by David Plante
Sometimes we talked about writers, and she admitted, with no sign of great regret, that she hadn’t read Balzac, Proust, Fielding, Trollope, George Eliot, James, Conrad, Joyce. She couldn’t read Austen, she had tried. She had read a lot of Dickens. She had read, and remembered in great patches, the English Romantic poets, and Shakespeare. Her favourite writer, she said, was Robert Hichens, who wrote turn-of-the-century melodramas; she said his books took her away, especially The Garden of Allah. But when friends brought her his novels from second-hand book shops she left them in a pile. She read, instead, thrillers, and in her late life she read almost nothing else but. In Chelsea, she read, over and over, a novel called The Other Side of Midnight, and she said, “It’s trash, perfect trash, but it takes you away,” and made a sign as of going away, far off, with her hand. She said it was very important for a writer to have read a great deal at some time in his life. I presumed this was when she was a girl in Dominica, when she read books from her father’s library and from the public library, where she sat on a veranda to read, with a view of the sea. While she was on tour in music hall the girls read The Forest Lovers, and Jean read it too. It was about a couple in the Middle Ages who ran away into the forest because everyone disapproved of their love, but they always slept with a sword between them. The sword, Jean said, was an endless topic of conversation. (“What a soppy idea. What’d they do that for? I wouldn’t care about an old sword, would you?”) The Forest Lovers was the only book Jean read for years. She must have read when she started to write, though I am not sure what. She spoke very highly of Hemingway, and she knew many modern writers at least well enough to comment on them. About Beckett, she said, “I read a book by him. It seemed to me too set up, too studied.”
Shortly before she was to leave for Venice, amidst all the organization, she developed a slight cold. She thought she shouldn’t go. The doctor said she could. On my last visit before she left, she was wrapped in a quilt, and had a silk scarf tied as a turban around her head. Her cold, she said, was worse. She really thought she couldn’t go to Venice. She said she’d been reading a guide book about the city which said it was full of rats. She looked at me as if she had found out something everyone had deliberately kept from her to give her a false impression, and she had now found out the truth for herself. I said, “But there are a lot of cats.” She raised her eyebrows.
When I left her, telling myself I shouldn’t, I fantasized that Jean would die in Venice, the typescript of the unfinished autobiography would be destroyed, and I would be left with the handwritten pages of dictation. I, alone, would have Jean Rhys’s secrets.
•
This was in late February 1977. In November of the same year Jean returned to London for the last time. She stayed for months in the house of friends, where she had a bedroom and sitting room with pink floors. The friends helped her buy new dresses, and in her new dresses she sat in the sitting room off her bedroom and received visitors. But she would say, “I don’t want to see anyone,” and, ten minutes later, “No one ever comes to see me.”
We resumed work on the autobiography. She had done very little on it over the summer and autumn, but she had made a mess of it. I sorted it out. Each time I came back it was messed up again. I would put it in order, with clips; she would ask to see it, the whole thing would fall apart in her lap and to the floor, and she would say, “I don’t know if this will ever be finished, it’s in such a mess.” Finally, I put each section, or chapter, in a different coloured folder, wrote in big letters the names of the sections on the folders, and numbered them. If, however, there was more than one version of the section in the folder, she would become confused; I had to make sure there was only one copy, and the previous working copies I tore up and threw away in Jean’s presence. This tearing up and throwing away satisfied her for a time.
The days were dark grey and rainy; we had to light the lamps shortly after lunch, when we began the work. I read, countless times, the sections she wanted to hear again, and at the end she always said, “That needs more work,” but she never got around to doing the work unless I said, “All right, let’s do it now.” As often as I read certain passages to her, she always wept at some and laughed at others; she might have been hearing them for the first time. I thought: Yes, she’s right, it will never be done. Many days, she couldn’t work.
I began to take the separate sections home and I worked on them in my study; she knew this, and approved at least to the extent that, when I read them out to her on my next visit, she said, “That’s all right.” Very slowly, we finished chapters, and these were typed in triplicate. I threw away the working copy, put the top copy and the carbon in the folder, and gave Jean’s editor the third copy, as I thought that now the work, however little there was of it, should be preserved. Sometimes she had me rework the top copy, and the corrections I transferred to the carbon, then threw the top copy away. When, at times, she asked where the top copy of a chapter was, I would try to explain what I had done, but she didn’t understand, and she simply raised her hands. I was worried that she thought I was stealing from her.
One day, when she said she was too tired to work, we talked; but I was tired, too, and found it difficult to keep up the talk. I had now heard Jean’s stories many times.
I yawned.
She said, “You’re bored.”
I felt she was testing me. “No,” I said, “no.”
She said, “Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else. Do you promise you won’t tell anyone? Promise me.”
I crossed my heart.
“You’ll think I’ve told it to you before, and I have, part of it, but not all. I told you, didn’t I, how my third husband Max and I settled, having failed to settle in other places, in the cottage in Devon. I accepted it without seeing it, partly because Max wasn’t well, and we would be peaceful there. There were four small rooms. It was scantily furnished, and at first I thought it was rather nice. There wasn’t much in the sitting room except a desk and a good chair in front of the desk. There was a big bed and also a dressing table in the bedroom. By the time I put our armchairs in the sitting room, however, it began to look very crowded. I took a dislike to it then, and lived in the kitchen mostly. And after I discovered that the kitchen was haunted by spiders and mice, the feeling of peace left me. I was trying to write Sargasso Sea at the time, but I had been interrupted time after time, and in this cottage I quite gave up.” Jean rubbed her forehead and looked down. “As usual, I took refuge in bottles of wine, and would get pretty drunk every night. Instead of getting better my husband got definitely worse. He kept falling, the way I keep falling now. At last the doctor insisted that he should go into hospital. I protested violently against this, but it was quite useless. Max died in hospital. I was left completely alone.” Jean let her hand fall to her lap; she kept looking down. “Alone, when I had nearly finished a bottle of wine, I’d pin on all the medals Max had had, for he had been in the RAF in the First World War, go out of the door, and shout, ‘Wings up! Wings up.’ I think I must have been pretty nearly crazy at this time.” After a pause, Jean shook her head and her body, as with a shiver. “Never mind about that,” she said.
After another pause, she said, “One day there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was a young man I didn’t know. When I asked his name and if he wanted to see me, he said, ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m your friend.’ Then I vaguely remembered that one evening, when I was tormented by a pack of little boys while I was shouting, ‘Wings up,’ he had chased them away. So I asked him in and offered him a drink. I am still completely puzzled as to why this young man came to see me. He told me that he worked in the road outside, and would I speak to him if I saw him? I said of course I would, and I did keep a lookout for him after that, but I never saw him.”
It began to get dark in the room, and I turned on a lamp with a sheer pink scarf draped over it.
“After my husband died, I was determined to run away. It was winter, and
a friend got me a room in a very nice house in, I think, Earls Court. He had chosen a large, rather pleasant room, and I had a moment of happiness when they brought me in tea and smiled. I remember looking out of the window as I poured the tea, and thinking that I had escaped. Unfortunately, the heating failed, and the whole place got icy cold. I stupidly went to take a shower. I pulled at the shower, but the water was completely icy. The landlady ended by sending for the doctor. He said I had had a heart attack, and I was in St. Mary Abbots Hospital for two weeks. After the hospital I went to a convalescent home for two weeks. Then I went to a nursing home in Exmouth for another two weeks. It was while I was there that I began to want to finish Sargasso Sea, and decided that the cottage was a quiet place where I might be able to go on with it. Sitting at the long table in the kitchen, I did manage to fill two exercise books, but when I stopped and reread what I had done, I discovered that I had written one short chapter, and then about six more versions of it. It wasn’t the chapter that appalled me so much as the fact that every one of the versions was the same. I had merely written the same thing over and over again, not changing a word. After that I gave up. It seemed to me that it would be impossible ever to write again. I had no money; it would be quite useless for me to borrow money from my brother to go up to London. I had only a few books, which I knew almost by heart. I spent my time walking up and down the passage, afraid of the spiders and the mice, and all the people in the village. I think it was one of the worst times of my life.
“One day the clergyman of the village called on me. My brother had given me an introduction to this man’s wife, whom he knew, but after I had been several months in the place, they hadn’t taken the faintest notice of me. So I was rather astonished at his appearing, and still more astonished that I liked him very much. He didn’t talk of religion at all. I had heard of this man. He was supposed to have thousands of books in his rectory. Someone also told me that he was a great scholar. After that first visit, he came back almost every week. He even began to knock in a special way, so that I would know who it was and open the door. I think that the reason I began to value his friendship so much was that he had never read any of my books and doubtless would have thought them ephemeral if he had. At last I told him about the fear that was surrounding me now and that it was getting worse all the time, that I had begun to hate human beings, that I had to force myself to go out at all. Week after week he came. He told me over and over that there was nothing to fear. Now this is what I never told you before, what I’ve never told anyone. He asked me one day if I would take Communion. I said I didn’t know if I believed. He said, ‘You were baptized, weren’t you?’ I said yes. So the next time he came he came with Holy Communion, with the host, and I got down on my knees, stuck out my tongue, and he placed the host on it. And then, you know, I started to write, and I finished the novel. If there was any fairness in the world, I would have dedicated it to him, but of course I didn’t.” Jean was silent, her hands in her lap. She raised them and looked at me. She said, “Only writing is important. Only writing takes you out of yourself.”
•
On our work days, there was no inspiration. Jean quickly became drunk. I became drunk with her. The work sessions degenerated into her shouting, “Lies! Lies!” And she would look at me, her face hard, and say, “You don’t understand.”
Once, angry, I said, “I do understand.”
She immediately sat back, her face softened, and she said, softly, “I don’t mean you.”
I gathered, then, that when she said “you” she meant a very general “you”: people.
When she said, “You know what you must do. Do you? You must know, and you must do it.” I wasn’t sure if she meant what I or what people must do. “You know what you must do in your writing,” she said. I became reassured: she was going to say that I must in my writing save all civilization. But she stared keenly at me, expecting me to reply to her repeated, “Don’t you know?” I smiled. She said, “You must tell the truth about them.” She slammed her hand down on the arm of the chair. “You must tell the truth against their lies.” My anger gave way to sudden sadness.
She saw the sadness in my eyes. She said, “When I was a little girl I was always saying, ‘That’s not fair, that’s not fair,’ and I was known as socialist Gwen. I was on the side of the Negroes, the workers. Now I say, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ about the other side, because I think they aren’t treated fairly.”
I simply looked at her.
Her face, it seemed to me, became that of a little girl. She looked at the floor. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know any more.”
Sometimes, in my reading, she would ask me to cut a passage I thought good. Often, I convinced her to keep it in, though she said it should be cut because she didn’t understand it. One passage she wanted to cut, which I said really should stay in, was that as a child she imagined God was a big book. But a passage about her mother, which she said she simply could not understand, she insisted on leaving in:
She would often stick up for what she called their rights. We had a large mango tree which took up most of the room in the small garden. The fruit was round, small and very sweet. But the branches hung over the wall in such a way that when it bore fruit anyone in the street could get it. My father was furious as he liked mangoes and he couldn’t bear to think that little boys stole them. He sometimes threatened to put broken glass along the top of the wall or buy another, fiercer dog. “Scap’s no good,” he’d say. My mother said, “You can’t stop them from picking fruit if they are thirsty, they have a right to.” “What right?” my father said; “those are my mangoes.” “They have a right to it,” was all my mother would say. She often talked like this about their rights, as she maintained that though all babies were sweet, black babies were much prettier. There still remained, however, this wide, cold gulf between her and them which she made no attempt to cross. She was a contradictory woman and as I grew older I stopped wondering what she thought and why.
And she insisted on cutting this, which she said was irrelevant:
There were two breezes, the sea breeze and the land breeze. People said that they called the land breeze the undertaker breeze. But I never thought that. It smelt of flowers.
She often had me check to make sure a passage she thought of using in her autobiography hadn’t already been used in one of her novels or short stories. I did my best, but I, too, couldn’t always remember.
When I arrived at the house and before I left, I sat with the friend with whom Jean was staying, and we talked, obsessively, about Jean.
I found the friend in tears once, sitting at the kitchen table. She said, “I feel I’m becoming like her. Yesterday she said to me, ‘It’s eight o’clock, thank God, now I can go to bed,’ and at nine o’clock I was saying to myself, ‘Thank God, now I can go to bed.’”
I said, “I guess I’d better go up to her. How is she?”
“She fell in the bathroom last night, getting up to pee. It was a struggle. I had to roll her on to a blanket and drag her back to her bed. But she’s all right now.”
Jean was in the bathroom when I got to her sitting room. I waited for her. She came out, unsteadily. She was wearing large pink bloomers, tied at the ankles, a white silk blouse, and her pink wig, put on backwards. She smiled when she saw me. I went to her, kissed her. She stood holding the back of a chair, and she appeared thoughtful.
“You know,” she said, “I was just thinking about the differences in our writing. I can’t make things up, I can’t invent. I have no imagination. I can’t invent character. I don’t think I know what character is. I just write about what happened. Not that my books are entirely my life—but almost. You invent, don’t you?”
I said, “I suppose I do.”
I helped her to her chair across the room.
On the slow way, she said, “Though I guess the invention is in the writing. But then there are two ways of writing. One way is to try to write in an extraordinary way,
the other in an ordinary way. Do you think it’s possible to write in both ways?”
“No,” I said.
“You understand?”
“I think so.” “I think what one should do is write in an ordinary way and make the writing seem extraordinary. One should write, too, about what is ordinary, and see the extraordinary behind it.”
“Yes.”
She dropped down among the bright pillows of her chair. “I have never, never got what I felt and thought into words.”
“You think not?”
“No.”
“And yet, when you dictate a sentence to me, I study it and think, this sentence should be banal and sentimental, and it’s in fact original and tough. Why is that?”
“Je n’sais pas,” she said.
“And there’s a sense of space around your words.”
“Yes,” she said, “I tried to get that. I thought very hard of each word in itself.”
I said, “Sometimes I think your writing is not only about your life, it is your life. I mean, you’ve had a few very intense experiences in your life, all isolated by great space and silence. Your words are like that, intense events which occur in space and silence.”
“My life has been turbulent and very boring,” she said.
I didn’t want to start working. The best of Jean was not, now, in her writing, but her talk about writing. With one drink, however, she started, “Lies! Lies!” and when we tried to work her dictation was incoherent. I took down sentences, sometimes words, to compose at home scrappy paragraphs. We were meant to be working on her later life. I was determined to finish at least a first draft. The deeper she got into her later life, the more incoherent she became. After half an hour, she couldn’t work.
I told her about a dream I had had about a woman at a market stall from whom I, hungry, asked for a bun, and she said, “They’re very expensive,” but I said, “It doesn’t matter,” and as I was reaching into my pocket for the money she gave me the bun and money from her own pocket, and I suddenly understood that in the country I was in when you bought something you were in fact paid to take it.
