Well, she was obviously an alcoholic, the WASP-y Newberry employee, her pageboy like black glass, says of Sasha Jensen, Rhys’s boozy nihilist in Good Morning, Midnight, one of the finest evocations of breakdown ever written. (A novel that came out at the wrong time, at the dawn of the Second World War, when no one wanted to read something equally acidic and awash in tender melancholy.)
It is so exhausting sometimes to defend my women writers, my compatriots in this dark doomed country of ours. For we are not full citizens. We are forever caught without our papers.
“I just feel like Ford Madox Ford put a pen in her hand and said, write your diary, dear, we’ll just edit it a lot.” This is the black pageboy’s friend and coworker, who had a blonde bob.
The atmosphere in the classroom grows into the public pathos of a Jean Rhys scene. I grow agitated, I get tears in my eyes, my face grows red. Later I find out the two women complained about me. The atmosphere was too “intense.” I am not asked to teach there again.
I have thought often, however, about this scene in the classroom, these reactions to Jean Rhys that often mirror mainstream attitudes towards literature, and what literature should be.
What I find striking about the second woman’s reaction to Rhys is that she questioned her right to authorship entirely. She is not author but heroine. The idea that some literary patriarch must have been the one to wrestle with her writing, make it into something else. The idea that a woman’s life is, at its basis, raw material. She is read as raw material — too raw, too open, too needy, too emotional. She is the dilettante scribbling away in her diary. She does not even edit her own material.
Of course one could not be more wrong about Rhys. I know of no other writer who so painstakingly refined her prose more than Jean Rhys, who spent years whittling down lifetimes into her perfect, gemlike novellas of voice. She LABORED over her writing, to make it sing in such a way, to make it absolutely economical. The deceptive ease and flow of her work is excruciatingly difficult to accomplish. Like Hemingway, Rhys was a minimalist and cut away any excess language from her books — as the story goes, she was upset with her editor for Wide Sargasso Sea for publishing the work before it was ready — she felt there were two extraneous words in the entire text.
Inherent in these students’ bias is, again, the criminalizing of the confessional. That this is somehow not “real” writing. It didn’t go through a necessary alchemy to make into literature.
The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize — too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.
I wonder what would have happened if instead of reading the great gods in my twenties I had stumbled upon Jean Rhys instead? If I had other literary models, an alternative canon?
I first discovered Rhys when working at Foyles Bookshop in London. And I devoured her, I who had always been so devouring. In London all the silver Penguin Rhys paperbacks, alongside the gold Jane Bowles and Anna Kavan Peter Owen paperbacks.
Jean Rhys is the patron saint of girls, then women like me, who have always been so mute, cast aside, their subjectivity surrendered in the big novels, world. The patron saint of girls who are charming diversions until they grow old or one grows bored with them. And Jean Rhys writes back, the prose intoxicated, fragmented, elliptical, with snatches of song and dialogue. It is the singularity of voice that stands out, the perfectly tuned desolation and rage. Rhys who speaks for her mute vagabonds, her former (and present) selves, struggling from the bottom, sinking delirious in bottles of rouge, Pernod and barbituates — always another, please. The kept woman speaks back!
Except sometimes her characters don’t speak. They think instead what they’d like to say to the cool, slimy face of patriarchy. (In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie Julia thinks, “Because he has money he’s a kind of god. Because I have none I’m a kind of woman.”) Julia who has been “smashed up” by her lover leaving her, who worries over becoming “shabby” and growing old. The rage and violence and vulnerability in these forgotten women. That scene where Julia’s staring at a Modigliani reproduction (the slanted honey-toned nude): “I felt as if the woman in the picture were laughing at me and saying: ‘I am more real than you. But at the same time I am you. I am all that matters of you.’”
Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight may be my favorite book. I read it nearly every six months. I open it and then despair and wrench and fall madly in love. In the novel Sophia Jensen (who has changed her name to Sasha), visits Paris for a fortnight, after being saved by a concerned friend from drinking herself to death in London, and finds herself flooded with memories of the past. What Rhys does best: rooms and moods.
Sasha is like Duras’ Lol Stein, she numbs herself with another Pernod, please, a bottle of wine on the tic, she numbs herself with passivity, but she is wide open to the cruel world, as if a layer of skin has been flayed off, and she cannot keep from being seduced by the past. She sits in public at cafes, feeling on Exhibition. She cries in public. She is a wound ripped open. “Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armour at home.” She cannot but sink back to the past, flashbacks of her baby dying, her husband leaving, humiliating encounters with the outside world, piggy bosses and wolfy predators. The gramo-phone record going off in her head, here this happened, here that happened. Always an SOS, always something that can save her from herself, dying her hair blonde, a beautiful dress, a new hotel room with a better view.
But what Rhys does best is the ecstasy within the melancholy. Jean Rhys is not restrained despite her perfecting economy. She is messy, she spills over, her characters are Ophelias drowning in the whirlpool of their own emotions. But, oh, what emotion. What energy. The abject ending mirroring the end of the Molly Bloom passage in Ulysses, falling into the arms of a man who horrifies and disgusts her. Yes, yes, yes.
(I do not experience the anxiety of influence with these women writers that I love, no, no, I experience instead the ECSTASY of influence.)
Second Wave feminists like the novelist and critic Angela Carter have reacted so strongly to Rhys’ raw and sensitive heroines, who often cry in public, her “dippy dames,” as Carter calls them. Yet this is what I’ve always loved about Jean Rhys. Her characters are so girly and damaged.
In her essay collection Nothing Sacred, Carter reads Jean Rhys as being a “female impersonator,” (a critique she also levels at the female characters in D.H. Lawrence) mostly because she writes her characters as wounded and scarred. It seems an older generation of feminist critics have swallowed some sort of narrative punishing women who are too feminine that reflects the revulsion towards the excessive that comes right out of patriarchy. These feminist critics take it a step further and say this is not an adequate reflection of how women live their lives. This is a move of the Second Wave I distrust, that women must write, must be, empowered heroines, and if they are not, they are frivolous and should be dismissed.
This feminist infighting allegedly began with the First Wavers and the flappers, the prejudice against modern girls so frivolous and excessive. The Victorian suffragette dismissing the shop-girls as victims of consumerism and silly girls for spending their paychecks on dangling earrings and silk pantyhose and jeweled cigarette cases, as if their sartorial excesses somehow set back the movement. Just like the straight-laced Second Wavers have become tightlipped over young feminists’ adoration of celebrity culture and fashion magazines. (Susan Faludi’s recent tirade in Harper’s over young feminists’ love of pop culture and Lady Gaga.)