by Diana Athill
So after one of her visits to Cheriton, Maryvonne came to London and asked me to lunch with her. Jean had been talking of moving to Holland, and Maryvonne had decided that she must quickly establish that this was impossible. She told me that she would keep in touch with her mother and visit her from time to time, and that I could count on her to come over in an emergency, but that she could not have her with or near her all the time. I would have to take on the responsibility of looking after Jean, because she simply couldn’t do it. ‘It would wreck my marriage,’ she said.
I cannot deny that my heart sank, all the more so because I could see exactly what Maryvonne meant. I knew less about Jean then than I do now, but I knew enough to see that she could not be lived with; certainly not by a daughter she had dumped at the age of about four. All editors have, to some extent, to play the role of Nanny, and I saw that in this case it was about to expand – in terms of size, not of glamour – into a star part. And so it would most onerously have done if it had not been for Sonia’s invaluable help, and that of Francis. But he was soon to have his mother’s old age to deal with, so he had gradually to withdraw from practical involvement, whereas it was many years before a combination of financial trouble and ill-health caused Sonia to flag.
It was thanks to her that I got a glimpse of how enchanting Jean must have been as a young woman (when happy). Sonia had taken her out to lunch and they had drunk enough champagne to make them both giggly – ‘tipsy’ would be the word rather than ‘drunk’. When Jean got drunk (which I was not to witness until the last two years of her life) it was usually a disastrous release of resentment and rage; but this time her tipsiness hit the level which is exactly right. Everything became comic: she remembered – and sang-delightful songs; she told jokes; she liked everyone. She might have been enclosed in a pink bubble of Paris-when-she-was-happy-there, and it lasted until I had filled her hot water bottle and steered her into bed (I was taking the late afternoon and evening shift, as I usually did). Jean and I often spent enjoyable times together, but only with Sonia did she taste that sort of fun. Sonia, who knew Paris intimately, brought a whiff of Jean’s favourite city with her, and she drank too much; whereas I was so undeniably English, and liked to stay sober. With me Jean couldn’t quite let herself go.
That occasion was at the Portobello Hotel: the Portobello winter was the best of the treats provided by Sonia. The hotel was small, elegant in an informal way, and favoured by French theatre people. At that time it was being managed by a young woman recently celebrated in a Sunday newspaper as one of ‘the new Fat’ – a despiser of dieting who liked to wear flamboyant clothes and enjoy her own amplitude. She had, Sonia told me, made a special price for Jean because she loved her books (unfortunately she was no longer in charge when the next winter came round, perhaps because of her amiable tendency to make such gestures). The first time I visited Jean there I was greeted at the reception desk by a faun-like being in a pink T-shirt trimmed with swansdown which had little zipped slits over each breast, both of them unzipped so that his nipples peeped out. This seemed such a far cry from Cheriton FitzPaine that I wondered whether Jean, much as she longed for a change, would find it upsetting; but she loved it, was fussed over charmingly by both the manageress and the saucy faun, and would have been happy to spend the rest of her days at the Portobello. I think it was during that holiday that she played with the idea of dyeing her hair red. I protested, because bright hair-dyes make one’s skin look old, and she said: ‘But it’s not other people I want to fool – only myself.’
Where Jean was not happy was in a hotel which Sonia fell back on later, when she was beginning to feel the financial pinch which, together with illness, made her last years miserable. It was one of those comfortable but drab places near the Cromwell Road which are chosen as permanent homes by elderly widows, and Jean made her loathing of it brutally clear. Generosity inspired in her no more sense of obligation than it would have done in a six-year-old, and even after Sonia had moved her (as she quickly did) into a vastly chic and expensive establishment, she remained slightly sulky. It was to Sonia, not to her, that the manager of the rejected hotel had said that they were accustomed to – indeed, specialized in – elderly people, but Jean had picked it up the moment she crossed the threshold, and was not going to forgive the making of such a choice for her. Later still, when Sonia left London for a cheaper life in Paris, I and others often explained to Jean how her circumstances had changed. Jean would acknowledge her friend’s misfortunes with a ritual ‘Poor Sonia’, but her voice would be indifferent and there would be a distant look in her eyes. For her, inevitably, a friend who had gone away was a friend who was rejecting her.
Jean’s comparative sedateness with me made it a shock when I received a letter from a man who had been her neighbour in Beckenham, and who resented the acclaim she was getting for Wide Sargasso Sea. He wrote an unsparing, and horridly convincing, description of the aggressive drunken behaviour which had led to her arrests, and he also took it on himself to tell me about Max’s disaster, which Jean had never mentioned. I was able, therefore, to explain Jean’s lapses as a breakdown under strain. Only in her last few years did I begin to understand that ugly drunkenness had been her downfall, on and off, for most of her adult life. Before that, my personal experience of her had revealed her incompetence, her paranoia, her need for help and reassurance, and the superficial nature of her gratitude (‘I’ve got hold of some money’ was how she told Maryvonne of Francis’s gift, and glimpses of that attitude were not infrequent through the chinks in her politeness). But I also knew that she was very often charming, had an old-fashioned sense of decorum and good taste (she hated unkind gossip), and that however tiresome her muddles could be, I enjoyed being her nanny more often than I found it wearisome.
It did not really matter that the Jean Committee failed to find her a new house. Her bungalow was made so much more comfortable and pleasant by the hard work and ingenuity of two of her new friends, Jo Batterham and Gini Stevens, that – given more visitors, and the daily help which Sonia and I were at last able to find for her – she was probably as well off there as anywhere. Gini even took over the role of amanuensis for a while (Jean couldn’t type and was frightened of tape-recorders, so she always had to have that kind of help). Like so many of Jean’s relationships, this one ended in tears; but not before it had enabled her to put together the collection of stories, Sleep it Off, Lady, which would have been impossible with-out it.
Meanwhile Jean’s finances were, by a miracle, kept in order by an accountant recommended by Sonia on the grounds that he liked good writing and drank a lot.
A good example of a Jean muddle was the case of Selma vaz Dias, the actress who had adapted Good Morning, Midnight for the radio, and who saw herself, not without reason, as Jean’s true ‘rediscoverer’. The trouble with Selma was not that she made that claim, but that she thought herself entitled by it to become a bandit.
Although middle-aged and rather stout, she was a striking woman with bold dark eyes who wore clothes to suggest a dash of the Spanish gypsy, and was an ebullient talker. Jean had been delighted and grateful on learning of her plans for Good Morning, Midnight, had enjoyed her company when they met, and loved her infrequent letters. Knowing they had planned to meet when Jean brought the manuscript of Wide Sargasso Sea to London, I telephoned Selma to report that she had been taken to hospital . . . and began almost at once to doubt the worth of her friendship. First, a surprising amount of prodding was necessary to make her visit Jean; then the visit turned out to be extremely short and to consist mostly of Selma complaining of its inconvenience to herself; and lastly, when I was giving her a lift home after it, she said almost nothing about Jean except: ‘You know, of course, that she used to work as a prostitute?’
Worse was to emerge. After the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea Jean confessed to worry about something which Selma had made her sign. It then came out that in 1963, on a visit to Cheriton, Selma had produced ‘a bit of paper’
which Jean understood to concern the broadcast rights of Good Morning, Midnight, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, but which was in fact an agreement to give Selma fifty per cent of the proceeds from any film, stage, television or radio adaptation of any of Jean’s books, anywhere in the world, for so long as the books were in copyright, and granting Selma sole artistic control of any such adaptation. Jean was to say repeatedly that she thought being made to sign it was a joke – ‘I was a bit drunk, you see . . . well, a bit, very.’ However, two years later, when Selma got an agent to recast this same agreement in more formal terms, and he wrote to ask Jean whether she really did want to sign it again, she apparently felt that she must, and did so. (The agent had never met her, so I suppose was unaware of her near-idiocy in practical matters; otherwise he would, I hope, have taken a stronger line.)
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 transinsular 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 half-way 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 incompara
ble 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.