Stet

by Diana Athill

  This tiny incident seemed to me to give a clear glimpse of the central mystery of Jean Rhys: the existence within a person so incompetent and so given to muddle and disaster – even to destruction – of an artist as strong as steel.

  It was that incident which made me write the following lines, which I think of as ‘Notes for a biography which will never be written’.

  THE MOTHER A woman wearing corsets under a dark serge riding habit, cantering over sand under palm trees, up a track through the forest of leaves like hands, saws, the ears of elephants.

  She banished mangoes from the breakfast table and gave her children porridge, lumpy because it was cooked by long-fingered brown hands more adept at preparing calaloo. She made the children wear woollen underwear the colour of porridge.

  ‘What will become of you?’ she said.

  For all her care they were in danger of not seeming English. Her grandfather had built his house in the forest and taken a beautiful wife whose hair was straight and fell to her waist. But it, and her eyes, were very black.

  Only one child was pink and white, with blue eyes, the proof. Why was she the one so difficult to love?

  That child never asked and never told. She listened hungrily to the laughter in the kitchen, was locked in sulky silence when the Administrator’s wife came to tea, and let the eyes of old men dwell on her.

  ‘What will become of you?’ Addressed to this one the question was more urgent, even angry; and after a while was not asked because what was the good? Who is not annoyed and fatigued by perversity?

  But the child obeyed her mother. Bidden to dream of England, she dreamt. ‘When I get there,’ she dreamt, ‘it will be like the poems, not like she says.’ When she got there she found dark serge, porridge and porridge-coloured underwear. ‘My poor mother,’ she said later. She had decided long ago never to forgive a country’s whole population, so she could afford to say no more than that about one woman.

  THE FATHER A man in a panama hat and a white linen suit, leaving the house to make people better. ‘Is the doctor in?’ The voices were sometimes frightened and only he could help. He was often out, often had to be spared trouble when he was in, so it was a long time before he came into the room and found the child crying over her plate of lumpy porridge. ‘In this climate!’ he said. And after that her breakfast was an egg beaten up in milk, flavoured with sugar and nutmeg.

  He liked her to mix his evening drink, and as she carefully measured out the rum and lime juice, and grated a little nutmeg over the glass, she knew she was a pretty sight in her white frock which hid the woollen vest.

  It was his mother who sent the child books for Christmas and all the grown-up books in the glass-fronted case were his, except The Sorrows of Satan which was her mother’s. And when he was a boy he ran away to sea because people were unkind and he couldn’t bear it.

  When he died there was no more money and no more love, and no one, she saw after that, could be relied on. But: ‘I have always been grateful to my father,’ she said later, ‘because he showed me that if you can’t bear something it’s all right to run away.’

  THEIR DAUGHTER She didn’t want to hurt the man, but she went with him. Her new dream was Paris and he could take her there. He came at a time when her bad luck was so bad that she deserved a little good luck for a change. She thought: ‘Poor man, I am sorry about this, but I would have been done for if he had not turned up to make life less difficult.’

  She didn’t want the child to die, but when it went a strange colour and wouldn’t eat she thought: ‘This baby, poor thing, has gone a strange colour and won’t eat and I don’t know what to do. I’m no good at this.’ So she took it to a hospital and left it there. When they wrote to tell her it had died she saw that life was as cruel as she had always believed. But it did become less difficult.

  She wanted to keep the other child, but where could she have put her? How could she have fed her? She thought: ‘Perhaps one day my luck will change and I will get her back.’ Her luck did change, and after that she saw the child from time to time; but the child loved her father better than she loved her. That was unfair. But it did make life less difficult.

  Cruelty had never surprised her because she had always heard it sniffing under the door; and the exhausting difficulty was her own fault. She knew that others who wanted blue skies, pretty dresses, kind men, went out to find what they wanted, but she was no good at that, she never had been. So all she could do was wait for her luck to change. And dream. ‘If you dream hard enough, sometimes it comes true.’ She could dream very hard, and when it failed to work she dreamt harder. But never hard enough to dream away one thing: her gift. She ran away, she dodged, she lay low, but her gift was always there. Over and over again it forced her to stand, to listen to the rattling door and put what she heard into words which were as nearly precisely true as she could make them. She said about her gift: ‘I hate it, for making me good at this one thing which is so difficult.’

  Perhaps she thought that true. She could not see herself when she was working. Out of her eyes, then, looked a whole and fearless being, without self-pity, knowing exactly what she wanted to do, and how to do it.

  * * *

  * Dominica has adopted the appellation ‘The Commonwealth of Dominica’. The Dominican Republic, also in the Caribbean, is a different country, which shares an island with Haiti.

  * I owe both this and the next quotation to Lennox Honychurch’s The Dominica Story.

  * Figures from Peter Hulme’s essay ‘Islands and Roads’, The Jean Rhys Review.

  * In Smile Please, her last book. The writing is less taut and evocative than it used to be.

  * In Jean Rhys: Letters 1931–1966, edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, André Deutsch, 1984.

  ALFRED CHESTER

  IT IS POSSIBLE that I am the only person in the United Kingdom who remembers Alfred Chester and his books: what he wrote was too strange to attract a large readership, and we did not overcome this problem. But he remains the most remarkable person I met through publishing and I, and his friends in the United States who, since his death in 1971, have been finding new readers for him, continue to think and talk about knowing him as one of our most important experiences.

  He was twenty-six when I first met him in 1956, the year we published his novel Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire and his stories Here Be Dragons. First impressions? The very first was probably of ugliness – he wore a wig, his brows and eyelids were hairless, his eyes were pale, he was dumpy – but immediately after that came his openness and funniness. It didn’t take me long to become fond of Alfred’s appearance.

  He also inspired awe, partly because of his prose and partly because of his personality. Alfred wore a wig, but never a mask: there he sat, being Alfred, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He was as compactly himself as a piece of quartz.

  He had come to London from Paris, where he had been kicking up his heels in green meadows of freedom from his conventional, even philistine, Jewish family in Brooklyn. Already brilliant young New Yorkers such as Susan Sontag and Cynthia Ozick, who had known him when they were students together, were eyeing him nervously as one who might be going to outshine them, but he had needed to get away. And now he was in a stage of first-novel euphoria, ready to enjoy whatever and whoever happened. Meeting him, whether alone or at parties, reminded me of the excitement and alarm felt by Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostov on meeting her seducer and knowing at once that between her and this man there were none of the usual barriers. Something like that shock of sexual accessibility can exist on the level of friendship: an instant recognition that with this person nothing need be hidden. I felt this with Alfred (though there was a small dark pit of secrecy in the middle of the openness: I would never have spoken to him about his wig).

  On his second visit he was with his lover, a very handsome young pianist called Arthur. When I went to supper with them in the cave-like flat which they had rented or borrowed, Arthur spent much time gazing
yearningly at a portrait of Liszt, and I wondered whether Alfred was husband or wife in this menage (heterosexuals are always trying to type-cast homosexuals). I decided eventually that, on that evening, anyway, what he mostly was was Mother.

  That was the first time he talked to me about identity, explaining how painful it was not to have one: to lack a basic ‘I’ and to exist only as a sequence of behaviours. Did I have a basic and continuous sense of identity, he asked, and I was tempted not to say ‘Yes’ because such a commonplace lack of anxiety seemed uninteresting compared with the condition he was claiming. I think I put the temptation aside because I didn’t take him seriously. How could quartz-like Alfred feel, even for a second, that he had no basic identity?

  Nevertheless I remember that long-ago talk very clearly. Perhaps I am being wise after the event, but it seems to me there was a slight judder of uneasiness under the surface which fixed it in my head.

  Through ‘56 and ‘57 we exchanged letters, and one of his contained a passage which now seems obviously deranged.

  I was running away from the police, through Luxembourg which is incredibly beautiful (a valley in the midst of a city), then to Brussels and back to Paris in thirty-six hours without sleep only to find that no one was chasing me after all. Unless they are being incredibly clever. You see, I’ll be able to do things like that when I finish my book.

  That sounds like paranoia. And how does the last sentence connect with the first two? But I was not much disturbed by this letter at the time. The rest of it was cheerful and normal, and the sobriety of my own life compared with Alfred’s must have made me assume that his might well include mystifying events.

  A letter of mine dated July 1959 reminds me that one of his London visits ended when he disappeared without a word.

  . . . at one time, a long time ago, there was an extraordinary panic in London. John Davenport kept calling me and Elizabeth Montagu kept calling me and I kept calling J.D. and E.M. and they kept calling each other and at one point an excursion was organised to Archway to confirm that you really had vanished and were not lying there sick unto death, or dead, or were not under arrest. After a while we said to each other ‘Look, if any of those things had happened we’d have heard somehow. Wherever he is he must be all right.’ So we gave up.

  It was about a year after this disappearance that a visiting New Yorker let fall that Alfred was back in New York, and gave me the address to which I sent the above, whereupon Alfred replied that yes indeed, he’d become fed up with Greece and was now installed in a Greenwich Village apartment ‘with a roof garden!’. And that was where I next saw him when I was on a business visit to New York: in almost unfurnished rooms above the theatre in Sullivan Street, where I found our friendship in good health.

  Alfred had to lead the way up the stairs because he was feuding with the landlord who had taken to leaving brooms and buckets in the darkness, to trip him and send him crashing through the frail and wobbly banisters. As we climbed he described the feud with great relish. It was still daylight, so he took me right to the top to show me the roof garden – the heat-softened asphalt of the roof’s surface, thickly studded with dog turds. Dutifully I leant over the parapet to admire the view and the freshness of the breeze, but I was shocked. Dogs are quasi-sacred in my family, and I had been raised in the understanding that they don’t ask to belong to people, so – given that we have taken them over for our own pleasure – it is our duty not only to love them but to recognize their nature and treat them accordingly. Never have I denied a dog exercise and the chance to shit in decent comfort away from its lair – adult dogs, except for half-witted ones, dislike fouling their own quarters. I saw soon enough that Alfred’s beloved Columbine and Skoura, whom he had rescued in Greece, were a barbaric pair, perfectly happy to shit on the roof – and indeed on the floors, and the mattresses which lay on the floors to serve as beds. They had never been house-trained, and Skoura, anyway, was half-witted. But still I was disconcerted that Alfred was prepared to inflict such a life on his dogs.

  It was dark by the time we sat down by candlelight (the electricity may have been cut off) to eat mushrooms in sour cream and some excellent steak, and the dim light concentrated on the carefully arranged table disguised the room’s bareness and dirt. Halfway through the meal we heard someone coming up the stairs. Alfred hushed me and blew out the candles. A knock, a shuffling, breathing pause; another knock; another pause; then the visitor retreated. When Alfred relit the candles he was looking smug. ‘I know what that was. A boy I don’t want to see any more.’

  That led to talk of his unhappiness. Arthur, the most serious and long-lasting of all his loves, had left him. He was trying to force himself into an austere acceptance of solitude, but like a fool kept on hoping, kept on falling into situations which ended in disappointment, or worse. The boy on the stairs was the latest disappointment, a chance pick-up who turned out to be inadequate. I said: ‘But Alfred, dear heart, what makes you think it likely that someone you pick up in a urinal will instantly turn into your own true love?’; to which he replied condescendingly that I had no sense of romance.

  My two favourite memories of New York were given me by Alfred during my visit: he showed me the only pleasure in the city which could still be had for a nickel, and he took me to Coney Island. The nickel pleasure was riding the Staten Island ferry there and back on a single fare, which meant hiding instead of landing at the end of the outward journey. Early on a summer evening, when the watery light and the ting-tong of a bell on a marker-buoy almost turned Manhattan into Venice, it was indeed a charming thing to do. And Coney Island was beautiful too, the water sleepy as it lapped the dun-coloured sand, the sound of the boardwalk underfoot evoking past summers which seemed – mysteriously – to have been experienced by me. Sitting on the beach, we watched the white flower of the parachute jump opening and floating down, opening and floating down . . . Alfred teased me to make the jump but I’m a coward about fairground thrills, and jibbed. He was afraid, too, and told stories about famous accidents. He showed me where, when he was a child, he used to climb down into the secret runways under the boardwalk, and instructed me in methods of cheating so that this or that could be seen or done without paying. He was fond and proud of the child who used to play truant there and had become so expert at exploiting the place’s delights, and as we sat beside each other in the subway, going home, I felt more comfortably accepted by New York than I had ever done before. I don’t remember him ever talking about the pleasures of being an enfant terrible reviewer, capable of causing a considerable frisson in literary New York, which he was at that time.

  Being the publisher of someone whose books are good but don’t sell is an uncomfortable business. Partly you feel guilt (did we miss chances? Could we have done this or that more effectively?), and partly irritation (does he really expect us to disregard all commercial considerations for the sake of his book?). Alfred gained a reputation for persecuting his publishers and agents with irrational demands, but with us he was never more than tetchy, and most of the uneasiness I felt came from my own disappointment rather than from his bullying. In England he was all but overlooked: a few reviewers made perfunctory acknowledgement of his cleverness and the unusual nature of his imagination, but many more failed to mention him. Our fiction list was well thought of by literary editors, and I had written them personal letters about Alfred. I was driven to wondering whether the favour we were in had backfired: had they – or some of them – taken against his work and decided that it would be kinder to us not to review it at all, rather than to review it badly? Only John Davenport, a good critic who had become Alfred’s friend out of admiration for his writing, spoke out with perceptive enthusiasm.

  I have forgotten when Alfred moved to Morocco and whether he told me why he was doing so (Paul Bowles had suggested it at a party in New York). The first letter that I still have with a Tangier address was written soon after the publication in England of his collection of stories, Behold Goliath, early i
n 1965.

  Dear Rat

  Why haven’t you written?

  Why didn’t you let me know about publication?

  Why haven’t you sent me copies?

  Why haven’t you sent me reviews?

  I will not make you suffer by asking why you didn’t use the Burroughs quote, though I would like you to volunteer an explanation. I hope you will write me by return of post.

  I’m coming to England, either driving in my trusty little Austin or by plane which terrifies me. I’m coming with my Moroccan boyfriend, and the real reason for the trip is to get his foot operated on. He has a spur, an excrescence of bone on the left heel, due to a rheumatic process. I’m afraid of doctors here. But please keep this a secret as they probably won’t let us into England if they find out . . . I would appreciate it if you would check up on surgeons, bone surgeons or orthopedic specialists. I have some money so it doesn’t have to be the health insurance thing, though that would help . . . They always used to fuss about me at the frontier, so there’s bound to be a fuss about Dris. I am going to tell them that we are going to be your guests over the summer. I hope this is okay with you (for me to say so, not for us to stay) and that if they phone you or anything you will say yes it’s true. Please reply at once.

  Oh, I don’t know if Norman [Glass] mentioned it, but I don’t wear a wig any more. I thought I’d better tell you in advance so you don’t go into shock. I like it better this way, but I’m still somewhat self-conscious.

  Edward [Field] says I must give you and Monique Nathan* a copy of The Exquisite Corpse immediately. Epstein** says: ‘I doubt very much that I can publish the book in a way that will be satisfactory to you, and I don’t want to compound our joint disappointment in Goliath. The other reason has to do with the book itself. I recognize its brilliance – or more accurately I recognize your brilliance – but I confess that I’m baffled by your intentions, and I’m concerned that I would not know how to present the book effectively. I don’t mean that for me the book didn’t work; simply that it worked in ways I only partly understood. Or in ways that suggest it is more a poem than a novel, though whether this distinction clarifies anything is a puzzle.’