by Lauren Elkin
Rhys was delighted to escape England, but the stateless Lenglet was perhaps not the best horse to bet on. A passionate man who, like Rhys, leapt before he looked, Lenglet had lost his Dutch citizenship when, in the passionate early days of WWI, he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion without first getting Dutch approval, which was apparently an excommunicable offence in Holland. After the war, he longed to return to Paris with Rhys, who was pregnant. Unfortunately, passports had recently been made a requirement for international travel, and Lenglet no longer had one; by extension, neither did Rhys. He decided they would circumvent that tiny issue by taking the most direct route from Belgium into France: on foot. In her diary, Rhys remembers: ‘… here I was without money & without a passport & going to have a baby. Going without a passport to cross from Belgium to France. How? Just by walking over the frontier. By walking along the road between rows of poplar trees at night. A quiet night with a moon up. Walking along until you get past the sentry & finding yourself in Dunkirk in the early morning so tired so tired … And the fear … And there we were in France without passports or money & me going to have a baby.’ That year, the powerful men of the world had gathered in Paris to negotiate the peace and to carve up Europe, drawing new borders, and here was Rhys, walking there, right past the guards. It was a terrifying night-walk, but Rhys learned something about the reliable value of putting one foot in front of the other.
They arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1919. She fell in love with the city on the spot. The weather was fine: they sat at a café outside, eating spaghetti, the sun shining down on them. The sun she had missed so much in England – not hot like in Dominica, but sun nonetheless. No wonder she said it felt like getting out of prison: even outside on the streets of London, she felt as if she were cooped up inside. ‘I’ve been very faithful and never really loved any other city,’ she later wrote.
Although Paris and Dominica were nothing like each other, they were both totally unlike London, and they were both paradise to Jean Rhys. The boulevards of Paris couldn’t have been more different from the rocky dirt byways of Dominica. Haussmann shot them through like rays of light, creating the perfect atmosphere in which to wander and dream, or to see and be seen, depending on your inclinations. In Dominica it could take hours to travel a short distance. Rhys’s editor, Diana Athill, wrote that she could only truly understand Rhys’s ‘foreignness’ once she had visited her island. ‘Except for the one between Roseau and Portsmouth, Dominica’s narrow bumpy roads still inspire awe just by existing: so much forest to be cleared, so many ups and downs to be negotiated hairpin after hairpin after hairpin, so many tropical downpours to wash away what has just been achieved … and so little money and no earth-moving equipment! They are valiant little roads, and keeping them in repair is a heavy task.’5 An attempt was made to build a road across the island, proudly named the Imperial Road, but it was never completed (thus go all empires). For Rhys, then, roads were freighted with meaning. Being able to walk anywhere she liked was empowering enough, but to do it in the beauty of Paris was a gift.
* * *
Paris in 1919 must have felt like the centre of the civilised world. From January to July, the world’s great leaders gathered there for the Peace Conference – everyone from Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau to T. E. Lawrence, Marie of Romania, and Ho Chi Minh. The Lenglets arrived after the signing of the Versailles Treaty and the inauguration of the League of Nations, and that energy lingered. Although economists like John Maynard Keynes warned that the treaty was inequitable and would prove disastrous in the long term, the world was so relieved that the war was finally over that the naysayers were drowned out. Paris was still fragile from the war; there was a giant hole where the Tuileries rose garden used to be; along the boulevards the trees had been cut down for firewood. The stained-glass windows in Notre-Dame were slowly being replaced (they had been removed and stored away), and there wasn’t enough coal, milk or bread. But determined to move on, Paris kicked up its heels at the feeling of having a fresh start. Rhys felt the same way: Paris was a refuge. And she wasn’t alone: immigrants flocked to Paris, fleeing the pogroms, revolutions and poverty sweeping across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. The arts saw a simultaneous flourishing of avant-garde movements as well as a Return to Order (rappel à l’ordre) that turned to traditional art forms, initiated by Georges Braque’s 1919 show at the gallery L’Effort Moderne. In retrospect, the avant-garde clearly won out. Picasso, Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Kees van Dongen, Chaim Soutine, Chana Orloff, Constantin Brancusi, Tamara de Lempicka, Man Ray, Lee Miller, Tsuguharu Foujita, Robert Capa, André Kertész: all came to Paris from around the world, drawn by the formal experimentation taking place there and the cutting-edge modernity it represented. The year 1919 was a big one for literature in Paris: Marcel Proust won the Goncourt for the second volume of In Search of Lost Time; André Breton and Philippe Soupault founded the journal Littérature (soon to become the official organ of the nascent Surrealist movement), Sylvia Beach opened her bookshop Shakespeare and Company in the rue Dupuytren near Odéon; and Jean Rhys came to town.
Eighty years later, Paris seemed like the unacknowledged centre of the civilised world. I couldn’t believe my good luck, landing in a city where you could buy cheap used paperbacks at bookstalls by the river, or a newspaper covered with dense print (news, not entertainment), and sit and read it in a café for hours, where the books on the front table in any bookstore (and there were hundreds of them, everywhere) would be emblazoned with names like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze. Paris was a heady intellectual melange of ideas to process in extremely stylish settings. I liked La Coupole, on the Boulevard Montparnasse, for its art deco columns and mosaics, and the dish of trail mix they’d bring you with your Kir if you drank at the bar, or Le Select across the street, which managed to be modern and traditional at the same time, and whose impeccably professional tuxedoed waitstaff were jolly and flirtatious.
And it wasn’t just intellectual ideas I was trying to process, but personal ones, which, back then, I regarded as one and the same. Soon after I arrived in Paris, I met an American at a friend’s party. We danced on tables in a sweaty, smoky bar in the 2nd arrondissement until four in the morning. He too was from Long Island; he too was studying abroad. He looked like a Jewish Patrick Dempsey. I was insecure, and amazed that someone so attractive would be interested in me. One of our first conversations was about my background. ‘What kind of name is Elkin?’ he asked. ‘Russian,’ I said. ‘So you’re Jewish.’ ‘Half,’ I answered. But to a Conservative Jew there are no halves, you either is or you ain’t. I wasn’t ‘Jewish enough’ to be his girlfriend, so I became his non-girlfriend and hoped eventually he would come around.
I hadn’t yet discovered how important it is to agree to terms. I thought together was together and it didn’t matter what you called it. But the longer we were together, the more unsatisfying, insulting even, this arrangement began to feel. We slept together, we travelled together, but if I touched his face he’d push my hand away. He had clamped down: no love would get in or out. He made not being Jewish – or not Jewish enough – feel like a class inequality, like he was some kind of swell, destined for a society marriage, and I was his youthful indiscretion.
Then I read Voyage in the Dark, based on Rhys’s affair with Lancelot, about a chorus girl who becomes the mistress of a gentleman. He takes her out and shows her off in certain contexts but not in others, and eventually grows tired of her. Rhys’s novels provided a means of understanding what was happening with Jewish Patrick Dempsey. I was his chorus girl! But breaking up with him was out of the question. He was in the ad hoc circle of friends that always stitches together among students abroad; he was at every party, every bar, he was brought up in every conversation. I wouldn’t be able to avoid him. And anyway, I didn’t want to give up. I was convinced that he would eventually love me back: this wasn’t a Jean Rhys novel. I found out from his friend that I was the first person h
e’d ever slept with. That has to count for something, I flattered myself.
Oh, honey, don’t flatter yourself, I can hear Rhys cackle.
* * *
In Rhys’s life with Lenglet, fate was kind in some ways and cruel in others. The baby she carried died of pneumonia weeks after his birth. And their stay in Paris was not to last: a few months later Lenglet was dispatched to Vienna, and then Budapest, and then Brussels, where their second child was born. Billeted in these cities, Lenglet seemed able to keep them in relative luxury, but only at a price: they had to flee Lenglet’s debtors and take refuge once again in Paris, where, after an attempt to seek temporary asylum in Amsterdam, Lenglet was arrested on charges of theft and imprisoned. With no money and no one to support her, Rhys sent her daughter to be looked after at a clinic in Brussels, and in 1924 moved in with a journalist friend called Pearl Adam.
Good move, Jean. It’s all about who you know, especially in Paris in the twenties. Throwing herself on the kindness of friends in this way led to her big break as a writer. As Rhys tells the story, she went to Adam to try to get journalism work for Lenglet; Adam didn’t care for his writing, but she asked Rhys if she had done any writing of her own. Rhys showed Adam some notebooks she had been keeping as a diary. Adam, impressed, put them together to create a manuscript she called Suzy Tells, in three parts, with each part named for a different man, and sent them off to Ford Madox Ford, then editor of the transatlantic review. He decided to mentor Rhys, and when her first story collection, The Left Bank, was published in 1927, he wrote the preface.
Rhys was not part of the expatriate scene in Paris. Though she writes about the bohemian 5th and 6th arrondissements, staying close to the river in Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, she herself lived in the down-and-out 13th, a neighbourhood in the south of Paris that to this day has still not quite thrown off this air of shabbiness. In a 1964 letter to Diana Athill, she commented, ‘The “Paris” all these people write about, Henry Miller, even Hemingway etc. was not “Paris” at all – it was “America in Paris” or “England in Paris.” The real Paris had nothing to do with that lot – As soon as the tourists came the real Montparnos packed up and left.’6 She met Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas through Ford; the so-called Queen of Bohemia, Nina Hamnett, called her ‘Ford’s girl’.7 But she avoided their company.
Ford was a large – Hemingway said ‘walrus’-like – man and a powerful one, too. The renowned editor of the transatlantic review and English Review, which had published authors like D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and the author of The Good Soldier (1915), Ford was well known and well respected in the literary world. Ford’s personal life, however, raised a few eyebrows. In spite of his physical appearance he was quite the ladies’ man, and his unconventional love life caused such a scandal he had to leave London and move abroad with his mistress, the Australian painter Stella Bowen, in the early 1920s. James Joyce would write of him:
O Father O’Ford you’ve a masterful way with you
Maid, wife and widow are wild to make hay with you.
Ford was another of these solid, protective types Rhys sought out over and over. He quite literally created Jean Rhys, by suggesting she change her name from Ella Lenglet. More profoundly, Ford helped her not only to become a writer but to see herself as one. She had a work ethic, spending hours locked in her room committing ink to paper, but he educated her literary judgement. He helped her understand when a story was getting too melodramatic, and he gave her writing exercises: if a sentence wasn’t working, he suggested, try translating it into French, and if it still wouldn’t do, chuck it out. Ford had, in his youth, lived with the older writer Joseph Conrad, working at all hours together, collaborating on three novels. When Rhys came to live with Ford and Stella Bowen, it was his turn to play the live-in mentor. But Rhys was no bearded middle-aged Polish sailor. For a man of Ford’s appetites, a lovely young woman living in your spare room is difficult to resist, and the relationship inevitably went beyond mentoring.
Things ended badly, of course. Rhys would later find it difficult to take the full measure of Ford’s impact on her, writing to Francis Wyndham, ‘I don’t think he influenced my writing, but he influenced me tremendously which is the same thing. […] I’m afraid I can’t write about it coherently so won’t try.’8 But their affair proved to have nearly limitless literary potential, as each of the parties went on to write their own fictionalised account of it: Rhys wrote Quartet (first published in 1928 as Postures), Ford When the Wicked Man (1932), Bowen her autobiography, Drawn from Life (1941, in which she described Rhys as ‘a really tragic person’ who ‘had written an unpublishable sordid novel’), and Lenglet a novel called Barred (1932).9 Though it defies credulity, Rhys herself translated Barred into English, edited it heavily, and fought hard to see it published, under the pseudonym Edward de Nève. Some suggest she completely rewrote it: it does read very much like her own novels.
* * *
In Paris in 1999, I had no Ford Madox Ford to learn from: instead I had Ernest Hemingway. Swaggering Hemingway, whose every period is a bullet hole, in whose work, as the critic Jacob Michael Leland has written, ‘the Hemingway hero loses some version of his maleness to the first World War, and he replaces it with a tool – in Upper Michigan, a fishing rod or a pocketknife; in Africa, a hunting rifle’.10 The man who married sweet Hadley Richardson, then betrayed her with Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he then left for Martha Gellhorn, the first woman who was his equal as a writer and reporter, and whom he tried to outfox and out-scoop when she made him feel inadequate. (After their marriage dissolved, Gellhorn would walk out of the room if anyone tried to bring up her years with Papa.) I learned from this most unlikely of teachers, until I found Jean Rhys.
To say I found my copy of A Moveable Feast inspiring would be an understatement. Whereas today I would be too embarrassed to be seen in public in Paris holding a copy of it – when I taught The Sun Also Rises I refused to take it out of my bag on the métro – back in 1999 I was guileless, and sat happily reading away in a café near my flat, pausing to write in long draughts. From the first chapter, I knew this book wasn’t like anything I’d read previously, as young Hemingway evokes the city I was coming to love, what makes a café good to work in, and tucks into a café au lait, a rum St James, a dozen oysters and a half-carafe of white wine while writing a short story and looking at all the people in the café. For most of my teenage years I had been reading anything I could get my hands on, which basically meant whatever they had at the Smithtown branch of the Commack Public Library: from Madeleine L’Engle and Toni Morrison to Sylvia Plath and romance novels set in the Regency period (will the high-spirited Josephine marry the soldier or the rake?). Even books I came to at university, like Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, or E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, were all novels, and distant from my experience. But A Moveable Feast showed me a young American in Left Bank Paris, sitting in cafés and learning to be a writer. Hemingway wasn’t much older than I was, although he had been through the First World War and was married, not to mention a macho macho man, whereas I was a single, naive young university student from the suburbs, who had only ever seen a war mediated through television and photographs, pre-digested by the American news machine. But in spite of the biographical differences between us, I felt we had the same instincts. The happy intersection of the café, with all its stimulants, the work and the random people the city brought across my path, gave me the ideal context in which to write.
In the papeterie of the Galeries Lafayette I found these two smallish spiral notebooks, about the size of a paperback book, filled with unlined pages of a nice stock, not too hefty, not too light, one with a mint-green cover, the other vanilla, and carried one, then the other all over Paris with me, filling the blank pages whenever I had a spare moment. I still carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. I learned to do that from Hemingway.
But I was put off by Hemingway’s habit of approaching the city and its inhabitants with a
sense of mastery. Spying a lovely young woman sitting near the door of the café, Hemingway felt inspired to ‘put her in the story’ he was writing about Michigan, but, he writes, ‘she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone’. It’s almost a non sequitur – it seems as if Hemingway is going to explain why he couldn’t write her into the story, and instead he says she was waiting for someone, as if to say she already belonged to someone, somewhere else, and could therefore not be ‘put’ anywhere Hemingway wanted her. Unruffled, he finds a way around her boyfriend, writing, famously, ‘I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.’11 I sat in my own café and looked around me, but I didn’t see any particularly lovely girls, or lovely boys, and if I had, it’s doubtful I would have felt they belonged to me. It’s hard today for me not to bristle at Hemingway’s association of seeing with power – women, Paris, everything he surveys ‘belongs’ to him and his pencil. What I felt, on the other hand, was not a sense of possession, but one of belonging.
* * *
Rhys also became a writer by accident, after buying some notebooks. At loose ends in London after her love affair with Lancelot failed, she had moved into a depressing, bare bedsit in a neighbourhood appropriately named World’s End. ‘I must get some flowers or a plant or something,’ she recalls thinking, so she went out to look for some.12
I passed a stationer’s shop where quill pens were displayed in the window, a lot of them, red, blue, green, yellow. Some of them would be all right in a glass, to cheer up my table. I went into the shop and bought about a dozen. Then I noticed some black exercise books on the counter. They were not at all like exercise books are now. They were twice the thickness, the stiff black covers were shiny, the spine and the edges were red, and the pages were ruled. I bought several of those, I didn’t know why, just because I liked the look of them. I got a box of J nibs, the sort I liked, an ordinary pen-holder, a bottle of ink and a cheap ink-stand. Now that old table won’t look so bare, I thought.
