Take Jean Rhys. Of the three relationships Plante describes this was the one that troubled him most, largely because he knew that he wanted something from it that wasn’t just friendship, and he didn’t like this in himself. ‘I wondered if my deepest interest in her was as a writer I could take advantage of,’ he reflected at an early stage in their relationship. ‘I did not like this feeling.’ The feeling recurred when she accepted his offer to help her write the autobiography she wanted to write but could no longer manage. (‘I can’t do it myself and no one can help me,’ she said, as she always said.) Their collaboration was long and painful. The same material was gone over again and again: sometimes she liked it, often she hated it; she would drink, become confused, shout at him, say it was worthless, that there was no point going on. He would put a thousand disparate fragments into chronological order and she would drop them on the floor. Then, looking at what she had done, she would again say, ‘I don’t know if this will ever be finished, it’s in such a mess.’ After Jean Rhys died, Sonia Orwell explained what Plante had no doubt understood all along: that Rhys was overcome with terror at the thought of another writer taking over her book. Her fears are easy to sympathise with. Unfortunately, they tie in all too well with the paranoia of a woman who, while always asking for help, never ceased to find fault with those who helped her; who would say ‘I don’t want to see anyone,’ and ten minutes later: ‘No one ever comes to see me.’ It’s clear from David Plante’s account of her, as it is from everything she wrote both when she was young and when she was an old lady, that she depended on, and was inspired by, a sense of being treated badly.
Plante describes a tearful afternoon when she tried to dictate a passage about the loneliness of old age:
She said no one helped her, she was utterly alone. She said she had had to come up to London on her own, when in fact Sonia and her editor had gone to stay in the village for three days to get her ready, and drove her up to London to the flat they had found for her. She asked me to read the whole thing out. She said, afterwards: ‘Well, there are one or two good sentences in it.’ I wondered how much of the ‘incredible loneliness’ of her life was literature, in which she hoped for one or two good sentences – all, she often said, that would remain of her writing, those one or two good sentences.
She was always incredibly lonely because in her own mind no one else existed. Sonia Orwell told David Plante that she wished he had known how charming Jean Rhys had been when she was younger, but the charm is there for everyone to see in the heroines of her novels, all of whom are versions of herself and all of whom are charming and very pretty. ‘I don’t think I know what character is,’ she admitted to Plante. ‘I just write about what happened.’ By which she meant what happened to her. And it wasn’t only as a novelist that she found the notion of character elusive: everyone she knew in life was a mystery to her. ‘I don’t know much about my husbands,’ she told Plante, confessing that she had no idea why her first and third husbands had spent time in prison. Max Hamer, her third husband, was married before, she said, ‘but whether he had any children or not I don’t know.’ She herself had two by her first husband, Jean Lenglet. After they divorced, the daughter (prudently) stayed with her father: the son had died in early infancy. ‘What did it die of?’ Plante asked. ‘Je n’sais pas’ was her reply: ‘I was never a good mother.’
It was characteristic of her that while she talked a great deal about her writing and writing in general, both of which seemed to matter a lot to her, she was prepared to turn her back on everything she had done for the sake of a couple of sad sentences: ‘I’ll die without having lived … I never wanted to be a writer. All I wanted was to be happy.’ What is hard to understand is the part Jean Rhys’s obsession with herself played in other people’s affection for her. ‘For some mad reason, I love you,’ David Plante said to her one day and then wondered, not why he had said it, but why he loved her. ‘The most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her,’ Scott Fitzgerald once remarked of his wife, ‘has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness of Zelda.’ Perhaps there is something unfailingly attractive about pretty women whose self-absorption makes them unable to cope with anything. ‘It took me three visits to teach her how to open a compact she had been given as a gift,’ Plante writes in passing about Jean Rhys: maybe it was the gallantry her selfishness inspired that made him think he loved her.
David Plante had first met Jean Rhys at a ‘luncheon party’ at Sonia Orwell’s house; and when he was working on her autobiography he liked to discuss her with Mrs Orwell. Heaven knows why, since Sonia could not bear to let him think that he knew anything about Jean that she didn’t already know: ‘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.’ That’s the way Sonia Orwell, who thought, perhaps rightly, that ‘most people’ didn’t like her, talked to her friends, as if telling them anything that didn’t make them feel awful would encourage in them a terrible sense of well-being. ‘When I was with her,’ Plante writes, ‘her effect was to make me see my life as meaningless, as I knew she saw her own life.’ It’s a funny reason for wanting to be someone’s friend. ‘I was in love with that unhappiness in her,’ he continues. Mrs Orwell, who had more common sense than David Plante, thought it was self-indulgent to say that kind of thing about oneself – and she had a point.
Plante acknowledges her qualities, her generosity with her time and her money, and what he calls her ‘disinterested devotion’ to her friends: but it is the many unpleasantnesses, or ‘difficulties’, of her behaviour that are assiduously reported. He took her to Italy to stay in his house, though her friends warned him against it (‘When I said I was going to Italy with Sonia Orwell, he said: “You’re out of your fucking mind”’): she didn’t like it there and the bits he was particularly proud of she particularly hated. She was often drunk; she didn’t like anyone she didn’t know (and a large number of people she did know): ‘The writer mentioned friends of hers. Sonia said: “They’re swine.”’ One or two people, her protégés, she respected, but mostly she was contemptuous of other people’s endeavours and even more contemptuous of their reputations: ‘Freddy Ayer. He doesn’t think … My God. I know Freddy Ayer. I know he doesn’t think.’ Having wanted to write and, in her own eyes, failed, she was particularly hard on writers, especially those who hoped for success: a writer was congratulated in her presence on a book he had recently published: ‘Sonia said: “I won’t read it. I’m sure it’s awful.”’ It seems likely, however, that she found her own behaviour more repellent than Plante did. ‘Sonia was difficult, but she was difficult for a reason. She wanted, demanded so much from herself and from others, and it made her rage that she and others couldn’t ever match what was done to what was aspired to.’ It’s an admiring remark but the rage wasn’t always admirable. When she was ill, a friend came to stay with her: ‘In the late morning, she’d bring a tray up to her, and would either find Sonia in a darkened room, her head lifted a little from the pillow, saying angrily, “You fucking well woke me up just when I’d fallen asleep,” or, in a bright room, sitting up in bed, saying, as she stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray: “Enfin. I thought breakfast would never come.”’
Sonia Orwell disapproved of Jean Rhys for making a meal of her miseries, but she didn’t invariably do better herself. On the other hand, she at least had some idea of what she was up to:
‘Yesterday a young woman stopped me in the street to ask me the time. I shouted at her: “Do you think I can give the time to everyone who stops me in the street?” Afterwards, I wondered why I had been so rude to her. Why? Why am I so filled with anger?’
I said nothing.
She said: ‘I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life.’
David Plante doesn’t tell us a lot about Jean Rhys that Jean Rhys hasn’t. His portrait of Mrs Orwell is persuasive: but th
ere is little reason for people who never knew her – who have never even heard of her – to know now how much and with what cause she loathed herself. Novelists have more tactful ways of saying what they think about their friends.
The year Sonia Orwell stayed with David Plante in Italy he decided to spend a few days with Germaine Greer before returning to England. The first thing he saw when he arrived at the house with Greer was a baby sitting at a table under a fig tree playing with finger paints. ‘That’s not the way to use fucking finger paints,’ Greer shouted at the child, who ‘looked up at her with a look of shocked awe that there was a wrong and a right way to use finger paints’. Plante went into the house while ‘Germaine taught the baby the use of finger paints.’ Inside the child’s mother was reading a magazine. ‘Where the fuck are you while your baby is making a fucking mess out of the fucking finger paints I paid fucking good money for?’ Greer shouted from the garden. Germaine Greer knows a lot more than the right way to use fucking finger paints: as Plante describes her, there isn’t a single fucking thing she doesn’t know how to do. The next morning he finds her doing drawings for a dovecot she wants to build:
I said: ‘It looks as if you’re designing a whole palazzo.’
‘I’m simply doing it the way it should be done,’ she said.
They visit a local coppersmith: Greer and the coppersmith speak to each other in the local dialect.
Outside I asked: ‘But how do you know the dialect?’
‘Don’t you?’ she asked. ‘You live here. Shouldn’t you know the dialect?’
They go to a garage where the mechanics stare at her: ‘they have never known a woman who could swing her hips from side to side and clasp her hands to her breasts and pucker her mouth and know as much as they did about shock absorbers.’ Wherever Greer and Plante go together, in Tulsa or in Tuscany, it’s the same story: she is in complete fucking command; he is flummoxed. The only expertise they seem to share is an ability to take care of their own sexual requirements:
At dinner with six others, Germaine said to me across the dinner table: ‘I haven’t had sex in weeks, not since I got here.’ ‘Neither have I,’ I said. She said: ‘Well, I’ve been happy enough in my little white room taking care of it all by myself.’ ‘I’m pretty content in that way, too,’ I said.
Clearly Plante is dazzled by her: dazzled by the sight of her breasts shining in the candlelight as she sits in a bath with burning candles all along the edge, dazzled by the sight of her pubic hair peeping out through the gaping buttons of her skirt, by her ‘bodily presence’, by her looks (until he noticed her ‘stubby’ feet, he had thought she ‘was beautiful beyond any fault’); dazzled by her sex life, her stories of fucks in the sea with used-car salesmen and the descriptions of her ‘long, violently fluttering orgasms’; dazzled by her ‘knowledge of the whole world and what was happening or not happening in it’; dazzled by her understanding of ‘what it is to be a woman’ (what is it?): ‘Her intelligence was to me the intelligence of a woman, because she had, as a woman, thought out her role in the world; the complexity of the role required intelligence to see it, and she had seen it, I thought, thoroughly’; dazzled, above all, by the splendour of her public persona. The chapter ends with a description of the wondrous Greer giving a lecture at the Unitarian Church in Tulsa:
Powerful lights illuminated the stage so TV cameras could film the lecture; in the intense light, Germaine appeared to have a burning silver sheen about her. As she talked, she moved her arms in loose soft gestures, and I found myself being drawn in, not to a public argument in support of abortion as she defined it, but a private revelation about love … I thought: She’s talking about herself. And yet she wasn’t talking about herself. She was talking about the outside world, and in her large awareness of it, she knew it as I did not; it was as if she had a secret knowledge of it, and to learn that secret from her would make me a different person. I wanted to be a different person. I had never heard Germaine give a public lecture; I had never seen her so personal. I thought: I love her.
What is surprising is not that Germaine Greer finds him a creep but that after everything he says about her he finds her difficult. If that adjective can encompass both the helpless Jean Rhys and the very able Germaine Greer, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Book reviewed:
Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three by David Plante
Vita Longa
‘Contemplating a worn piece of green velvet on her dressing table, I felt my whole being dissolve in love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by another woman, allowed St John to hold her hand. She even allowed her, Victoria Glendinning reports, to accompany her in her car ‘all the way’ to Tonbridge: in Tonbridge Christopher was put on a train back to London. But on the way out of London – on the Westminster Bridge Road, to be precise – Vita had ‘stretched out her left hand’ and told Christopher that she loved her, and when they got to the station in Tonbridge Vita parked the car in a side street and gave Christopher ‘a lover’s kiss’. (‘I never knew unalloyed bliss with V. except on that November day.’) The lover’s kiss was followed by ‘one night of love’. Then it was all over.
Glendinning’s book is mostly about love: Vita falling into it, dying for it, falling out of it; being adored, being swept off her feet, glimpsing paradise, getting bored. At the time of her affair with Christopher St John Vita was forty: Christopher, Glendinning writes, was ‘very ugly and in her late fifties’. (Virginia Woolf, called on to intercede with Vita on Christopher’s behalf, described her as ‘that mule-faced harridan of yours’.) Vita didn’t drop Christopher: she liked people to go on loving her, provided they didn’t expect much in return, and Christopher eventually settled for a phone call every Friday night. She didn’t stop being in love with Vita, however, and twenty years later, at the age of nearly eighty, was still in love with her: ‘my dearly loved Vita – my soul’s joy’.
All the women who loved Vita Sackville-West loved her with that kind of intensity. ‘I have loved you all my life,’ Violet Trefusis wrote: ‘loved you as my ideal, my inspiration, my perfection.’ And in most cases Vita’s feelings, for a while at least, ran equally high. There can’t be many people who were so much involved in bliss. Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson, attempting to give some account of what went on between his mother and Violet Trefusis, speaks of the two women being ‘carried on the breezes towards the sun, exalted and ecstatic, breathing the thin air of the empyrean’. One might, more meanly, say that an important part of their extreme love for each other was the sense it gave them of their great superiority to everyone else. In a life in which what mattered most was to be grand and free and take risks and have adventures and generally be carried on the breezes towards the sun, there is something to be said for a minor character like Christopher St John who made a note of what exactly happened to her, however meagre, and what the street was called and where the car was parked.
The young Vita Sackville-West, living at Knole, prepared for her adventurous life in a variety of literary forms – ‘all romantic and all long’, as Virginia Woolf said of the works of the young Orlando. Tremendously dissatisfied with herself – ‘I must have been quite dreadful’ – Vita filled her exercise books with elaborate and high-minded reconstructions of the past. Her heroes were aristocratic and overdressed: Richelieu and the Medicis and her own Sackville ancestors. ‘My Vita,’ Harold Nicolson was to say of his wife, ‘is a heroine to everyone including her own darling self.’ But it took her a while to figure out what sort of heroine she was going to be. When she had finished a 65,000-word novel celebrating Edward Sackville, a modest hero of the Civil War, she added a coy ‘author’s note’ – she was then 14 – in which she wondered whe
ther he could see her and if he knew ‘how I wish to be like him’. (This coyness is infectious: Glendinning in her author’s note says that she thinks Vita ‘would like’ the form her biography has taken.) She was more bold in her next novel, at any rate about her wish not to be a girl, and told her mother that its young hero, Cranfield Sackville – ‘he held his tongue and committed his thoughts to paper only’ – was intended to be a portrait of herself.
Even better than dressing up as a boy in a novel was dressing up as a boy in real life. When she was 17 she wrote a verse drama on the life and death of Thomas Chatterton: dressed in a white shirt and a pair of black breeches (run up for her in secret by Emily, her maid), she would act it out alone in the attic at Knole and every time be ‘moved to tears’ by her own performance. Twenty years later, in a flamboyant account of her own adolescence attributed to the heroine of All Passion Spent, Vita described her thoughts as having been ‘of an extravagance to do credit even to a wild young man. They were thoughts of nothing less than escape and disguise: a changed name, a travestied sex and freedom in some foreign city.’ But by then she wore breeches every day, though she wore them with pearls, and had disguised herself as a man to go dancing with Violet Trefusis. She had even, at the height of her passion for Violet, changed her name, faked her sex and, briefly, found freedom in a foreign city. It wasn’t only Vita herself, or the giddy Violet, who found her trousers a turn-on. Virginia Woolf told Vita that it had been the sight of her gaiters that inspired Orlando, Virginia’s homage to Vita’s androgyny.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 12