by Jean Rhys
The Collected Short Stories
* * *
JEAN RHYS
With an Introduction by Diana Athill
Contents
Introduction by Diana Athill
Illusion
A Spiritualist
From a French Prison
In a Café
Tout Montparnasse and a Lady
Mannequin
In the Luxemburg Gardens
Tea with an Artist
Trio
Mixing Cocktails
Again the Antilles
Hunger
Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend
A Night
In the Rue de l’Arrivée
Learning to Be a Mother
The Blue Bird
The Grey Day
The Sidi
At the Villa d’Or
La Grosse Fifi
Vienne
Till September Petronella
The Day They Burned the Books
Let Them Call It Jazz
Tigers Are Better-Looking
Outside the Machine
The Lotus
A Solid House
The Sound of the River
I Spy a Stranger
Temps Perdi
Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers
Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose
The Bishop’s Feast
Heat
Fishy Waters
Overture and Beginners Please
Before the Deluge
On Not Shooting Sitting Birds
Kikimora
Night Out 1925
The Chevalier of the Place Blanche
The Insect World
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?
Sleep It Off Lady
I Used to Live Here Once
Kismet
The Whistling Bird
Invitation to the Dance
Follow Penguin
About the Author
Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother. She came to England when she was sixteen, where she trained as an actress and worked on chorus lines. In 1919 she married Jean Lenglet (‘Edward de Nève’), with whom she lived on the Continent until their divorce in 1923. One child from the marriage survived. It was in Paris that she came under the influence of the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who encouraged her to write. Rhys’s first book, a collection of stories called The Left Bank, was published in 1927. This was followed by Quartet (originally Postures, 1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In 1932, she married Leslie Tilden-Smith, who was a reader with the publisher Hamish Hamilton and acted as her literary agent; he died in 1945. In 1947, she married Max Hamer, Leslie’s cousin. Max was convicted of fraud and as he was moved from prison to prison, Rhys followed him and disappeared from the literary scene. On his release, they moved to a cottage in Devon, where Rhys was re-discovered in 1958. She had begun work on a Dominica-based novel on her return from a visit there in 1936; despite poverty and ill-health, but with the support of her editor, Diana Athill, this would be published as Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. The novel was Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre and was a sensational comeback. It won literary prizes on publication and is today recognized as her masterpiece. Rhys wrote two further story collections, Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976). She died in 1979, and her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published posthumously the same year.
Introduction
These stories fall into three groups: up to page 118, early work, written before Jean Rhys’s first novel; from page 119 to page 263, stories written, or completed, in the sixties (some of them were probably begun a good deal earlier); from page 264 to the end, stories written, or completed, when she was an old woman.
She published the first group in 1927 under the title The Left Bank. Like all her work, these stories relate closely to her own experience: she was teaching herself, as she wrote them, how to turn personal experience into something of value to other people. They contain touches of self-consciousness (the last line of ‘Hunger’, for example) which she never allowed herself in her later work, and an occasional cuteness (like calling Miss Dufreyne, in ‘In the Rue de l’Arrivée’, ‘the Lady’, which is the sort of thing she came to detest). But this does not prevent Miss Dufreyne’s being an accurate self-portrait. What Jean Rhys had to say and how she said it had not yet blended into the clarity and simplicity of her mature style, but the process was on its way.
She had lived in the Caribbean until she was sixteen; in England (which disappointed and frightened her) until she was twenty-nine; and then in 1919 had married a Dutchman called Jean Lenglet and had gone with him to Paris. At first she was happy there. She had escaped from the cold-eyed English and her sense of herself as despised by them for being an ignorant ‘colonial’, and the relief was intoxicating. She was able to look out at what surrounded her and take little ‘snapshots’ of it with a light heart. But only too soon things began to go wrong. The Lenglets never had enough money; her first child died when he was about three weeks old (although her story about his birth leaves this unsaid); and Lenglet’s too-good-to-be-true job in Vienna really was too good to be true – it took him into a French prison, and how it did so is recorded in the marvellous story ‘Vienne.’ Fear, loneliness, cruelty – these became her subjects. She struggled to treat them defiantly, even jauntily, and learnt as she did so that this was a mistake. The essential thing was to treat them truthfully: to write in a ‘voice’ as near that of natural speech as possible, and to tell how things really were. Which meant, of course, how things were for her: a truth, not the truth – the latter being something which no honest person can claim to tell.
Jean Rhys’s truth was that of a woman who was no good at managing life – so inept in practical matters that circumstances which would have been difficult for anyone were crushing for her – and who suffered from a tendency to be paranoid. She was well aware of this tendency, but used to say ‘When people are paranoid you can bet your life they have something to be paranoid about.’ Which is true – but then, so has everyone. The difference is that the robust psyche confronted with – say – a touch of suspicion or dislike on the part of a new acquaintance, will either disregard it because this new person is unimportant in her or his life, or will take it for granted that it will change to friendliness as the acquaintance deepens. The ‘person who is paranoid’, on the other hand, will see only the suspicion or dislike – will magnify it – and will very often, in consequence, behave in such a way that the hostile feelings are confirmed and increased. This unhappy condition was one into which Jean could easily slip, and it colours many of the substantial stories of her middle period.
Yet these are, without question, her best stories. There are times when she allows her paranoia to colour what she writes too luridly (in ‘Outside the Machine’, for example, the crude beastliness of the women who turn on the patient who attempts suicide is portrayed with a kind of fierce relish, while the narrator is curiously remote in describing the unexpected kindness of old Madame Tavernier). But usually Jean Rhys is seeing the character who represents herself as impartially as everything else in the story, and therefore persuades us that the whole thing did, indeed, happen just like that. Reading her, we understand that we deceive ourselves when we hope that the powerless are not despised and pushed aside; we understand the devices by which they manage to survive (which include humour – witness ‘Tigers Are Better-Looking’: there is more humour in Jean Rhys’s observation of life than is usually recognized). And these sad stories are told – here is where the spell th
ey cast comes in – in a voice of great charm. Jean was charming. I knew her only for the last fifteen years of her life, but even as an old woman her voice, her look, her manner, her way of laughing until the tears ran down her face, made her unusually attractive. Because she had learnt to pare everything extraneous away from her prose, it expressed the essence of how she saw things – and therefore, the essence of how she was. Which makes it quite mysteriously charming, given the melancholy nature of what is being described.
Some of the late stories are very small, because she was too old and weary to take on anything bigger. She would attempt only what she knew she could do – but what she could do, she still did right. And there are two stories in this group which are extraordinary: ‘Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic’ and ‘Sleep It Off Lady’. Who else has reported back from the frontier of old age with such clarity, speaking truthfully about being old in the voice of the young person who continues to inhabit all of us for so long as we hold onto full awareness?
Of the three hitherto uncollected stories, ‘Kismet’ is a welcome retrieval from Jean’s ‘chorus line’ days, but the other two make me feel sad. These two little fragments from her last years mark the point at which her strength began to fail, and she could no longer quite bring off what she was trying to do. But to end one’s writing life in one’s late eighties, with no more than two ‘not quites’, is an achievement which certainly makes their suppression unnecessary.
Diana Athill
Illusion
Miss Bruce was quite an old inhabitant of the Quarter. For seven years she had lived there, in a little studio up five flights of stairs. She had painted portraits, exhibited occasionally at the Salon. She had even sold a picture sometimes – a remarkable achievement for Montparnasse, but possible, for I believe she was just clever enough and not too clever, though I am no judge of these matters.
She was a tall, thin woman, with large bones and hands and feet. One thought of her as a shining example of what character and training – British character and training – can do. After seven years in Paris she appeared utterly untouched, utterly unaffected, by anything hectic, slightly exotic or unwholesome. Going on all the time all round her were the cult of beauty and the worship of physical love: she just looked at her surroundings in her healthy, sensible way, and then dismissed them from her thoughts . . . rather like some sturdy rock with impotent blue waves washing round it.
When pretty women passed her in the streets or sat near her in restaurants she would look appraisingly with the artist’s eye, and make a suitably critical remark. She exhibited no tinge of curiosity or envy. As for the others, the petites femmes, anxiously consulting the mirrors of their bags, anxiously and searchingly looking round with darkened eyelids: ‘Those unfortunate people!’ would say Miss Bruce. Not in a hard way, but broadmindedly, breezily: indeed with a thoroughly gentlemanly intonation . . . Those unfortunate little people!
She always wore a neat serge dress in the summer and a neat tweed costume in the winter, brown shoes with low heels and cotton stockings. When she was going to parties she put on a black gown of crêpe de chine, just well enough cut, not extravagantly pretty.
In fact Miss Bruce was an exceedingly nice woman.
She powdered her nose as a concession to Paris; the rest of her face shone, beautifully washed, in the sunlight or the electric light as the case might be, with here and there a few rather lovable freckles.
She had, of course, like most of the English and American artists in Paris, a private income – a respectably large one, I believe. She knew most people and was intimate with nobody. We had been dining and lunching together, now and then, for two years, yet I only knew the outside of Miss Bruce – the cool sensible, tidy English outside.
Well, we had an appointment on a hot, sunny afternoon, and I arrived to see her about three o’clock. I was met by a very perturbed concierge.
Mademoiselle had been in bed just one day, and, suddenly, last night about eight o’clock the pain had become terrible. The femme de ménage, ‘Mame’ Pichon who had stayed all day and she, the concierge, had consulted anxiously, had fetched a doctor and, at his recommendation, had had her conveyed to the English Hospital in an ambulance.
‘She took nothing with her,’ said the femme de ménage, a thin and voluble woman. ‘Nothing at all, pauvre Mademoiselle.’ If Madame – that was me – would give herself the trouble to come up to the studio, here were the keys. I followed Madame Pichon up the stairs. I must go at once to Miss Bruce and take her some things. She must at least have nightgowns and a comb and brush.
‘The keys of the wardrobe of Mademoiselle,’ said Madame Pichon insinuatingly, and with rather a queer sidelong look at me, ‘are in this small drawer. Ah, les voilâ!’
I thanked her with a dismissing manner. Madame Pichon was not a favourite of mine, and with firmness I watched her walk slowly to the door, try to start a conversation, and then, very reluctantly, disappear. Then I turned to the wardrobe – a big, square solid piece of old, dark furniture, suited for the square and solid coats and skirts of Miss Bruce. Indeed, most of her furniture was big and square. Some strain in her made her value solidity and worth more than grace or fantasies. It was difficult to turn the large key, but I managed it at last.
‘Good Lord!’ I remarked out loud. Then, being very much surprised I sat down on a chair and said: ‘Well, what a funny girl!’
For Miss Bruce’s wardrobe when one opened it was a glow of colour, a riot of soft silks . . . everything that one did not expect.
In the middle, hanging in the place of honour, was an evening dress of a very beautiful shade of old gold: near it another of flame colour: of two black dresses the one was touched with silver, the other with a jaunty embroidery of emerald and blue. There were a black and white check with a jaunty belt, a flowered crêpe de chine – positively flowered! – then a carnival costume complete with mask, then a huddle, a positive huddle of all colours, of all stuffs.
For one instant I thought of kleptomania, and dismissed the idea. Dresses for models, then? Absurd! Who would spend thousands of francs on dresses for models . . . No nightgowns here, in any case.
As I looked, hesitating, I saw in the corner a box without a lid. It contained a neat little range of smaller boxes: Rouge Fascination; Rouge Manadarine; Rouge Andalouse; several powders; kohl for the eyelids and paint for the eyelashes – an outfit for a budding Manon Lescaut. Nothing was missing: there were scents too.
I shut the door hastily. I had no business to look or to guess. But I guessed. I knew. Whilst I opened the other half of the wardrobe and searched the shelves for nightgowns I knew it all: Miss Bruce, passing by a shop, with the perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve, well hidden under her neat dress, more or less stifled, more or less unrecognized.
Miss Bruce had seen a dress and had suddenly thought: in that dress perhaps . . . And, immediately afterwards: why not? And had entered the shop, and, blushing slightly, had asked the price. That had been the first time: an accident, an impulse.
The dress must have been disappointing, yet beautiful enough, becoming enough to lure her on. Then must have begun the search for the dress, the perfect Dress, beautiful, beautifying, possible to be worn. And lastly, the search for illusion – a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of Miss Bruce’s life.
Wonderful moment! When the new dress would arrive and would emerge smiling and graceful from its tissue paper.
‘Wear me, give me life,’ it would seem to say to her, ‘and I will do my damnedest for you!’ And first, not unskilfully, for was she not a portrait painter? Miss Bruce would put on the powder, the Rouge Fascination, the rouge for her lips, lastly the dress – and she would gaze into the glass at a transformed self. She would sleep that night with a warm glow at her heart. No impossible thing, beauty and all that beauty brings. There close at hand, to be clutched if one dared. Somehow she never dared, next morning.
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I thankfully seized a pile of nightgowns and sat down, rather miserably undecided. I knew she would hate me to have seen those dresses: ‘Mame’ Pichon would tell her that I had been to the armoire. But she must have her nightgowns. I went to lock the wardrobe doors and felt a sudden, irrational pity for the beautiful things inside. I imagined them, shrugging their silken shoulders, rustling, whispering about the anglaise who had dared to buy them in order to condemn them to life in the dark . . . And I opened the door again.
The yellow dress appeared malevolent, slouching on its hanger; the black ones were mournful, only the little chintz frock smiled gaily, waiting for the supple body and limbs that should breathe life into it.
When I was allowed to see Miss Bruce a week afterwards I found her lying, clean, calm and sensible in the big ward – an appendicitis patient. They patched her up and two or three weeks later we dined together at our restaurant. At the coffee stage she said suddenly: ‘I suppose you noticed my collection of frocks. Why should I not collect frocks? They fascinate me. The colour and all that. Exquisite sometimes!’
Of course, she added, carefully staring over my head at what appeared to me to be a very bad picture, ‘I should never make such a fool of myself as to wear them . . . They ought to be worn, I suppose.’
A plump, dark girl, near us, gazed into the eyes of her dark, plump escort, and lit a cigarette with the slightly affected movements of a non-smoker.
‘Not bad hands and arms, that girl,’ said Miss Bruce in her gentlemanly manner.
A Spiritualist
‘I assure you,’ said the Commandant, ‘that I adore women – that without a woman in my life I cannot exist.
‘But one must admit that one has deceptions. They are frankly disappointing, or else they exact so much that the day comes when, inevitably, one asks oneself: Is it worth while?
‘In any case it cracks. It always cracks.’