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Fact and Fiction: A London Life (1911–13)

“He was a dream come true for me and one doesn’t question dreams, or envy them.”

—Jean Rhys, “The Interval,” Smile Please (1979)

RHYS’S FIRST LOVER was named after one of England’s best-known eighteenth-century landscape designers. Lancelot “Capability” Brown had laid out the gardens at Mount Clare, the handsome house at Roehampton in which Lancelot, third son of the Hugh Smiths, was born in 1870.

Lancelot (always “Lancey” to his colleagues and clients), had grown up in a world of order and great wealth. The closest friends of his parents were the Hambros and Junius Morgan, father of the legendary John Pierpont Morgan himself. The Hugh Smiths were connected to the Martin Smiths, the Ridley Smiths and the Abel Smiths: all were members of a quietly powerful clan that helped to control, and even to dictate, Britain’s finances. Theirs was a world of cool discretion in which a gentleman’s returned cheque—as with Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End—could immediately destroy his reputation. So might a misjudged marriage.

Writing her unpublished recollections of a flawlessly dull life, Lancey’s mother Constance (Lady Hugh Smith) identified only one outsider in the cosily integrated world of Surrey bankers who ranked among her family’s closest friends. Grove House—it adjoined Mount Clare—belonged to the widow of Mr. Lyne Stephens, a banker who had left the whole of his fortune to his wife. Her enormous inheritance included a manor house in Norfolk, a magnificent home in Paris and a collection of art fine enough to rival those of the Wallace and the Frick. The reason that nobody called upon the wealthy little widow was simply this: the former Yolande Duvernoy had once been a dancer. Occasionally, the Hugh Smith children skated—with the lonely old lady’s permission—upon her garden pond; breaking the strict code of ostracism upheld by Roehampton’s banking matrons in order to express her gratitude, Constance thought she had never encountered a woman with a sadder face than Yolande Lyne Stephens. Her funeral, which Lady Hugh Smith described from hearsay, was singularly modest: nobody of consequence had attended.¹

“Lancey” Hugh Smith photographed with his dog at a sports event a few years before he met Rhys. (Used with permission of the Smith family)

Lancey was obsessed by Mount Clare (of which he would eventually become the proud custodian) and by social position. The awful consequences of Mr. Lyne Stephens’s imprudent alliance were still in his mind when, as a middle-aged and cautious man of the world, he began his own discreet courtship of a chorus girl.

DISCRETION WAS ESSENTIAL to a man with powerful clients; we need not wonder why Lancey himself preserved no trace of an imprudent love affair. Rhys destroyed everything except for a couple of affectionate notes despatched from the Bishopsgate office of Rowe & Pitman, the stockbroking firm which twenty-six-year-old Lancey had joined in 1895. Shrewdly, Rhys’s first biographer Carole Angier connected Mr. Hugh Smith to “Neil James,” the affable former lover to whom the perennially hard-up Julia Martin knows she can always resort for a handout in Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931). While drawing more deeply upon memories of her first love affair for Voyage in the Dark (1934), Rhys would remain carefully circumspect. It was never her intention that Lancey’s grand friends should identify him as Walter Jeffries, the mildly seedy protector of Anna Morgan, an innocent young woman who ends by sleeping with men for money.

Rhys’s realistic description of Jeffries has nevertheless provided her biographers and critics with a convincing story line. Reading Voyage as autobiography, a reader can easily assume that the novelist herself had first encountered a mildly sleazy financier while taking a day off from performing at the King’s Theatre in the summer of 1911, to stroll along the promenade at jolly, raffish Southsea (a seaside extension of the naval town of Portsmouth). It’s at Southsea that an admiring Walter Jeffries treats Anna Morgan to some cotton stockings before making his first attempt to seduce her in a London brothel masquerading as a plush-mantled restaurant. But Rhys flags up the contrast between Anna and Emile Zola’s worldly Nana on the first page. Nana is at ease in such places. Anna—her name is a deliberately unsubtle anagram—is not. And neither was Rhys. Restaurants of the kind described in Voyage in the Dark had almost vanished from view by 1911, the year in which the twenty-one-year-old Jean, still known to all her friends as Ella, embarked on her first serious love affair.

Walter’s encounter with Anna is a biographical red herring. A more convincing start to Rhys’s own liaison emerges from “Before the Deluge,” a short story that Jean only began to write many years after her lover’s death. Rhys’s stories contain far more autobiographical detail than her novels. Here, quite casually, the narrator lets drop the fact that her friend Daisie Irving often swept her off to the smart supper parties at which admirers feted the pretty stand-in star of The Count of Luxembourg. Rhys’s official role was to carry Daisie’s armful of bouquets, but she was also a welcome guest at the dinners held in Daisie’s honour. Snobbish, conventional Lancey would neither have slummed it at Southsea, nor gone shopping for ladies’ stockings. He certainly wouldn’t have objected to escorting the star of a musical that had received the royal seal of approval at its premiere to a supper at Romano’s or the Savoy, chaperoned by Daisie’s pretty attendant.

As with Anna Morgan at Walter’s “Green Street” home, it was probably in the bedroom of Lancey’s Mayfair home at 30 Charles Street (now part of the Saudi Embassy) that Jean Rhys lost her virginity. Penniless, and with no home of her own, she had little option but to become a fond and generous man’s kept mistress. (“He had money. I had none,” she would bluntly explain, many years later, in Smile Please.) Settled by her lover into pleasant lodgings close to Primrose Hill, a lavish dress allowance enabled Lancey’s pretty “kitten”—as he liked to call her—to dress in style for elegant suppers out. “I was for sleeping with—not for talking to,” Julia Martin dryly remarks of her past affair with Neil James; Rhys herself remembered Lancey asking with genuine interest about her early life in the West Indies and (quite uselessly) attempting to act as her financial advisor. Bewitched by his courtesy and kindness (“He was like all the men in all the books I had ever read about London,” she recollected in Smile Please²), Rhys saw nothing humiliating about the fact that she was never allowed to spend a night at Lancey’s bachelor home, or to visit Mount Clare. “I was never envious,” she would write with touching defensiveness in her memoir. “It was right, I felt.”³

Voyage in the Dark offered readers a carefully misleading account of its author’s first encounter with Lancey. Nevertheless, discreet though Rhys would always try to be for the sake of a shy, proud man to whom she remained enduringly attached, fictionalised accounts of actual events do appear within Voyage. It’s here that we read of a romantic weekend for four spent at a hotel in Wiltshire’s glorious Savernake Forest; remembering that escapade with Lancey and two friends (the tall green trees had reminded her of Dominica), the older Rhys would often reminisce to friends about the beauty of Savernake’s glades and valleys.

Rhys’s personal memories of the jaunt may have been pleasant. She kept until the end of her life a long, high-necked and clinging flower-printed dress that is fondly identified in Voyage as Anna Morgan’s chosen costume for her first evening at the hotel. But the novel also makes the hotel at Savernake the place in which Walter Jeffries casually reveals that he and his young cousin Vincent will shortly be off to New York on a business trip. Vincent, rather than Walter, brutally advises a shocked Anna to start making plans for a life alone. “The new show at Daly’s,” he tells her in a slyly hidden authorial reference to the very theatre where Lancey had first seen Rhys dancing in The Count of Luxembourg. “You ought to be able to warble like what’s her name after all those singing lessons.”⁴

Whether or not the actual break-up began during a Wiltshire weekend, there’s no doubt that Rhys based her portrait of Vincent on the only member of Lancey’s family who knew about his affair. Julian Martin Smith, Lancey’s handsome eighteen-year-old cousin and favourite protégé, was perceived by Rhys as her nemesis. Lancey, she would always persuade herself, had truly loved her. As the product of a rigidly conservative colonial world, she may for a time have aspired no higher than marriage to her wealthy and generous protector; a man of whose grand family home she had not been permitted so much as a glimpse. She would always believe that it was Julian—the look in Vincent’s eyes is compared by a dispirited Anna Morgan to “a high, smooth, unclimbable wall. No communication possible”—who had destroyed their love affair.

Julian Martin Smith, Lancey’s cousin and protégé. Rhys put the young stockbroker in Voyage in the Dark as Vincent. (Used with permission of the Smith family)

While it’s unlikely that Lancelot Hugh Smith ever considered marrying Rhys—he remained a bachelor until his death—it’s clear that he did recruit Julian Martin Smith as his broker and spokesman during the delicate process of disentanglement. Writing Smile Please decades after both Lancey and his young cousin were dead, Rhys described the condescending visits that Julian (whom she identified in print, but only by his first name) had made as Lancey’s proxy. The sense of barely suppressed rage is almost palpable in Rhys’s description of Julian’s demanding the return of her lover’s letters and smoothly producing in exchange the cash for an abortion (described in her memoir as “an illegal operation”) to which she had already declared her opposition.

The rules of severance had always been explicit. When a Marylebone landlady ordered Miss Ella Gray to leave the elegant suite of rooms that Lancey had recently taken on her behalf—abortions were bad for business—Rhys obediently posted her forwarding address, not to the baby’s father, but to Julian Martin Smith (who thoughtfully arranged a quiet seaside holiday at Ramsgate as a reward for her compliance). When a letter arrived to explain that she could rely upon a monthly stipend, a cheque payable via a solicitor’s office, Lancey presented it as a joint decision, taken by Julian and himself. “‘We thought that perhaps this was the best way . . . (I thought: ‘we—yes, I thought so.’)”⁵ Explaining to readers of her memoir why she had accepted the pay-off, the elderly Rhys justified the continued allowance as a symbolic bond: “The man still cared what became of me and the bond was still there.”⁶ Tellingly, when she came to write After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Jean Rhys named the least empathetic of her female protagonists “Julia Martin.” Reading his former girlfriend’s novel, as we can confidently assume that he did, Lancey must have winced at the memories revived by her bold hijacking of his adored young cousin’s name.^*

“I KNOW HOW ghastly it is to be stranded when you’re young,” Rhys would write to a woman friend in 1950.⁷ In Smile Please, Rhys described herself as withdrawing from the world during the autumn weeks that followed her abortion and seaside recuperation. She went for long, solitary walks, neglected her appearance and slept for fifteen hours at a time. Solitude and sleep; sleep and solitude. “I am talking,” Rhys wrote in the section of her memoir called “Christmas Day,” “about sadness.” Anna, in Voyage, falls swiftly into prostitution after Walter Jeffries rejects her final, desperate overture. All Rhys herself could remember having done during those bleak months was to earn some money as a movie extra: girls deemed to be pretty were always welcome for crowd scenes in the early years of film-making.

Lancey, who still took his desolate girlfriend out to an occasional supper, at which he talked and she cried, sent along a miniature star-crowned tree for his Christmas gift at the end of the affair, laden with prettily wrapped trinkets and accompanied by an unsigned card. The reminder of happier times brought no comfort; after donating it to the Children’s Hospital on Great Ormond Street, Rhys sat alone in her room, pondering whether life was still worth living. Later, Jean Rhys would claim that she only once made a serious attempt to kill herself, by slitting her wrists in a warm bath. On this earlier occasion, according to Smile Please, one of the unhappy young woman’s film-extra girlfriends, an artist’s model, turned up in time to stop her jumping out of a window and to suggest—over a shared bottle of gin—the possibility of making a new start. Why stay in and mope when she could be out having fun in rackety, sociable Chelsea?

Not every detail of Jean Rhys’s early life made its way into either her memoir or her fiction. Voyage in the Dark invites us to see her as having followed Anna Morgan’s tragic course, sliding down the ladder of despair—from being Walter Jeffries’ mistress, to a job as a hopelessly inept manicurist, before Anna finally sleepwalks into prostitution. Smile Please, in contrast, moves straight from the sad little episode on Christmas Day 1911 to Rhys’s discovery of herself as a writer, while leading a solitary life in Chelsea. Neither version offers an accurate portrait.

It seems to have been around the beginning of 1912 that an enterprising Rhys tried her hand at manufacturing cold cream in her lodgings, before she took a job selling the pretty hats made by a deft-fingered girlfriend (identified only as Dawn). According to the story told by Rhys to her daughter almost forty years later, Dawn dispensed with her assistance after finding that her partner, instead of pushing the sale of their most expensive hats, was sweetly encouraging clients to buy only what they could easily afford.⁸

More significant, and more than a little puzzling, is the absence from any of Rhys’s accounts of the fascinatingly odd man who befriended her during the year 1912. His memorable name was Arthur Fox Strangways.

Born in 1859, “Foxie,” as a sensitive and intensely musical man was always known to his friends, was old enough to have been Rhys’s father, and it was as a paternal figure that Rhys adored him. A respected public-school teacher at Wellington during the first half of his life, Fox Strangways retired early, after suffering a breakdown. Following a year in India, during which he became close to the Bengal-born poet Rabindranath Tagore, he returned to London late in 1911 and settled into a bachelor flat on King’s Bench Walk in the Temple, just north of Blackfriars Bridge. When Rhys met him in 1912, Strangways had become a respected music critic, writing both for the Musical Times and the Observer, while acting as Tagore’s representative in London.

Rhys’s first biographer Carole Angier has speculated that the nymph-like “Ella” became Fox Strangways’ mistress.⁹ More plausibly, at a time when Rhys was still bruised and miserable about the end of her affair with Lancey, this touchingly old-fashioned Englishman offered the reassurance of a cultured and unthreatening friendship.

Questioned a little patronisingly in later years about her fondness for popular songs, Rhys murmured that she was “not quite indifferent to better things.”¹⁰ Stravinsky and Nijinsky were electrifying London audiences during the prewar years; Rhys’s enduringly romantic taste suggests that Strangways took his young friend to hear the less revolutionary music that was usually on offer at the drab but acoustically superb Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, first home of the Proms. As a man who counted George Moore among his close friends, “Foxie” may also have introduced an avid bookworm to one singularly bleak novel for which Rhys formed an abiding passion. Published in 1894, Moore’s Esther Waters was years ahead of its time, with its story of a hard-working woman who bravely decides to keep her baby after an accidental pregnancy. Was Rhys’s initial admiration for Esther connected to her own regretted abortion, or was it Esther’s quiet courage which she always found so sustaining? In her old age, Rhys told friends that she could no longer recall how many times she had reread Moore’s book.

DIANA ATHILL, THE editor whose difficult task was to chivvy along the memoir that Jean Rhys produced with painful slowness in her final years, thought the chapter of Smile Please set on the fringes of Chelsea and titled “World’s End and a Beginning” was a triumph. So it is, if we are seeking only to know when Rhys felt herself ready to become a writer.

It was on the very first day that she moved into lodgings in Fulham, according to Smile Please, that Jean Rhys (still Ella to her London friends) set off to explore the neighbourhood and find a plant to brighten the work table in her room. Walking into a stationer’s shop on the nearby King’s Road, she impulsively purchased some thick exercise books, a handful of brightly coloured pens and nibs (“the sort I liked”) and took them home. Following her habitual modest supper of bread, cheese and a glass of milk, Rhys felt a curious tingling in her fingers. “I remembered everything that happened to me in the last year and a half. I remembered what he’d said, what I’d felt. I wrote on late into the night . . .” After filling almost four exercise books, she set down a single, striking sentence that would later surface in the voice of Anna Morgan: “Oh God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living and living and living.”¹¹ Rhys herself, at the opening of 1913, was twenty-two.

There is no reason to doubt that this vividly described experience was largely true, as was the unanticipated sense of emotional release. (Rhys recalled that the irate lodger downstairs threatened to hand in his notice because of the sobs and laughs and pacing feet as she herself scribbled on late into the night, unconscious of the passing days.) But this discovery of a vocation was not all that occurred during Ella’s stay in Chelsea. A glimpse of her lively social existence there emerges from the unpublished memoir written by the artist Adrian Allinson (and lodged at the McFarlin Library, together with Rhys’s archive). In “A Painter’s Pilgrimage,” Allinson describes how he met “Ella, a fair young Englishwoman born in the West Indies” at a Chelsea studio party, and how affected he immediately felt by her “tender loveliness.”

Chelsea, just before the outbreak of war, offered a headily adventurous experience to a young, single woman. The annual Chelsea Arts Ball, raising funds for artists’ charities, was a famously riotous affair. Women were welcome at the Arts Club on Old Church Street, while a mass of new cinemas had recently opened, including two “Electric Theatres” and a “Palace of Varieties” on the King’s Road. One of Allinson’s fellow artists shot his young mistress in the Chelsea room they shared.

Life in Chelsea was unpredictable. Fresh from Adelaide and comfortably supported by a family allowance, Stella Bowen was startled to find herself living in a Chelsea flat where a late partygoer might casually scramble through her bedroom window at 3 a.m., having missed a late train to the suburbs. Stella soon settled in, teaching a nimble-footed Ezra Pound new dance steps and attending his weekly dinner club in Soho, while taking occasional lessons from Walter Sickert at the Westminster School of Art, chief rival to the Slade.¹² Nina Hamnett, renting her first Chelsea studio in 1911 when she was just twenty-one, would fondly recall a young Mark Gertler bringing to tea a golden-thatched Dora Carrington, wearing one red shoe and one blue; it felt, Hamnett reminisced, “as if I had invited a god and goddess . . . I preserved Gertler’s tea-cup intact and unwashed on the mantlepiece.”¹³ A little later, Nina fell in love with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska—and wept after discovering that the fierce young woman who shared the French sculptor’s penurious life in a Fulham Road studio was not his sister, but his mistress.

Sickert; Yeats; Epstein; Pound; Wyndham Lewis and even the theatrically creepy Aleister Crowley; these are the names that ripple through the pages of Hamnett and Bowen’s recollections of prewar life in Chelsea and Fitzrovia (as the most consciously artistic quarter of Bloomsbury became known). This was the remarkable world into which Jean Rhys ventured in 1913. Adrian Allinson’s recollection of meeting her at a studio party in Chelsea suggests that a shy and uncommonly beautiful young woman soon ceased to be an outsider.

Generous though Hugh Smith’s monthly allowance proved to be, extra funds could always be raised by modelling for artists. Unfazed by posing nude for a “classical” work if no strings were attached, Rhys gladly agreed to model for the elderly and eminently respectable Sir Edward Poynter. Later, Rhys drew upon personal memories of her modelling work for the immensely successful and sexually unscrupulous Sir William Orpen when she wrote (in an early, unpublished work called “Suzy Tells” and then, “Triple Sec”) about a flirtatious society artist whom she named “Tommie.” After Tommie ardently embraces his alluring new model in a taxi, the narrator asks for money. Relieved by the modesty of the requested sum, Tommie obliges—and promptly resumes the attack. Ordered to stop, he withdraws. “I know now that I have a certain power,” the narrator remarks, “and yet, how mean, how mean.”

Was Rhys conveying outrage at an attempted rape in this early and unpublished work of fiction? With Jean Rhys—who would one day describe Mr. Howard as having recognised and responded to the secret fantasies of an adolescent girl’s wicked self, in the Botanical Gardens of Roseau—it’s impossible ever to be certain precisely where the blame is being laid.

*Lancey’s interest in the development of his former girlfriend’s career as a writer appears in two notes that Rhys preserved from 1927.