7
“L’affaire Ford”* (1924–26)
“‘The snow was all over Ireland, falling on the living and the dead.’ Who used to read James Joyce to me? I forget.”
—Jean Rhys, misquoting in her old age a line from the famous closing paragraph of Joyce’s story “The Dead,” from Dubliners1
RHYS HAD MOST likely first met Ford’s partner, Stella Bowen, in London, shortly after her arrival from Adelaide, Australia. Back before the war, Bowen and Rhys briefly belonged to the same Chelsea-based group of bohemians. Stella was studying art; Rhys was beginning to write “Triple Sec,” while picking up cash by posing as an artist’s model. In 1918, the year after the twenty-eight-year-old Rhys met Jean Lenglet in London, Stella, aged twenty-four, fell for Major Ford. A highly educated officer, half German on his father’s side, Ford had recently returned to England from a war that left him temporarily shellshocked and suffering from memory lapses.
Nobody has ever described Ford as handsome, but nobody who knew him has questioned his ability to charm women, or his gift both as a writer and editor, one who had collaborated with Joseph Conrad and who published his own widely admired novel, The Good Soldier, in 1916. Ford’s generous nature had never been constrained by a perpetual lack of funds; neither had a concern for facts impeded his genius for telling stories. At work, he pumped out what were often magnificent novels at the rate of some manic teleprinting machine. Winding down at night, he knocked back red wine with as much gusto as he (very badly) danced and (very enchantingly) talked. Like his own most autobiographical creation, Christopher Tietjens in the sequence of novels called Parade’s End, Ford would always seem larger in spirit than the world he was obliged to inhabit.
“Silenus in tweeds”—according to the great war artist Paul Nash, who knew him pretty well—Ford was too gentle in manner ever to appear predatory.2 Stella, a darkly attractive and culture-hungry young woman with a talent for organising other people’s lives, found this brilliant and deceptively helpless man irresistible. An age gap of twenty years was vaulted as easily as the fact that her lover was still entangled with the writer Violet Hunt (for whom Ford had previously abandoned his wife and two children). Two years later, Stella gave birth to Julie (Ford’s adored “petite princesse”), with whom the couple migrated in 1922 to the south of France—and who was later left to the care of a dependable nurse in their country cottage close to the capital. Often though the “Fords,” as the unmarried couple were always known in France, would return to the then unspoiled Riviera coast, Paris exerted a powerful attraction over an astonishingly well-read francophile who thrived on discovering talented new writers.
Stella Bowen lived in Chelsea at the same time as Rhys and visited the Crabtree Club with considerably less pleasure.
Later, she formed a relationship with Ford Madox Ford and moved to France.
By the autumn of 1924, when Jean Rhys entered his life, Ford stood at the heart of the expatriate and (thanks to spectacular exchange rates) uncharacteristically affluent literary world that thronged the brasseries of Montparnasse. Ford himself, despite regular injections of funds from Stella’s Australian investment trust, was always strapped for cash, in part because of his generous impulse to subsidise needy poets like the reticent Ralph Cheever Dunning, a starving opium addict whose sour warning against the acceptance of charity was taken by Jean Rhys as the prefatory heading for her own first novel, Quartet. By September 1924, the imminent closure of Ford’s cherished year-old creation, the transatlantic review, was already on the cards.
After their fashion, Stella and Ford did their best to economise. In the country, they rented the stone-walled labourer’s cottage at Guermantes where little Julie was lodged; in the city, they occupied a minute apartment at 16 avenue Denfert-Rochereau. Meanwhile, Ford encouraged his magazine’s illustrious contributors to buy their own drinks at the impromptu weekly evenings he hosted at the Bal du Printemps, a tiny cafe-restaurant squirrelled away in the winding streets behind the Panthéon. More student-style partying took place in the dungeon-like premises that the transatlantic review’s headquarters shared with Bill Bird’s illustrious Three Mountains Press on Ile Saint Louis’s quai d’Anjou. The setting was as dingy as the menu, but the dancing was wild and the guests included everybody from Ernest Hemingway to a majestic Gertrude Stein. Hemingway, Ford’s first and prodigiously gifted literary beneficiary in Paris—he was even allowed to edit an issue of the magazine in which Ford published the young American’s work—paved the way for Jean Rhys as she joined this exhilarating coterie, shortly after her first encounter with Ford in September 1924.
Recalling the events of the next two years in her memoir, Drawn from Life (1941), Stella Bowen would describe an unnamed but entirely identifiable Rhys as having first appeared on their doorstep toting a battered suitcase that contained “an unpublishably sordid novel.” Bowen’s recollection doesn’t square with the account in Smile Please of Pearl Adam having already edited and submitted “Suzy Tells” to Ford; what Rhys had produced from her shabby holdall at that first meeting with Ford was the manuscript of a recent—and far more accomplished—short story. Reading “Vienne,” Ford thought it so remarkable that he instantly offered to publish the opening six pages (unpaid, of course) in the final, December issue of transatlantic review. He might have published more, but Rhys, while willing to undergo another change of name—“Ella Lenglet” did not meet with her new patron’s approval—insisted on withholding the part of the story dealing with the couple’s ignominious flight from Budapest. The rapid choice of the name “Jean” for herself—no other explanation sounds convincing—may have struck Ella as a way, following the embarrassing rejection by the Mail and Pearl Adam of her cultured husband’s own, less remarkable stories, to grant Monsieur Jean Lenglet a role in her new literary life.
For Rhys, the news could not have been better. The extract from “Vienne” was to appear in Ford’s distinguished magazine alongside contributions from Hemingway, Stein, Tristan Tzara, Robert McAlmon and Ford himself (publishing a tender homage to his old friend Joseph Conrad, who had died in August). No aspiring young writer could have hoped for a more auspicious debut.
Rhys’s good fortune seemed infectious. In that same month, September 1924, Lenglet obtained a well-paid job with Exprinter, a Paris tourist bureau. Elated, the Lenglets took their two-year-old daughter out of her latest foster home and away to Tours for a celebratory holiday. Many years later, Rhys would tenderly remind a middle-aged Maryvonne of the visit to Tours with “my sweety pie baby.” An informal snap from the trip, presumably taken by a fond Lenglet, shows Rhys laughing up at the photographer as she nuzzles the elegant canine snout of a new friend’s German shepherd. Aged thirty-four, Rhys still looked like a carefree twenty-year-old, one whose serene features belied the writer’s evident familiarity with a world of fathomless darkness. It’s easy to see why both Ford and Stella were intrigued and—from the very start—a little smitten.
Throughout that golden autumn of 1924, a triangle was established from which Jean Lenglet’s demanding new job excluded him. Later, Jean Rhys would say little about this period. It is possible that the relationship between herself and Ford—and possibly Stella—was sexual from the start. Publicly, nothing was said by anybody. It was Stella herself who later coined the phrase “Ford’s girl” to suggest how scornfully the gifted intruder was regarded by their friends. Hemingway, who attended the same parties, and worked on editing the transatlantic review alongside one of Rhys’s new chums, the Midwestern poet, Ivan Beede, never mentioned Rhys once. James Joyce, indebted to Ford for his unfaltering support in publishing the Irish novelist’s most experimental work, recalled only having been asked to zip up Miss Rhys’s dress while sharing a lift. A lift? An unzipped dress? Clearly, Joyce was flagging up an assignation at a hotel, but Ford is not named, only the vulnerable young outsider from whom a slightly malicious Joyce had nothing to fear.3
Ignored in the memoirs of the novelists and poets and painters who flocked to Paris during the 1920s, Rhys herself would maintain a maddening discretion. She didn’t want to betray Ford and Stella, her friends and patrons. She hated the idea of dropping famous names. Years later, when asked about Joyce, Rhys acknowledged having met him, but not that Ford had taught her to read his early stories as carefully as she would do Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Asked for anecdotes about Ernest Hemingway, the older Rhys recalled an unassuming young man who came to life only when he was dancing. Subjected to more persistent interrogation, she grew vaguer still. Had Ford really introduced her to Gertrude Stein? She might have visited. Miss Stein’s companion, Alice Toklas (Rhys added with an almost wilful satisfaction at her own elusiveness), had certainly made herself friendly.4
The newly named writer “Jean Rhys” at the time of her affair with Ford. Out of sight at her side here is Germaine Richelot, among the most loyal of Rhys’s friends in Paris. (McFarlin)
Always evasive in public about what was clearly a passionate love affair (“I love him. Terribly,” Marya Zelli says about Hugo Heidler in Rhys’s unashamedly autobiographical first novel, Quartet), Rhys never failed to honour Ford as her literary mentor. Rattling off a florid introduction in 1927 to his brilliant protégée’s first publication, a collection of short stories, Ford himself was equally careful to distance himself, pointing out that Miss Rhys had always known better than to take his advice. Rhys, while she didn’t disagree, credited Ford with broadening her knowledge of the great French and Russian authors from whom she learned so much.
The absence of almost any documentation before 1931 in the form of letters makes it nearly impossible to chart Rhys’s reading habits in Paris during the Twenties. Then, as now, books were always easily available from the bouquinistes beside the Seine, but it’s likely that Ford, a widely read man who treated Rhys as his pupil, gave her access to his own extensive library. Her husband, the ardent admirer of one of France’s most revered modern novelists, had already introduced Ella to the novels of Anatole France, whose vast public funeral the couple attended in 1924. French poetry had come into her life through the nuns at the Virgo Fidelis convent in Roseau. Adoring Mallarmé and Rimbaud, Rhys’s strongest affinity was still with Baudelaire, in whose sensual but also condescending celebrations of his beautiful Haitian-born mistress, Jeanne Duval, she perhaps sensed the beginning of her long journey to reclaim a place in history for Mr. Rochester’s mistreated Creole wife, the madwoman in the Thornfield attic of Jane Eyre. Perhaps: we can only conjecture.
Ford made Rhys aware of some of the writers who would become her touchstones as she strove to create a style—and a world—of her own. Her admiration of Guy de Maupassant, frequently mentioned in her later letters as a master storyteller, is apparent in “La Grosse Fifi.” This story of an older woman’s brutal murder by her young gigolo lover stands alongside “Vienne” as a minor masterpiece in Rhys’s early work. Maupassant’s influence was still in evidence in the 1950s, when she planned to call a later story “Fort comme la Mort” in homage to Maupassant’s work of the same name. The novella, about an older man’s passion for a much younger woman, had been Ford’s favourite of all Maupassant’s writings. But Ford also introduced Rhys to the novels of his cherished colleague, Joseph Conrad, and to the Russian writers, often in translations made by his friend Constance Garnett. One of the bleakest moments in Rhys’s later life would come when a shortage of money and space obliged her to sell her treasured Russian novels. Putting them up for sale in the 1950s, she got only a few pounds in return.
WHILE RHYS WAS being introduced to a world of writers, poets and painters in the halcyon autumn of 1924, her husband made a reckless attempt to improve their family circumstances by speculating with money that had been entrusted to him by the tourist agency, earmarked for a specific commercial transaction. Arrested for an abus de confiance (premeditated felony) and taken on 28 December to the grim Parisian holding prison of La Santé, pending his trial, a distraught Lenglet begged Germaine Richelot to help him to get legal assistance. Curiously, he made no mention of Rhys, although Germaine’s swift response expressed a pointed concern for “your poor little wife.” It’s possible that Lenglet already felt confident that Rhys would be protected by her powerful new friends.
Quartet, the novel published by Rhys in 1928, relates how a dismayed Marya Zelli is abruptly summoned into the back room of the cheap hotel in Montmartre where she and her husband have been staying. Informed by the hotel’s owners that the police have taken Zelli to an undisclosed address, Marya remains in Paris. Rhys herself did not. During the late afternoon of 28 December (the very day of Lenglet’s arrest), Ford chaperoned his protégée to the Gare de Lyon; there, the two of them were observed having a heated argument in the station brasserie. It seems likely that Rhys was disputing Ford’s hasty decision to get her out of Paris before news of the scandal broke. Later that same evening, a wheezing Ford clambered onto the night train to the French Riviera to beg a favour of the artist Paul Nash and his remarkable wife, Margaret Odeh, a Jerusalem-born radical feminist with—it was said—clairvoyant powers. Ford may not have known that the Nashes had witnessed his quarrel with Rhys; now, he wanted to know if they, too, were travelling down to Cros de Cagnes? If so, could they take care of the suitcase keys which his young friend had inadvertently left behind her in the brasserie as she rushed to secure a seat—somewhere; he couldn’t find her—on the Riviera-bound train? The Nashes knew Ford well enough to conclude that the lost passenger was a cast-off mistress. They gave him their word.
Settled into the main hotel at Cros de Cagnes, the Nashes waited for Ford’s mystery friend to appear. When Rhys arrived, pale with dismay after spending the night at what she had assumed to be a pension (it proved to be a brothel) the Nashes invited her to supper and arranged for a room: “Ah, les anglaises,” tittered the hotel manager, swiftly assuming that Nash was sleeping with both women. No sooner was Rhys settled in than she asked Margaret to cover the cost of her return ticket to Paris. And that was that: the young woman “disappeared from our lives in the same ghost-like way in which she had appeared,” Margaret Odeh Nash wrote in her unpublished memoir.5
Confirmation of the encounter at Cros de Cagnes—and evidence of Rhys’s discomfort—would later surface in an unflattering portrait of the Nashes as the stiffly correct Olsens in “La Grosse Fifi,” a story which Rhys wrote in the mid-Twenties and set on the French Riviera. “How rum some English people are!” the central character, Roseau, exclaims. “They ask to be shocked and long to be shocked, but if you really shock them . . . how shocked they are!”6 The Nashes had not been shocked, but they were certainly intrigued. Setting out the subjects for a future chapter of his marvelous and sadly unfinished memoir, Outline, Paul Nash made an opaque reference to a Riviera encounter with the “blonde legacy from Ford.”
Seeing her convicted husband was a prime reason for Rhys’s return to Paris and she visited Lenglet as loyally as Marya Zelli would do in Quartet. At that stage, however, there was nothing Rhys could do for Lenglet (and almost as little to help herself). Like Marya, she sold her pretty Viennese dresses; possibly, Rhys begged assistance from her Aunt Clarice in Wales and received a modest sum, together with advice to seek help from some British clergymen settled in Paris. (“You could easily find out the address of one of them, or I could find out and send it to you,” counsels Marya’s kindly aunt, Maria Hughes, in Quartet.) Marya is taken to live with the Heidlers in their village home at Brunoy; Ford swept Rhys off to the cold little cottage at Guermantes where—as he disclosed to his new agent, William Bradley—the poor young woman became too ill even to work on her writing. Stella was also reported to be sick; a resigned Ford found himself acting as cook, cleaner and nurse, all amidst struggling to complete the second part of his great tetralogy, Parade’s End.7
On 10 February 1925, Rhys learned that her husband had been found guilty of the planned felony charge. Jean Lenglet was condemned to spend two years in the notoriously brutal prison of Fresnes, and then to depart from France. Germaine Richelot advised Rhys to seek a divorce; instead, a destitute Rhys turned for help to her new patrons. According to Stella Bowen’s recollection, their unfortunate friend possessed only a few francs along with her precious writings; there was no question but that they would take her in. The flat on avenue Denfert-Rochereau contained a small spare room; there, Rhys could sleep and write while, for the foreseeable future, Ford and Stella acted as her providers and joint guardians. All they asked in return was that she should be compliant and discreet. As Rhys would later remark of this humiliating episode in her life, she really had no other option.
AS WITH MARYA ZELLI, Rhys’s life now developed its own melancholy pattern. Once a week, she went to Versailles to visit little Maryvonne at the most recent orphanage to have been located by Germaine Richelot. Once a fortnight, she took a tram out to Fresnes. Seated opposite Lenglet in one of the square booths that reminded her of roofless telephone boxes, Rhys noticed how thin and nervous her husband had become. They still cared about each other; it was a fact which nobody else seemed to understand.
But Rhys had also fallen in love with Ford, and he with her, as he helped her to revise the short, almost sketch-like stories that she was writing about Paris and Dominica. Sometimes—which gave her pleasure—Ford would snatch up one of her pencilled scrawls and read it aloud, shaking his head when he stumbled over a banality (“Cliché! Cliché!”) and putting on a solemn voice for passages that he admired. The praise felt good, and so did the reassurance of being loved. Stella worked on a portrait of their guest; Ford praised her mind and took her to bed with comforting enthusiasm. If Stella knew—as, despite her later, published protestations of ignorance, she probably did—she turned a blind eye to an affair which she had no power to prevent. Sometimes, when Rhys drank too much and felt that the couple were playing a cruel game of their own with her emotions, she lost control and screamed or even spat. This aspect of their emotional guest alarmed her hosts. Neither Ford nor Stella relished the dramas upon which Rhys seemed to thrive. Their highly strung protégée could write as much as she pleased about violence and despair without bringing her anger into what was, despite their bohemian friendships, an outwardly conventional household. They didn’t want a fuss. Tensions grew.
Lenglet’s prison sentence was shortened, due to good behaviour and the need for space in the large but always overcrowded prison of Fresnes. Released after four months, a shivering ghost of his former charming self, he was granted a few days of freedom before his enforced departure from France. In his largely autobiographical novel Sous les verrous (Under Lock and Key) published in 1933, Lenglet described Stania and Hubner (Rhys and Ford) coming to the station to wave him off to Belgium: Hubner, eager to see him gone after sitting through one disastrous dinner out for the four of them, even paid for his rival’s rail ticket. Legally, Lenglet was exiled for life. The risks he took to return to his wife speak for the strength of his love for Jean.
And what, meanwhile, was to be done with “Ford’s girl” and her inconvenient rages? Ford was still like a man under a spell, but Stella, on whose financial support and organisational skills he relied, was sick of being expected to play the calm, capable wife, as opposed to Rhys the victim—“the poor, brave and desperate beggar who was doomed to be let down by the bourgeoisie.”8 Their experimental ménage à trois had failed, and—as even Rhys had become aware—“it was high time I got away from Montparnasse.”9
The solution arrived in the form of a potentially undemanding job in the south of France. Winifred Shaughnessy Hudnut, the languidly elegant wife of America’s first cosmetics magnate, was the mother-in-law to Rudolph Valentino and—thanks to Hudnut’s well-marketed products—the proud owner of the palatial Château Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. She was also an ardent spiritualist. In the summer of 1925, Mrs. Hudnut despatched a representative to Paris to seek out some writer gifted enough to assist her in writing a book about the importance of dressing in the spirit—so to speak—of one’s previous incarnation.
The energy with which both Stella and Ford represented Jean Rhys as the perfect candidate for Winifred Hudnut’s bizarre project reveals how eager they were to be rid of Rhys. Stella provided a glowing character reference for their friend; Ford went further and actually forged a couple of stories intended to showcase Rhys’s vast knowledge of the eighteenth century (Mrs. Hudnut’s favourite period) and of Russian folklore. (Ford’s faux-Serbian folk tale has not survived, but doubtless contained much about reincarnation.) Their efforts were rewarded: on a hot afternoon in July 1925, for the second time in five months, Ford escorted his protégée to a train that was bound for the Riviera.
IT’S A SHAME that Ford kept none of the lively letters in which Rhys regaled him with tales of chateau life at Juan-les-Pins, but her two fictional accounts offer rich compensation. “At the Villa d’Or,” a story published in Rhys’s first collection, lightly disguises the lecherous and sprightly Mr. Hudnut as Robert B. Valentine, a vegetarian plutocrat who hatches plans to seduce his guest, a curvaceous young singer named only as “Sara of Montparnasse.” The ethereal Mrs. Valentine, fiddling with her long strings of beads while she lolls on a cushioned sofa among her pekineses, ponders the merits of rice over ham (“I’m dead sick of rice, Bobbie”); Charles, her obsequious manservant, is fashionably English (“like the armchairs”). Sara, the Rhysian visitor, revels serenely in the chateau’s luxury: “Very nice too,” is her calm response to an opulent bathroom glittering with crystal bottles of scents and oils.
A Riviera palace had no place in the despairing life Rhys constructed for Marya Zelli in Quartet. A decade later, however, Rhys would return to her sojourn with the Hudnuts in Good Morning, Midnight (1939). There, in one of her fourth novel’s most oddly tender scenes, Sasha Jensen and her suitor, René (a quick-witted gigolo whose history and appearance bear a striking resemblance to those of Jean Lenglet), share a moment of emotional connection in the discovery that they have been guests at the very same chateau: “Here are the palm trees. Here are the entrance steps. That terrible English butler they had—do you remember?” Briefly, Sasha and her dubious companion become cheerful allies in their memories of an absurd but privileged life.
Rhys’s three months at Château Juan-les-Pins were far from wretched. Winifred Hudnut took her to Monte Carlo to hear the ageing Russian bass, Chaliapin, growling his way through a concert, while her husband preferred to take an attractive young woman to watch her lecherous host gambling at the casino. During the day, when not required to assist with Winifred’s writing project, Rhys retired to her room to work over the collection of stories for which Ford had promised to find publishers in England and America. Sometimes, she went wandering. It was during an impulsive excursion to the deserted nearby beach at La Napoule that Rhys experienced a rare moment of bliss; a feeling of being at one with the world and filled with joy, “not only for me, but for everyone.” Such moments never fooled Rhys for long; later, reshaping her exquisite epiphany as a story in draft form, she cynically named it: “The Forlorn Hope.”10
Rhys’s abrupt return to Paris was engineered by Ford. Winifred Hudnut had been displeased to learn from a sharp-eyed chauffeur that her husband had been coaxing kisses from their guest during their drives to Monte Carlo; what vexed her more was a complaint from Ford that a gifted writer was being asked to work unpaid on Winifred’s second literary venture. Rhys had grumbled to her mentor about the lack of payment; she had not expected Ford to seize an excuse to summon her back to himself. Escorted to Paris by her irate employer, Rhys was greeted at the station by a beaming Ford. As for her own feelings: conducted by Ford to a grim hotel near Gare Montparnasse: “I thought of the Chateau Juan les Pins and very nearly burst into tears.”11
“GOD SAVE ME I perish SOS SOS I am so alone.”12 That heartfelt wail most convincingly belongs to a period that would be vividly evoked in Quartet when Marya moves from the Heidlers’ home into the Hotel du Bosphore, a sour reference by the well-read Rhys to the archly self-forgiving title of Ford’s “Mr Bosphorus and the Muses.”
At the chateau, Rhys had grown accustomed to luxury; in Paris, she became a poor dependent, isolated from the literary world to which Ford had introduced her, confined to a lonely room in which she wrote and drank and drowned herself in narcotics-induced sleep. Ford moved her to a nearby hotel on rue Vavin. He visited her once a week; he paid the bills. Rhys had become his part-time mistress—his private toy. It was better than nothing for a woman who remained, as Quartet would make painfully apparent, in love with this improbable Casanova. Her role now was that of the grateful dependent. Her lover called the shots. Plausible public encounters were conducted for Stella’s benefit, to keep up the pretence of a conventional friendship between the three of them. Later, Rhys would remember the humiliation of being ordered by a lofty Stella to sit on the strapontin, the inferior seat, her back to the carriage driver, whenever the three of them shared a cab. Showing a quiet face to the world, she burned with rage and wounded pride.
Alone, Rhys visited her daughter. Occasionally, she ventured out with Ivan Beede, the friendly young novelist and poet from the American Midwest who had worked as Ford’s assistant on the transatlantic review. Beede disapproved of what he saw as Ford’s manipulative hold over Rhys. If Quartet can be believed (Beede appears there lightly disguised as “Cairn”), he was even prepared to borrow funds and give them to Rhys, simply to get her out of Ford’s clutches. Marya Zelli turns Cairn’s offer down. Jean Rhys did not stop seeing Ford.
At the centre of Rhys’s life—throughout the bleak months that followed her return to Paris—stood her writing, a resource that is entirely absent from the lives of the women she describes in her novels. Glimpses of the world through which she drifted—a flâneur’s habit that Rhys shared with her female protagonists and borrowed from Baudelaire—appear in the stories that now began to take their final form from pages of urgently scrawled notes. Sometimes, as in “Mixing Cocktails”—one of two sketches about her Caribbean childhood—she looked back, remembering the melancholy mountains of Dominica, the hammock where she lay dreaming at Bona Vista, the chirping voice of her visiting aunt, Clarice (“That sea . . . Could anything be more lovely?”). Sometimes, evoking Parisian life among the down but not quite out, Rhys trained a cold stare on her present self, mocking Miss Dorothy Dufreyne of “In the Rue de L’Arrivée” as the fallen “Lady” (Rhys’s own awkward term) who drinks a brandy and soda at every second cafe she passes, while erroneously congratulating herself on not yet—despite the waiters’ “curious stares”—appearing to be entirely drunk. Sometimes, as in “The Sidi,” Rhys would crib and recreate a story from one of Lenglet’s eloquent accounts of his terrible four months at Fresnes. She knew he wouldn’t mind. Their shared passion for writing (and above all, for her writing) would always remain a bond. Lenglet was yet to understand how devastated his wife had been to see her attractive husband transformed into the trembling ghost of himself that he became at Fresnes, or how intense and complex were her feelings for Ford.
STELLA AND FORD were away at Avignon in July 1926, when Jean Lenglet stole back across the French border to secretly rejoin his wife in Paris, while hiding away in the quiet suburb of Clamart. The Lenglets had evidently remained in touch during his absence from France,13 and it’s clear from the clandestine reunion that Rhys still cared about a husband who was willing to take such risks to be with her.
On 4 August, Lenglet was hunted down and once again expelled from France (following a further miserable week-long stay at the fortress-like prison of La Santé). In mid-September, spurred by the fear of losing his wife, Lenglet returned once more. Ford now tried yet again to ship an unhappy Jean Rhys off to the Riviera, out of the reach of a man he believed was endangering his protégée’s literary future. She refused to go. According to the fictional accounts subsequently provided by both Lenglet and Rhys herself, this was the moment when Ford announced that he had personally endured enough. As a writer, he would always support her; as a lover, he could take no more drama. Rhys must have been distraught; ordered by a hysterical Lenglet to choose between her lover and her husband, she refused to renounce Ford.
Quartet, at this moment of climax, permits an enraged Stephan Zelli to murder his wife with a cool “Voila pour toi” and then flee, accompanied by another, intriguingly available woman. In reality, a distraught Lenglet armed himself with a revolver and raced off with the crazed intention of killing his portly rival. The police had already learned enough to intercept the would-be assassin. Briefly thrown back into La Santé on 16 September, Lenglet was released only when he promised to leave France for ever.14
How had the gendarmes known where to find Lenglet, or that he planned to murder Ford? The most likely source of information was Stella Bowen, whose jealous anger still rang out when she described Rhys, in a memoir written fifteen years after these events, as a “doomed soul, violent and demoralised . . . She nearly sank our ship!”15
If Stella did go to the police, Ford did not discourage her. Emotionally, he was done with both women: as Ford sailed away to undertake a lucrative American lecture tour, Stella was left to comfort herself with a flowery public assurance of his enduring devotion. (It took the form of a dedicatory letter prefacing Ford’s own new French translation of his finest novel, The Good Soldier). Professionally, as Rhys was aware, her faithless lover was still determined to promote her career. The difficulty that Ford now faced was how to offer continued literary support while closing the door on what had proved to be an exhausting and sometimes alarming love affair. It wouldn’t be easy.
*The phrase used by Rhys for a long retrospective account of her relationship with Ford, to which she referred when dictating the Paris section of her memoir to the novelist David Plante (McFarlin, 007-14.5.f5).