Sleep It Off Lady (1976)

The order of the stories roughly follows the settings of Rhys’s own life chronologically (the Caribbean, London, Paris, and London again, during the War). The final story is even beyond old age, a haunting imagining of returning home to the Caribbean after death, as a ghost. Rhys is always experimenting with narrative voice, whether in long or short fiction. Nine stories are told in the third person and six in first-person narrative. “Fishy Waters” is told through most effectively juxtaposed letters to a Dominican newspaper, followed by a summary of a lead article in the same paper and finally a third-person, all-seeing narrator voice to conclude. Rhys sometimes uses a distancing third-person voice for something so intensely remembered in her own life that it cannot be told more intimately.
“Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose” is an extraordinary fictionalized account of the “Mr. Howard” story contained in Rhys’s “Black Exercise Book” (see page 4 above). The third-person narrative makes the story even more sinister as it represents the sexual and emotional abuse impassively. Captain Cardew is an elderly war hero, visiting the West Indies with his wife. He takes the twelve-year-old Phoebe to the Botanical Gardens, touches her breast (inside her blouse), and on subsequent walks, rather than touching her, spins stories of sexual love that involve “(v)iolence, even cruelty” (CS:287). Both his wife and Phoebe’s mother seem to notice something is going on, but direct their suspicions to Phoebe rather than protecting her. The wife takes Cardew away prematurely. The piece ends with Phoebe thinking that her “childish” desires to find a good husband and have children she would call Marcus and Rose are now irrelevant: she has lost a key piece of her innocence and ability to trust, and, somewhere deep down, blames herself for what happened, as victims of abuse so often do.
“The Bishop’s Feast” is a fragment of memoir, originally part of the “Imperial Road” manuscript. “Heat” is a short piece on the eruption of Mt. Pelée in Martinique (1902) and the famous Dominican Boiling Lake. Both are of most interest to scholars researching the contexts of Rhys’s life and work. “Overture and Beginners Please” and “After the Deluge” are about the life of a chorus girl, part of Rhys’s preparation for her autobiography, because they include details directly from Rhys’s own experience (leaving the West Indies and attending the Perse School in Cambridge in “Overture,” being in a company touring around Britain in “Deluge”). Daisy in “After the Deluge” is a memorable character, an accomplished and quite devastating gossip, as well as an absolute narcissist who crashes to the floor, taking down a small table, when she hears the narrator angrily deny gossiping about her (CS:312). “Overture” is less successful as a story and reads more as a piece of rather stiff memoir.
Other third-person narratives are of variable quality. “Kikimora” is too short to be an effective story, but it is another example of Rhys’s clever portrayals of the effect of alcohol on women with suppressed anger towards wealthy and powerful older men. “The Insect World” is set in wartime. A young woman feels anxious about insects (both in a novel she is reading about the tropics and in her own memories), but in reality her fears are more about getting older.
“Sleep It Off Lady” is, however, an extremely effective story, where the third-person narration correlates to the indifference of the world to elderly Miss Verney. She lives alone in a cottage. She sees a huge rat in the shed in her yard, but since she drinks quite a bit (the neighbors know because they carry her heavy dustbin, full of bottles, to the gate each week), the man she asks for help thinks she is seeing things: “Are you sure it wasn’t a pink rat?” (CS:379). Her cleaning woman, Mrs. Randolph, complains she has had to pick up the contents of the dustbin, which she thinks was upset by a stray dog. Miss Verney is sure it was the rat. She frantically cleans her house, and eats less, so there is less garbage. She is diagnosed with heart problems and told not to pick up weights. But one day, feeling stronger and happier than usual, she discovers the dustbin has been forgotten at the gate and she first carries it in and then the heavy stones which are to protect its lid from removal. As she lifts her pail to empty it into the dustbin, she passes out, and comes to with the food she was throwing out all over her, eggshells and stale bread. She finds she cannot move. A twelve-year-old child, who lives across the street, comes when called but, in response to Miss Verney’s request for help, says everyone knows she drinks, so “Sleep it off, lady” (CS:385). In the morning, she is found unconscious by the postman, and dies soon afterwards, “of shock and cold” (CS:386).
There are two striking and related stories about Dominica, “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers” and “Fishy Waters.” “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers” is told complexly, beginning with two young sisters, Rosalie and Irene, who are clearly in Roseau, Dominica in 1899 (the same Market Street as is mentioned at the opening of Voyage in the Dark). They comment on the eccentrics in their small community, like Mrs. Menzies, Jimmy Longa, and Mr. Ramage. Rosalie is said to have fallen in love with Ramage when she was seven, two years ago. Rhys would have been nine in 1899, the same age as Rosalie, and, since Rhys’s father was Welsh, the detail of the picture in Rhys’s childhood home of the famous Welsh town of Bettws-y-Coed seems to be right out of direct memory. After an ellipsis, typical of Rhys’s modernist narrative strategies, the narrative point of view switches to the girl’s doctor father, Dr. Cox, and then to a third-person account of Ramage’s arrival in the island, his purchase of a small estate buried in the forest, his marriage to a “coloured girl,” and his growing strangeness, which includes wandering the forest naked but for his tools or lying naked in his hammock. The local paper reports not only the scheme for settling the “Imperial Road,” the project of Hesketh Bell, the Administrator, but the oddity of Ramage. Local people begin to throw stones at his house, especially as his wife has disappeared and there are rumors that he might have done away with her. One night he appears dressed in white on his verandah to confront the stone-throwers, looking “like a zombi” (CS:283), and shortly afterwards is found mysteriously dead in his house, with all the windows and doors open. His wife turns up for the funeral, having been brought back from a visit to relatives in Guadaloupe (for which she departed suspiciously, in a fishing boat from the opposite side of the island). The story ends with Rosalie writing a love letter to the dead Ramage and her mother throwing it away whilst her daughter sleeps.
“Fishy Waters” is even more complex in structure. It concerns Jimmy Longa, who was mentioned in “Pioneers Oh Pioneers,” and tells the story of the investigation of his alleged assault on a little black girl, told most effectively via letters to the local newspaper and a long and detailed account of Longa’s trial, and the story ends with a third-person narrative about the fate of the little girl. It is one of Rhys’s most deceptive stories, which rewards patient, close reading. The first letter is signed “Disgusted,” in the manner of newspaper correspondents across the British colonial world dealing with touchy subjects and protecting their identity. This first letter describes Longa as a white British socialist, who lost a room in a boarding house for that reason, and was then criticized for living in a “predominantly negro quarter” (CS:298). Then the incident with the child occurs. Some people think he is a scapegoat (victimized by the white plantocracy). Presumably this letter is written by someone from the mixed-race elite. In late nineteenth-century Dominica this was characterized by a feisty involvement with the press and a continuous battle with the colonial English presence in the island. The next letter is signed Ian J. McDonald, who is presumably of the white elite, because this man attacks the first writer for trying to stir up racial hatred and argues that slavery originated with African chiefs. The third letter, signed by a local merchant called Kelly (presumably of color), attacks McDonald for omitting the greed of white merchants and planters. Then an anonymous “defender of justice” points out that the case ought not to be discussed before trial and the Editor of the paper shuts down the exchange. Another letter is from “Maggie,” the wife of Matt Penrice, who discovered Longa with the little girl, but who is himself acting strangely, so they have plans to move from the town to a decaying small estate in the country.
The newspaper account of the trial follows. Matt Penrice describes how he came across Longa, standing over a naked, unconscious little girl who was lying on a plank laid on trestles, with a saw in his hand that was touching the little girl’s waist. Penrice said he saw the child’s body was covered in bruises. But there is something fishy about Penrice’s story of his activities that day, not only his route to the Club and the time he left (unusually early for his routine), but the fact that he did not take the injured child to the hospital but to a former servant of his, Madame Joseph, to whom he had given a house when she left his service. Thus the little girl is kept away from talking to anyone but the doctor and Joseph, and the claim is made by the doctor that she refused to talk about her experience. Longa admits to drinking heavily and to wanting to scare the child as she was one of a group of children who had been tormenting him. He says he didn’t think it odd that she was naked, making a racist inference, “they very often are, especially on hot days” (CS:307). The magistrate finds there is no direct evidence that Longa attacked the child, but it is distinctly odd that he didn’t notice her injuries if he did not inflict them. Longa is to leave the island at the government’s expense and return to England. But then the story moves to the Penrices’, and the plan to send the child to be adopted by a friend of Madame Joseph in St. Lucia. It is clear that it was Penrice who beat the child. He plans to leave the island, but the story’s final touch is that his wife feels she does not know him any more. He is a lost man.

The Collected Short Stories (1987)

The description of a Creole woman walking into the narrator’s hotel bedroom with a tea tray, wearing a bright-colored “high-waisted dress, a turban, and heavy gold earrings” (CS:397), is highly reminiscent of the description of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea when she brings in the morning coffee to Antoinette and her husband. “Invitation to the Dance” is again a memoir, about a childhood game and song called “Looby Li,” which is vaguely suggestive and shocks adults into forbidding their children to play it.
The earlier stories, “I Spy a Stranger” and “Temps Perdi,” are powerful. Laura in “I Spy a Stranger” is a strange woman trying to survive in a hostile rural community in England during the war. The attitudes of Mrs. Trant and Mrs. Hudson, who dominate this community, are reflected in the tone of the narrator who is conventional and rather formal. But this voice is interrupted by excerpts from Laura’s writing in an exercise book (which is something Rhys did a great deal). Trant and Hudson discuss it: they’ve possessed it since Laura was sent off by taxi to a depressing “ugly house with small windows, those on the top two barred” (CS:255), an echo of the fate of Antoinette at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea. Angier comments that Laura’s instincts are too literary for someone not a writer (one of the things that enrages Laura is a man kicking his dog which is called Emily Brontë).52
“Temps Perdi” is divided into three sections. The second and third are both numbered and titled, and deal respectively with memories from the protagonist’s Caribbean childhood as well as her young adulthood in Vienna. Rhys of course had both these experiences. The first section begins in present time, during the Second World War in England, and then goes back in time. In Section 3, “Carib Quarter,” the title of the story is explained as a Creole term for “wasted time”.
The Caribs of Dominica live in a particular area of the island and are descendants of the people who occupied the Caribbean before Europeans came.53 The protagonist remembers a visit to the Carib Quarter, which seems to be a memory of Rhys’s visit to Dominica in the 1930s, with her second husband Leslie. The narrative has the tone of heightened personal recollection, or creative non-fiction: “The day we went to the Carib Quarter the wind was blowing luminous heavy clouds across the sky” (CS:270). It is the narrator’s statement at the end of the second section that she will become “a savage person – a real Carib” (CS:267) that provides a link to the third section. This story was a remarkable step forward for Rhys into finding a voice for personal recollection – or, as we would say now, creative non-fiction, neither strictly autobiography nor fiction, but something in between.
Malcolm and Malcolm argue for more recognition of her considerable skill with the story as a genre, though they consider the content of her stories has a remarkable similarity over the fifty years or so of her writing career and A. C. Morrell sees Rhys’s characters as “a society of types.”54 But her stories, like her fiction, do evolve, as she tries different modes of narration, and develops several types, such as the story as personal testimony, or the ghost story, like the haunting fragment, “I Used to Live Here Once,” or the longer, more complex story that is on the way to a novella.

Smile Please (1979)

This unfinished autobiography was edited by Diana Athill and published in the year of Rhys’s death. Rhys was nervous about other people writing her biography, perhaps because she had lived a life that was easy to misrepresent, in terms of bourgeois values, and she had a daughter to protect. But an autobiography was not easy to finish in her last years: she had already used up much of her life for fictional material and let what she did not need fall away in memory.
She did, however, complete a series of short pieces that give impressions of her childhood and adolescence, up to the time she left Dominica for London. The second section is preceded by a note from Athill to the effect that this was “not considered by Jean Rhys to be finished work” (SP:77). It is of course highly valuable to those wishing to understand this complex and enigmatic woman.
The intervention of David Plante as aid to the final stages of Rhys’s work on Smile Please is troubling because he wrote an appallingly opportunistic betrayal of her trust.55 Though the finished pieces end early in Rhys’s life (her departure for London as a teenager), Athill’s inclusion of work Rhys did not approve for release takes the story on to her marriage to Lenglet. There is also an extraordinary piece called “From a Diary: At the Ropemaker’s Arms,” and the book ends with two very short pieces, one about her life in Devon in her old age, “The Cottage,” and the other, “My Day,” first published in Vogue, about the same topic.
Rhys’s texts, whether short or long, are economical and layered, as poetry is, and able to accomplish a great deal in a short space. They are most satisfying to readers who enjoy discovering the language games she plays, because the political and cultural concerns that inform her work are accessed as much or more through her style as through what stories she tells.