Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Dominica in 1890, making her the same generation as Katherine Mansfield, another colonial girl whose early life provides many striking parallels with that of Rhys. Her mother came of a line of estate-owning sugar merchants and slave-owners – slavery was abolished in 1834 – and her father was a highly respectable Welsh doctor who travelled to the Antilles as a medical officer, married and stayed on. Carol Angier believes that Jean suffered very early from feeling rejected: the baby girl who preceded her in the family died, and the one after her stole all her mother’s love, leaving Jean full of rage, ‘a stranger on the face of the earth’.

  But a very pretty stranger, eyes wide apart, sweet downturned mouth, and wilful. When she was seventeen she was taken to England by a kindly aunt, sent to school in Cambridge, which she detested, and then allowed to enrol in Beerbohm Tree’s Academy of Dramatic Art. There her colonial accent proved an insuperable handicap; and after two terms, and despite the disapproval and warnings of her family, she got herself work as a chorus girl. In 1909 chorus girls needed to be tough. Jean was not tough enough, and when she was picked up and taken to bed by a rich young man of good family she fell piteously in love. Soon, by the custom of his class, he paid her off. Collapsed with misery, she drifted into an even more sordid world, for a while working as a prostitute. She had a late abortion. She felt she had died. At Christmas 1913 she considered suicide. Instead, she bought some exercise books and began to write about what had happened: the magic moment that is always excluded from her fiction, in which the heroines have no resource.

  Many years passed before she published anything, while her life settled into a cycle of disasters. She married a young Dutch writer, John Lenglet; he was already married, and penniless, but they moved to Paris together, where their first baby died. The second baby, a girl, Maryvonne, was consigned to clinics paid for by a friend; Lenglet was arrested and imprisoned for embezzlement, and Jean fell in with Ford Madox Ford, who published her stories and conducted an affair with her which humiliated her and destroyed her marriage. (Lenglet became a considerable writer himself, and a hero of the Dutch resistance against the Nazis.)

  By now she had become an alcoholic. She was never capable of looking after Maryvonne, who spent her childhood in clinics and convents and then the care of her father; but she acquired two further husbands, both Englishmen. The first, a gentle publishers’ reader, was able by encouraging and typing out her drafts to help her finish and publish four novels during the 1930s. They are lucid and powerful statements of what it is like to feel yourself a victimized woman in a world in which none of the strategies of the victim are going to succeed because powerful, unfeeling men will always override them. Yet the fact was that, at this point in her life, Jean was enabled to work entirely by the generosity, selfless love and understanding of her husband.

  Jean’s heroines have something of the slave, something of the tart in them; they are nostalgic and supremely passive, their plans rarely going further than the next hairdo, the next hand-out, the next pretty dress, the next drink. Their stories are all on one lowering note. Yet the note is struck with the accuracy and pure strength of genius. You believe that every sentence was written and rewritten a hundred times, and that for every word that has survived into the final version another hundred at least were discarded; and the books made their mark, if only with the happy few.

  During the Second World War Jean wrecked her second husband’s life and after his frightful death married his cousin Max. He adored her too, but turned out to be another embezzler. Max emerged from prison in the mid fifties and they sank together into the most wretched poverty, too poor to live anywhere but in remote hovels in the country; when he fell ill, Jean would sometimes batter him in her drunk exasperation, so that he had to be removed to hospital for safety. Almost unbelievably, a village clergyman who knew nothing of her writing past appeared, ministered to her, picked up the scattered scraps of paper on the floor of her cottage, took them home in a plastic bag, pieced some together and saw that she was a genius. From this (and from the patient encouragement of Francis Wyndham, Diana Athill and Sonia Orwell) came Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel which she had carried in her seemingly addled head for years. It was acclaimed, rightly, as a masterpiece, and brought her the fame, friends, awards, reprints and money she had never had. She was getting on for eighty by now; during the years that remained she managed to bite most of the hands held out to her.

  For Jean Rhys was as much monster as she was victim. She knew everything there is to know of the woes of writers, the woes of women, and – of course and especially – the woes of women writers. She knew all about snobbery and cold respectable people, and still more of misogyny, and particularly the misogyny that prevails among Englishmen educated from preparatory school onward to distrust women and the feelings associated with women. Out of this she distilled brief, lucid, marvellous pieces of writing, poetic and disturbing; but the conduct of her life does make you see why the philistine sometimes slams his door against the artist, and doesn’t mind breaking a few of the artist’s fingers in the process. The artist will in any case be the one to survive, and the philistine would rather be mauled dead than alive.

  Independent on Sunday, 1990

  The Lion and the Lady

  Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 edited by Lyall H. Powers

  If your idea of a good letter is a low, infinitely circumlocutory booming on and on, rising every now and then to a breathless twitter, and a flurry of French or even Franglais, then Henry James (or ‘Jemmes’ as he sometimes Gallicized it) is the answer, at any rate in his later years.

  If not, you may find that this collection in which his voice is vastly predominant – there are 131 of his letters to 13 of Edith Wharton’s – brings on mystified giggles or even rage. The most interesting passages have been printed before, either in studies like Millicent Bell’s 1961 Edith Wharton and Henry James or in Leon Edel’s various volumes, where they gain immeasurably by being seen in the context of the rest of James’s correspondence. This selection, while it gives careful translations of drearissime, devotissimo, à bientôt, allons, je vous embrasse and basta (etc.), deals scantily with the story behind the correspondence.

  Yet it is an extraordinary, and thoroughly Jamesian, story. Their correspondence began in 1900 when James was fifty-seven, an acknowledged master of his art as novelist, thoroughly Anglicized and living in Sussex. His fellow American, Edith Wharton, was twenty years younger and just embarking on her writing career; she was what was called a society matron, accustomed to dividing her time between America and Europe, immensely rich, with a sporting husband who left her cold and spent her money on chorus girls. Teddy Wharton was possibly psychotic; Edith was clever, by now intent on leading her own life and becoming a writer. She had made several attempts to attract James’s attention in the 1880s – in Paris, in Venice – but succeeded only after her first book, set in eighteenth-century Italy, attracted reviews which suggested her prose style was modelled on his.

  For Wharton, he was the literary lion of his generation. He in turn admired her talent, and urged her to make her subject the American, not the European, scene; and, following this advice, she produced some of her finest novels, among them The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. But there was much more than literature to the relationship. He was dazzled by her style, intelligence and force of personality, the limitless luxury of her life. Professor Powers writes of the ‘safely controlled but invigorating element of the erotic’ in his feelings for her, but this doesn’t seem quite right. It is clear from his letters to others that he was sometimes alarmed as well as excited by her. ‘The Angel of Devastation’ he called her when she threatened a visit, or excursions in her chauffeur-driven motor (always referred to as ‘She’ by James). Elsewhere he called her an eagle, ready to pounce; and the ‘lady who consumes worlds as you and I (don’t even) consume apples’. This is not erotic language; or not directly so.

&
nbsp; In fact for some years the tightest bond between them was a three-cornered one. James introduced Wharton to his friend Morton Fullerton, a moustachioed bisexual American journalist on the make in Europe, for whom the elderly writer entertained feelings of the greatest tenderness. Soon Wharton (too, one is tempted to write) was in love with Fullerton, and by 1908 they became lovers, on one occasion spending the night together at the Charing Cross Hotel after dinner with James, who seems to have enacted almost the exact role assigned to him in Beerbohm’s famous cartoon, which shows him peering at two pairs of shoes outside a hotel bedroom.

  This was not all. Fullerton was being blackmailed by a French mistress, who had got hold of letters proving his homosexual involvements, and James and Wharton between them helped to pay off the blackmail, though how much they knew about its origin is uncertain. The affair between Wharton and Fullerton lasted less than two years, and she later wrote bitterly of his habit of turning up only when he needed something; James, however, continued to ask warmly and wistfully for news of him. His excitement extended to her involvements with younger men, of which there were quite a few, and he enjoyed hovering benevolently in the background, in the know, though not too much so; he didn’t like to hear about ‘dirty bedrooms’. All this makes for uneasy reading at times. When you reflect how cruelly James treated his old friend Violet Hunt when she got her name into the papers in a divorce suit, you see how delicately adjusted his tastes in voyeurism were; he relished a frisson, but if a scandal were publicly reported he withdrew his friendship at once.

  The letters in this collection at first suggest a comedy set against exactly the world described in James’s fiction – a rich and cultured cosmopolites with sexual ambiguities and secrets – and then move on into something more sombre, and more touching. The balance between Wharton and James changed as his books failed to sell, and he grew frail and ill, while she enjoyed commercial as well as artistic success, divorced Teddy at last in 1913 (James wrote to another friend, ‘Teddy is now howling in space’) and in 1914 took up active war work for the French. Her kindness and concern for her Cherest Maître increased, and were increasingly appreciated by him as he dwindled and suffered, his lifelong hypochondria at last justified. In his final lucid months he wrote to her with unreserved gratitude and affection. When he could no longer write, she kept in touch with his amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, even inviting her to become her secretary. Miss Bosanquet, however, declined the honour, recording crisply that Mrs Wharton used too much perfume, had a ‘brownish-yellow’ complexion, and kept the central heating turned up too high. But to Mrs Wharton’s ‘all-battered but all-affectionate’ Master, she was no longer a subject even for irony: she was simply ‘dearest Edith’, to whom he was devoted and grateful, and of whom his niece remarked, ‘he merely takes the good part of her and is thankful’ – a more genuine tribute to a friend than most.

  Independent on Sunday, 1990

  Nice People

  A. A. Milne: His Life by Ann Thwaite

  A. A. Milne was a nice man. One look at his perfectly clean-cut, clean-shaven face in the photograph tells you as much; his eyes are fixed on the middle distance, almost certainly focused on a golf or cricket ball, and his lips are firmly clenched on the sort of pipe Leslie Howard, whom he closely resembled, also used so effectively to establish an impeccable English public school persona. Milne’s nice-ness, like his looks, was of a very English kind, self-deprecating, whimsical – the word he came to hate so much – and humorous; the humour was never cruel, or even dangerous, because there were a great many things that were for ever outside its range. Rebecca West, who so often hit the nail on the head, suggested that he retained in all his work the persona of a British child, well trained and truthful, with beautifully brushed hair and clear eyes and ‘knowing no fear at all save that there may perhaps be some form of existence which is not the nursery and will not be kind however good one is’.

  Milne’s four Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin books, all of which appeared in the 1920s, made him one of the richest and most famous writers in the world; they also brought down on his head the mockery of some formidable critics, from Dorothy Parker (‘Tonstant Weader fwowed up’) to P. G. Wodehouse, who suggested – not without cause – that the father of ‘Timothy Bobbin’ was ‘wantonly laying up a lifetime of shame and misery for the wretched little moppet’ by writing poems about him. There were attacks by Graham Greene and Geoffrey Grigson too, but what really hurt Milne was that his fame as a children’s writer made it increasingly difficult for him to interest public, critics or publishers in his other, serious work. Even his plays, which brought him early success, lost their appeal in his lifetime.

  The pattern of Milne’s life follows what looks at first glance like a golden course: youngest and cleverest son of a kind, good schoolmaster, he won a scholarship to Westminster, went on to Trinity, Cambridge, edited Granta, sailed into a job on Punch, married for love, served honourably in the first war (three months on the Somme) and became a pacifist. A year before the war ended he was attending his own successful first nights, and soon his plays were on Broadway too. The immense riches brought by the children’s books did not go to his head, but left his tastes much as they had always been: he liked to watch cricket, lunch at the club, write to The Times and play golf with his men friends. He didn’t drink much, he was careful with women, he took a Betjemanesque view of beastly abroad. There was a pretty house in Chelsea and a pretend farm in Sussex.

  Always generous with his money, he continued to work at writing until a stroke stopped him. When he died in 1956, at the age of seventy-four, he had produced dozens of plays, novels, poems, political pamphlets, a detective story, dramatic adaptations of Jane Austen and Kenneth Grahame and an autobiography; just about all of which are forgotten, while Winnie-the-Pooh, adapted by Disney, now rivals Marilyn Monroe in late-twentieth-century world mythology.

  Is it a success story or a tragedy? Ann Thwaite allows us to arrive at our own conclusions. On the way, she uncovers some terrific details. H. G. Wells taught at Milne’s father’s school, and the young Alfred Harmsworth edited the school magazine: two useful contacts, you might think, though, as things turned out, Wells remained always friendly and encouraging, while Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) brusquely told Milne he should ‘make his own way’. At Cambridge, Milne joined in play-readings with Leonard Woolf, Sydney Saxon-Turner, Lytton Strachey and, on one occasion, his mother Lady Strachey; but that was the last of his contact with what became Bloomsbury, and there is no suggestion that we have here new possible originals for Rabbit, Piglet, Eeyore or Kanga, although the idea obstinately presents itself to me.

  And marriage: Milne seems to have been an innocent, boy and man. His Daphne, or Daff, was a rich, vivacious girl with a face like a Pekinese, who believed that a good wife should immerse herself entirely in promoting her husband’s career. She adored shopping at Harrods and having the house redecorated, and thought her hats made a significant contribution to his first nights. She was for romance and against sex. Later in his life, Milne wrote that ‘the doom of Holy Matrimony is the Separate Room’, but Daphne, who believed that ‘if you don’t think about something, it isn’t there’, insisted on separate rooms from the beginning. Giving birth to one child was so frightful that she would not consider any more. What she did enjoy was giving interviews to the press; she was never short of opinions.

  The more you reflect on the Milne story, the more disturbing it becomes. Beneath that nice surface was a tangle of heaving Balzacian monsters. Milne suspected his brother Barry of making their father change his will in his own favour, and never spoke to him again, even when he wrote to say he was dying of throat cancer. Daphne’s brother Aubrey was similarly treated for fifteen years for a financial misdemeanour; shock and horror when Christopher announced that he was going to marry his cousin, Aubrey’s daughter. The relations between son and parents became deeply embittered. Ann Thwaite is so discreet about this that you want to know more, but she
does say Milne changed his will after Christopher gave an interview in which he stated that he had seen very little of his father as a child, and that his mother provided most of the material for the books; and that Christopher never saw his mother again after Milne’s funeral, though she lived for another fifteen years.

  Vogue, 1990

  Translating by Candlelight

  Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life by Richard Garnett

  ‘Alas and alack, I have married a Black’ – ‘Oh damn it, oh darn it, I have married a Garnett’: so, according to Richard Garnett, went the legendary exchange between his grandparents, the celebrated publishers’ reader Edward Garnett and his wife Constance, née Black, still more celebrated for her translations from the Russian. The Blacks and the Garnetts were both notable Victorian clans, and this is very much a family book, swimming with cousins and uncles and aunts; the sort of book in which an unexplained ‘Arthur’ has you wrestling with both family trees for enlightenment. Sorting out the generations must have been a daunting task even for Richard Garnett, who is the son of David (Lady into Fox, Aspects of Love), and named for a great- and a great-great-grandfather (the latter born in 1789), both noted scholars associated with the book collection at the British Library. Let it be said at once that he has triumphed over difficulties, and produced a wonderfully warm, sprawling and absorbing book.

  He has also fully justified his subtitle; when you come to the last page you feel you have travelled through life with a peculiarly British heroine, self-effacing, frugal, honourable, clear-thinking, brave, and above all a worker on a scale that can only be called heroic. Much of Constance Garnett’s translating was done when her eyes were so bad that she had to ask a friend to read the Russian original aloud to her; she listened, and then dictated her English version (mishearing may in fact be responsible for some of her slips). In 1901, when she had translated most of Turgenev and was getting down to Tolstoy, we learn that she and Edward had only one reading lamp, which he (of course) used in the evenings, while she worked by candlelight. It is a relief to learn that her father-in-law provided her with a lamp of her own.