Culture | Arts | People | Literature | Dominica Jean Rhys: voyager in the dark Gwen Williams never felt like she fit in — not in Dominica, where she was born and grew up, not in Britain, where she worked as an actress, not in Europe... By Jeremy Taylor | Issue 70 (November/December 2004) 0 Comments Rhys at her cottage at Cheriton Fitzpaine. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections Leslie Tilden Smith, circa 1930s. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections Rhys's daughter Maryvonne. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections Max Hamer. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections Jean Lenglet and Jean Rhys, circa 1920. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections Lancelot Hugh Smith in 1913. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections Jean Rhys, circa 1930s. Photograph by the Jean Rhys Papers, University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections On a cold spring day in 1847, Charlotte Brontë sits at her writing-desk in her father’s parsonage. She looks out of the window, across the graveyard, to the sodden, windy moorland of northern England. She is small and delicate and serious, her dark hair tied loosely back behind her neck. She is 31, and is struggling to finish her second novel. It is a love story. Her heroine, the feisty Jane Eyre, is engaged to Edward Rochester, the brusque and autocratic owner of Thornfield Hall. But she can’t marry him, because Rochester is married already — to a beautiful creole heiress from Jamaica, Bertha Mason, whose money he has been living on. But nobody had told him about the madness in Bertha’s family. Now she is locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall, guarded by the sinister Grace Poole; she is tied up like an animal, howling and screeching, ready to scratch and bite anyone who goes near her. Charlotte sees at last how she will end the story. Bertha will get loose, burn down Thornfield Hall, and die in the flames; Rochester will be cruelly mutilated and blinded; but Jane Eyre will come back to love him and heal him, his sight will partially return . . . Yes. She picks up her quill pen and begins to write. Ninety years later, in London, Jean Rhys reads Jane Eyre, which she remembers from childhood. She is 49 now; she has published five books. But her personal life is in chaos — “borderline personality disorder”, her biographer will later conclude: that grey and desolate area between normal functioning and psychic disability. She has spent years drifting in London and Paris, she has become an alcoholic, and is subject to terrible rages and depressions. And Jane Eyre enrages her. Jean comes from the same white creole background as Bertha Mason: established families of European descent, born in the islands. She too feels locked in an attic of rage and madness, rejected and unloved. She recognises Bertha’s fury. She has had her own experience of English “gentlemen” like Rochester. She knows just how he would seize on Bertha for her money, and would then drive her mad with his cold English ways. Bertha is herself, Jean realises. Bertha’s experience is her own. Bertha is the untold story of the Caribbean creole. She knows she must write the real story of Bertha Mason: give her a human voice and face, restore her dignity; show how a beautiful West Indian woman is reduced to a snarling animal in an English attic. Jean writes fast. But then she has a flaming row with her second husband, who is typing the pages for her; she tears up the typescript and burns it. Most of her handwritten manuscript is lost. For 18 years the idea stays in her head until, in 1957, she starts again. It is the hardest book she has ever written. It takes her nine years of work. But it turns out to be her masterpiece: Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys never meant to be a writer. When she was growing up in Roseau a hundred years ago, she would have laughed at the thought that she would write one of the great Caribbean novels, or be called “the best living English novelist” in the New York Times. Like Bertha Mason, she just wanted to be ordinary, safe, and happy. And she was sometimes happy as she grew up in Dominica, that island of vertical green mountains and fast-flowing rivers (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic, several hundred miles to the north-west). Her father was a well-liked doctor, a broad-minded Welshman who had only arrived in the island in 1881. He lived in a two-storey house in the middle of Roseau (it is still there, a guest-house now, though without the open verandah and garden it once had). Dr Rees Williams had bought a beautiful but unviable estate up in the mountains, three hours’ ride from town. His wife Minna Lockhart was a Dominican creole whose Scottish ancestor had arrived in 1824; her family also owned an estate, near the coast. They had five children, the fourth of whom, born in 1890, they named Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, later to be known as Jean Rhys. The white creole community in Dominica was small and introverted; the estates were in decline. Living was comfortable, but the privilege of class and colour had become a double-edged sword. And Gwen Williams felt somehow different, an outsider among outsiders, not grounded anywhere. She was fairer in complexion than her siblings, one of the few whites in her convent school. She felt that black Dominicans “had a better time than we did, they laughed a lot . . . they were more alive, more a part of the place than we were”. Yet she was terrified of her own black nurse Meta (who told her that if she read so many books her eyes would fall out). Meta, she wrote later, showed her a world of “fear and distrust, and I am still in that world”. Gwen Williams could be vivacious and attractive, but she could also be shy and lonely, awkward and withdrawn. She devoured books and wrote secret poems. “Fear and distrust” shadowed her. An infant sister died, plunging her mother into a lasting coldness and grief. Gwen’s isolation became worse when her youngest sister was born and her mother transferred all her love to this latest arrival. Later, sexual abuse (involving a family friend) gave Gwen further proof that she was wicked and unlovable. Her father encouraged her to be herself; but her mother tried to make her an English lady. Like everyone in the island’s small white society, she romanticised England as a land of theatres and shops, “blazing coal fires in winter . . . exotic food . . . strawberries and cream . . .”. Naturally it was to England that a clever colonial young lady must go. There was no further education in Dominica, nobody “suitable” for her to marry. So in 1907, still 16, to England she went, firmly accompanied by an aunt. But England was anything but romantic. It was grey, wet, cold and hostile. Everything bewildered her — trains, English plumbing, hockey, riding a bicycle. She felt that everyone was laughing at her and excluding her. The cold cramped box-houses seemed grotesque after the island houses of the Caribbean. At her spartan school in Cambridge, the girls called her “Hottentot”, “coon”, or “West Indies”, and found her accent hilarious. Her accent was still a problem when she went on to drama school in 1909 — nothing could be done with it, the school said. Her uncertain ethnicity didn’t help either. Gwen later insisted: “I learnt nothing at the school of acting except the exact meaning of the word snob.” She had to leave after two terms anyway, because her father died. But instead of going dutifully home in defeat, she scandalised her family by finding herself a job in the chorus of a travelling theatre company. For more than a year she endured frigid boarding-houses, mean landladies, and the starvation wages of a third-rate touring musical comedy, Our Miss Gibbs. The only thing she really enjoyed was the down-to-earth humour of the chorus girls, with their cigarettes and gin, their flirtations and their Cinderella dreams of being discovered by a rich and handsome man. One day, a wealthy businessman called Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, a man twice Gwen’s age, picked up this desolate Caribbean Cinderella. Gwen thought this was the passion of her life. When Lancelot dumped her after eighteen months, she never recovered. He gave her an allowance for several years, and helped her at crisis points in her later life. But Gwen found it very hard to trust a man ever again; she had gambled everything, and lost. She sank into a terrible depression, as she would do many times more. She abandoned the stage, and drifted into a twilight world of masseurs and escorts and call girls; she had a risky late-term abortion. “I’m finding out what a useful thing drink is,” she wrote. Rejection had gone so deep that Gwen felt completely void: “Nothing matters, nothing matters . . . I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it . . . I am a stranger and I always will be”. It is hard to know who, at this point, she hated most — men, herself, or the entire human race. On Christmas Day 1913, when Lancelot sent a Christmas tree to her room, she decided to kill herself by jumping from her window (until a chorus friend pointed out that it was not high enough). In London’s King’s Road one day, on the spur of the moment, she bought a set of coloured quill pens to cheer up the table in a new room. She went home and began to write down the story of Lancelot Smith. In ten days of frantic work, she filled three and a half thick black exercise books. The lodger on the floor below asked the landlady to have Gwen take off her shoes, since she was keeping him awake striding up and down all night. The writing eased the hurt, but solved nothing. She drifted back into humdrum jobs and affairs. She sat for artists, did some stage work, and through that summer of 1914 partied all night every night at a club in Soho, the Crabtree, a hangout for artists and writers. She accepted a marriage proposal from a writer on The Times, and flirted with a famous painter, a sub-editor, a music critic, a lawyer. She was a strikingly attractive woman, still only 24, and she knew now how to use her sexual power. She scarcely noticed that a world war had started until the Crabtree closed for the duration. It was replaced by shift work at a soldiers’ canteen next to Euston station. When Gwen Williams was happy, she was light-hearted and enchanting, funny and flirtatious and compassionate. She loved clothes, shopping, good times, laughter, perfumes, make-up, the brief spark of love when it came. But Lancelot’s rejection had changed her. Now, when she was unhappy, her childhood shadows gathered and darkened; she became reckless and obsessive, and could be volatile and dangerous. Her rages could be frightening and violent, her paranoia unmanageable, and her drinking became a need. Her relationships usually started well and went steadily downhill. She was drawn to older men who made her feel safe, but also to adventurers who could charm and excite her. The first of her three husbands, a Dutch “journalist” called Jean Lenglet, was an adventurer. When he proposed to Gwen in 1917, he was actually married to someone else, had no passport, and was doing something mysterious for French intelligence. They were married in Holland in 1919, and Gwen followed him to Paris, then to Vienna and Budapest, where it turned out that he had been dealing on the currency black market and had lost a lot of other people’s money. The couple went on the run before returning cautiously to Paris to hustle a living; this time Gwen worked as a model, a mannequin, a tour guide, an English teacher, a shop assistant. They had two children — a son who survived only three weeks, and a daughter, Maryvonne, who spent most of her early years in French cliniques because her parents lacked the time and the money to look after her. In 1924 French police arrested Lenglet; he was sentenced to eight months in jail for embezzling money from a travel agency. By this time Gwen had been introduced to one of the most influential literary figures of the day, Ford Madox Ford. He was 51, lived in Paris, edited and published his own literary review, and specialised in discovering new and exciting writers. By roundabout means, Gwen’s London notebooks about Lancelot Smith — edited into a novel — reached Ford. He liked her work, and liked her even better. Although he was living at the time with an Australian painter, Stella Bowen, he had Gwen move in with them; a bizarre menage à trois ensued. Ford turned Gwen Williams into a professional writer. He made her read extensively and write stories (“show, don’t tell,” he instructed; “when in doubt, cut”; “write what you know”). Her first published story appeared in Ford’s transatlantic review in December 1924, and he wrote a pompous introduction to her first published book, the Parisian stories and sketches called The Left Bank. Writing became the most important thing in her life. Ford even gave her a new name to write under: Jean Rhys. The affair went sour. Ford was ready to move on to somebody else, though (like Lancelot) he sent her money for a while. Gwen became bitter and hysterical, and turned Lenglet and Ford into characters in her angry first novel, Quartet. Jean married twice more. Her second husband, Leslie Tilden Smith, was her London literary agent. He was well educated and well spoken, but poor. As a good English gentleman, he was gentle and kind, but reserved and controlled. Leslie kept Jean steady and focused in her new mission as a writer. He helped her to return frequently to Paris because she wrote better there; he handled her business and domestic affairs; he knew when to take a manuscript away from her, to stop her endlessly revising it. Together they visited Dominica in 1936, the last time Jean saw her homeland. But living with Jean required a saint’s patience. By the mid-1930s, she was a full-blown alcoholic. They were always poor, and Leslie did not know how to handle Jean, especially when she was angry or drinking hard. In June 1935, they were both arrested after a 4 a.m. brawl in London’s Soho and were fined for being “drunk and disorderly”. The young writer Rosamond Lehmann tried to befriend Jean that same year. Her first meeting was with a buttoned-up, stylishly-dressed Dominican matron who would barely talk. The second was quite different, according to Jean’s biographer Carole Angier. “Jean was lying on the sofa, drunk. She looked ill, unkempt, dishevelled; she didn’t speak to Rosamond, didn’t seem to know she was there. Instead she spoke, incoherently and incessantly, half to herself and half to Leslie. ‘Poor Leslie,’ she kept saying, ‘poor, poor Leslie. He looks so miserable and wretched and ill.’ And to Leslie: ‘Why are you so sad? Are you very sad? Why do you look so sad?’ . . . in a needling, taunting tone, daring him to answer.” Soon after the second world war began in 1939, Leslie rejoined the RAF, perhaps with relief. Jean tried to stay close to him — she could not bear the loneliness. She was desperately worried about her daughter Maryvonne, who had been with Lenglet in Holland when the Germans invaded. Jean was arrested again (wandering on a highway cursing the English — someone had thrown a bucket of water over her), apparently attempted suicide, and spent at least some time in a “sanatorium” for a “rest”. She was accused of being a German spy (her wartime story “I Spy a Stranger” conveys her sense of persecution beautifully). Leslie was demoted and transferred after Jean had provoked a huge row in a pub, sarcastically shouting “Heil Hitler!” at her opponents. Anyone who has been seriously adrift in life, alone, or seriously depressed, will understand Jean Rhys. Today, she would be stuffed with prozac and mood stabilisers and would feel happy and ordinary in the way she wanted. But then there would not have been the books. In 1945, Leslie died of a heart attack, alone with Jean in a remote moorland cottage where they had gone for a rest. He had been vital to Jean’s development as a writer. During her years with him, she had written much of her best work. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie she started to examine her response to Lancelot’s rejection. In Voyage in the Dark she scrutinised her early years in England in the touring company and her descent into the pit. And in Good Morning Midnight she tried to describe the nature of the void. These were deeply sad and beautifully written books, far ahead of their time in their instinctive modernism, though their existentialist, feminist aspects were only appreciated much later. Jean’s writing is far more skilled than its smooth surface suggests. She was a perfectionist, always correcting and improving, cutting and rewriting. She had developed her own unmistakable “voice” almost from the start. Writing, she felt, was a matter of enormous toil, after which every trace of effort had to be erased. But the heroines of these books from the 1930s are walking disasters. Each is adrift in London or Paris, drinking hard, at least mildly crazed. They are moody, with no personal past or social context; nothing in their world is solid; relationships are casual and whimsical. “The world crushes unloved and unprotected women like us,” they seem to say; “respectable society is a farce; without money and power, we can do nothing.” The self-destructive drifters of these books are all versions of Jean. “I can’t make things up,” she confessed, “I can’t invent . . . I just write about what happened. Not that my books are entirely my life — but almost.” It was by writing about them that she gradually understood how, like her characters, she was using victimhood as a safe place to hide in. Jean’s third husband was Leslie’s cousin and executor, Max Hamer, a good-natured but gullible solicitor of 65. Jean herself was 57 when they married; she had published nothing since before the war. In 1950, when they had been married three years, Max was arrested for cheque fraud, a pawn in a friend’s get-rich-quick scam. He served two years in jail; Jean lodged nearby the whole time, writing and visiting him. She severed connections with almost everyone else. Then came eight years of wandering, which in 1955 led to Cornwall, the south-west tip of England — a bleak, windy, wild coast where she and Max moved to new rented accommodation five times — and then, in 1960, to a decrepit cottage in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine 200 miles from London, bought for them by Jean’s brother Edward, who had retired after an army career. Still Jean published nothing, and was widely assumed to be dead. She was always poor, cold, exhausted, unhappy, lonely and afraid. She was always wanting and never finding the time and space to write properly; always moving, drinking, missing her daughter (who did survive the war, as did Jean Lenglet, though he spent four years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They had both worked for the Dutch resistance). But always, Jean insisted, things were just about to get better. There was plenty more that she didn’t reveal even to friends and correspondents. Her fights with Max; their desperate poverty when he was barred from his profession after leaving jail; his failing health. More collisions with the law (a brick through an annoying neighbour’s window in London, fines for drunkenness and insulting behaviour, a conviction for assault, five days in the medical wing of Holloway prison). Her quarrels with the Devon villagers, who (she said) called her a witch. She was sustained by a few flimsy lifelines. An “anonymous friend” (probably Max’s brother) came up with some money. An actress, Selma Vaz Dias, dramatised Good Morning Midnight for the BBC, and tracked Jean down in Devon; so did a London editor, Francis Wyndham, who came across her pre-war books. The BBC broadcast and the story of her “rediscovery” aroused interest; and when Wyndham heard she was contemplating a new book, he promptly commissioned it (for £25). Another London editor, Diana Athill, became a good friend; the village rector understood and supported her, even buying her whisky. The village taxi driver who drove her into nearby towns for supplies became a good and reliable friend. In her Devon cottage, Jean wrote in bed or at the table in her tiny kitchen, next to a small electric heater. She worked sometimes on stories, sometimes on her new book, which wouldn’t come right. Notes and drafts and changes were stuffed into bags under the bed; nobody but herself could decipher them. There were leaks, floods, rising damp, icicles in the bathroom, unmentionable things in the ceiling. It took Jean from 1957 to 1966 to write Wide Sargasso Sea. She had to keep putting it aside to write stories for cash, or to look after Max as his health deteriorated. There were technical problems she couldn’t solve; there were tangles with typists and well-meaning assistants, and pressure from the publishers in London. In 1964 she had a heart attack. Her life while writing the book was harder than she let anyone know. But “my dream,” she wrote brightly, already in her seventies, “is to finish my book, get a facelift — and a bright red wig”. Wide Sargasso Sea turned Jane Eyre on its head. The gene of “madness” in Bertha’s family is played down. Instead, Bertha is driven to isolation and despair, and beyond, by the cruelty and injustice of the social order around her; by the fracture between the races (“white nigger”, “white cockroach”); by the “new” English colonists looking to get rich off the pickings of the crumbling plantations and their ruined families. And finally by malice, and by Rochester, who tries to love her but fails, and takes his predictable revenge. Bertha is destroyed as surely as the Sargasso weed chokes the ocean between old Europe and the new world. The book is a brilliant “prequel” to Jane Eyre, by a scriptwriter bent on subversion. And for Jean Rhys, it was a personal victory. The sense of misty victimhood from the earlier novels is gone. Rochester, though clearly flawed as a man, seems human and comprehensible (this was the biggest problem Jean had had with the book — for in Rochester dwelt so many ghosts, from Lancelot on). Jean had traced her own turmoil back to its roots, and back to the Caribbean. She had probed back far enough now to see how the iron enters the soul in the first place. Both Bertha’s soul and her own. When Wide Sargasso Sea finally appeared in 1966, Jean was 76. At last critical and popular success caught up with her. She won awards, her other books were republished, and she even had some money. She permitted a few modest comforts in her cottage. The stories she had written since the 1920s were collected and published. She started an autobiography, though she was exhausted now, unable to work for long, her hands crippled and shaking, and had to resort to dictation. A group of admirers including Diana Athill, Francis Wyndham and the widow of George Orwell kept an eye on her, helped with money, and brought Jean to London for a holiday every winter to enjoy restaurants and theatres and champagne, which revived her old charm and humour. They even took her to Venice. But in time, she drove even them to despair. It had all come “too late” for her to rid herself of her demons, the old hurts and fears, the drinking habit, the rages. She had confronted them in words, but could not exorcise them from her life. She was 89 when she broke her hip in March 1979; then, even she had had enough. Two months later, she died. Jean Rhys had not managed to be happy, or safe, or ordinary. But nobody happy, safe or ordinary could have written Good Morning Midnight or Wide Sargasso Sea. JEAN RHYS (Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams) “I never wanted to write. I wished to be happy and peaceful and obscure” 1890 Born August 24, Roseau, Dominica 1907 Sent to school in England 1909 School of Dramatic Art; joins Our Miss Gibbs 1910 Father’s death; affair with Lancelot Smith 1919 First marriage (to Jean Lenglet); first taste of Paris 1920 Death of son in Paris; moves to Vienna 1921 Moves to Budapest 1922 Daughter born in Belgium; returns to Paris 1924 Meets Ford Madox Ford; Jean Lenglet arrested 1927 The Left Bank (stories) 1928 Quartet 1930 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie 1932 Second marriage (to Leslie Tilden Smith) 1934 Voyage in the Dark 1936 Revisits Dominica 1939 Good Morning, Midnight 1947 Third marriage (to Max Hamer) 1955 Retreats to Cornwall 1957 Good Morning, Midnight dramatised on BBC radio 1960 Settles in Cheriton Fitzpaine, Devon 1964 Heart attack 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea; W.H. Smith Literary Award 1968 Tigers Are Better Looking 1976 Sleep It Off, Lady 1979 Dies, May 14; Smile Please 1984 Jean Rhys: Letters 1931–1966 Related