jean rhys forever

on my favourite writer and alcoholism and being useless

As I write, I’m drinking a virgin mojito at my hotel bar in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Tomorrow I’ll get a ferry to Dominica where a man (the diplomat, mentioned in a previous post, whom I met in Mexico) will be waiting for me at the port in Roseau. It came after an idle suggestion I made about going to Dominica on account of its being where Jean Rhys grew up; the next day, he had booked a flight from London. It feels unbelievable, ridiculous, like something that happens in films or old novels where people were more impulsive and romantic and less jaded about love. People don’t do things like this. But why shouldn’t they? If they can afford it, why not?¹

I first read Jean Rhys on the Megabus back from Paris when I was eighteen. I’d spent the summer there after a bunch of delayed bursary payments from my college had come through in one lump sum just as I finished my A-levels. The book was Good Morning, Midnight and I’d found it in a bookshop near Montparnasse, not even an English-language one. On the cover was a woman who looked very tired and was wearing a hat, with some Parisian buildings and trees sketched behind her. I didn’t know then that I’d bought it in her old stomping grounds, the setting of Good Morning, Midnight and parts of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and all of Quartet, her first novel which followed a collection of short stories the previous year. That was 1928 and she had just left Paris, where she’d been for almost four years, drifting around cafés and bars on the Left Bank and having an ultimately disastrous menage à trois with Ford Maddox Ford and his wife, Stella. It was Ford who first published her and gave her the name Jean Rhys (she was Ella Lenglet when she arrived in Paris and had been born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams), though he would come to hate her.

She lived in Paris as she had in London, in hotels and lodgings (the dreary English boarding houses and hostels of the period feature prominently in her novels), depending on men who sent her cheques, both during their affairs and afterwards. The latter made her feel humiliated and pitiable and initially she rejected such gestures but soon, as was typical, she relented and came to rely on them. She lived like this for most of her life, moving from place to place, never settling, being thrown out of her digs for bad morals or fighting (she was briefly imprisoned in Holloway) or difficulty getting on with people. ‘There is something as unstable as water in me,’ she wrote in her autobiography, Smile, Please, ‘and when things get tough I go away. I haven’t got what the English call “guts”.’² I read her letters earlier this year and they were mostly about finding somewhere to live. The problem wasn’t so much the paying of rent but the arrangements. She was often unhappy and always hoped that moving somewhere else might fix her. The right town, the right part of London, the right clothes and furniture—then everything would fall into place. Though her love affairs consumed her life and her attachments were frequently obsessive, she still tended to think of her salvation as depending on objects and places rather than people.

When she first arrived in London, finding it grey and cold and disappointing after all the stories she’d heard and books she’d read about it, her mood was entirely changed by running a hot bath—before being plunged into unhappiness again by being told off for using all the hot water. In Voyage in the Dark, the semi-autobiographical Anna buys a new dress and it changes her world. She is a different person now: she is a person who can get a taxi and go into a shop and buy a dress. ‘This is a beginning. Out of this warm room that smells of fur I’ll go to all the lovely places I’ve ever dreamt of. This is the beginning.’ Rhys seemed to trust these feelings absolutely even though they betrayed her again and again.

She was, perhaps predictably, an alcoholic. Good Morning, Midnight is largely a novel about alcohol and the degradation of drinking once all the fun has gone out of it and age has set in. When I read it, at eighteen, I was already a daily drinker. Once I moved to London at sixteen (the same age at which Jean moved from Dominica to England, first to Cambridge and then London to study at RADA), I started drinking in earnest. I’d already realised that I was a liability while drinking in public and couldn’t control the blackouts so I preferred to drink in my room. I liked shutting the door as if I was shutting the world out and opening a bottle of wine or gin and reading or going on the internet. I think I felt such kinship when I first read her because it was the first time I’d read someone describe drinking in the way I did it. The sense that everything would be ok if only one could select the right drink and the right circumstances; the sense that alcohol was a magical thing, almost mythic, capable of creating something out of nothing. Leslie Jamison’s half-memoir-half-doctoral-thesis The Recovering, which is in part about Rhys’s alcoholism, deals particularly with the issue of alcohol and creativity as it applies to writers. I read it in 2018 when I’d just started drinking again for precisely this reason—nothing described in my cult of saints essay would have happened without wine. Alcohol makes things happen: it unlocks experiences which would otherwise be unavailable.

I’m nervous about embarking on a love affair without drinking. I’ve been sober through some brief flings over the last year but they were little things; all my grand, cinematic love stories (again, read here) have started with alcohol. This is the only real difficulty I’ve had with sobriety. In all other respects, it’s clearly the better choice. I’m not good in drink and get into trouble of more or less serious sorts. But there are times when not drinking means you miss out on something. You get to the part of the evening when everyone is a bit silly and you feel tired of it and go home. You tend not to stay out so late and, stone-cold sober, most bars look grimy and their patrons unappealing. You start preferring to stay in and read. And this is all fine—it’s a better life than nights in cells and drunken arguments and other regrettable decisions. But you do miss out. Especially, I think, as a writer, where networks are built largely in the hours of 12 to 3am. These are the hours where guards are let down and things, impossible to plan for, happen which cement relationships with people who would otherwise remain acquaintances. Jean Rhys’s literary career would probably never have begun if not for her relationship with Ford Maddox Ford, which came about because she frequented the same bars and cafés and fell in with his crowd.

Sober people are much less likely to have a crowd. Sober, I can go to pubs and bars with friends without an issue—but I’ll never be someone who’s called on and counted on to come out. The people who can be counted on to show up and have a drink any night of the week tend to be alcoholics. I wrote a while ago about Dan Farson’s book Soho in the Fifties, the first half of which is great fun—but read to the end and it’s a less salutary catalogue of liver disease and old demented drunks still hanging around once everyone else had moved on. Some people can drink daily for a period of their lives and then move on and have a drink now and again without any particular attachment to it. I very much wanted to be one of these people. But already at the age of eighteen, I think, I knew this wasn’t true. I have addict brain. I love systems and routines. Introduce me to a drug and I straight away want to master its usage. Amphetamines (prescribed!) in the day, alcohol to smooth out the crash. Others that I shan’t go into for fear of being denied entrance to various countries in the future. I love anything with the potential to re-engineer reality and have never understood others’ capacity to walk away from something so powerful. It’s like being handed a magic wand.

Leslie Jamison’s book tries to put a positive spin on this. Yes, you give up certain things that come with drinking, but you gain access to other things which are ultimately more fulfilling. In this, she follows the formula of a typical AA share, where the pleasures of drinking are always followed with assurances that greater pleasures follow in sobriety. ‘We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness’, etc. This is true, of course. But the point of sharing it is to keep newcomers coming back, especially in the hideous early days where it seems like everything worthwhile has been lost. Nothing dishonest is said—there is, I think, something dishonest in the framing, which is manipulative to the extent that it’s tactical. Yes, something greater has been gained. But some things have been lost. I don’t think for a minute that I’m incapable of falling in love without drinking, having already proved this by experience. But the molten intensity of being drunk with a new lover is something I won’t experience again. Love, now, is calmer and more intentional. What I’ve lost, I think, is the capacity for extreme and successful self-deception which daily drinking allows. Self-deception will always be a personality trait but it doesn’t come off properly anymore. (It makes sense that drinking feels like magic because magic has everything to do with deception—I wrote about this here.)

I don’t know if Jean Rhys was ever happy. I read her letters earlier this year while I was holed up in a guesthouse in Oban doing a hideous task for my lawyer. It was a good place for it, on the edge of Britain looking out over the sea and feeling like I was as far as I could possibly get from the things I was afraid of. She seemed more content in her later years, while she was writing and publishing Wide Sargasso Sea—her last novel and very different from the others, departing from the autobiographical formula of meandering unhappily from Paris to London and back under the patronage of men. It’s a prequel to Jane Eyre and draws on Jean Rhys’s childhood in Dominica, which becomes the setting for the life of Antoinette/Bertha (re-named, as Jean was, by a man) before her marriage to Mr Rochester (I’ve written about Wide Sargasso Sea in a previous post, not a happy one.) The letters give the impression of someone much more solid than you would guess from her autobiography and novels, probably because they deal with practicalities and the sort of light, happy matters one discusses with friends. But the restlessness and the sense of always being under assault, of being fragile and unfit for the world and never fitting into it, remain consistent. In Smile, Please, she wrote:

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care. Perhaps it’s my fault, I really can’t think far enough for that. But I don’t like these people, I thought. I don’t hate—they hate—but I don’t love what they love.

Her view of human nature was martial: ‘I do not agree that my way of looking at life and human beings is distorted,’ she wrote in a letter to her friend and patron Evelyn Scott, ‘I think that the desire to be cruel and to hurt (with words because any other way might be dangerous to ourself) is part of human nature. Parties are battles (most parties), a conversation is a duel (often). Everyone’s trying to hurt first, to get in the dig that will make him or her feel superior, feel triumph.’ She continued:

I admit that the properly adapted human being enjoys the battle. I even admit that it can all be done charmingly wittily and with an air (though I don’t think anglo saxons shine at that). It can also be without significance. But I do not admit that because I am badly adapted to these encounters I’m therefore a mental deformity—I could fight in a big battle—or accept a great cruelty—or be cruel to myself—but the little petty day by day snips and snaps—why should I be crazy if I say that I don’t think it’s worth it—that it takes something from one that is necessary to me—a certain how shall I say single mindedness—

It wasn’t that she disliked herself, though some have accused her of this. It was more that the world was not adapted to her and so she spent her life looking for a place she could bear to live, where people were not cruel and didn’t degrade her in the course of their interactions. Her most constant feeling was of rejection by the world. Not just individual people but the whole world—the great, hulking force of it. She believed in the reality of malevolence, both as the darkness of the human heart and as a force, the Obeah which she knew from childhood (though she says ‘it was against the law in the “English” islands’). Go out the door and you walk into a world which will not work in your favour and where the odds are set against you by design. In childhood she believed that Satan was all-powerful and this understanding of evil’s power remained with her, though in a less religious type, until the end of her life.

Even as a child, she had felt rejected by the world in a cosmic sense. Part of this feeling was to do with growing up white in a place where most people were black and being aware that some of them hated her automatically because of her race. But it was more than this, a feeling that creation itself had a disposition against her. In Smile, Please, she wrote of a place called Morgan’s Rest on Dominica, one of her father’s properties:

It was there, not in wild beautiful Bona Vista, that I began to feel I loved the land and to know that I would never forget it. There I would go for long walks alone. It’s strange growing up in a very beautiful place and seeing that it is beautiful. 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, to lose myself in it. (But it turned its head away indifferent.)

When she returned to Dominica (the only time she returned) in her old age, she was told she must have a guide to visit the estate where she had spent part of her childhood. The house was gone, burnt down long ago, only empty space remaining.

I stared at it trying to remember the house, the garden, the honeysuckle and the jasmine and the tall fern trees.

But there was nothing, nothing. Nothing to look at. Nothing to say. Even the mounting stone had gone.

When we got to the river I bent down and sipped from it. I was very thirsty and perhaps had some vague, superstitious idea that if I drank the water I’d come back. The guide caught my arm and said, ‘Don’t drink that. It’s very dirty now. You’d be ill if you drank it.’

How many times had I drunk from that river when I was thirsty? There are supposed to be three hundred and sixty-five rivers in the island, one for every day of the year. Were they all dirty? Yes, he seems to think they were all very dirty indeed. ‘Very dirty, not like you remember it.’

No, it wasn’t as I remembered it.

It feels bewildering, ten years after first reading her, to be going to this place. I never dreamt that I’d get to the Caribbean and yesterday I flew over the Sargasso Sea and walked off the plane into a wall of heat and birdsong. Her house in Roseau was torn down because of disrepair a few years ago and I don’t think much trace remains of the other properties, though I’ll try to find out.

I think I’ve been more influenced by Jean Rhys than anyone else in the world. You can see her influence in my writing, which has always been imitative of hers to some extent. That summer in Paris was when I started regularly keeping a diary—where I bought the first moleskine, which have gradually multiplied as I’ve carried them from house to house. I think I’ve read everything she’s written outside of archives, as well as the excellent biography by Lilian Pizzichini, and returned to her again and again. Each time, it’s like reading my own thoughts and feelings committed to paper. I have the same temperament and many of the same circumstances. I’ve always had a feeling of not fitting in and not being part of things—the same experience of the world as a series of blows. I’ve always felt safest in my room and in bed and have wanted, more than anything, to have a permanent home, but for some reason this has never happened for me. I’ve watched the people I went to school and university with get good, solid jobs and houses and wondered why I haven’t been able to do the same. But, in truth, I’ve wanted it this way. ‘I don’t love what they love.’ My home has been wherever I’ve had a bed with some of my books and favourite possessions around it.

I even feel the same way about writing, which she discussed in a letter of 1953, and about the relationship between writing and alcohol.³ I found it immensely frustrating when I began writing full-time because it seemed like an activity that I had no control over whatsoever. I could try every day for two weeks and it would be pointless and then one day it would come with no trouble at all, as if it was working through me rather than something I was doing. It seems entirely about arranging the internal and external environmental conditions until something clicks and suddenly it comes. Alcohol did help, not just the drink itself but the setting where drinking happens; I would always write in the wine café or in pubs and there was a rhythm to it that worked, and then at some point I would get too drunk and go home, whereas now I finish writing and feel drained and angry. (But these were only the good times.)

I took Voyage in the Dark with me to Iona and finished it in the guesthouse in Oban. It felt like being in one of the succession of boarding houses which she describes at the beginning of the novel, which were cold and always in the north in identical faded seaside towns. The decor was dated, which I liked, and it was only £55 a night. There was a shared bathroom and the toilet was 70s pale blue, everything round-edged. In the bedroom there was a dining tray with a kettle and tea and biscuits and a space heater, which I put on full-blast until I was slightly too hot and starting to sweat, which is where I’m most comfortable. It was raining heavily most days and I stayed inside until the task was finished. The landlady called good morning when she heard me on the stairs and knocked to bring me more tea and milk and fresh towels.

I’ve always been bad at looking after myself. On the boat there was no heat in the kitchen and it was so cold and mouldy and the taps froze so I never went in there except to quickly pan-fry a steak. I never did the washing up. It was the same when I lived in houses, especially if I was by myself. It’s been easier when I’ve lived in college or university accommodation—where scouts or cleaners empty bins and clean the bathroom and sink, leaving only small domestic chores like dishes and laundry. I always thought of this as an aristocratic impulse but Rhys’s novels reveal a way of living where you could be poor and still be brought breakfast and any letters to your room, which was not an uncommon way of living for women in the first half of the twentieth century (Anna Evans writes about Rhys’s Bloomsbury boarding houses here, if you want to read more, and it’s also covered in a very good BBC documentary from 1956 called A Girl Comes to London). Her protagonists, always tired and frequently sick, come in from rainy streets and ask to have a fire set or a bath run. ‘She is not the sort of girl who will ever do anything for herself,’ says one of the landladies in Voyage. This year I’ve lived in student accommodation, a convent and a succession of AirBnBs (this seems to be the modern equivalent of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who lived long-term in hotels.) As in other areas, it’s only Jean Rhys who’s made me feel like this manner of living might not make me utterly defective, and that I might stand a chance of contributing something worthwhile.

In Voyage, Rhys wrote, in parentheses, ‘(Of course it’ll be all right. Something will happen when I’m better, and then something else, and then something else. It’ll be all right.)’ The passivity in her novels is optimistic like this, resembling something like faith. There is a type of passive person who is content to remain where they are, but she wasn’t one of these. ‘With the weak something is always happening,’ wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights. Rhys’s weakness (see Diana Athill’s description of her which I quoted at the beginning of this piece) had her always moving to the next thing, knowing that she was someone to whom things happened in both senses of the phrase. As she said in one letter,

The trouble is that most things that happen to me are so unlikely! My best friends (not so many) don’t believe me. Unlikely, and a bit comic too as a rule.

Martinique!

1. Please refer to the subscription button above.

2. I recently remembered an old blog, written in 2017, where I quoted this line, and the conditions I wrote about are much the same. Plus ça change…

3. I don’t know to whom because I didn’t make a note of it at the time and Internet Archive is down.