovary to Revolutionary Road. Dream big, end up dead. Thelma and Louise could never come home to the suburbs. I began to think of houses the way Marguerite Duras did: places ‘specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they’ve had since time began’, but to ‘children and men’ I added ‘and women’.9
As I became alert to the city, I became alert to women’s history, literature, politics, as if it were impossible to learn about one without the other. I read everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Brownmiller. Once I became aware of that alternative history, it gave me something to move towards, and I began to seek out its clues, scattered throughout the world.
I wasn’t naive enough to idealise the city as a place of equal access and possibility. Certainly Columbia University’s complicated history with its neighbourhood testified to the contrary.10 But it is in the practice of the city that we have the best chance of making a just world. Freedom of movement is an intrinsic part of that.
* * *
Let me walk. Let me go at my own pace. Let me feel life as it moves through me and around me. Give me drama. Give me unexpected curvilinear corners. Give me unsettling churches and beautiful storefronts and parks I can lie down in.
The city turns you on, gets you going, moving, thinking, wanting, engaging. The city is life itself.
line 10 at Duroc get off at Cluny-la-Sorbonne walk north up rue Boutebrie get lost in warren of medieval streets full of Turkish and Greek restaurants whose owners implore you to step inside with promises of plates broken against walls and all the doner meat you could dream of past the old Tunisian bakery out past the church and left onto the rue Saint-Jacques clogged with tourists and a right onto a small street just south of the park whose name nobody knows except the people who live on it, and those who work in the bookshop
PARIS
CAFÉS WHERE THEY
But what if it were heaven when she got there?
– Jean Rhys, ‘In the Rue de l’Arrivée’
I was in Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank of Paris when I saw her looking at me. This dark-eyed Modigliani woman with an elongated neck and dark almond holes for eyes, reclining in a passionate attitude on the cover of a paperback book called After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. She looked troubled, distraught, aroused, all at once. I picked it up, turned it over, and read the back cover:
JULIA MARTIN IS IN PARIS AND AT THE END OF HER ROPE.
The author was someone called Jean Rhys. It was the ‘Rhys’ part that first caught my interest. I had a brief love affair with all things Welsh as an early teenager after inhaling the historical fiction of Sharon Kay Penman, which was largely about Wales’s loss of independence in the thirteenth century. As a teenager stuck in the suburbs, I think I sympathised with Wales.
There were a couple of other books by this Welsh person, which all seemed to be about Paris. There was one called Quartet:
AFTER HER HUSBAND IS ARRESTED, MARYA ZELLI FINDS HERSELF ALONE AND PENNILESS IN PARIS.
And one with the Dickinsonian title Good Morning, Midnight:
SASHA JENSEN HAS RETURNED TO PARIS, THE CITY OF BOTH HER HAPPIEST MOMENTS AND HER MOST DESPERATE.
The publishers couldn’t have targeted their copy to their audience more effectively if they had held a focus group made up specifically of oversensitive American co-eds. These were just the words to resonate with a twenty-year-old who’s beginning to suspect – nay, to hope – that life is going to be far more unhappy than she had previously supposed. I read everything I could get my hands on by and about Jean Rhys, whose taut, terse sentences were steeped in gorgeous sorrow yet skirted sentimentality. From her, I learned an aesthetics of pain that refused to self-romanticise. That’s an important distinction, one that took me a while to understand, and one that’s often overlooked by those who misread her. The novels made suffering feel purposeful, meaningful – if I have to live through this horrible thing at least I can write about it. But it’s a slippery slope; before you know it you’re putting yourself through horrible things just so you can write about it.
Rhys is smarter than that. We have to be, too, to read her right.
* * *
At twenty, I hadn’t experienced anything like what Rhys’s characters had been through: exile, poverty, abandonment, abortion, the death of a child, alcoholism, near-prostitution, or that scourge of Rhys’s Paris novels, the onset of age. A twenty-year-old doesn’t know what physical decline is; she can only imagine, as inconceivable as a moon-landing, the arrival of lines on her face, the deepening of grooves she didn’t know she had, the loss of elasticity in her skin, the hair follicles that give up making pigment, the suddenly unreliable joints, the once-legible typeface that now seems impossibly small. I was lucky enough to have parents who supported me through college. Rhys’s women have little to no family, no personal income, and often can’t hold down a job. It’s up to them to find a man to buy them a drink, give them a fiver, buy them some clothes, pay the rent.
And yet I felt jaded and cynical, used-up. ‘Oh God I’m only twenty and I’ll have
to go on living and living,’ Rhys wrote in the black exercise book she picked up one day in London that served as her journal. The final lines of her 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight rang true to me: when, having lost the man she thinks she could have loved, Sasha allows a complete stranger – a neighbour who for most of the novel has been a menacing presence in the hallway – to enter her room and make love to her. She lies in bed, holding her arm over her eyes. Someone enters her bedroom. It might be René, the man who has just left. It might be the man who lives in the bedsit next door. She knows without looking which one it is. The very last lines of the book go like this:
He stands there, looking down at me. Not sure of himself, his mean eyes flickering. He doesn’t say anything. Thank God, he doesn’t say anything. I look straight into his eyes and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. For the last time … Then I put my arms around him and pull him down to the bed, saying ‘Yes – yes – yes…’1
I hadn’t yet read Joyce’s Ulysses, so I didn’t see that this was a grim response to that novel’s infamous last lines, Molly Bloom’s incantatory yes I said yes I will Yes. The earthy affirmation of Molly’s monologue is mocked by Sasha’s deadened acceptance of whatever life has in store for her. It’s that first loss of love that does it, separates us into Sashas and Mollys. It’s how you respond to that loss when nothing coheres any more, when you feel your life is spent, and you no longer care what happens to you or who you allow into your bed.
The women Rhys describes are similar enough that they used to be referred to in the singular, as the Rhys heroine. Definitely Sashas rather than Mollys; there is not a joyous one in the bunch. Life has beaten the joy out of them. But they are not all the same woman; and they are not quite fictionalised doubles of their author. They are, on the contrary, spectres of Rhys’s worst nightmares of how her life could have been, based on the few autobiographical details they share. Anna in Voyage in the Dark has much in common with Rhys: a West Indian upbringing, a stint as a chorus girl, an affair with a wealthy older man; in the original manuscript she dies of a botched abortion. (Rhys’s publishers made her change this.) Quartet’s Marya is a cipher, with no real backstory beyond occasional references to having lived in England where she had a brief stint as a chorus girl. She is an expatriate everywoman, with no country, no past, no future. The romantic mess she finds herself in, however, was inspired by Rhys’s affair with the writer Ford Madox Ford. Julia, whose story picks up where Marya’s leaves off, returns to London midway through After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, in the hopes that her family – poor but respectable – can give her some support. She is the first Rhys woman to have lost a child, like Rhys, unless you count Anna’s abortion. Julia has a trans-European background – her child, Mackenzie recalls, died ‘in Central Europe, somewhere’ – but she also has a mother, and a sister, and childhood memories in England. In short, she has a context. Sasha, in Good Morning, Midnight, has the fullest backstory and shares Rhys’s biography more closely than Marya and Julia, except for the fact that by Sasha’s age Rhys was married to Leslie Tilden Smith and living in London, returning to Paris to research her novels. She may have felt desperation during those years, but nothing like Sasha’s.
They can seem maddeningly passive; dependent on men for money, they spend it on clothing the moment they get any. They have a self-destructive streak, and their author was at times comfortable, even thrilled, by self-abasement: Rhys writes of finding it ‘humiliating and exciting’ to think to herself: ‘I belong to this man, I want to belong to him completely.’2 Many of Rhys’s readers recoil at a character like Sasha, who seems to abdicate responsibility for herself, and let what will happen, happen. I’m not sure it’s passivity so much as a will not to be hurt by the things that happen to a single woman who gets attached too easily. But the alternative is not to get attached at all, and what is the point of a life without attachments?
Rhys relates in her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, that she once told a Frenchman: ‘“I can abstract myself from my body.” He looked so shocked that I asked if I was speaking bad French. He said “Oh non, mais … c’est horrible.” And yet for so long that was what I did.’ This willingness can make Rhys’s women seem passive, static, stagnant, as if they’re daring the world to do its worst. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, when Julia goes to London, she chooses her hotel by asking the taxi driver to take her somewhere. By Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha is taking excessive amounts of veronal ‘so I could sleep fifteen hours out of the twenty-four’.3 Marya, the protagonist of Quartet, is described as ‘reckless, lazy, a vagabond by nature’;4 it seems as if she makes no choices for herself, but rather ‘ends up’, again and again. Even as she wants to run away from the Heidlers, Marya can’t bring herself to leave. She is fully aware that it is something irrational which keeps her there: ‘I don’t like him or trust him. I love him.’
Paris, a city with a soundtrack in a minor key, is the ideal setting for this kind of self-relinquishing. There is a certain pain, related to love and loss, that it amplifies until it almost feels good. And it was the ideal setting for my own first encounter with the addictive pleasure of despair.
* * *
Rhys’s inability to operate by the same social guidelines as everyone else frequently brought her trouble, if not outright tragedy. Her first child died in infancy – of neglect, she believed. She was frequently brought up on charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct. She did a stint in Holloway prison. She had an estranged daughter, Maryvonne, who spent time in a concentration camp during the Second World War. She suffered from alcoholism, cultural dislocation, alienation. Depressive rage. Bursts of creativity. All of this made it into her novels and short stories. But Rhys left so little primary material behind – she explicitly said she did not want to be the subject of a biography – that those who went ahead and wrote her life anyway resorted to calling on Rhys’s fiction as if it provided an eyewitness account of her life, recreating Rhys as one of her characters.
Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in 1890 in the West Indies, her father was Welsh (aha!) and her mother Scottish/Creole. Her plantation-owning family had lived in Dominica for three generations. Though her father was doting, her mother was emotionally distant, and neither kept a particularly close eye on their daughter, to such a point that at least one of their friends helped himself to her adolescent charms while no one was looking.
But on the whole, and in retrospect, Rhys was happy in Dominica. Everything was suspended there; it was as if nothing would ever come due. But there was no longer any future there for the Rhys clan; their fortune lost, they were slowly trickling home. After an early life spent dreaming among the wild colours and languid Caribbean foliage, Rhys was sent to school in England in 1906. When she first arrived, she was devastated by the grey drabness of it all. All ‘brown’ and ‘dingy’, it did not match the England of her fantasies, which she had imagined full of colour and light. It should have been a homecoming, but instead it was the most disheartening kind of reverse exile. She suffered through boarding school in Cambridge, where the other students ridiculed her sing-song Caribbean accent, calling her a ‘coon’. She gave riveting performances in the school theatricals, and, thinking that her talents perhaps lay in the theatre, she persuaded her father to let her study at Tree’s School in London, today the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But her accent kept her from fitting in there, too. Another girl might have worked to neutralise her speaking voice, but Rhys refused. She expected to be taken as she was. To be rejected on the basis of something as petty as her voice, she thought, was more of an indictment of the world than of her.
When her father died, the family ordered her home to Dominica, as they could no longer support her abroad. But she took matters into her own hands. Rather than return home, or languish, depressed, in London, she got herself moving, touring the north as a chorus girl in a production of Our Miss Gibbs. The provincial towns were as cold and wet as London, but they at least provided some adve
nture. She became aware of her charms, and how to use them to her advantage, eventually becoming involved with a wealthy man. Of course, it didn’t work out. His name, most improbably, was Lancelot. This was the great love Rhys never recovered from, and for decades to come, she would turn to Lancelot when things looked bleak. She was too contrarian and too ‘vague’ (her word) to hold down a job; she came to rely on the kindness of friends and lovers. In search of stability, she married, often.
* * *
In 1919, Rhys drifted into Paris, the place that would make her into a writer. In fact, she walked there.
Having spent the war living on an allowance from Lancelot, volunteering at a canteen in Euston for soldiers on their way to France, in early 1918 she met a Dutch journalist called Jean Lenglet. He had a flat near hers in Bloomsbury; they had friends in common, and would spend evenings smoking and arguing at the Café Royal. He had joined the French Foreign Legion and worked in intelligence: he wouldn’t tell Jean exactly what he did, but it called for him to travel covertly through Germany, the Netherlands, London and Paris. Jean waited for him when he went away. The Armistice gave them the reprieve they needed: by Christmas they were engaged, and on 30 April 1919 they were married in The Hague.
