Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Luckily she gradually became less inhibited with Francis – partly, no doubt, because he was a man, and partly because he wrote to her as a friend from his own home, not as her publisher from an office (he worked with us only part-time). To him she owed the fact that a publisher was waiting for her book, and in him (this was probably more important to her) she had found someone who understood and loved her writing, who was sympathetic, amusing, kind, anxious to help. He made her dig out stories and found magazines to publish them, and when at last she let him know that she was on the verge of collapse, he sent her £100 so that she could go to a hotel or into a nursing-home for a rest. Her letters to me during those years are those of a writer glad to have a sympathetic editor; her letters to Francis are those of someone luxuriating in the unexpected discovery of a friend. Had it not been for his support she would not have been able to finish the book through which, in spite of such heavy odds against it, she was slowly, slowly, slowly inching her way.

  People are not, thank God, wholly explicable. Carole Angier’s biography of Jean does as much as anything ever will to explain the connections between the life and the work, but how this hopelessly inept, seemingly incomplete woman could write with such clarity, power and grace remains a mystery. I have long since settled for this fact; but I think I have reached a better understanding of the bad-at-life side of Jean since coming to know Dominica*, the island in the eastern Caribbean where she was born.

  I have been given an unusually close view of the island by a piece of great good fortune: becoming friends (through having been Jean’s publisher) with a Dominican family which includes the man who knows more than anyone else about every aspect of it. In Lennox Honychurch one of the Caribbean’s smallest islands has produced the region’s best historian, and it is through mental spectacles borrowed from him that I suddenly saw how foreign Jean was when she came to England in 1906, at the age of sixteen.

  The British, thinking ‘West Indies’, mostly envisage a mixture of Jamaica and Barbados with a touch of Mustique. My own image, which I considered well-founded because I had been there, was Trinidad & Tobago plus Jamaica. So Dominica surprised me.

  In the first place, no one had seriously wanted to make a colony of it. Columbus hit on it in 1493, and once described it by scrunching up a sheet of paper and tossing it onto a table: an inadequate image, but one can see what he meant. It consists of thirty by sixteen miles of densely packed volcanic mountains separated by deep valleys into which waterfalls roar and down which little rivers, often turbulent, run. The whole of it is clad in exuberant forest and some of it is given to steaming and shuddering. The dramatic nature of its conformation, and the tropical richness of its forest (much of it rain forest) make it wonderfully beautiful, but it is hardly useful-looking.

  Human beings have two ways of relating to such terrain. If, like the Caribs, who were there when Columbus turned up, you are the kind of human who lives with nature rather than on or against it, you find it hospitable: you can’t freeze in it, you can’t starve in it, there is plenty of material for building shelters and a vast number of mighty trees out of which to make canoes; and if hostile humans invade they find it extremely difficult to move about in, while you can very easily hide, and then ambush them. (There are still more Caribs living in Dominica than anywhere else, and it enabled escaped slaves to put up a more impressive resistance to vengeful slave-owners than they could do on any other island.) But if you are the kind of human who likes to control nature, and hopes to make a profit from it, then you must either leave such an island alone, as the Spanish sensibly did, or else steel yourself to work very hard for sadly little return. Dominica’s settlers have tried planting a variety of crops – coffee, cocoa, a very little sugar (not enough flat ground), lots of bananas and citrus fruit, vanilla, bay rum … all of them reasonably profitable for a time, then wiped out or greatly reduced by hurricanes, blights, or shifts in the market. In many parts of the Caribbean planters made fortunes; in Dominica with luck you got by, but rich you did not get.

  It was the French who first, early in the eighteenth century, edged themselves in to start plantation life: the Dominicans of today, almost all of them of African descent, still speak the French-based patois introduced by the slaves of the French planters, and Catholicism remains the island’s predominant religion. The English took the place over in 1763 as part of the peace settlement at the end of the Seven Years War between France and England, and were not excited by it. ‘These islands’, said a booklet for investors in 1764, ‘are not the promised land, flowing with milk and honey … Of those who adventure, many fall untimely. Of those who survive, many fall before enjoyment …’* Most plantation owners from then on were absentees who left managers in charge – men who had a bad reputation. A coffee planter in the eighteenth century wrote: ‘When we look around and see the many drunken, ignorant, illiterate, dissolute, unprincipled Characters to whom the charge of property is confided … it is no wonder that the Estate goes to ruin and destruction.’ But the managers deserve some sympathy: it was a lonely life. The small and rustic estate houses were separated from each other not by great distances, but by impassable terrain.

  To this day the abruptness with which mountains plunge into sea at each end of the island has defeated road-builders, so that no road runs right round it; and only since 1956 has it been possible to drive obliquely across it from the Caribbean to the Atlantic on a road forced by mountains to be much longer than the distance straight across. This trans-insular road, grandly named the Imperial Road, was officially ‘opened’ in about 1900, but in fact petered out halfway across, with only the first five or six miles surfaced. In Jean’s day you either sailed round the island, or rode a very difficult track often interrupted by flood or landslip. Even the flat coast road linking Roseau and Portsmouth, the two main towns on the Caribbean side, was non-existent until 1972. Nowadays a few narrow metalled roads run up into the mountains from the coast, so that farmers can truck their produce down to be shipped; but when Jean went to visit her grandmother at Geneva, the family’s estate, she rode nine miles of stony track.

  Except for the one between Roseau and Portsmouth, Dominica’s narrow bumpy roads still inspire awe just by existing: so much forest to be cleared, so many ups and so many downs to be negotiated hairpin after hairpin after hairpin, so many tropical downpours to wash away what has just been achieved … and so little money and no earth-moving equipment! They are valiant little roads, and keeping them in repair is a heavy task.

  So it is not surprising that few white people settled in Dominica. In Jean’s girlhood an energetic Administrator tempted in a new generation of English planters, and briefly the white population soared … from forty-four in 1891 to three hundred and ninety-nine in 1911*. But the new planters soon gave up, and now it is under a dozen. Jean’s parents lent her elder sister to rich relations to be brought up, and I can see why. White middle-class girls didn’t work, they got married, and who was there in Dominica for a girl to marry? No one. In those days British neglect of the island had been so scandalous regarding schools that hardly any black Dominicans had any schooling at all. Racial prejudice would, anyway, have made a black husband for a white girl seem impossible, but there would also have been real incompatibility. White education was nothing to boast of, but even the least polished white daughter could read.

  In a colonial society people only had to be white to feel themselves upper-class, in addition to which they hung on with determination to awareness of gentlemanly forebears if they had them, as the Lockharts (Jean’s mother’s family) did. So normal life to the child Jean was life at the top of the pile. Against which, the pile was no more than a molehill. Such a very small and isolated white society was less than provincial – less, even, than parochial, since there was considerably less enduring structure to it than to an average English village. It was threatened from below, which Jean sensed while still very young; but that pushed her in the direction of her family’s attitudes, rather than away
from them (not until she had worked her way through to the writer in herself – the seeing eye – would she, almost in spite of herself, reflect back an image of white Dominican society as it really was). As she approached the age of sixteen, when she would leave for England, her life was that of a tiny group of people whose experience was considerably narrower than they liked to think, combined with life in the head: dream life.

  Part of the dream was of Dominica itself, because its combination of beauty and untameability exerts a strong pull on the imagination. Jean wrote**

  … It was alive, I was sure of it. Behind the bright colours the softness, the hills like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills. There was something austere, sad, lost, all these things. I wanted to identify myself with it, lose myself in it. (But it turned its head away, indifferent, and that broke my heart.)

  The earth was like a magnet which pulled me and sometimes I came near it, this identification or annihilation that I longed for. Once, regardless of the ants, I lay down and kissed the earth and thought, ‘Mine, mine.’ I wanted to defend it from strangers …

  Outsiders, too, respond to it romantically. I know others beside myself who try to play down the intensity of their infatuation with it for fear of seeming absurd. I was charmed by Tobago, but it did not haunt my imagination as Dominica does. Perhaps it has to do with its volcanic nature. In addition to the Boiling Lake, steaming and gulping in its impressive crater, it has several lesser fumaroles, sulphur springs, earth tremors … vulcanologists say that at least four of its centres of volcanic activity might blow at any time. The inconceivable violence barely contained within our planet can’t be forgotten on Dominica. It is a place so far from ordinary in the mind’s eye that belonging to it, as Jean so passionately felt she did, must set one apart.

  Her other dream was of England, bred partly from the way that colonial families of British origin idealized it, more from the books which were sent her by her grandmother on her father’s side. From this material she created a promised land even more seductive than her beloved Dominica. Her father had an inkling of what would happen when she got there: he warned her that it would be ‘very different’, and told her to write directly to him if she was unhappy – ‘But don’t write at the first shock or I’ll be disappointed in you.’ But when they said goodbye, and he hugged her tightly enough to break the coral brooch she was wearing, she was unmoved by his emotion and felt very cheerful, ‘for already I was on my way to England’. At which she arrived knowing so little about it that she might have been landing from Mars.

  It was not just a matter of the obvious ignorances, such as not knowing what a train looked like (put into a little brown room at her first railway station she didn’t realize what it was), or supposing that the hot water gushing from bathroom taps was inexhaustible (she was scolded for using it all up when she took her first bath, and how could she have known?). And of course she had never dreamt of endless streets of joined-together brick houses, all grey … All that was bad enough, but worse was having none of the instinctive sense of give and take that is gained from living in a complex society surrounded by plenty of people like oneself. The older women she had known had been given no more opportunity than she had to acquire this … She could hardly have known what it was that she lacked, but she did know how badly she was at a loss.

  In England everyone she met knew things she didn’t know – not just the things taught in schools, but baffling ordinary, everyday things. Many young women are nimble face-savers, able to learn ways out of difficult situations, but Jean was not. Already, for whatever reason, she was in some ways trammelled in childishness; already paranoia threatened. It did not occur to her to learn, all she could do was hate. She hated this country which was so far from resembling her dream, and even more fiercely its inhabitants, for despising (as she was sure they did) her ignorance and her home. This feeling persisted into her old age: I saw it flare up when a woman spoke of Castries, in St Lucia, as ‘a shanty town’. Instantly Jean assumed that this sneering woman – these sneering English – would see Roseau in the same way, and Roseau was not a shanty town – it was not – they were not seeing it right. She sprang to defend it against strangers – hateful strangers. She had always hated them with their damned cold competence and common sense: never would she dream of trying to be like them. Probably she could not have been, anyway; but her abhorrence of what she saw as Englishness did make her embrace her own incompetence.

  The book she was trying against such heavy odds to finish was inspired by this hate. At first it was called ‘The First Mrs Rochester’. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had always filled her with indignation on behalf of the mad West Indian wife shut up in the attic of Thornfield Hall. She knew that Englishmen had sometimes married West Indian heiresses for their money, and suspected that Brontë had based her story on local gossip about such a marriage; and to Jean such gossip could only have been spiteful and unfair. For years she had wanted to write a novel showing the wife’s point of view, and for almost as many years again that was what – with long and painful interruptions – she had been doing.

  We had not been corresponding for long before she admitted that her worry about Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea (as it had become) was exhausting her. In this Part Mr Rochester turns up and marries Antoinette (disliking the name Bertha, which Brontë gave the wife, Jean chooses to call her heroine by her second name). Their relationship has to be established and the reason why this marriage of convenience goes so terribly wrong has to be explained. For Antoinette’s childhood and schooling, Jean said in letters, she could draw on her own, and ‘the end was also possible because I am in England and can all too easily imagine being mad’. But for the wedding and what followed she had nothing to go on, and she went through agonies of uncertainty: ‘Not one real fact. Not one. No dialogue. Nothing.’

  She sent an early version of Parts One and Two to Francis, who showed them to me, and in that version Part Two was indeed thin: the marriage became a disaster almost immediately, before it had been given time to exist. About this I wrote to her – nervously, because Part One was so marvellous that the book I was meddling with could obviously become a work of genius. I was relieved when she accepted what I had said; but not until much later, when I read one of her letters to Francis*, did I see that my suggestion had been of real use.

  She told him of certain ‘clues’ that had led her forward. The first was obeah, and how it must have played its ambiguous part in the story. ‘The second clue was when Miss Athill suggested a few weeks’ happiness for the unfortunate couple – before he gets disturbing letters.’ Starting to follow this suggestion, she saw at once that ‘He must have fallen for her, and violently too’, and at once the marriage came alive and was launched on its complex and agonizing course.

  That was to remain my only editorial intervention, strictly speaking, in Jean Rhys’s work: on points of detail she was such a perfectionist that she never needed ‘tidying up’.

  Jean and I met for the first time in November 1964, when, after the support she had received from Francis, and also from another Deutsch editor, Esther Whitby, who had volunteered to spend a weekend at Cheriton FitzPaine to help her sort out and arrange what she had written, she felt able to bring the finished book to London. Or rather, the almost finished book: there were still a few lines which she would have to dictate to the typist to whom we had given the material brought back by Esther. We would meet, Jean and I, for a celebratory lunch the day after she arrived … Instead, I was called to her hotel by an agitated manageress, who reported that she had suffered a heart attack during the night. So there was no triumph over a bottle of champagne. I had to pack her into an ambulance and take her to hospital. This, followed by three or four weeks of hospital visiting, with all the usual intimacies of nightdress washing, toothpaste buying and so on, plunged us into the deep end of friendship – though I soon learnt that it would be a mistake to suppose that meant trust. Jean never entirely trusted anybody. But she was
never thereafter to show me an unfriendly face.

  At the end of her first day in hospital she presented me with what might have become a painful moral problem: she asked me for a solemn promise that the book would never be published in its unfinished state – without, that is, the few lines she had been intending to dictate. Naturally I gave it. And then I went home to think ‘What if she dies?’ It seemed quite likely that she would. The book was publishable as it stood – perhaps a footnote or two would be necessary at the places where the lines were to go, but that was all. If she died would I be able to – would it even be right to – keep my promise? Now I know there would have been no question about it: of course we would have published. But at the time, in all the disturbance and anxiety caused by her illness, my sense of the terrifyingly treacherous world in which Jean’s paranoia could trap her (I’d picked that up at once) was so strong that I felt any promise given her must be real.

  A possible solution occurred to me. Esther had described how Jean kept her manuscript in shopping-bags under her bed, a huggermugger of loose sheets and little notebooks which Jean had said only she herself could make sense of. I knew that her brother, Colonel Rees-Williams, was coming up from Budleigh Salterton to visit her in hospital. Why not ask him to collect every bag of writing he could find in her cottage and bring it to me, without telling her (she was too ill to deal with it herself)? I would then go through it, returning everything meticulously to the order in which I found it, hoping to find clues to what she intended to insert; so that, if the worst happened, I could follow, at least approximately, her intentions.