There is first the matter of name, something that reverberates in Rhys’s work. She was christened Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams,
and later (on the stage or in married life) was known as Ella, Vivien or Emma Grey, Ella Lenglet or Ella Hamer. Gwendolen
is the spelling on her tombstone, and the one she used in her autobiography,
Smile Please. But she was christened Gwendoline.
1 She hated the name Gwendolen (which she learned means white in Welsh), just as she hated being the palest of her siblings
(five in all surviving): they had brown eyes and hair, and she had blue eyes, fair skin and lighter hair (
SP:14).
Dominica, where she was born, on August 24, 1890, is still a wildly beautiful island, the heavily forested, mostly undeveloped
top of a submerged volcano which still produces the sulfurous “Boiling Lake” in its crater.
2 In her childhood, it was very difficult to get around, and boats were often used to go from one part of the island to another.
Hesketh Bell, the famous colonial
Administrator of Dominica (1899–1905), tried to build the “Imperial Road” to facilitate colonial plantations on the island:
it was never finished.
3Dominica was a colony of Britain with a long history of slavery and a white English hegemony. But, unusually in the Caribbean
at the time, this was challenged by a powerful, mixed-race elite, whose slave-owning ancestors had migrated from Saint Domingue
around 1790.
4 In 1838, they were known as the “Mulatto Ascendancy” when they became the majority in the House of Assembly. They held onto
this power until Crown Colony Rule was imposed by the British to obtain more direct colonial control in 1898.
5 The Lockharts, Gwen Williams’ mother’s white Creole family, belonged to the Anglican, British faction, established prominently
in Dominica for five generations by the time of Rhys’s birth, since James Potter Lockhart emigrated to Dominica to first manage
a sugar plantation, Geneva, and then by the mid-1820s to own it, along with 258 slaves.
6 He became a powerful political figure in Dominica. His wife Jean was reputedly a Spanish princess from Cuba, though the young
Gwen did not believe this story (
SP:26). She was perhaps of mixed race, not uncommon among Creoles, but an issue for Rhys’s mother’s family, who liked to think
their bloodline was only English.
7Gwen Williams was eight when the English made Dominica a Crown Colony. Property qualifications for voting were very high in
Dominica at the time, so few could vote, but elected representation was prized and defended. Crown Colony rule replaced elected
representatives with a Legislative Council made up of six officials and six members nominated by the Administrator.
8 Jean Rhys still remembered in old age how Administrator Hesketh Bell (known for charming those who were still angry about
the political change) gave a very enjoyable fancy-dress ball for children in honor of his niece and paid her special attention
(
SP:73–4).
9 In that period, a thriving newspaper rivalry expressed the competing interests of the colonial English and brown skin elite,
demonstrating the power and value of verbal skills: that she knew about this is clear in her short story, “Again the Antilles”
(
CS:39–41).
10Rhys’s Welsh father, William Rees Williams, ran off to sea at fourteen and was quickly taken home, but eventually joined the
Merchant Navy. He later completed medical school.
11 One of the feisty local papers,
The Dominica Dial, reported that his medical career had begun inauspiciously on board a ship repairing telegraph communications, but his luck
changed when he got a colonial appointment as a doctor in Roseau, Dominica’s capital. He later temporarily acquired two estates
in the interior of Dominica to which the family went via coastal steamer and horseback. The larger one Rhys remembered was
called Bona Vista (
SP:15) It had a wide and impressive view of Dominica’s forested Mornes (the term for mountains in Dominica as in the French
Caribbean), but also across valleys to the sea. In “Mixing
Cocktails,” Rhys recalls the view from “the house in the hills”
(CS:36–7). Though the house has all but vanished, the site affirms the spectacular view. In Roseau, the family lived in a pleasant,
colonial-style house not far from the waterfront, with a jalousied balcony overlooking the main street and a courtyard at
the back. It was here that Dr. Williams had his practice.
12 The opening of Rhys’s third novel (
Voyage in the Dark) describes looking down a street from “the house at home” to “the Bay”: standing in front of Rhys’s family home in Roseau,
this is the view down to the sea.
The majority of Dominica’s population are of African descent, mainly speaking French Creole and of the Catholic faith. Slavery
ended there earlier than in neighbouring Guadaloupe and Martinique, from where slaves then fled to Dominica.
13 Race and shade permeated Rhys’s child consciousness. When given a fair doll (her sister got the dark-haired one she wanted),
she took it into the garden and ritually smashed its face with a rock (
SP:30–1). She had a dark-skinned nurse, Meta, who, by Rhys’s account, often played on her child’s credulity, and told her terrifying
stories of spirits and demons. She had to witness the annual Carnival procession from within her house, since it was an expression
of the black Dominican community, though she was sent out with money to give to the stilt-man called the Bois-Bois. She had
a close friendship “with a Negro girl called Francine” (
SP:23) who was a very good storyteller. The Anglican church in Roseau, where the Williams family worshipped along with others
willing to be affiliated with Britain, had segregated seats and entrances: whites sat at the front with a space between them
and black congregants, who were fewer in number. Rhys remembered not having any problems with this arrangement as a child
(
SP:72), and reported yelling “Black Devil” at Meta. She had both what Ford Madox Ford called her “passion for stating the case
of the underdog”
14 and a capacity to sound thoroughly white English colonial: “I never tried to be friends with any of the colored girls again
… They hate us. We are hated” (
SP:39). Rhys was contradictory about race. She was romantic about black culture as a child (she thought it more fun than white),
but in old age she could sound resentful at the loss of white power in Dominica.
Race and colonialism figure in two stories about Gwen Williams’ adolescent life, one a highly suspect rumor and the other
recorded in one of Rhys’s writing notebooks. The rumor is that Rhys might have had a love interest in someone partly Carib
(this is based on a piece of fiction which her brother Owen wrote).
15 It seems, however, unlikely that such a violation of racial mores could have gone unnoticed in a world where adolescent white
girls were constantly under supervision and servants noticed everything. But there is a sense of forbidden love across racial
caste lines in the submerged story of Sandi and Antoinette in
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Then, in the
Black Exercise Book, Rhys wrote an account of being sexually and psychologically abused by an old Englishman, Mr. Howard,
who touched her breast once, and then developed a sadomasochistic serial story about her sexual submission to him.
16 The married Howard was an emblem of colonial English privilege. Rhys’s mother, thinking him a charming old gentleman, sent
her daughter out with him to the Botanical Gardens in Roseau. Thus Rhys did not dare to tell her mother. The incident could
easily have been amongst those aspects of her life that Rhys erased. But though she only wrote of it clearly in one story,
she never lost her notebook account of it (and she lost much else). The narrative of a young female victim of sexual abuse
is clearly one source of the sexual inhibition or emotional masochism that most of Rhys’s protagonists display. Another is
the devastating end of her first serious love affair.
Gwen Williams left Dominica to complete her education under the guardianship of her English aunt, Clarice.
17 In Roseau, she had attended a convent school as a boarder, and in England she would again be a boarder at the Perse School
for Girls in Cambridge, leaving in 1908. In 1909 she enrolled at what would become the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (then
called, after its founder Beerbohm Tree, Tree’s School). She left the same year and defied her family’s wishes to go on the
stage as a chorus girl, choosing Ella Gray (or sometimes, Vivien or Emma Gray) as her stage name. Though Rhys said she left
Tree’s School because her father died, Angier points out that he died in 1910, and that the real reason was that her West
Indian accent was not acceptable for serious theater in England at the time (
SP:86–91).
18Rhys writes about her chorus-girl experience in her autobiography (
SP:86–91). The life she lived was both gloriously fake (makeup, costumes and make-believe during the performances), and brutally
real (tawdry boarding houses in which the chorus spent their leisure time). In old age, Rhys was often seen as an elderly
siren, always made up and responsive to male attention: this was the way she had learned to face the public as a shy young
woman. Chorus girls were also very often working class, and took part in the pub culture of Britain. This may have been where
Rhys first began to drink: there may have been a tendency to alcoholism in her family, because her father was described in
the Dominican press as being too fond of the bottle. Chorus girls were also prey for men of means. Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith
took up with Rhys, but she fell very much in love. He was well to do,
single, well connected, a successful stockbroker by profession at a time when that was breaking ground, and he had a London
town house and a significant family home in the country. He was also twenty years older. Their relationship followed the usual
pattern of such a man’s casual sexual arrangements. He saw her when he felt like it, took her out to dinner, gave her money,
had her visit him at his grand London town house but sent her home in a taxi before dawn, and was usually away at the weekends
seeing his own family and friends at his parents’ country house.
19 The relationship with Smith was in a sense a stage set, a place where the young Rhys could taste an English life she would
have enjoyed, and forget that it was not anchored in real life.
Smith ended the affair before it got too serious for, whatever Rhys thought and hoped about her suitability for him, he would
never have considered a white Creole chorus girl a likely long-term partner (moreover he never found any satisfactory candidate
and remained unmarried). Following the social custom for men who indulged in cross-class affairs but wanted to be gentlemanly,
he arranged for her to be financially supported, through money sent by his lawyer, for a number of years. But Rhys was emotionally
devastated. Many years later she reflected: “It seems to me now that the whole business of money and sex is mixed up with
something primitive and deep. When you take money directly from somebody you love it becomes not money but a symbol” (SP:97). Money and sex are often deeply intertwined in her fiction.
Her emotional collapse at the end of the affair is presented in her autobiography as triggering her entry into obsessively
writing a journal, experienced as an extraordinary event: “My fingers tingled, and the palms of my hands … I wrote on until
late into the night …” (
SP:104). Writing thus became a release – but her portrayal of this as having the force of a conversion is likely a fiction,
having the sort of shape actual experience would not: Diana Athill, Rhys’s devoted editor for
Wide Sargasso Sea, remarks that Rhys felt she had to rework experience to fit “the shape and nature of the work of art.”
20Rhys’s admission in her autobiography that she had an abortion (“after what was then called an illegal operation,”
SP:95) is located just after her lover leaves for New York (the end of the affair). It is followed by a suicidal period, and
then the release into writing. Angier feels the timeline is the end of the affair in 1912, and the drift into a risky demi-monde
life in 1913, including pregnancy and abortion early in that year.
21 She locates a particular intensity in Rhys’s habit of writing notebooks from late 1913 into early 1914: these would become
key sources for her fiction.
Rhys had a good many friends in the arts, suggesting that, though she loved a man who was in finance, she already wanted to
spend a lot of time with artists early on, whether on the stage or not. However, she wrote sparingly about this. In
Smile Please, Rhys speaks of a journalist called Alan, a proposal of marriage from someone she meets in a nightclub in 1914, a job in
a crowd scene in a play, volunteering during the war in a canteen serving soldiers leaving for France, and a Belgian refugee
called Camille whom she meets in a house in Torrington Square. Angier locates these men and others during the period between
the affair with Smith and Rhys’s first marriage: society painter Sir Edward Poynter (for whom Rhys posed), Alan Bott (subeditor
on the
Daily Chronicle, a leading national paper), Maxwell Henry Hayes Macartney (a journalist with
The Times, to whom Rhys was engaged for a while), Adrian Allinson (a painter), Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (music critic for
The Times) and Philip Heseltine (a composer and music critic).
22 Rhys’s story “Till September Petronella” reflects this period, particularly through two artistic male characters, the music
critic Julian and the artist Marston (
CS).
In 1919, Rhys had the pleasure of writing to her former lover, Smith, and telling him that his lawyer could stop sending her
cheques (
SP:113) because she was going to marry Willem Johan Marie (Jean) Lenglet. The marriage took place in The Hague on April 30.
Angier offers details of how complicated this relationship really was, given that Lenglet was still, presumably unbeknown
to Rhys, married to Marie Pollart until 1925. He left Rhys in Paris for periods during 1922–4. But Angier’s portrait is not
nearly as sympathetic and interesting as that of Kappers-den Hollander, who gives much more evidence of his complexity.
23 He was evidently a fine linguist, a brave soldier in World War I and a fighter against injustice who took enormous personal
risks to combat fascism. He was entirely careless about paperwork, though he engaged in currency and art dealings, but this
needs to be contextualized by the chaos of war and the aftermath of war. Many who profited far more deliberately got away
with it. He was eventually a fugitive and a stateless person, arrested in 1924, accused of fraud and jailed. The Lenglets
had two children, the first a boy, William Owen, who died in infancy in early 1920, and the second a girl, Maryvonne, born
in May 1922, when Rhys and her husband could not afford to keep a child, so that Maryvonne probably spent some time in a clinic
or with Rhys’s friends.
24 Rhys was highly protective of her daughter, and the experience of motherhood is almost entirely erased from her fiction. During
the difficult period of Lenglet’s absences, Rhys may have stayed with H. Pearl Adam, a journalist and the wife of a journalist,
who later, when Rhys tried to sell her translations of some of Lenglet’s work, encouraged her to develop her diaries into
fiction, and even edited them herself into the never-published novel “Triple Sec.” It was Mrs. Adams who, via this manuscript,
introduced Rhys to Ford Madox Ford.
Ford was a literary impresario and indefatigable if uneven writer (he published eighty-one books and over four hundred articles).
25 He was known for helping and publishing promising writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene and Wyndham Lewis. He
held court in Paris restaurants, most famously Le Dôme, and made temporary consecutive sexual connections with attractive
and gifted young female writers to boost his creative energies. Rhys moved in for a while with Ford and his companion of the
previous six years, painter Stella Bowen, who eventually described Rhys as having a “needle-quick intelligence and a good
sort of honesty” but also called her a “doomed soul, violent and demoralized.”
26 Ford’s affair with Rhys did serious damage to his relationship with Bowen, but for Rhys it was a very helpful training ground
for her future work.
27She also had a strong friendship with Germaine Richelot, a kind, well-to-do and highly cultivated Jewish woman for whose family
Rhys worked as a tutor for several months during her pregnancy with her first child, and who seems likely to have helped her
a great deal. Also Rhys may have posed for a Jewish sculptor from England, Violet Dreschfeld.
28 There are minor but intriguing references to Jewish people and cultural symbols in her fiction: it seems likely that, over
and above her loyalty to Jewish friends whom she loved, she also felt something of common cause between her own colonial displacement
and the marginalization of Jews in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s.
No doubt being in Paris helped her remember the French Creole that so flourished in Dominica in her childhood. She developed
a strong love for French poetry. She began to earn money by work related to writing quite early. During the ending of her
affair with Ford, she worked briefly for a Mrs. Hudnut, a rich American woman with writing ambitions who lived in the South
of France. She also translated a novel,
Perversité, by Francis Carco, though when it appeared Ford’s name was on the title page.
29 Lenglet and Rhys communicated in French and, in this period of her life, constant translation between French and English
must have sharpened her sense of each word she used, as did her lifelong love of poetry. In her papers, when
she died, were poems she particularly enjoyed which she had copied out by hand. Her fiction has many of the attributes of
the heightened, layered language of poetry.
Her first book was a volume of short stories, The Left Bank (1927). Ford published what became the last story in the collection, “Vienne,” in his transatlantic review, which put this unknown and inexperienced writer in the company of modernist stars like Joyce, Hemingway, Pound, Djuna Barnes
and Gertrude Stein, among others. He also helped her place the collection and wrote an introduction to the stories which is
as much about him as about the stories, and has a patronizing tone at times, but was also important to Rhys’s collection being
noticed.
Rhys’s second book was a novel, Quartet (1928), in which she fictionalized the affair with Ford. By the time it came out she was in London, now the writer, Jean
Rhys. Rhys is a different spelling of her father’s family name of Rees, and Jean could have been chosen for her husband, Jean,
or her “Cuban” ancestor Jean, or both.
Quartet was only one of the four books that represented the “
affaire Ford,” the others being Jean Lenglet’s novel,
Sous les Verrous (written under the name Edouard de Nève, 1933), Ford’s novel
When the Wicked Man (1931), and Stella Bowen’s account in her autobiography,
Drawn from Life (1941). Rhys’s fictional portrayal of Ford irritated him (and his friends among the London
literati). He then wrote what is probably his worst novel, with a lurid white Creole character called Lola Porter who is suspected
of murdering her husband and loves telling stories about voodoo and “obi” (obeah). Ford’s narrator uncritically reflects the
cultural and racial prejudices commonplace in Britain at the time, describing “Mrs Porter” in Harlem as insisting “on dancing
half-naked in a regular tohuwabohu of negroes, mulatresses and gangsters.”
30 Because Lenglet’s novel was translated and edited by Rhys as
Barred, appearing in Britain a year before his own version in French, we might see it as a fifth “version,” by both of them.
When
Quartet appeared, Rhys was living in London with Leslie Tilden Smith, a rather unsuccessful literary agent, who was very supportive
of her work. It is ironical that she had romantic relationships with two Englishmen called L. Smith (Lancelot and Leslie).
She married Tilden Smith on February 19, 1934 (the year
Voyage in the Dark was published). Smith’s daughter reported that he wrote to Ford to ask if he needed an English agent, and got
the reply that Ford didn’t but Rhys did. Ford sent Smith some of her stories, and Angier believes Smith was both domestically
and professionally an important part of the literary productivity Rhys achieved between 1928 and 1939.
31 But Rhys strongly disliked London and England, and probably returned to Paris when she could. She and Lenglet divorced in
1928 (though their literary connection lasted longer and was complicated: over a number of years they each revised, built
on, translated, or, in Lenglet’s case, perhaps appropriated the other’s work).
32 She helped
Barred be published and reviewed in Britain. This is interesting proof that Rhys’s strongest connections were those through writing:
it was what she and both her first and second husbands really had in common.
After 1924, when the Lenglets separated, the plan was for their daughter Maryvonne to live with each parent as convenient.
Though Maryvonne spent more time with her father as time went on, she did remember staying with her mother for six months
in the South of France.
33 She was schooled in Amsterdam and visited her mother for holidays, thus relieving Rhys of the distraction of raising a child.
Rhys was unable to be a normally domesticated wife and mother, though she clearly deeply loved her daughter.
She was thus able to commit herself to writing, and she really did, publishing her second novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in 1931, her third, Voyage in the Dark, in 1934, and her fourth, Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939. She worked on shorter pieces of fiction. She had friendships with women who loved literature or wrote it (Peggy
Kirkaldy and Evelyn Scott; see L). Scott, who liked After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, shared something of Rhys’s racial complexities, being white from a culture that had been built on racialized plantation
slavery. She extended Rhys’s knowledge of American literature. Their friendship was to founder, as did many of Rhys’s connections
with literary women (L:34).
In 1936, as a result of a bequest Leslie Tilden Smith received, Rhys was able to visit Dominica, the only time she saw it
after she left as a teenager. This was crucial in giving her a vivid new set of memories of its topography and in refreshing
childhood recollections. It was in New York on the way home from this trip that Rhys quarreled with Evelyn Scott.
The end of the thirties saw the onset of fascism in Germany and the start of World War II in 1939. This was the year Rhys’s
fourth novel,
Good Morning, Midnight appeared: understandably it was largely ignored. She burned an early version of
Wide Sargasso Sea in this period, according to Angier, in a quarrel with Leslie.
34 The war years clearly were very hard for Rhys. She did not hear from her daughter for the entire duration of hostilities
(1939–45), as Maryvonne had chosen to return to Holland to live with
her father in late 1939, while still a teenager. As the war progressed, Rhys received alarming news, that when the Germans
invaded Holland Maryvonne had been staying with Jewish friends. It was only in 1945 that Rhys heard her daughter was safe,
had worked in the Resistance and been arrested, and now was about to be married. Lenglet had also worked for the Resistance
and had been arrested, declared insane and put into an asylum, then prison, then Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and had
even survived the notorious death march of 1945.
35During the war, Leslie joined the RAF for several years, but he was able to serve at a desk. He died of a heart attack in
1945. Though it is clear that Rhys had the opportunity to work during these years, there were immense stresses: anxiety about
her daughter and Lenglet and the loss through death of Leslie’s loving support. During and after the war she seems to have
worked on short stories and her habitual notebook entries, but after 1939 she entered a long period in which she vanished
from public view as a writer and in literary circles was assumed to be dead.
Angier suggests that Leslie’s death, and his active involvement in Rhys’s writing life, prevented the publication of a volume
of short stories which she had ready in 1945, and that she only published two new stories between 1945 and 1966.
36 In 1947, she married Max Hamer, a cousin of Leslie, who was devoted to her but not a literary man. Their life together was
tumultuous, as well as happy. Max was impulsive, looking for ways to make money, which got him into trouble with the law,
wrecking his career and ultimately his health.
37 As her alcoholism worsened, Rhys went through some years of fighting with neighbors and tenants living in the house she and
Max had in Beckenham, a suburb of south London.
38 Though her family had moved to Britain, she had difficult relationships with many of her relatives. She quarreled or lost
touch with several friends, and Maryvonne married a Dutch man and was living in Holland. Whilst Max was in prison, therefore,
Rhys spent a good deal of time alone, out of which came a remarkable document, “From a Diary: At the Ropemaker’s Arms.” She
prefaced it with a note, “While for a time I was separated from Max, I lived in rooms above a pub in Maidstone, and there
wrote a diary in a little brown copybook. The year was 1947 …” (
SP:129). Angier corrects the date to 1952 (Rhys did not even marry Max until October 1947, and he went to prison in 1950 and
served exactly two years of his three-year sentence).
39 “From a Diary” contains “The
Trial of Jean Rhys,” in which Rhys is cross-questioned by prosecution and defence lawyers as to her life. She says, “I must
write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death” (
SP:133); and, “all of a writer that matters is in the book or books” (
SP:136). Rhys had a great deal of courage in facing her demons when she could work.
In the late 1950s, she applied herself to completing
Wide Sargasso Sea. The BBC broadcast a dramatization of part of
Good Morning, Midnight (May, 1957), and in the process mentioned that she was working on a new novel, which brought Rhys a contract for its publication.
40 In 1949, when an actress, Selma vaz Dias, was seeking permission for the dramatization, there was a strong rumour that Rhys
had died. Despite difficult living conditions, (a former tea-room in Cornwall, highly unsuitable during the winter), she persisted
with the work, eventually moving to a small bungalow in a village near Exeter, through her brother Edward’s generosity in
1960.
41 Her struggle to finish her last novel is vividly recorded in letters, often to her Deutsch editors Francis Wyndham and Diana
Athill. Just before it appeared, Max died, after a long period of very poor health and physical dependency.
42
Wide Sargasso Sea was enormously successful. In addition, the story of Rhys’s presumed “death” and return to writerly life made for good copy.
Though she could easily have stopped writing after this triumph, Rhys worked on her old stories and wrote some new ones, which
resulted in two volumes,
Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and
Sleep It Off Lady (1976), as well as a slim collection of three short pieces,
My Day (1975), and finally the unfinished autobiography,
Smile Please (1979). She died in May 1979 after a fall which broke her hip and resulted in an operation.
43
Rhys was unquestionably a Caribbean writer, but she was also a cosmopolitan, and her work often protests borders and separations.
Though she did travel as a young woman, leaving the Caribbean, moving from London to Paris and Europe, most of her adult life
was spent imagining places as opposed to going to them.
Rhys lived a very writerly life, full of commitment to the work and obsessive perfectionism about form, and she proved herself
bravely capable of extraordinary work in the face of serious difficulties. She was first and foremost a writer, and she “earned
her death,” as she put it, by doing what she did best to the very end.