The author Jean Rhys had trouble finishing her stories. Rhys told her editor and friend Diana Athill that “ending a novel based on things that had really happened ... was difficult because a novel must have shape, and real life usually has none.” In Rhys’s later years, spent struggling with her autobiography and idly drinking in her Devonshire bungalow, her memory was faulty. The problem wasn’t just that she couldn’t remember; Rhys told Athill that she sometimes felt “more like a pen being used than like a person using a pen,” a startling insight that perhaps led Athill to write, in the foreword to Rhys’s unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, published posthumously in 1979, that her friend had “used up” her life in fiction.
My friend Eddie was a small, thin boy. You could see the blue veins in his wrists and temples. People said that he had consumption and wasn't long for this world. I loved, but sometimes despised him.
Alexander Chee and Maud Newton discovered a shared passion for the works of Jean Rhys this winter while anticipating Lilian Pizzichini’s new biography, The Blue Hour. They decided to read the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair with one another. This conversation is the result.
Granta
22nd June 2009
From: Alexander Chee To: Maud Newton
Dear Maud,
I am imagining Jean Rhys finally holding the printed edition of The Left Bank and Other Stories, with its long strange preface by Ford Madox Ford. The preface begins with Ford describing his childhood in Paris, spending hard winters there, hating Paris, and then he gives a long description of Paris, and after fifteen pages, after talking about Parisians and the Rive Gauche, just when you have no idea who he is anymore, or why you would care, he finally says something about her.
From Kazuo Ishiguro’s laconic intimations to Mark Twain’s garrulous energy, these are masterclasses in the difficult art of beginning
Catherine Lacey
S
ometimes I want an opening to slap me in the face; other times I’d rather it come on like a creepy hand across my shoulder. There are millions of ways a voice can convince me to listen, but there are even more ways it can fail. I have little patience for the latter. Life is not long enough to ingest sub-par art.
It all gets so much more fraught when I’m the writer, not the reader, of that opening scene. I worked and reworked, un-worked and reworked the first chapter of my second novel, The Answers, trying to get the tone just right. It began as 12 pages, a braid of the main character’s memories and anxieties, then whittled down to 10, then eight, then five. For a year, I thought that five-page opening was perfect. Then, in a rare late-night revision fit, I deleted it and replaced the whole thing with a single paragraph. Now it wastes no time in opening the book with the right feeling –a mix of regret and menace and mystery.
Here are 10 openings that satisfied me enough to be memorable. As usual, the list is unranked and inherently incomplete.
“Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one.”
I was first compelled by the nervous, halting voice, but in only two sentences the narrator has hinted at tensions between past and present, mother and father, England and Japan.
“Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.”
The language here is so deliciously clear, yet the content is about how brutal and controlling an inherited story can be, how the repeated words of others can predetermine the life of another. Few writers have elucidated this human predicament as well as Baldwin.
“Her first name was India – she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.”
The utter exasperation and estrangement. Enough said.
“The disease has been in remission for seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.
“For seven years I tried not to remember too much because there was too much to remember, and I didn’t want to fall any further behind with the events of my life. I still don’t have a vegetable garden. I still haven’t been to France. I have gone to bed with enough people that they seem like actual people now, but while I was going to bed with them I thought I was catching up. I am sorry. I had lost what seemed like a lot of time.”
Manguso makes memoir seem easy, but do not be fooled. Her works are often short and spare because she knows how to discern what is unnecessary from what is vital.
“One way of looking at it is that it was just an unfortunate by-product of Hurricane Edna.”
Perhaps my years in New Orleans predispose me to want to know every unfortunate by-product of a hurricane, but I can assure you that what the narrator is referring to here is much stranger than anything you could easily imagine. Lightning Rodsis one of the most marvellous books about subterranean sexual forces in the modern era.
“‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’
“There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse.”
I am not often a fan of overt scene-setting as a first paragraph, but here Rhys uses it to slyly convey a sense of ruin and disappointment. That last sentence always makes me smile darkly.
“Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
“A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Every thing in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their loads of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.”
I’m sure I don’t need to convince you to read Dickens, but has there ever been a description of a place more bizarre and clear at once? He manages to be hilarious and lucid, loose and exacting – all these things in a simple description of a place. Not a cliche in sight.
“Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliche and, presumably, creating a genre. There was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love – you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over.”
This one breaks a lot of rules you would be taught in a creative writing class, but it has enough mystery and momentum that I don’t care. Every time I read something by Adler, I go immediately into that trance that is the closest thing to being another person I can imagine.
“We are on our way to Budapest. Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mizilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going.”
All I thought when I read this was, I’m going too.
“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing.”
It’s all about the voice and playfulness and warmth here. It’s another example of how Twain could transfer the sound of a story well-told to the page, giving it nuance and depth without losing any colloquial heat.
The Answers by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta.
Filled with doomed women in loveless relationships, Jean Rhys's prose would be very hard to read if it weren't so extraordinary
Chris Power Monday 14 April 2014 15.04 BST
"Too bitter," Jean Rhys said of her work in 1945. "And besides, who wants short stories?" No one did then, at least not hers. Rhys published her first collection in 1927, and her first novel the following year. In the 1930s came three increasingly dark and accomplished novels, but the better she got, the less she was read. She published nothing for 20 years, until stories began appearing in the London Magazine in the early 1960s. In 1966, her final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, brought her acclaim and a degree of financial security at the age of 76. Another two short-story collections appeared before her death in 1979. They include some of the best British short stories of the last century.
The Left Bank, Rhys's debut collection, which Ford Madox Ford helped bring to publication, comprises a series of modernist fragments in which hard-up bohemians get mournfully smashed in Paris: "But there she was stony-broke and with a hand that was rapidly losing its cunning, seeking oblivion in a cheap Montparnasse café." Much of it resembles the most insubstantial parts of Maupassant. The best thing in it by far is the long closing story, Vienne, which describes a relationship disintegrating as a couple move through a corrupt and crumbling Europe.
Jean Rhys
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas
As with the vast majority of Rhys's stories, Vienne was heavily autobiographical. The extent to which Rhys drew on her own life means her stories and novels contain many repeating elements: a childhood on the Caribbean island of Dominica, English public school and stage school, chorus-line work, hard times in Paris, Bloomsbury bedsits, exploitation, alcoholism, depression, and the loneliness of the perennial outsider. Her protagonists appear on a spectrum between distress and desolation, with little hope of escape. "How few people", we are told of one, "understood what a tightrope she walked or what would happen if she slipped. The abyss. Despair. All those things."
"All those things"; Rhys's style, casual at a glance but devastatingly exact when considered closely, developed rapidly throughout the 1930s (despite not appearing until the 1960s and 70s, most of her best short stories were written in the late 30s and early 40s). She can execute an array of powerful effects, from the stunning, cadenza-like torrent of loosely associated words and phrases that ends Tigers Are Better-Looking, or the eerie gothic of Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers, to Selina's stylised Martiniquaise patios in Let Them Call It Jazz. And, whichever mode she is operating in, her prose remains, as Al Alvarez judged, contemporary in the way a poem by Donne is contemporary: you hear her voice speaking directly to you; her reality is your reality. It is a prose close to poetry not in the lush sense usually implied by the term "poetic prose", but because it is condensed, elliptical, emotionally precise.
Given her dismal subject matter, if Rhys's prose weren't so extraordinary it would be difficult to read her. Rhys's emotional precision focuses chiefly on the dissection of loneliness. Her women encounter men who function, VS Naipaul notes, as "arbitrary providers of dinners, rooms, clothes", but this isn't a world of courtship and marriage. This is a world of transient relationships based on sex, not love. "No homes are entered," Naipaul continues, "the metropolis is reduced to a few cafés, boarding houses, and hotels."
The subject of Till September Petronella, one of Rhys's best stories, embodies this marginalised position. Petronella Gray is an ex-chorus line girl scraping a living as an artist's model. Accepting an offer to escape her drab bedsit and stay with an admirer at his cottage in the Cotswolds, she is treated by his other guests first with snobbish disdain, then outright hostility. Leaving, she encounters a farmer who tries to set her up as a lover he can call on when he visits London. "A bit of loving," he tells her, "[a]ll women like that. They like it dressed up and sometimes – and sometimes not … they like pretty dresses and bottles of scent, and bracelets with blue stones in them." Back in the city, Petronella picks up a man called Melville at a taxi rank. They go for dinner, have sex, and when he drops her home she mocks the memory of the farmer by telling Melville to bring her "a gold bracelet with blue stones in it".
Before he goes, Petronella tells Melville about a stage manager who pulled her out of the chorus and gave her a line. But on her cue she froze, and in that terrible moment looked into the face of a man in the front row. "'Help me, tell me what I have forgotten'", she remembers thinking:
But though he had looked, as it seemed, straight into my eyes, and though I was sure he knew exactly what I was thinking, he had not helped me. He had only smiled. He had left me in that moment that seemed like years standing there …
This is surely one of the moments Michael Wood was thinking of when he wrote, "Jean Rhys's women go under because they are imprisoned in their isolation and no one has the generosity to visit them there." Throughout Rhys's works, this sometimes uncaring, sometimes hostile response emanates not only from people, but also from nature and the physical world. London's streets are "a grey nightmare in the sun"; a mirror is "malevolent with age"; a dripping tap plays "a gay and horrible tune"; an early spring day is "heartless" and "acid, like an unripe gooseberry"; in more than one story, trees are "tormented" by the wind; the sky has "no colour", or it is a white glare, or it is, when Rhys is at her most direct, "the colour of no hope".
It is not surprising that this harsh environment should provoke so much psychic distress. The Sound of the River, I Spy a Stranger, Outside the Machine and The Lotus are just a few of the more memorable of Rhys's stories that address mental illness. Petronella Gray confides that when she gets anxious the thought comes to her "suddenly, like a revelation, that I could kill myself any time I liked and so end it. After that I put a better face on things". And although it might sound unlikely, Petronella is upbeat for a Rhys heroine. But then she is still young, and hasn't yet incurred the critical – and in Rhys's universe unavoidable – amount of damage that will break her will. Selina strikes a note of defiance at the end of Let Them Call It Jazz, but here, too, the feeling arises that over time she might become just like another Martiniquaise in Rhys's fiction: the pitiful one we witness offering herself up to a stranger in Rhys's 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight, "'crying because she was at the end of everything'".
For Rhys's characters, the journey through life is less an arc than a steep slide, and lying at the bottom of it is Miss Verney. The subject of Rhys's late and great story Sleep It Off Lady, Miss Verney lives in drunken, genteel poverty in a small country cottage. There is a galvanised iron shed in her garden, "astonishingly large, the end almost dark". She wants it removed, but as a builder explains the size of the job she suddenly realises that the shed, and the objects around it, will all outlast her:
Long after she was dead and her cottage had vanished it would survive. The tin bucket and the rusty lawnmower, the pieces of rag fluttering in the wind. All would last for ever.
The menacing shed, and the rats she believes infest it, obsess her. Her neighbour, friendly in the past, becomes mocking. Miss Verney's unease grows. Then, just as Rhys allows us to think things might improve, the old woman falls while taking out the rubbish. She lies propped against the dustbin on the cold shed floor, waiting for a rat to detach itself from the shadows. People pass by on the lane without hearing her cries. A little girl sees her, but thinks she has been drinking – "'Everybody knows that you shut yourself up to get drunk'" – and skips away. So there Miss Verney lies, as a "numb weak feeling slowly took possession of her. Stronger than cold. Stronger than fear. It was a great unwillingness to do anything more at all". Her savagely bleak situation is an appropriate terminus for Jean Rhys's fiction.
She is one of the 20th-century's greats: a novelist of yearning, rage and desire whose unadorned prose hits the solar plexus
Linda Grant Friday 22 February 2013 18.59 GMT
When I was in my 20s in the 1970s I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me.
Rhys is mainly known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the mad wife in the attic, and I scandalised an audience at the British Library a few years ago by claiming it was a greater novel than Charlotte Brontë's. Rhys in recent years has most often been seen her in the context of post-colonial writing, but it was the novels written and set in Paris in the 1930s that chilled me to the bone.
A woman, somewhat faded, sits in a room waiting for the post, which might contain a cheque from a former lover that will give her the money to buy a new dress so she can sit in a cafe and attract a new lover. There is a fine line between this and prostitution. I used to wonder if her female characters were simply Jane Austen heroines kicked away from Hampshire and left stranded in the early 20th century. Work is always a last option, jobs are for the defeated, there is no sense of a career leading to independence.
When I read Rhys, I lost interest in fireworks in fiction. Sentence after apparently unremarkable sentence would pass until suddenly you would feel yourself hit in the solar plexus by the accumulated tension. I would look back and ask: how did you do that?
She is the novelist of longing and yearning and rage and sexual desire, and the need for nice clothes and the fear of what happens to women when they lose their looks and become the old woman alone upstairs, drinking alone, smoking alone, dying alone. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the character Julia appears to have no instinct for self-preservation. Yet her creator endures, one of the 20th-century greats. I would die to write like her.
