Some mornings, just to brace myself, I look at the jacket photograph on Jean Rhys’s 1976 story collection Sleep It Off, Lady. Rhys was eighty-six in Fay Godwin’s photo, her fingers arthritic, head cocked, one eye larger than the other, grooves from nose to chin, staring back at whoever dares to stare at her in her chic beat-up hat and jacket. She might be saying, “Go ahead and look if you dare.” She looks back just as sharply and with as little expectation as she might have done in life. Her look defines the phrase gimlet-eyed.
And so it is with her writing, her brief and searing novels, and her short stories that are delivered like taps that slice the reader at the end.
The title story of Sleep It Off, Lady begins with two ladies at tea, Mrs. Baker and Miss Verney, having a chat about a proposed village project, when Miss Verney says that lately she’s been thinking “a great deal about death.” Here the subversion of the cozy English village begins.
Mrs. Baker answers that it isn’t so strange that Miss Verney thinks of death:
“We old people are rather like children, we live in the present as a rule. A merciful dispensation of providence.”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Verney doubtfully.
Like many of Rhys’s stories, “Sleep It Off, Lady” centers on a character who understands very little about the world and is in turn not much understood. Rhys’s early heroines, young women alone, lack an instinct for self-preservation and they are always strangers, wherever they are. They trust the wrong person, usually a man, and they end up more isolated and wounded than ever. One story, set on a Caribbean island like Dominica (where Rhys was born and raised), has the same clueless, innocent character missing the niceties of not shooting sitting birds. Whatever everyone else knows and takes for granted, a Rhys heroine will not.
In “Sleep It Off, Lady,” even the children are judgmental, mean, and exceedingly unhelpful. In her bitter innocence, the main character has no gift for the sort of politeness that would make a bearable life of tea and non sequiturs. She cannot stand to ask for help and she gets none. Indeed, the villagers condemn her for drinking, which she does often and early. When she needs their aid, they ignore her.
The photographic portrait was taken near the end of Rhys’s life when she was rediscovered and republished, rescued by the efforts and publicity campaign of her editor Diana Athill and the writer Francis Wyndham. Her rescue came too late, Rhys told an interviewer.
Jean Rhys’s stories would only be painful were it not for the beauty of her prose. She writes simply and clearly. There is never a pretense of style or stylishness. Her tales of alcoholics, petty criminals, and perpetual losers in love are lit by the intimacy of her voice. Her reader is one of her losers. Who in the world that Jean Rhys created would care to be one of the heartless winners?
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas