Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  At first I was not too worried, because I was unable to believe that anything so outrageous could stand. Selma herself, I thought, could surely be made to see as much: a foolish thought, that one turned out to be. Then André Deutsch and I talked to her husband who, though obviously deeply embarrassed, insisted there was nothing he could do. So – ‘Write a full account of the whole thing,’ said André to me, ‘and I’ll send it to Arnold.’

  ‘Arnold’ was Arnold Goodman, not yet a lord but already the most famous lawyer in the United Kingdom and André’s guru. Hope revived: of course Arnold would save the day. But all he could say was that this was a contract, and if someone was daft enough to sign a contract without understanding it, whether drunk or sober, too bad for them. My inability to expect anything good from lawyers was born out of that day’s impotent rage.

  I have forgotten how I knew that the theatrical agent Margaret Ramsay had once been Selma’s agent and friend, but I did know it, and inspiration hit me. ‘If anyone can deal with this it will be that little war-horse.’ Peggy always talked without drawing breath, so when she heard me name one of my authors it was a minute or two before I could stem the torrent of her refusal even to think about taking on another writer, and explain our problem. Once she had taken it in: ‘GOOD GOD! That’s perfectly appalling! Selma can’t be allowed to get away with that. LEAVE HER TO ME!’ Oh, the gratitude.

  Even Peggy couldn’t make Selma cancel the contract, but she did get her to reduce her fifty per cent to thirty-three and a third; and – far more important – she did make her cancel the clause giving her artistic control by somehow drilling into her mulish head that such a clause would forever prevent the sale of any such rights to anyone.

  From then on Peggy Ramsay handled all Jean’s film, stage, television and radio rights; and a few years later we steered her other literary affairs into the hands of the agent Anthony Sheil – a belated and profound relief. Because until then almost anyone Jean met could, and only too often did, become her agent, with results which – though never so dire as the Selma affair – were often maddeningly confusing and counter-productive.

  Although I never had to do any work on a text by Jean, I did once intervene by discouraging the inclusion of one of her stories in the collection Sleep it Off, Lady. Francis, too, advised her to leave it out; I can’t now remember which of us was the first to raise the matter. In a catalogue of her private papers, appended to the typescript of the story ‘The Imperial Road’, there is this note: ‘Miss Rhys has stated that her publishers declined to include this story in Sleep it Off, Lady, considering it to be too anti-Negro in tone.’ True, but over-simplified.

  Jean shared many of the attitudes of other white Dominicans born towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is true that she often spoke of how, as a child, she longed to be black, because black people’s lives were so much less cramped by boring inhibitions than those of the whites; but this was a romantic rebellion within the existing framework, not a rejection of the framework. When I knew her she talked – sometimes unselfconsciously, sometimes with a touch of defiance – like any other old member of the Caribbean plantocracy, describing black people she liked as ‘loyal’; saying what a mess ‘they’ had made of things once ‘we’ were no longer there (that was the burden of ‘The Imperial Road’) and so on. Typical white liberal of the sixties that I was, I disliked hearing her talk like that, but it seemed natural: and it never failed to make me marvel that in Wide Sargasso Sea she had, by adhering to her creed as a writer, transcended her own attitude.

  Her creed – so simple to state, so difficult to follow – was that she must tell the truth: must get things down as they really were. Carole Angier, in her biography, has demonstrated how this fierce endeavour enabled her to write her way through to understanding her own damaged nature; and it also enabled her, in her last novel, to show Dominica’s racial pain as it really was. But it didn’t work in ‘The Imperial Road’.

  Oddly enough neither Francis nor I was then aware of how far it was from working. We were simply uneasy at the story’s tone, without realizing that it was the consequence of a major (though explicable) misunderstanding on Jean’s part. In the story the Jean-figure sets out to cross Dominica on the Imperial Road – the trans-insular road built in her childhood. Revisiting the island many years later she wants to follow the road. To her incredulous dismay she finds that ‘they’ have let it be swallowed up by the forest: it is no longer there.

  Jean herself had been present, as a child, at the opening of the Imperial Road, and had not unnaturally supposed that if a trans-insular road is declared open, it must have been built. No one had explained to her that it had in fact been built only to a point halfway across, where the Administrator’s estate happened to be, and that even that stretch of it was metalled for only five miles. What she thought, thirty years later, to have vanished as a result of ‘their’ neglect, had never in fact been built by ‘us’. So the story was even more ‘wrong’ than it smelled to Francis and me; and once I had learnt the historical facts I became even gladder that she did not dig in her heels and insist on including it (which, of course, she could have done if she had really wanted to).

  The contrast with Wide Sargasso Sea is striking. In that novel the story is told from the point of view of someone whose life was wrecked by the emancipation of the slaves, and who is puzzled and angry, as well as grieved, by the hostility which blacks are now free to show against whites. But because the observation is so precise, and the black and mixed-blood people are allowed their own voices when they speak, the reader understands why Coulibri is burnt down; why Daniel Cosway has become the very disagreeable person he is; why the child Tia turns against Antoinette – indeed, has never really been able to be her friend, which is a fact equally cruel to both of them. Antoinette’s world has been poisoned, not by these people’s malice, but by their having been owned, until very recently, by her family as though they were cattle. Nowhere does Jean say this, but she shows it: Jean writing at her best knew more than the Jean one met in everyday life. I did not want her to publish ‘The Imperial Road’ because I did not want anyone to despise as racist a writer who could, when it mattered, defeat her own limitations with such authority.

  By the time Jean started work on her last book, the autobiographical Smile Please, she was too old to do without help; but it was not I who gave it (apart from reading and making encouraging noises as it progressed) … She had always had to find someone to type her books for her, and continued to think of the person helping her as doing no more than that. But the novelist David Plante, who had offered to be her amanuensis for this book, did a good deal more to coax material out of her, and organize it, than she acknowledged. There was an anxious time when she panicked at what he was doing, telling me that he was taking the book over and trying to make it his own; but he had only been using scissors and paste on a few pages, to get the material into its proper sequence. Once she had been persuaded to read it and see her own words still saying what she wanted them to say, she relaxed. More or less. That was a difficult time: her last winter in London, when she proved to be beyond coping with a hotel, and Diana Melly, with incomparable generosity, took her into her house (indeed, gave up her own bedroom to her) for three months. After a few weeks of great pleasure, Jean began to slide into a sort of senile delinquency, and to drink too much: one of David’s problems was steering his way between the disintegration which soon followed if he joined her in a drink, and the mutinous rage if he refused to. I remember huddling round the kitchen table with him and Diana, all of us agreeing that it was just a matter of one of us going upstairs and taking the drinks tray out of her room … a discussion which ended in Diana saying: ‘Oh God – we’re none of us any more use than a wet Kleenex.’ But the book did get done, all the same: it was not what she wanted it to be, but it had a good deal more value than she feared.

  In fact Smile Please is an extraordinary example of Jean’s ability to condense: everything about her that
matters is in it, though sometimes touched in so lightly that it can escape the notice of a reader who is less than fully attentive. It was as though something in her quite separate from her conscious mind was still in control, still making choices and decisions; and I have always thought that, about a year earlier, I was granted a glimpse of that something at work.

  The proofs of Sleep it Off, Lady came in from the printer while Jean was in London, and she told me she was worried about checking them because she feared she was no longer capable of the necessary concentration. So I suggested that I should read them aloud to her, going very slowly, and doing no more than twenty minutes at a time. As soon as we began she became a different person, her face stern, her eyes hooded, her concentration intense. When I was halfway down the first galley-proof she said: ‘Wait – go back to the beginning – it must be about three lines down – where it says “and then”. Put a full stop instead of the “and”, and start a new sentence.’ She was carrying the whole thing in her mind’s eye.

  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 ménage (heterosexuals are always trying to type-cast homosexuals). I decided eventually that, on that evening, anyway, what he mostly was was Mother.