by David Plante
On the train back to London, everything I looked at was stark. Whenever I looked at Sonia, her face in the grey light appeared set; her narrowed eyes were hard.
Sonia, from Paris, wrote me a letter about Jean:
She was, towards the end, so very old and so senile so much of the time. And I think that people who live so much alone tend to “highlight” just a few incidents or thoughts in their lives and come out with these over and over again while other things, since they’ve not been used to talking about them, never, never get mentioned—they’ve been buried too deep to dig up again. Jean was the sort of essence of someone who’d forgotten how to talk naturally through having been isolated, which accounts for the yards of subconscious she dragged up when drunk, her endless thoughts about the “unfairness of it all,” blacks, politics, etc., because this is the way a lonely person behaves when she finds herself at last in company. I mean a person who wasn’t really born to be solitary, rather the opposite, but finds herself alone through quirks of fate or character. I felt sad that you’d never known her as early as I did because there’s no describing her charm, at moments, in those days, and also no describing how selfless she could be when she thought about her friends or other people or, indeed, people in general. I remember that winter when we moved her from that ghastly hotel to the one off the Portobello Road, I knew she was ageing so rapidly and I think being in that “old people’s” hotel must have been quite abominable to her. I remember her saying how awful it was to be old etc., but always adding, “But darling I’m not old inside” and how all that winter I heard distinguished aged people say exactly, but exactly the same thing in the same words: “I don’t feel old inside,” “I don’t feel old inside.” It was awful.
I think perhaps, too, you don’t, or didn’t quite realize that Jean did have reservations about you taking down her book just simply because you were a writer yourself. She told me time and time again how impossible it was for one writer not to, quite unconsciously, alter or rewrite another writer and I think she was torn between her quite clear understanding that you could perhaps help her more because you were a writer—after all what’s a perfectly ordinary dim-witted young “secretary” to make of a jumble of words which would have some magic for anyone who was of the métier—and her terror that two writers never have the same “voice” and that, without meaning to, you were in fact writing her book for her in a way she wouldn’t have written it herself. I do absolutely see her dilemma and in a sense she couldn’t cope with it because she was too old, too helpless, and not lucid enough. But I think this explains why she wanted to talk about writing so much with you, and why she both so enjoyed doing this and again, perhaps you don’t realize her generosity in this, why she wanted in any tiny way she could to help you. It also explains how hard it was for you to get her to do any long stint of work. Her terror of you writing her book would overcome her and drink would muddy up her mind entirely because she was drinking in a panic-stricken way. Yet she always wanted to give you something: an idea, a new shirt, some knowledge she just might have that you didn’t. It was all much, much sadder than I think you realize.
I’m only so very glad she’s dead. The other day I was walking along the street and suddenly saw the white choker which Jean had been wanting, and which we had been hunting for, for years, and I was overcome by a sort of relieved indifference: “It doesn’t matter a damn that it’s there,” I said to myself and was amazed that I felt no grief: in fact felt nothing more than a sort of: “Tiens, pity it wasn’t there some years ago,” and no more.
Sonia had introduced me to Jean at a luncheon party at her house. At the head of the table of six people, Sonia talked while Jean, a little lady wearing a new spring hat and slumped in her chair, was silent; as Sonia talked, I noted tears rolling down Jean’s face, but she didn’t wipe them away and let them drip, she told me later, because she didn’t want to draw attention to them and make a fuss. If Sonia noticed, she ignored Jean’s tears; she kept the conversation general, and the general conversation was high over Jean’s hat.
There was this strong sense in Sonia’s treatment of Jean: that she would help Jean in whatever way she possibly could, even to washing and ironing her clothes, but Jean must not presume she was the only person in the world who was in a position to need help.
•
The next year, I was with Sonia in Jean’s hotel room as Sonia made out a shopping list for a party. Jean said, “Please don’t forget the vermouth for me.” Sonia, baring her teeth, answered her, “Do you think you’re the only person at the party who is going to drink?” Jean frowned and her eyes went vague. Sonia said, “Think first of what the people who are buying you the vermouth may want.” Jean said quietly, “Yes.”
Sonia seemed to think that Jean should feel no guilt for being helpless—helpless not only physically, but, by some accident of character, psychologically—but that she should feel guilty whenever she presumed on her helplessness as a means of making others attentive to her.
Sonia did not like people to talk about themselves in a group; alone with her, one could talk at great length about, not oneself, but one’s problems with one’s husband, wife, lover, friends, taxes, flat. Sometimes when I arrived at Jean’s hotel I would find Sonia on the edge of a chair, leaning towards Jean, half reclining on a sofa among pillows, and I’d feel I had come into a room, filled with smoke, in which great intimacies had been exposed. Sonia would smile at me, and Jean, too, as from a far distance; I was sure Jean had been telling something to Sonia which she had perhaps not told anyone else, ever, and the revelation hung in the air like the smoke. If Sonia wouldn’t let Jean think she was unique, Sonia herself thought she was.
While Jean was in London on her winter visits, I, when alone with Sonia, talked about Jean, and if I said, with a certain possessiveness, “Did you know that Jean was once . . .?,” Sonia always answered, “Of course I knew.” Then she said, “I don’t like your imagining you’ll find out from Jean secrets which she wouldn’t share with anyone else. Everything you’ve said about Jean that she’s told you I’ve known, in greater detail, from her, and there is a great deal she has told me which she hasn’t mentioned to you, I’m sure.” “I’m sure,” I said.
Then Sonia said to me, “I’m a snob. I’m not helping Jean because she’s just anyone. I’m helping her because she’s Jean Rhys.”
In her world of special people—writers, painters, musicians, philosophers—Sonia thought of herself as someone to help them; and, among them, she would say, “Don’t think you’re special.”
About Sonia, Jean said to me, “She is the only woman I trust.”
Sonia organized Jean’s London life for her, and exhausted herself doing it. She kept Jean’s agenda—a sheet of paper ruled into large squares which Jean could see—filled. It was not easy to find people to visit Jean, and, often, they did not return for a second visit. If Sonia could not get anyone to visit, she went to Jean herself, at lunch time and supper time, and then put Jean to bed.
Sonia once came to dinner after having got Jean into bed with her hot-water bottle, her glass of milk and pills by her side, and having switched off her light, and Sonia said to me, shaking her head, “She’s a monster. She’s a total monster of selfishness.”
At tea at Sonia’s house, a friend, an actor who had made a date to visit Jean that evening, said, jokingly, that he was rather dreading the visit, and Sonia, staring hard at him, said angrily, “You don’t understand at all how utterly, utterly lonely she is. You joke, and should be weeping, because Jean’s state is desperate.” He got up quickly and left for Jean’s hotel. Sonia said to me, “No one, no one understands Jean’s total, total desperation.”
I thought that for Sonia to prepare breakfast for herself must have been almost beyond her because of exhaustion; with how much greater effort did she prepare parties for Jean, after which, she said, she would have to collapse completely.
Helping Jean, Sonia couldn’t collapse, no matter how great the strai
n, because Jean needed her help.
One of the winters when Jean was in London, I took Germaine Greer along to her hotel to introduce them. Before we went in to see her, Germaine bought a bottle of champagne, and she and I followed a young man with the bottle into the room. Jean, sitting at the end of a sofa in her long blue, padded housecoat, jerked to attention, a look of bewilderment in her large eyes, the colour of her housecoat. At the other end of the sofa was another, younger woman writer.
Germaine sat in an armchair. As we drank champagne, she talked about breast cancer, and described how the breast is clamped into a kind of vise for the operation. Jean seemed to be listening closely, then she leaned towards the other woman and said that she had been to a shop and seen some pretty hats.
When, the next time I was with Jean, I asked her what she had thought of Germaine, she said, with that small jerk of her body with which she always started to speak, “I liked her. I’m sure she must be very courageous.”
Germaine went down to Devon to visit Jean in her cottage.
At a drinks party, while I was speaking with Sonia, I saw Germaine stride towards us. She said to me, “I’ve solved the problem of how to help Jean.” She and Sonia did not know one another; I didn’t introduce them, as Sonia turned to Germaine, smiling with her teeth, and said, “We’re perfectly capable of taking care of Jean ourselves, thank you.” Germaine stepped back and turned away.
1
I was first introduced to Sonia in Paris at the opening of an exhibition of paintings by a friend of hers. She wore a fur hat, and all the while she spoke to me, so rapidly I hardly understood her, she shoved her hat about her head. I hadn’t got her name, and had no idea who was speaking to me.
She seemed to be making rapid comments on a great many subjects: England, France, America.
She didn’t ask me any questions about myself, and I couldn’t ask her any about herself.
During brief pauses, she looked at me, and I thought she might suddenly walk away, then she continued to talk, that furious talk, which had nothing to do with her or me, but which seemed to be addressed to people standing about us, whom she also looked at starkly. She repeated herself a lot; whatever the subject was, she, I thought at one pause, had exhausted it, and I tried to think of something to say, but she went on, repeating herself over and over. Perhaps she remained with me because she didn’t want to leave me by myself in the crowded gallery, and she was repeating herself for lack of anything else to say. I hoped someone would come along and relieve her; but when someone did join us, instead of going off to others, Sonia stayed with us, and, shoving her hat so it almost tipped from her head, went on talking. After every brief pause, she said, as if she had heard someone contradicting her, “No, it is absolutely true that in England . . . in France . . . in America.”
Then, after a stark look at me, she said, “No, as George used to say . . .,” and, with the authority of this George, whom I didn’t know, she made a comment, and, her hands lifting her hat up and pulling it straight down so the fur was low over her forehead, her hard look seemed to soften as if she had, finally, stated her justification for all her chatter, and her look said, “You do know who George is, don’t you?” All I knew was that he gave her authority.
I nodded.
She went on talking.
At the centre of the gallery, the painter and some of his friends, drunk, were tearing open telegrams and dropping them to the parquet floor, and laughing.
It occurred to me that Sonia was also drunk.
When, later, I was told her name, and realized who George was, I tried to recall her chatter, but I couldn’t.
The day after the opening, I went with the painter and a party of extraordinary people, including Sonia, to lunch in a restaurant. I was wearing a cap with a narrow peak, and, on the way into the restaurant, before I could take it off, Sonia did; she kept it, and at the table put it on, then passed it to others, who put it on, until it came back to me.
Sonia was talking furiously. It might have been about the hat. I didn’t know what it was about. She spoke in French. She pulled her hair, disarranged it, and, to arrange it again, ran her fingers through it and shook her head. Her hair was light, and she was, of a certain age, beautiful. She spoke French as if it were her own possession, and she spoke it in a loud voice. She often mentioned le képi, but there was more, much more, than kepis in her talk.
A lot of bottles of wine were put on the table. Quickly drunk myself, I noticed that Sonia was drunk as quickly. She was never still, and seemed to be looking at and listening to everyone at the table, whenever anyone could talk. She would say, “Non, non, c’n’est pas ça, c’n’est pas ça du tout,” and, disarranging or arranging her hair, she’d say what it was.
There were Frenchmen in the party, and when one spoke in English, Sonia abruptly said to him, in French, “The French think they can speak any language they want, it doesn’t matter how badly, because only French counts. It may be true that only French counts, but knowing French is no excuse to speak other languages badly. You shouldn’t try to speak English, because you don’t know it. Really, people who try to speak languages they don’t know—” She emphasized this by jerking her head back, then forward, and saying, “Do you see?”
“Yes, Sonia, I see,” he said.
I thought: Everyone is being very tolerant of her.
But as Sonia went on in French, she made a mistake, and the Frenchman corrected her; she went on in English.
Her English was louder than her French. To one person or another she’d say, “How ridiculous! It’s not like that at all! How utterly ridiculous!” No one objected to this; it was as though she were an overactive, perhaps frenzied relative at a big family luncheon; everyone was used to her, and tolerant. I imagined at times that she was saying about the luncheon itself, “How ridiculous,” and no one said it wasn’t, because perhaps it was.
Back in London, Sonia rang me to invite me to dinner.
I was early, and, alone in her drawing room, studied the furniture, the pictures, the books, the vase of chrysanthemums on a small, round, highly polished table which reflected the flowers. The room was bright and orderly. She came in, looking bright and orderly herself, and she moved about at quick, sharp angles as she talked.
When others arrived, she asked if I would prepare the drinks they asked for.
She introduced me as a young writer; I was twenty-five, and had published nothing. She introduced me to people whom I had known only as names, and who, I’d imagined, only existed in their names; suddenly, they had bodies—some had very large and some very small bodies—and I was drinking with them, then sitting about a round dining-room table with them. I walked home, through the clear early fall night, drunk, and imagining that the houses were books, and Sonia was opening the doors of the houses like book covers, introducing me into literary London.
At a luncheon to which I was asked by three of her old friends, they discussed happy and unhappy people; unable to say who was a really happy person, they all agreed that Sonia Orwell was the unhappiest.
A glass of wine in my hand, as I wandered about a big reception given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Sonia grabbed my sleeve and pulled me towards her. She said, “You must help me.” Holding my sleeve, she pulled me through the crowd, in which everyone had a glass of red or white wine, to a narrow partition. She said, nodding, “There, on that side, is So-and-so with his girl friend, and there, on that side,” and she nodded towards the other side, “is his wife. Now, we must talk to the wife and keep her distracted.” We went. To distract the wife, I didn’t have to do much; Sonia did it all.
Sonia, I thought, knew what everyone was up to.
She invited me again to her house for dinner. I arrived, just on time, with a bouquet of flowers. I kissed her and she thanked me, but when she stepped back I saw that hard look in her eyes.
Jokingly, I asked her about So-and-so and his girl friend and wife. She said, the hardness now in her voice, “That’s
nothing to joke about. It’s a very sad affair, a very very sad affair, and not to be treated frivolously.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
My flowers in her hand, she said, “No one seems to understand what happens in human relationships, and the sadness of it all. It isn’t anything to joke about. It really isn’t.”
I began to sweat.
The bell rang, and she answered. While she went out with the flowers, I, sweating, tried to talk, in the drawing room, with the second guest. The last time I had been here, I had been made to feel at home; now I felt constrained, and, looking at the bottles and glasses and ice cube bucket and slices of lemon, thought I mustn’t presume to make myself a drink, as I didn’t presume to answer when the doorbell rang again. I saw Sonia go to answer.
I wondered what had happened to my flowers.
She introduced me to the first few guests, but, as the room filled with eight or ten of us, not to others. Sometimes I stood to the side and looked into the room; sometimes I turned away to look at the pictures.
I thought: What am I doing here?
At table, I tried to take my place in the talk, but most of it—as I discovered often happened in London—had to do with people I didn’t know. Whenever I did speak up, Sonia glared at me and said, “That’s silly.” I kept sweating. The small downstairs dining room was hot, and filled with cigarette smoke. Sonia smoked between courses. The conversation turned to a writer whose work I didn’t like, and I said something about it, and Sonia said to me harshly, almost shouting, “What do you know about writing?”
With a kind of amazement, I felt myself rise up from myself and stare down at myself at the table, and that disembodied self said, coldly, “You fool.”
Because I thought I must, I made efforts to be attentive and to talk, but the part of me above me stared down no matter how much I drank, and even as I walked home it said to me from above, “You stupid fool, what makes you think you have any right in that world?”
