by David Plante
She shook her head. “No, never. They’re sheep. Sweet. I appreciate them. But they’re sheep, they follow after. And I never thought about money or fame. You mustn’t ever think of money or fame. The voices go if you do. I don’t think about anything but my writing.”
“You don’t think about yourself?”
She laughed. “I always thought I was different. I always thought I was a freak, that I felt things they didn’t feel.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “They.”
I laughed. “The ones who don’t understand?”
“Yes, all of them. I’ve always felt best when I was alone, felt most real. People have always been shadows to me, and are so more and more. I’m not curious about other people—not about what they do, a little about what they think—and the more dependent I become on people, as I must, the more I shy away from them. But you like people, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” I said, “yes, I do.”
“And you’re optimistic.”
“In small ways.”
“You are in person,” she said, “but I don’t know if you are in your writing.”
I laughed.
“People don’t like me,” she said. “I know they always try to put me down. They think I’m not nice.”
I said, “Sonia, who is totally honest, once said to me, ‘Oh David, no one thinks you’re as nice as you try to be.’”
Jean laughed; she liked that.
I asked, “Are you curious about yourself?”
“Yes,” she said. “I shouldn’t be. A mystic would say I shouldn’t be. But I delve and delve. I don’t know other people. I never have known other people. I have only ever written about myself.”
“Yes,” I said. “But doesn’t that make you selfish?”
“Very,” she said. “You have to be selfish to be a writer.”
“Monstrously selfish?”
“Monstrously selfish,” she said. “But you’ve also got to realize that if you’re going to be that selfish you can’t expect anything from anyone.”
“And you’re upset that you’re so dependent now on others?”
She spoke in a flat, tired voice. “I’m a prisoner. I can’t go out to shop, I can’t prepare my own food, can’t bathe alone, or make my bed. I worry that people resent my depending on them. And they do, of course they do.”
“But do you in any way feel justified in accepting help because you’re writing?”
She raised her hands and dropped them. “Oh, that: writing. No, nothing ever justifies what you have to do to write, to go on writing. But you do, you must, go on. You hear a voice that says, ‘Write this,’ and you must write it to stop the voice. I don’t hear any voices any more. My last collection of stories was no good, no good, magazine stories. I wasted two and a half years on that book. Not good. Oh, the reviews say it’s good. But you know when you’ve done something good, and those stories are no good. I can’t do it any more.”
She said it in such a sober, straight way I almost said, “Yes.”
She said, “Let’s have more drinks, honey. I know I’m not supposed to, but—the sins of the flesh and drink are very minor sins, aren’t they?”
There was very little drink left. I had to run out to buy another bottle of gin and of sweet vermouth.
She was sitting in the middle of the couch. She said, when I sat on my chair, “David, what will I do with my life?”
“What would you like to do?”
“I want to go away, I want to do something really wild, really really wild. What shall I do? I’m a prisoner.”
Her small body appeared to me more hunched and twisted than ever, and locked in that position, so when she moved even her head her entire body, rigid, moved too, in jerks.
“I once tried to commit suicide,” she said, “a long time ago. I cut my wrists. The doctor when I got to him sewed me up as if he’d done it six times before that same evening. I thought he’d be angry with me, send me to an asylum, but he didn’t say anything to me.”
I said, “Jean, would you like to hear some music?”
“Yes,” she said, “the Polovtsian Dances. I saw Prince Igor once in Nice.”
I put the record on, just at the part I knew she liked; the music was filled with the crackling and popping of scratches. She raised her gaunt arms high as the music pounded, and seemed to be punching the air above her head with her fists, her head lifted to look up, tears pouring down her cheeks, and she said, “It’s so alive! It’s so marvellous!”
The moment the particular dance she liked ended, she lowered her arms, wiped her eyes with her hands, and said, “That’s enough of that.”
When I next went to work with her, I found her, on the divan, surrounded by cosmetics: compacts, lipsticks, creams. She was rubbing colours from a little flat box of many different shades of eye makeup on to the back of her hand. She was excited. “Look at this,” she said, “someone sent me all this. It’ll keep me happy for weeks.” I asked her who had sent it all, but she couldn’t remember. I sat next to her, and we discussed the shades of makeup that might best suit her. She took out her compact to look in the mirror and try a shade; I was worried that with her shaking hands she’d get it in her eyes. She smeared some on a temple. Looking at herself in the little round mirror, she raised her upper lip as in a sneer. She dropped her hand.
“You know,” she said, “being attractive is alien to women, so when they try the strain shows.”
I didn’t know what she meant, and I didn’t ask her.
She asked me, before we got to work on her autobiography, if I would help her with some correspondence. I got her to a chair by the desk and I opened a drawer to a heap of torn-open letters. She put on her spectacles, and reached out for a letter from the heap, examined it closely without, I thought, reading it, and handed it to me. Some letters were from acquaintances. We discussed whether she should answer them, but as all the letters said the sender would be in touch again, Jean asked me to tear them up. When we came across statements from publishers or letters from her accountant, she would put her hands over her eyes and say, “I can’t, I can’t.” She never knew who her foreign publishers were or what, exactly, was happening to her books; and she never knew, no matter how often she was told, how much money she had, except, she was sure, that it was very little. Letters from fans she asked me to read out to her and as I did she looked wistfully sad. If the letters enclosed reviews, she asked the title and the first line, then said, “Tear it up.” When the title was “The Dark Underworld of Women” or “The Woes of Women” or had “women” in it in any way, she’d grab the review from me and tear it up herself and throw it in the basket, laughing, and say, “No, I’ve had enough of that!”
It is impossible to say what Jean’s attitude was towards any subject. She seemed to have little interest in reactions to her work from serious readers, and I think she found it improbable that any opinion of hers should be taken seriously in the world; and yet she raged that no one paid any attention to her, no one at all. I wrote down some of the things she said about women: “I’m not at all for women’s lib. I don’t dislike women exactly, but I don’t trust them. You can never tell them what you really think, because if they know what you think they’ll do you down. I’m not, I’ve never been intimate with them. It’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I’m not like other women, that I lack feminine qualities. I’m not, and I have never been jealous, for example, never, and women are very jealous of one another.” And: “Don’t tell anyone this. Women are kind, but they do for you what they want to do, not what you want to do. They can’t imagine that you may want something quite different from what they want. Men at least try to do for you what you want.” And when women who were not close friends spoke to her, she looked at them with a superior and wounded tolerance as she listened, and said in response, simply, “Perhaps.”
To have argued with Jean about her opinions would have been mad: she simply would not have understood if one had said, “
But Jean, don’t you wonder why you say that about women?” In terms of psychology (she said she had never read Adler, Jung or Freud, didn’t know what they were about, and didn’t want to know) or social studies (she wouldn’t have understood what a social study was), she never asked why her main female characters acted as they did: they just did, as she did. There is about them a great dark space in which they do not ask themselves, removing themselves from themselves to see themselves in the world in which they live: Why do I suffer? When Jean said she delved and delved into herself, I didn’t understand; it was certainly not to question her happiness, or, more, unhappiness, in terms of the world she lived in, and certainly not her prejudices. These prejudices were many, and sometimes odd: Protestants, Elizabethans—
When the time came for dictating, Jean said she wanted to do something unrelated to the book. I settled her on the divan with a drink. She began, “Today, I realize I am old, irretrievably old.” I wrote. As she dictated, I became angry, and I kept asking myself: Why am I wasting my time with this? The long paragraph was banal and affected, and the more banal and affected it became the more she wept as she dictated. She said, “A sort of despair,” in a sentence, and when I read the sentence to her, she said, “Cut the ‘a sort of’ and leave just ‘despair.’” 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 Devon 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, afterward, “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. I thought: She is false, and I am false for being here. I was annoyed, not because Jean was being unfair (one of her most commonly used expressions was “It’s not fair!”) but because she was being totally unimaginative; I expected more from her.
She said, when I gave her another drink, “Trust only yourself and your writing. You will write something marvellous if you trust yourself and don’t give up.” And though I clasped her free hand and squeezed it, I became more angry—with Jean, but mostly with myself. She went on, a little drunkenly, about writing. She said, “People think they can sit down and write novels. Nonsense. It isn’t done that way. It’s not a part-time occupation, it’s your life.” I resented what she said, thought everything she said was false, and didn’t want to hear it; I sat across from her, drunk myself, and listened.
She put her glass down. “All right,” she said, “I’m ready to do some work on the autobiography.”
Quickly, and it seemed to me without thinking, she dictated this paragraph:
“Below the lonely house was the distant sea and Roseau Bay, and in the bay there was sometimes a strange ship flying the yellow flag, and we knew there was contagion on board. Rising up behind the house was untouched forest and, further up, a range of mountains, Morne Anglais, Morne Colle Anglais, Morne Bruce, Morne Diabletin. Morne Diabletin was the highest, and covered in mist. It had never been climbed because the summit was rock, and round the summit flew large black birds called devil birds. We could see the rain coming over the mountains and ran for shelter before it fell on us. There were a great many storms with forked lightning and thunder and great wind and heavy showers of rain, after which it cleared instantly, and the sky was blue again. When it was clear, the smell was fresh and sweet, and the sea below and the mountains above were bright.”
I thought: This is beautiful, and it is because of this that I am working with her.
But the paragraph underwent many different changes. She kept saying, “It should be vague, more vaguely remembered.” After a while, I was writing it with her, and she seemed to like the collaboration.
She said, after the paper and pencil were put away, “You know, what I’m trying to write about, my life in Dominica, happened almost a century ago. I remember songs my great-aunt taught me which her mother had taught her. It all goes such a long way back.” With another drink, she said, “And what is Dominica like now? They say there are no roses in Dominica now. There were, I remember them. They gave such a scent to the air.” She suddenly shouted, “Lies! Lies!” She bared her teeth. “A pack of lies. And who cares? Who does anything? Terrible things people do. Getting rid of the roses in Dominica. I hate the word ‘people.’” She spat the word out. “People! I hate people! I hate everyone. I think they’re all enemies. Terrible. No roses in Dominica. Who got rid of them? I know. I know. Up the Dreads. Yeah, the Dreads. They’re in London, too, and they wear dark glasses. In Dominica they live in the forests. They’re taking over. And who cares? Who gives a damn? Who? No one understands! Well, so what? I’ll be dead soon.”
I let her rage. Often she would open her compact, always with difficulty, and I’d watch her look in the little round mirror to powder her nose and cheeks and pull and push the hair around her face, her lips pursed with bitterness.
She suddenly stopped talking and looked at me for a moment in silence, blurry-eyed, then asked, “Why do you come to see me?”
I smiled.
She said, “I feel I can say anything to you, that you do understand, a little, just a little. Why do you come? Is it curiosity?”
I kept my smile. “A little.”
“And what else?”
I didn’t know what to say. I said, “For some mad reason, I love you.”
“You’re not pretending that?”
“I said it was mad. Could madness be a pretence?”
“No, it couldn’t. I do trust you.”
I thought: But why do I love her?
We didn’t work the next time I saw her. One of Jean’s close friends helped me to take her to a beauty clinic. She had been saying that no one understood how her morale depended on makeup and pretty clothes. She wanted her face done up and her lashes dyed black. The clinic was at the top of a very long flight of stairs, which we took one at a time, pausing at each step. In the rather severe grey waiting room, Jean said, “This looks serious.” A young woman came for her, and I helped her up another flight of stairs into an alcove with green velvet curtains, then left to do shopping, and came back after an hour. She looked exactly as I had left her. In the car back to the flat, she said, “I am a fool.” Then she giggled and said, “Well, I’ll never go back there again.”
I stayed with her for a few hours. We didn’t work. She talked calmly about herself and, for the first time, about her family: her two older brothers, her elder sister, her younger sister. Her eldest brother, she said, studied medicine in Edinburgh, then went to India. The other brother, who had many illegitimate half-caste children in Dominica before he left (some still wrote to Jean and called her “dear Aunty”), went to Canada, then Australia, then East Africa, and finally died in England, “falling down a flight of stairs somewhere.” Her elder sister, when young, went to stay with an aunt and uncle in the Bahamas, on a holiday, and stayed and stayed, until, Jean said, it was obvious she was not going to return to her own family. Then Jean herself, who left the West Indies when she was sixteen to study at a girls’ school in Cambridge, was written to by her mother after her father’s death and told there was no more money and that she should return; but Jean stayed in England and “sort of drifted away” from her family. Her younger sister came to England with her mother. Jean had hardly seen either of them. She wasn’t in England when her mother died. Her sister, whom she never saw in later life, had died a few years before.
I said, “Do you consider yourself a West Indian?”
She shrugged. “It was such a long time ago when I left.”
“So you don’t think of yourself as a West Indian writer?”
Again, she shrugged, but said nothing.
“What about English? Do you consider yourself an English writer?”
“No! I’m not! I’m not! I’m
not even English.”
“What about a French writer?” I asked.
Again, she shrugged and said nothing.
“You have no desire to go back to Dominica?”
“Sometimes,” she said, “but I know it will all have changed.” She remembered something. “Honey, will you get from the top of the desk a piece of folded paper?”
I did, and gave it to her; she unfolded the paper to reveal three dried black leaves.
She said, “They’re voodoo. Someone, I can’t remember who, gave them to me. They’re from Haiti. You put them under your pillow and you dream the solution to your problem. You can’t drink too much and you can’t take sleeping pills. I must try it tonight. I won’t say I believe, and I won’t say I don’t believe.”
She had the solution to her problem when I saw her again. She would do something really wild and go to Venice. Two close female friends would go with her. Jean asked me to come next time with two huge manila envelopes and a stick of sealing wax. We put the unfinished autobiography into the envelopes, sealed them with melted wax, and I wrote on each TO BE DESTROYED UNOPENED IF ANYTHING SHOULD HAPPEN TO ME, and she signed, with both Jean Rhys and E. G. Hamer. The envelopes were to be given to her accountant.
She said, “My work is ephemeral.”
The work put aside, my following visits with Jean were chatty, and when I asked her about her life it was simply to get her to chat, and she did, with ease. I did not write anything down afterward in my diary, except this: “Jean told me she remembered seeing Sarah Bernhardt on the stage, in the last act of La Dame aux camelias. It was after Bernhardt’s leg had been amputated, and she did the whole thing on a chaise longue. Jean recalled her saying, ‘Je ne veux pas mourir, je ne veux pas mourir,’ and a man in the seat next to Jean, tears streaming down his face, said, ‘But she’s just an old woman with one leg.’ Jean herself began to weep; she took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her eyes and said, laughing, ‘I’ll bet my tears are ninety per cent gin.’ I felt close to her.”