by Lauren Elkin
This crucial step towards writing came from wandering, from a need to cheer up an ugly table, to make a room her own. These notebooks were the ones Rhys would show to Pearl Adam.
The time Rhys spent with Ford helped her claim herself as a writer. In order to become a writer, Rhys had to ‘give up her dream of being a happy woman. And it was Ford himself who made her give that up, finally and forever … Like Mackenzie with Julia, he had “destroyed some necessary illusions about herself”.’13 This seems a heavy-handed reading of the affair, one that subscribes to the notion that people – especially women – must suffer for their art. Rhys’s women are not artists, as she herself unquestionably was; if anything, this is why they suffer: they don’t have anything to sustain them. And just because Rhys was unhappy when things went south with Ford does not mean that she remained unhappy ever after; she married two more men, and one must suppose there was some joy in those relationships. Let us remember that she was not an innocent young woman who was taken advantage of by a more worldly older man; by the time Ford came along she was already a thirty-year-old wife and mother. Ford was a turning point in her life; just as for Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie there was a before and an after Mackenzie, for Rhys there was a before and an after Ford. He was not some harbinger of the innate misery of the writer’s life. Rather, he was the catalyst that led to the realisation that she was irretrievably different from other people, and would never be able to get along as they did. This, I think, was the source of much of whatever unhappiness there was in her life, that drove her to drink as she did.
Rhys saw the world with what Virginia Woolf called a ‘difference of view’. It’s there in her female characters: they can’t dress right or talk right or give the right answers to questions; they give too much information or not enough or the wrong kind. The city is a place where we can finally be ourselves, but even in Paris, there’s still no escaping other people’s judgement. Some of us live ‘outside the machine’, as Rhys put it in a story about a young Englishwoman suffering from depression in a French clinic, where she’s awaiting some unspecified surgery.14 She sees the nurses and other patients as being ‘like parts of a machine’, which gives them ‘a strength, a certainty’, that she lacks, and that she is convinced they will find out she lacks. The machine is always right, and it has the power to dispose of broken parts: ‘“Useless, this one,” they would say.’ In Rhys’s 1969 story ‘I Spy a Stranger’, set in wartime England, Laura herself has become part of the machine, which even as it assimilates her, aims to destroy her: ‘[There was a] mechanical quality about everything and everybody which I found frightening. When I bought a ticket for the Tube, got on a bus, went into a shop, I felt like a cog in a machine in contact with others, not like one human being associated with other human beings. The feeling that I had been drawn into a mechanism which intended to destroy me became an obsession.’15
The men Rhys’s women get involved with are very much ‘inside the machine’; and so must they be, as providers of money and protection. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the title character stands for an English moral code. Mr Mackenzie is described as someone who had once had rather romantic ambitions. ‘Once, in his youth,’ Rhys writes, ‘he had published a small book of poems’; but then he discovered that those ‘who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people’.16 He consequently ‘adopted a certain mental attitude, a certain code of morals and manners, from which he seldom departed’. This is the code he attempts to hold Julia to. ‘My darling child,’ Heidler, the Ford character in Quartet, says calmly, ‘your whole point of view and your whole attitude to life is impossible and wrong and you’ve got to change it for everybody’s sake.’17 She must learn to keep up appearances. As Heidler rags on, Marya thinks to herself: ‘He looks exactly like a picture of Queen Victoria.’
Rhys is a much funnier writer than she is generally given credit for being.
The code, the machine, the game. Your whole point of view and your whole attitude toward life is impossible and wrong. Rhys’s woman can’t play the game; she rejects its inhuman and arbitrary rules, rules which are stacked against her. Why can’t she seem to get on? everyone around her wonders. Surely she’s not really trying. ‘Get on or get out,’ Anna thinks in Voyage in the Dark.18 I felt the same way; but while Rhys’s women can’t find an escape anywhere from the social forces that keep them down, and repeatedly make the worst of the limited choices available to them, I saw Paris as an escape from a place where I had wanted to fit in, but didn’t. Maybe that’s why I took up with this boy from Long Island: he was exactly the kind of guy who never would have gone for me back home. Dating him, no matter how humiliating, was a way of showing – who? – that I could, in fact, get on, if I really wanted to. But on some level, I understood that I was kidding myself.
* * *
I went walking with Rhys in the streets of Montparnasse. I walked up and down the boulevard, between home and school; I dined at its restaurants, sat in La Coupole, where for five francs you could get a big pot of coffee and an equally big pot of steamed milk, and stay at your table for hours and hours. Sometimes I went to Le Select and played with their enormous lazy cat. On rare occasions I switched to La Rotonde, just for a change. Cafés where Rhys’s women would drop in for an aperitif, a second aperitif, a third aperitif, until some nice man would stand them some dinner. I didn’t know how to get a man to pay for my dinners – this is not a skill you pick up at Barnard. Instead I sat for hours scribbling into those notebooks, worrying for pages over what was happening in my life. I suspected that all my wondering about this boy, analysing his every word, was a way of avoiding the truth. We were doomed; he was a dick. But, I had decided, I loved him. I would fight on.
Like Rhys, Ford was an enthusiastic city walker. In fact, he went so far as to credit a walk in London with having cured him of a nervous breakdown in 1904. In his autobiography, he recounts having been told by a certain Doctor Tebb that, given his strung-out mental condition, he would surely be dead in a month. Where another person might go home and try to get some rest, Ford headed straight for Piccadilly Circus, and walked around there for an hour and a half, muttering, ‘Damn that brute. I will not be dead in a month.’ As he fought the traffic round Piccadilly, his physical ills disappeared: by walking in this extremely unpleasant part of London, he more or less shocked himself well.19
This improvised walking cure inspired Ford to write about the city. The book he produced in 1905, The Soul of London, would launch his career. Ever Conrad’s student, Ford invokes the language of the sailor to express London’s unknowability. ‘One may sail easily round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not even the most enthusiastic geographer … ever memorised a map of London. Certainly no one ever walks round it. For England it is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But London is illimitable.’ To comprehend it, Ford writes, calls for a very particular combination of skills: ‘an impressionability and an impersonality, a single-mindedness to see, and a power of arranging his illustrations cold-bloodedly, an unemotional mind and a great sympathy, a life-long engrossment in his “subject”, and an immense knowledge, for purposes of comparison, of other cities. He must have an avidity and a sobriety of intellect, an untirable physique and a delicately tempered mind.’ He must be, in other words, a flâneur.
Ford said it was crucial for the novelist to be able to ‘pass unobserved in the crowd if he himself is to observe’. The very first thing the novelist must learn, he wrote, ‘is self-effacement – the first and that always’. This aligns the novelist with the flâneur, who is at once a man of the crowd and an observer of it.20 This is impossible for a woman like Rhys, or the women she invents. How to walk past a café terrace unnoticed, when the chairs face the street, the better to allow patrons to scrutinise the world as it goes by? While the flâneur – and the male novelist – has the freedom to pass unobserved in the crowd, Rhys’s characters move through the city, p
ainfully aware that they are mocked. They try, desperately, to be invisible. They may spend all their money on clothing – the astrakhan coat as protective camouflage – but they are inevitably caught out, accosted by men who are disappointed to find they aren’t as beautiful close up as they appeared to be from afar. They try for self-effacement, but this is impossible. They avoid meeting people they know; they steel themselves against the smirks and glares they expect to receive. ‘Pourquoi êtes-vous si triste?’ strange men in the street ask Marya and Sasha, and the question echoes through each novel like a marble dropped into a pipe. Sasha stares at herself in the mirror, downstairs in a café bathroom. ‘What do I want to cry about?’
Rhys and Ford had different ideas about the best way to write Paris. In Ford’s preface to The Left Bank he laments Rhys’s refusal to include physical descriptions of the city in her stories. Not even some of its ‘topography’? he asked. Not only did she say no, he recalled, but she went and cut the few descriptive words that had somehow crept in. She refused to romanticise Paris for him. ‘Her business was with passion, hardship, emotions: the locality in which these things are endured is immaterial,’ he observed.21
Reading these stories and novels, I find it hard to agree. They’re saturated with Paris, though perhaps not in such a way that might delight the armchair traveller, as Ford would have liked. Rhys takes some of the more familiar aspects of Left Bank Paris – the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the Boulevard Montparnasse; the Seine, a quai, a café, a shop – and transforms them as she filters them through the emotional life of her protagonists. In Quartet, when Marya’s husband has been arrested, the trees on the Boulevard Clichy stretch ‘ridiculously frail and naked arms to a sky without stars’, as if the city and Marya were one, bereft and exposed; as if the shock had transformed Marya into a dryad, or the dryad into the city.22 Later, walking down the rue Saint-Jacques, which she renames ‘the street of homeless cats’, she identifies with the felines she sees there, ‘prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud’.23 Instead of making the city an object, Marya turns it into a fantastical mirror. Then, too, walking can be a form of self-avoidance: she spends the next ‘foggy’ day ‘in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her’.24 When she has decided it’s no use worrying about things, the ‘endless labyrinth of Parisian streets’ fill her with a ‘strange excitement’.25
Sasha’s Montparnasse has a very personal topography, comprised of ‘cafes where they like me and cafes where they don’t, streets that are friendly and streets that aren’t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be’.26 All the novels are set mainly in cafés, hotels and the city streets their heroines walk after humiliating encounters in these cafés and hotels. A bit of lèche-vitrine – window-shopping – gives them something to aim for: a new hat, a new dress, a new coat, and all will be well. The city streets may blend together, or continue interminably, or remind her of London, but they contain untold surprises. Hope, in a Rhys novel, is never knowing what’s around the next corner. Marya catches at bits and scraps – the ‘drone of a concertina’, as a man tries to play ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’. His mangling of the song gives Marya ‘the same feeling of melancholy pleasure as she had when walking along the shadowed side of one of those narrow streets full of shabby parfumeries, second-hand book-stalls, cheap hat-shops, bars frequented by gaily-painted ladies and loud-voiced men, midwives’ premises…’27
Rhys’s heroines prefer the bits of Paris that stick out, rough and untameable, to those which are sanded-down, well-travelled. Against her husband’s wishes, Marya goes flâneuse-ing past the limits of respectable Montparnasse and out into the interstitial parts where the 14th meets the 15th, turning down side streets and discovering places like the restaurant ‘full of men in caps who bawled intimacies at each other; a gramophone played without ceasing; a beautiful white dog under the counter, which everybody called Zaza and threw bones to, barked madly’.28 Even on the beaten path Marya finds the places that really aren’t comme il faut. The Café Zanzi-Bar, for instance, on the much-travelled Boulevard Montparnasse which is ‘not one of those popular places swarming with the shingled and long-legged and their partners, who all wear picturesque collars and an incredibly contemptuous expression. No, it is small, half-empty, cheapish. Coffee costs five centimes less than in the Rotonde, for instance.’ In Rhys’s story ‘The Blue Bird’, her protagonist goes to the popular café Le Dôme. It is a hot day, and everyone sits outside on the terrace (‘There were the usual number of young gentlemen with high voices, carefully shabby trousers, jerseys, caressing gestures, undulating hips, and the usual number of the stony broke sitting haughtily behind cafés-crème’). The woman and her companion, however, sit inside, away from the crowd.29
Among the odd and the idiosyncratic is where Rhys’s women feel at home. In one of Julia’s walks she is fascinated by a shop window ‘exhibiting casts of deformed feet, stuffed dogs and foxes, or photographs of the moon’.30 She spends a long time standing in front of a shop in the rue de Seine, whose window features a picture ‘representing a male figure encircled by what appeared to be a huge mauve corkscrew. At the end of the picture was written “La vie est un spiral, flottant dans l’espace, que les hommes grimpent et redescendent très, très sérieusement”.’ Life is a spiral, floating in space, that men climb up and down very, very seriously.31 Women like Julia stand outside, watching them do it. But outside can be a very soothing place to be. Wandering the streets, looking in shop windows, going nowhere in particular, Julia feels ‘serene and peaceful’. ‘Her limbs moved smoothly; the damp, soft air was pleasant against her face. She felt complete in herself, detached, independent of the rest of humanity.’32 It is the tragedy of Rhys’s novels, and the lives of the women they describe, that they are denied the right to stand quietly alone outside: the machine doesn’t work that way.
* * *
On his street, the rue du Quatre Septembre, right next to his building, there was a café called Le Saint-Laurent. That my name glowed in neon right next to where he lived I took to be a good – well, a good sign. The nights all run together now, and announce themselves as one night, the first and the last. He is wearing a red long-sleeved polo and the apartment is too warm. A cat named Myrtille belonging to his flatmate (a girl whose name, unlike the cat’s, I’ve forgotten) stalks by. The kettle has boiled; a tea bag is in the mug: thé à la menthe. A jar of solid honey stands beside it. The memory of that first night, when I made the choice to stay, is distilled like the dried leaves in the bag, any time I make mint tea on a winter’s night in Paris. A little hot water and it all comes back, a room six storeys above a courtyard daubed with steel-grey cobblestones looking out over a clatter of rooftops and chimneys, the night sky shot through with bleach. I could hear Björk in my head as I looked out over the rooftops into the courtyard, Björk imagining the sound of her body slamming against those rocks. The mouth of the window welled open so wide that the rooftops and cobblestones seemed more real, more crisp, than the unreality of what was happening inside the bedroom. But the cold reality of the cobblestones kept me in place, kept me from twirling out.
Rhys didn’t commit suicide, she didn’t even try. She thought it was sentimental and cowardly. But she inched close to the edge, drugging herself with luminal, as I did with alcohol, and we both lay in bed, inert, the day after. We rolled ourselves closer to the edge to prove we could keep from going over, to savour how it might feel there. There was no perspective to be gained from our great heights; the higher we went, the closer in we got. The French have an expression for it: la joie du malheur. The Modigliani cover is just the right choice for this book, which includes a passage in which Julia feels both entranced and judged by the painting. The things that are the most fascinating can be the most hurtful.
Lying in the narrow bed in the early morning as the birds began to sing, him on his side facing the wall, me pressed against his back, my thou
ghts wandered. What am I doing here, in this grey morning, with this person who doesn’t want me, but doesn’t want me to go?
I listened to Björk a lot in those days, especially that song, with its wish to feel protected. That was all I wanted when I was twenty: to feel safe again, once I had learned what it felt like to feel unsafe. I was letting this machine person drive over me: I had to learn to push back, to get up, to back away from the window.
* * *
I was reminded of all of this well over a decade later, when I was now the professor in the study-abroad programme, teaching Good Morning, Midnight in a class on Paris in literature. The students identified with Sasha’s plight, just as I once did, on the basis of their own unhappiness, native to the twenty-year-old who has not yet learned to ask for what she wants, or may hardly know it herself. Twenty-year-olds – the kind who wander the streets of Paris looking for meaning – are hungry for experience, but they haven’t yet learned self-protection. They run headlong into despair, just to know how it feels, maybe to find out how strong they are.
A week later, I ran into the school psychologist. ‘You’re the culprit!’ she said. ‘You’re the one who taught Jean Rhys last week.’ ‘Yes,’ I said warily. ‘Why?’ ‘I had four of your students come to see me, totally shattered by that book!’ A couple of those students came to my office hours. One was the most dynamic person in the class, a Gallatin student who had so identified with the book that he waved it in the air and declared: ‘I am Jean Rhys!’ He was having a tough time romantically, and was worried that there was nothing he could do to be happy again. It felt, he said, both lonely and fascinating to be so devastated so far from home. Another came to me in tears. Her boyfriend had cheated on her. He made her feel unattractive and uninteresting.
