by David Plante
She said, “Now, David, if that ever happens to you with a lady again, don’t get into a panic. You put the lady on her bed, cover her, put a glass of water and a sleeping pill on the bedside table, turn the lights down very low, adjust your tie before you leave so you’ll look smart, say at reception that the lady is resting, and when you tell the story afterwards you make it funny.”
I ordered glasses and ice. A young man with a long gold earring, white hair, and a suit that looked as though made of black plastic, came in with a tray; he placed the tray on a low table by Jean and kissed her, said, “Darling, blue has to be your favourite colour, it suits you so,” and Jean, giggling, said, “I never wear green, that’s an unlucky colour for me.” The young man made the drinks for us.
Jean raised her glass to me and smiled; I raised mine to her.
She was, I realized, happy: she was wearing a pretty dressing gown in a pretty room. One of the signs of Jean’s happiness, I came to realize, was her sadness; happy, she allowed herself to be, at least a little, sad. When she was really unhappy, she was angry. She had been unhappy at the hotel in Kensington; instead, however, of taking a practical step to change the hotel, even to asking for another to be found for her, she simply raged, as though nothing could be done and all she could do was rage. Now, in another hotel, she smiled a little sadly when I told her she was looking beautiful.
She said, “Wouldn’t what happened to us make a funny story? We should write it.”
I was somewhat amazed that she should so quickly think of turning the episode into a story; but I was excited, too. “Yes, let’s,” I said. An uncomfortable feeling came over me which I didn’t recognize then, but which I now do: a feeling as of stealing manuscripts or letters from Jean, though she was allowing me to steal them, a feeling of some presumption, because of course I would be tempted to steal manuscripts and letters, of course I would want to write a short story with Jean. Again, I wondered if my deepest interest in her was as a writer I could take advantage of. I did not like this feeling. Though I wanted to start writing the story immediately, I let it drop; I wanted her to realize the idea came from her, not me, and it was up to her to act on it. But, too, I wanted to let her know I was interested; she very quickly imagined no one was interested at all.
She said, “What names shall we use for the old woman and the young man?”
“I’ll get some paper,” I said.
“Yes, do.”
I visited Jean often, and each time we worked a little on the story. I wrote bits of it at home and read them out to her; she corrected. The manuscript became very messy. One of Jean’s notes, dictated, was: “Cut down on her drink. Only two goes of malt whisky.” Jean was responsible for most of the dialogue, I for the description. She gave the piece its name: “Shades of Pink.” As, after a couple of weeks, I became more interested in finishing the story, Jean seemed to me to become less so. Finally she said, “You keep it now and do what you want with it. It’s a gift.” At home, I cut it down to a few pages, following the advice she said Ford had given her: “When in doubt, cut.” I put it in a bottom drawer.
Jean stayed on in the hotel over the winter. She was correcting the proofs of her collection of short stories, Sleep It Off, Lady. She once asked me to read out the story “Rapunzel, Rapunzel.” She asked me to cut a sentence, then said, “It’s a bad story. They’re all bad stories. Mediocre. Worse than bad. What can I do? The reviews, quite rightly, will be condemning. I shouldn’t have allowed them to be published. But it’s done, they’ll be published, and maybe it won’t matter. What I wanted to do was to write my autobiography, but no one seems interested in that. I can’t do it myself. No one can help me.”
From her letters, I knew that Jean could write only with great difficulty, her words large and shaky. I had also seen her sign books for visitors, holding the pen clenched between her thumb and middle finger and jabbing it at the paper.
I said, “Look, Jean, if it’s a question of your needing someone to write down what you want to dictate, I’d be happy to do that.”
She looked at me; she appeared doubtful. “Would you?”
The uncomfortable feeling came over me. “Of course I would.”
“You see,” she said, I just wanted to get down a few facts to correct the lies that have been said. I want to do that before I die.”
We started, I think, the next day, after lunch. She sat in a chair with a big pillow behind her, and she had one drink to get her going. She dictated a passage which, in relation to her fiction, followed on directly from Voyage in the Dark; the heroine of that novel, who lived in Langham Street, might have written the opening sentences of Jean’s dictation, recalling her recovery from her “illegal operation”: “After I got better, I stayed on in the flat in Langham Street . . . I didn’t see him, but he sent me a big rose plant in a pot and a very beautiful kitten.”
After a few pages of dictation, she fell back on the cushion and closed her eyes; she suddenly opened them, shook her head, and said, “Never mind. Let’s have a drink now.”
We sat drinking, and she, lounging back on her pillow, told me stories from her life. We were very easy with one another, and in the easy way she talked about her life, I talked about mine. We were spirited. But it was when we talked about writing that we got excited. Her excitement was in her eyes.
She said, “I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.”
What had happened to us in the bathroom was not more personal than our talk about writing; if we could talk about what had happened, we could talk about writing in the most open and vulnerable ways, which, perhaps, we would not want anyone else to hear.
I felt I could ask her anything. I said, “Do you ever think of the meaning of what you write?”
“No. No.” She raised a hand. “You see, I’m a pen. I’m nothing but a pen.”
“And do you imagine yourself in someone’s hand?”
Tears came to her eyes. “Of course. Of course. It’s only then that I know I’m writing well. It’s only then that I know my writing is true. Not really true, not as fact. But true as writing. That’s why I know the Bible is true. I know it’s a translation of a translation of a translation, thousands of years old, but the writing is true, it reads true. Oh, to be able to write like that! But you can’t do it. It’s not up to you. You’re picked up like a pen, and when you’re used up you’re thrown away, ruthlessly, and someone else is picked up. You can be sure of that: someone else will be picked up. No one in England has been picked up in a long while, no one in Europe, no one in America—”
“In South America?”
The expression burst from her like a revelation. “Yes! Yes!” Then she paused. “Perhaps.”
I asked, “Do you ever wonder why one is picked up?”
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I don’t know, and I wonder if it was right to allow oneself to be picked up. I wonder if it was right to give up so much of my life for writing. I don’t think, after all, that my writing was worth it.”
I said, “You couldn’t help it, could you?”
“No. But it kept me so much to myself.”
“Perhaps that’s what you really wanted,” I said.
“Yes, perhaps,” she said. “I imagine you like to be alone a lot, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do. I think there’s more than a little monk in me.”
“And there’s a lot of nun in me,” she said.
I went to see Jean week after week, three or four days a week. Sometimes she was too tired to dictate, having been out to lunch or to shop the day before. We talked. I half imagined she told me a lot about her life hoping I would write it all down; but I felt, whenever I did at home write down what she had told me that day, that I had been listening to Jean for the sake of writing down what she had said, and I wrote down, not what she said, but my reactions.
One grey
day in late March, after she had dictated on previous visits a number of disconnected bits about her life, we tried to organize them chronologically. She found this very difficult, as she couldn’t recall the sequence of events of so many years before. I had been careful not to interfere in what she dictated; I told her I was the one machine she could use. (She had never learned to type because she couldn’t understand machines. She refused to speak into a tape recorder because it was an incomprehensible machine. It took me three visits to teach her how to open a compact she was given as a gift.) But now I began to help her to sort out the months and years of her life: 1917, 1918, 1919. She often passed her hand over her face in her attempts to remember, and when she slumped back on her pillow, as if, suddenly, uninterested, I said, “Come on, Jean, when did you and your husband stay at Knokke-sur-Mer and for how long?” She raised herself from the pillow and tried to concentrate. She said, “All I can remember is the sea, cold and green.” “Try,” I said. “1923, I think,” she said, “and we stayed for two weeks. It was cheap. We bathed. We recovered.”
I stayed with her a long time, till long past her supper. The more we got into the chronology, the more muddled Jean became, until, her hands to the sides of her head, she said, “I can’t go on, I can’t. This isn’t the way I work.” We never again attempted to make a chronology.
On my next visit, she had gifts for me: a shirt with red and blue flowers printed on it and a white pullover. She said, “Try them on.” I went into her bedroom and put them on. When I came out, she studied me. “Go get one of my scarves,” she said, “from my room, and tie it round your neck.” I did. I came out. “Now walk around,” she said. I walked around the small sitting room. “Look in the glass,” she said. (She hated the word “mirror,” as she hated the word “perfume”; she used “looking glass” and “scent.”) I looked at myself. Jean was silent, as if silently judging. “Yes,” she finally said, “very nice.” I went to her and, laughing, put my arms around her.
By the time she was to leave London to return to Devon, I had covered thirty yellow and blue foolscap pages, back and front, with dictation. Sonia had typed them out.
I visited Jean briefly on her last day at the hotel. Sonia was packing for her. I kissed Jean goodbye. “Pray for me,” she said. “I will,” I said, “and you pray for me.” “I will, honey,” she said.
2
In november, Jean came back to London. She was put into a small flat in Chelsea, just across the Thames from where I lived in Battersea. She had a young woman to help her with her bath and dressing, and her friends to prepare lunch and dinner, and to entertain her. She didn’t like the flat. The walls of the sitting room were green. Bad luck. She was quite sure it was a mistake to have come up to London, but she so hated Devon in the winter; maybe, though, she would return to her cottage when she recovered a little from her trip.
She had, over the summer, dictated more of her autobiography to a young writer who lived near her in Devon. This more consisted of memories of her early life on the West Indian island of Dominica, where she was born. It would make up the first part of the autobiography. She asked if I would continue to help her if she stayed in London. I was writing myself, but I said, “Yes, of course.”
Often, crossing Chelsea Bridge on my way to her, I would think: You don’t want to go to Jean’s, you want to stay home to do your own writing. Also, I had very little money, and thought I should use the time I was with Jean to do a translation job, or write blurbs or book reports for a publisher.
Helping her became difficult. She needed a drink to start, a drink to continue, and yet another, and after two hours she was muddled, couldn’t remember what she’d been saying, and she’d repeat, over and over, that, say, Victorian knife-sharpeners were terribly good, you just stuck the knife in and turned the handle and the knife came out sharp and clean, so you didn’t have to clean it on wood, and the knives were much better than stainless steel ones—which showed that in many ways the Victorians were very clever, not what people think now. But people don’t understand. No one understands. No one! I was never quite sure what she wanted to go into the autobiography and what, drunk, she was simply talking about. I put in everything I thought interesting, condensing it often to a sentence fragment to insert somewhere later: the Victorian knife-sharpener her father brought from England so the help wouldn’t have to sharpen the knives on wood. A flash of anger would sometimes pass through her eyes when I’d read a passage to her to make sure I’d got it right, and she’d say, “No, that’s not right.”
In a little black briefcase that opened into a file, she kept the many bits and pieces of the autobiography, plus earlier writing on yellowing, torn paper. I wanted to go through these and sort them out, but I couldn’t presume; they seemed in the file to be very private. The time came in our work, however, when we needed to organize the autobiographical pieces. Versions of the same section, or detached paragraphs, confused her; she would ask me to read the different versions, she would choose what she thought the best, and then tell me to tear up the others. I tore up wastepaper baskets full. She seemed to get satisfaction from this, as if getting rid of something was a great clarification. (And, in fact, she told me that to her writing was a way of getting rid of something, something unpleasant especially. She asked me once to write down for her a short poem that was going round and round in her head: “Two hells have I / Dark Devon and grey London— / One purgatory: the past—” And after I wrote it down she said, “Thank God, now I can forget that.”) After as much clarification as could be made by tearing up, there still remained a mass of bits.
Jean often talked of the “shape” of her books: she imagined a shape, and everything that fit into the shape she put in, everything that didn’t she left out, and she had left out a lot. She could not see the shape yet of the autobiography. Some chapters were together, some were in fragments, and she wasn’t at all sure of the order of the chapters, much less the fragments in the chapters. We spent days trying, in our minds, to fit together pieces; Jean would often say, “It can’t be done. It’s too jumbled.” To remember the pieces, we gave them names. I might say, “Well, Jean, this bit about your mother, don’t you think it should go into the Mother chapter?”
One evening, as I was sitting with her while she ate her soup, I said, “Jean, why don’t I do a paste-up of what’s already been done of the autobiography?”
“A paste-up?”
I tried to explain, but it was like trying to explain a computer system to her.
She said, “If you think so.”
“I’ll do it tonight. You’ll see, it’ll help us.”
She said, “Please put it all in chronological order and cut out all the repetitions.”
I took the entire autobiography with me. Crossing Chelsea Bridge, the feeling came over me, as it often comes over me to jump when I am at a height, to throw the folder into the river. In my small study, before the gas fire, I spread pages and parts of pages on the floor. I cut out paragraphs which Jean had wanted to save from what she wanted to throw out. I cut in half a section called “The Zouaves.” I pasted the pages and paragraphs and sometimes single sentences in what I thought the right order on to large sheets.
The next day I brought the paste-up to Jean and read the whole thing straight through. She said nothing. As I read, I saw her, her head tilted to the side, glance sideways from time to time at the page.
I asked, hoarsely, “What do you think?”
“Fine,” she said weakly.
“Now,” I said, “I’ll take it home and type it all up.”
I left when her editor came in to help her to bed.
In the morning her editor rang me. She said that Jean had got into a frightful state after I left, so frightful the editor hoped she would never have to see anyone in such a state again. She was drunk and swearing and thought I had destroyed her book; she thought, too, I would lose it. She was particularly upset that I had cut in half a section called “The Zouaves.” She said, “It’
s David’s book now, not mine.” Her editor asked if we could have lunch the following day.
I spent all that day and the next morning typing out the paste-up. I put the two halves of “The Zouaves” together. Before I went to lunch, I stopped by Jean’s flat and left off the new typescript.
I said, “Jean, this is your book, not mine or anyone else’s.”
She said, “Of course it is, and if I don’t like it I’ll tear it up and throw it away.”
“Good,” I said.
I decided on my way to lunch that I would have nothing more to do with it. I thought Jean might have instructed her editor to say as much; but, in her office, she gave me a cheque for £500. Jean’s editor said the cheque was from the publishing house; later, Sonia told me that in fact it came from Jean, who had instructed her editor to tell me it came from the publishers.
I did not mention the autobiography again to Jean. I saw her often, as it was the holiday season. On New Year’s there was a champagne party in her flat. She, sitting in the midst, raised her glass and said, sadly, “Oh well, another year.” She was wearing a long silver dress. Her friends were about her.
Shortly afterward, when I went to give Jean her evening soup, I found a close friend with her, in a haze of smoke. We all talked for a while, then the friend left. Jean asked me, timidly, if I could continue to help her. I was reassured, and thought: Well, I wasn’t paid off. I wondered if she had been discussing it with the friend.
I said, “I’m very happy.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, three reasons. My agent likes my new book.”
Jean clapped her hands and laughed and said, “Hurrah.”
“Then,” I said, “I dropped a glass on the kitchen floor and it didn’t break.”
“Oh, that’s great luck,” she said.
“And because I’m here.”
She said, “That’s very tactful.”
We sat with drinks, talking about writing in a very simplistic way.
I asked, “Have you ever thought about your readers?”
