The literary legacy of novelist Jean Rhys has been unfairly tarnished by her alcoholism, unlike fellow writers in the drink
Sarah Hall
“I like writing about sex and the politics of the body,” says Cumbrian novelist Sarah…
Watching Jean Rhys as she sat alone at one of the crowded parties held by Sonia Orwell in the late 1960s, the young author James Fox caught the ageing and newly celebrated novelist’s eye as she raised a glass of whisky to her lips, then took a slow sip of champagne. One glass followed the other – left hand, right hand; champagne, whisky; whisky, champagne – while Rhys stared straight back at him. What Fox saw in her piercing eyes that evening was black defiance. Or was it fear?
Rhys was a drinker and unashamed of it. “I spent three weeks in New York and wasn’t sober for an instant,” she once told her last editor, Diana Athill, recalling a 1936 visit to the States that had ended in a fight, a fall, a twisted ankle and a broken friendship with another hard-drinking woman novelist, Evelyn Scott. Writing to Sonia Orwell, a loyal friend and supporter who knew all about drinking, an 86-year-old Rhys declared from her secluded village bungalow in Devon in 1976 that “my great pleasure is drink – indeed the only one.” Boastfully or nonchalantly, she added that: “I’m practically the parish drunk.”
Born in 1890, Rhys grew up on a small French-speaking Caribbean island. She started to drink seriously in Paris in the 1920s and never forgave herself that she and her first husband had been drinking champagne on the tiny balcony of their cheap hotel room in Rue Lamartine at the precise moment (by her own painful calculation) their first child, a baby boy, died in a nearby convent hospital. Guilt didn’t stop Rhys from drinking after her fecklessly charming husband went to prison for embezzling in 1924, or – a few months later – while she was struggling to preserve her independence in a difficult menage à trois with her literary mentor and lover, Ford Madox Ford, and his resentful artist partner, Stella Bowen. This was a situation that placed a hypersensitive and penniless Creole outsider at the mercy of a well-meaning but controlling couple. Drink gave her the courage to stand up to them.
Throughout Rhys’s long and challenging life – she endured years of isolation, humiliation and crippling poverty while watching a burgeoning literary reputation dwindle into near-oblivion – drink provided an escape from reality. Drink was also a release, one that allowed her to throw off the mask of convention that Rhys abhorred. “Someone called me a savage individual and that I believe is what I am,” she once told Diana Athill with pride.
Drink liberated Rhys by allowing her to vent the anger and hurt that always simmered just below a meticulous protective surface. “Like a hurricane. Like a Creole” as Antoinette Cosway observes of her mother in Wide Sargasso Sea. So it was with her volatile creator. Out in London’s literary society on her careful best behaviour, gloves buttoned, hat in place, treacherous island accent muted to a whisper, this nervous outsider became speechless with self-consciousness and anxiety. “I was always silent,” Rhys told a sympathetic Sonia Orwell, “except when drunk or ecstatic.” Drunk (and Rhys got drunk quickly) she screamed, spat, swore and hit out with her fists. On one obstreperous occasion in the early 1940s when Rhys was living alone in Norfolk, a disapproving neighbour tipped a bucket of water over her. On another, during a series of mortifying episodes that ended with the weeping author being despatched from Bromley Magistrates’ Court to spend a week at Holloway’s psychiatric wing, Rhys’s outraged tenants in prim-and-proper Beckenham summoned the police.
Plenty of notable twentieth-century women writers were heavy drinkers. To name an eminent handful: Jean Stafford, Marguerite Duras (another of the understanding Sonia Orwell’s protegées), Elizabeth Bishop, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles and Carson McCullers, discreetly hiding her sherry habit in a tea flask. But Rhys is the only woman who is persistently put on trial as a writer because of her bad habits.
An exaggeration? Hardly. Only a week ago, I was asked whether Rhys’s achievements as a novelist validated her personal flaws, meaning above all her reliance on alcohol. Imagine that same question being posed about Faulkner or Hemingway. It’s unthinkable. So, setting aside the baffling fact that we still like to gawp with fascinated horror at “badly behaved” women authors while turning a blind eye to similar transgressions in male writers, why do we keep picking on poor Jean Rhys? What is it that singles her out for castigation?
Researching a life of Rhys, I Used to Live Here Once, which was published this year, I grew determined to establish two things about a novelist I revere. As the first biographer to visit her Caribbean home before writing about her, I could explain the enduring spell that Dominica cast over Rhys’s mind and work. (“Two Tunes” was the name she first gave to Voyage in the Dark, a beautiful and sad 1934 novel that leapfrogs between Anna Morgan’s memories of the Caribbean and her inexorable descent from innocence into prostitution in an alien city, London.) I also set out to be the first biographer to separate Rhys the unhappy, hard-drinking but meticulous writer from the careless, angry, alcohol-dependent women who feature so prominently in her work.
It’s here – in her portraits of hard-drinking women who share some of her own experiences – that the problem of seeing Rhys clearly has always lain. Listening to the mockingly self-aware voice of Sasha Jensen in Rhys’s toughest novel, Good Morning Midnight (“Oh dear – how sad, how painful it is to read,” one well-bred lady sighed in 1939), we seem to hear Rhys talking about herself. We know how, when Rhys was broke, she holed up in cheap Paris rooms and drank alone. And here’s Sasha, talking about just that. “I have been here for five days. I have decided on a place to eat at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life.” It’s Rhys, the hardened drinker, stripping herself bare for our disapproving eyes. Isn’t it?
The exciting part about biography is following a hunch that you are certain will lead to a revelation. And so it was with I Used to Live Here Once. I’d learned from her notebooks and letters that Rhys did indeed draw on herself – the only person she really knew, as she often pointed out – for the unhappy outsiders she portrayed with such eerie conviction. She allocated traits of her personality and episodes from her life to them in a way that lends itself to being read as autobiographical. But she always withheld from her protagonists the key to her own survival: her work. Rhys herself never stopped writing and reading, except in brief, terrible periods of complete breakdown. The women of her novels are denied that essential resource. They drink alone, and without hope.
Evidence of Rhys’s obsessive perfectionism, her passion for getting every word right, her minute, repetitive revisions, often made over decades rather than years, was easy to find. The breakthrough came when I was shown an inventory of her last library, painstakingly reassembled after at least two terrible episodes when poor Rhys had been forced to sell everything she owned, including her clothes. That precious library list not only offered a guide to her literary influences, it also put paid to the idea that Rhys should be judged by the women about whom she wrote. Céline, Henry James, Maupassant, André Breton, Colette, George Moore, James Joyce, Hemingway: how could a well-thumbed collection like this be squared with the notion of a drunken, irresponsible reprobate?
Rhys wrote from a belief that she would “earn” death – her own striking phrase – by her writing. “I know that to write as well as I can is my truth and why I was born,” she once told her conventional and often bewildered daughter. She wrote about badly behaved women with more persistence than any of her hard-drinking peers. But because she herself she was capable of behaving appallingly – she once threatened to slash jazz singer George Melly’s surrealist paintings with a knife after staying in his home for three months – doesn’t mean we should equate Rhys with her characters. She wasn’t the parasitic Julia Martin, restless, suspicious Sasha Jensen, or even, in her last unimprisoned weeks of married life, Antoinette Cosway.
Nor – as her first and most romantic biographer sometimes did – should we see Jean Rhys’s writing as a form of self-therapy.
Jean Rhys was a flawed woman and she knew it. Self-knowledge provided that raw material for her work. The fact she was a woman who liked to drink enabled her to write with shocking lucidity about other women, less gifted and driven than herself, who relied on drink to give them the courage to endure.
Rhys herself drank to blot out a darkness that was central to her writing. “I cannot help what I see,” she wrote in her private notes. And more chillingly: “When I let go of what I have seen I am lost in a world so black and deadly that I am crazy with fear.”
So no, we shouldn’t try to set the quality of the work against the price of a messy, outrageous and often wretched life. As the novelist Paul Bailey once brilliantly remarked, Rhys’s finest literary achievement was not only to confront the abyss, but to walk down into it, taking us with her. It’s a terrifying journey.
