This
collection of sixteen stories contains only three previously published stories, and appeared just three years before Rhys’s
death in 1979 at the age of eighty-nine. “The Chevalier of the Place Blanche” is Rhys’s “much-adapted translation” of a story
by her first husband Jean Lenglet (written under his pen name of Edouard de Nève), and represents their close collaboration
as writers.
50 Diana Athill rightly comments that “Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic” and “Sleep It Off Lady” are “extraordinary” portraits
of the experience of old age, an unusual literary subject (
CS:ix).
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 first-person narratives that are most clearly autobiographical in tone are on the whole disappointingly slight (perhaps
too protected). “On Not Shooting Sitting Birds” begins: “There is no control over memory” (
CS:328):
the point of the story is the connection of memory to story-telling. This narrator has some of the mischievous quality of
Rhys’s young protagonists (she goes out to buy a silk chemise and drawers before having dinner with a man she likes, more
than hinting she expects him to see them). She remembers being lost in the Dominican forest as a child and that she came to
England thinking she knew all about English people from the novels she read, details that directly connect to Rhys’s own life.
In “Night Out 1925” Suzy has the same name as the central character in Rhys’s unpublished first novel, “Triple Sec,” and has
read Francis Carco’s books about seedy life, as Rhys did. Suzy goes with a man to a Parisian bar where scantily dressed young
women try to earn large tips by simulating sex or pretending sexual attraction to clients. It is odd to be a woman in a place
designed to appeal to men: the girl Suzy picks feels obliged to do something to respond and kisses Suzy’s knee and her lip.
Since Suzy gives the girls at their table far more of a tip than her companion instructed (and out of his wallet), he is annoyed.
He resents too much common cause between women.
“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.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel” is a sinister little first-person narrative about a stay in a convalescent home, where an elderly patient
brushes her long, silvery-white hair. One day, this patient asks for the ends of her hair to be trimmed but the male barber
simply chops it all off: afterwards, the woman loses the will to live and soon dies. This nasty little fairy tale works because
the first-person voice is only observing, giving nothing away: like all fairy tales, the cautionary aspect of this one is
very clear. “Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic” is third-person narration, about an old lady living alone, receiving a man
selling clothes door to door and a visitor from Holland who is anxious
about her and takes her out: this is a piece of Rhys’s actual life in old age, but she presumably needed the distancing narrative
voice to get her writerly balance.
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.
Diana Athill, one of Rhys’s devoted editors, put this collection together after Rhys died. It reprints all twenty-two stories
from
The Left Bank, as well as the eight stories in the first section of
Tigers Are Better-Looking, and all of
Sleep It Off Lady. In addition, Athill included five other stories, two published in 1969, “I Spy a Stranger” and “Temps Perdi,” and two published
in
Vogue in Rhys’s old age, “Kismet” and “Invitation to the Dance.” There is also “The Whistling Bird,” published here for the first
time. Athill says that the last stories, from Rhys’s time of failing energies, make her “feel sad” (
CS:ix). They are less impressive than earlier ones but still valuable. “Kismet” is a fragment about chorus-girl life. “The Whistling
Bird” is another account
of the trip to the West Indies with Leslie in 1936, this time about a cousin called Liliane who was living in St. Lucia, a
writer of songs, and perhaps the one who helped Rhys find the title for
Wide Sargasso Sea.
51
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.
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.
Angier dates “The Ropemakers’s Arms” to 1952, and considers that without it “she could not have written
Wide Sargasso Sea.”
56 Angier argues that in this brutal and dramatic self-evaluation, Rhys puts herself on trial. The piece is written in gripping
dialogue:
PROSECUTION: I suppose you will admit that the things that matter are difficult to tell?
Yes.
Impossible perhaps?
Perhaps, some of them.
DEFENCE: It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn?
It is not true.
DEFENCE: Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, so on?
Yes. Not friendships very much.
Did you succeed?
Sometimes. For a time.
It didn’t last?
No.
Whose fault was that?
Mine, I suppose.
(SP:132)
Rhys’s skill in taking the chaos of inner life and dramatizing it very effectively is clearly demonstrated here.
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.