9

Two Tunes: Past and Present (1929–36)

“When you were a child, you put your hand on the trunk of a tree and you were comforted . . . you knew that it was friendly to you, or at least, not hostile. But of people you were always a little afraid.”

—Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931)

AFTER LEAVING MR MACKENZIE was written in Paris and London over a period of two years from 1929. During that time, Rhys unexpectedly found herself having to care for Maryvonne on her own for several months while Lenglet—no explanation was provided for his abrupt departure—disappeared from Holland. Much though Rhys loved her solemn little girl, the frustration proved considerable of having to combine child care with the demands of writing a novel. Thankfully returning to Leslie Tilden Smith’s mews flat in Holland Park from the hated south London convent school at which she briefly boarded (it was the mother branch of the Virgo Fidelis convent formerly attended by Rhys in Dominica), Maryvonne witnessed enough drama to decide that she herself would never attempt to become a writer.^*

Rhys’s difficulties with producing her second and more carefully crafted novel are still apparent in the draft that survives at the British Library. Sometimes, only a few words were scribbled across a sheet of paper; insistent repetitions and carefully indicated gaps show how fully the novel needed to take shape in Rhys’s mind before she felt ready to commit any readable writing to a page.

Although less directly autobiographical than its predecessor, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie contains many links to Rhys’s own life. Some are easily spotted: Julia Martin, the narrator, remembers having been frightened and fascinated by masks as a child growing up in a hot and distant country. Her family live in Acton. She has had two unsatisfactory love affairs. She even occupies rooms in a cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, where Rhys began working on the novel in 1929. Unlike Julia, however, Rhys was typing out an English student’s doctoral thesis in order to pay the rent.^† Mr. Mackenzie is a pompous caricature of Ford, but Rhys is playing games with the reader by allowing Julia to discover him tucking into a dish of veau Clamart: Clamart was where Lenglet had skulked while hiding from the Paris gendarmerie. Another example of Rhys’s layering and game-playing is the way in which she signals Mackenzie’s debt to Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (especially in the portrayal of Julia and Norah as two fatherless sisters well past girlhood). Rhys winks her acknowledgement to Mansfield’s story when Julia’s cautious admirer, George Horsfield, follows the announcement of his father’s military rank with a troubling non sequitur: “Pa was a colonel. I was seduced by a clergyman at a garden-party. Pa shot him. Heavens, how the blighter bled!”¹ Mansfield’s story of a colonel’s two daughters had appeared in a collection called The Garden Party in 1922.

Finding the biographical clues hidden within a Rhys novel is always fun. Echoes and parallels can be filleted out; resemblances and points of difference can swiftly be established between the fiction and the life of its creator. Entertaining though the enterprise may be, it’s a pursuit which undermines appreciation of Rhys’s uncanny ability to engage with readers who know nothing about her personal circumstances.

While connected to Quartet in its use of the third person and abruptly shifting points of view, Rhys’s second novel is more sophisticated in the way that it separates the imagined Julia from the actual Jean. Although close to Rhys in her obsession with appearance, her vulnerability, lightning rages and casual reliance upon alcohol for a boost, Julia Martin—like Marya Zelli—is neither a writer nor even especially cultured. The “Rolling down to Rio” rhyme that haunts Julia—and neatly flags up her Brazilian childhood—comes from Kipling’s popular children’s book, the Just So Stories. Modigliani’s brazenly exposed nude, with which Julia registers a disturbing affinity when she first sees it, is feebly described by her as “a rum picture.” A reference to Joseph Conrad’s early novel, Almayer’s Folly—to which Rhys had been introduced by Ford—arises from the consciousness not of Julia, but of her quietly valiant sister, Norah Griffiths. Julia—it’s clear—wouldn’t know who Conrad was. Unlike Rhys, who hated the sense of being indebted, Julia Martin is a habitual parasite, a woman who takes money without shame from anyone she can persuade to bestow it. (She meets her match in Uncle Griffiths, the affluent but tight-fisted relative who stumps up a pound, but only to ensure his embarrassing niece’s immediate departure from England.)

Rhys’s genius—still not fully flowered in her fortieth year, but growing at an astonishing rate—lay in her unfailing ability to create, within fewer than 150 pages, a world that is both uniquely alien and recognisably mundane. The grim outline of Julia’s future life is visible from the bald opening statement (“After she had parted from Mr Mackenzie, Julia went to live in a cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins”²) to their second farewell at the novel’s disturbingly inconclusive ending:

“Goodbye,” said Mr Mackenzie.

The street was cool and full of grey shadows. Lights were beginning to come out in the cafes. It was the hour between dog and wolf, as they say.³

RHYS WOULD SOMETIMES describe Mackenzie as her best novel. The unshowy but always telling vocabulary (Uncle Griffiths sounds “alarmed and annoyed”; Julia speaks to her inert mother in a “frightened, hopeful” voice) reminds us that Ford had introduced his protégée to the early work of James Joyce; she could always quote lines from Dubliners. Shafts of sardonic wit lighten the darkness: a landlady is briskly skewered on her notion of acceptable behaviour in a female lodger: “A man, yes; a bottle, no,”⁴ while Mr. Mackenzie’s tips are “not always in proportion with the benevolence of his stomach.”⁵ Julia’s stingy uncle greets his penniless niece with utter disbelief: “as he might have said: ‘A zebra? A giraffe?’”⁶

Of less interest to her first readers than to students of literature is the way in which—far more than in Quartet—Rhys held herself apart from the imaginary Julia Martin. Rhys’s appearance remained exceptionally youthful and attractive. It is unlikely that any man reacted to her as a hopeful stroller does after a swift backward glance at Julia’s haggard face in the novel’s closing chapter, “Last.” (“Oh la la,” he said. “Ah, non alors”). Rhys’s sharp eye, not Julia’s, notices how the host of a certain Parisian restaurant always positions himself on the kitchen stairs, in order to leer up the skirts of female customers. Rhys, not Julia, undercuts the consideration shown by Mr. James (modelled upon the business-like Lancey) when he announces the precise number of minutes he can allot to a meeting with his former mistress. (“I’ve got loads of time—heaps of time. Nearly three-quarters of an hour.”)⁷ Rhys, not Julia, skilfully prefigures a suicidal moment beside the Seine through a deftly planted reference to Mr. James’s vase of drooping tulips.^‡ Dying, “with curved grace in their death,”⁸ the flowers will return as sirens of the night river, shadows that “thrust out long, curved, snake-like arms and beckoned.”⁹ Here, far more than in Quartet, Rhys’s prose approaches poetry in its evocative use of images—like the suggestive vase of tulips—to conjure up Julia’s thoughts.

JONATHAN CAPE PUBLISHED After Leaving Mr Mackenzie early in 1931. The times were commercially challenging; the novel’s jazzily bright pink and yellow jacket—it showed Parisian-style houses bordering the Seine—was directed at a broader market than The Left Bank’s heroically gloomy cover (from the same publishing house).

American publication by Knopf followed in June, but only after Rhys’s unflattering portrait of Ford, a major figure in the States, as Mr. Mackenzie had caused a nervous Max Schuster to reject the novel which his publishing firm had been keenly anticipating since 1929. Reviewers were unanimous in praising the exceptional quality of Rhys’s writing: the critics for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph described it as “flawless” and “superb,” while America’s Saturday Review astutely praised Rhys’s prose for possessing “the balance and beauty of verse.”¹⁰ Militating against any hope of popular success on either side of the Atlantic for Rhys’s second novel were the vociferous objections made to a morally dubious heroine and—once again—a “squalid” tale. The point was rammed home when The Times and the Times Literary Supplement simultaneously published an anonymous review in which Mackenzie was dismissed as “a waste of talent,” expended on “a sordid little story.”¹¹ Rebecca West, while assuring readers of the Telegraph that Rhys was among the finest writers of her generation, regretted that such an interesting writer should be “enamoured of gloom to an incredible degree.”¹²

By 1931, Leslie Tilden Smith was working in a freelance capacity for his friend Jamie (Hamish was his given name) Hamilton’s new London publishing firm, with connections in the States provided by Hamilton’s second job as a scout for Cass Canfield, head of Harper’s. Editors and publishers talk among themselves; overheard trade gossip may have led even Rhys’s devoted supporter at home to question the darkness of her subject matter. “My father had tremendous faith in her writing . . . he did all the typing and correcting,” Leslie’s daughter would inform Diana Athill in 1967.¹³ Within the privacy of her notebooks, however, Rhys jotted angry notes about observations made by a certain “Mr Smith,” who considers that the only kind of writing to succeed “is written to make money,” and that authors who “drink and starve and all the rest are mad.” Elsewhere in the same black exercise book, Rhys recorded a quarrel during which “L” warned her that “a writer is always to be identified with the kind of person he or she writes about.” Defending herself, Rhys had begun to shout. “Well then said L, enjoying himself in his quiet way . . . Yes he said now don’t get excited and don’t use that awful language.”¹⁴

Behind what read like fragments from actual discussions lies the sense of Rhys’s personal anxiety. She didn’t need to be warned that novels like Quartet and Mackenzie would never make her rich. The problem of distinguishing herself from the women about whom she wrote would become a lifelong concern. She was, and still too often is, judged by the fictitious alter egos whom she created, but only in part resembled.

Leslie Tilden Smith, Rhys’s second husband. (McFarlin)

In 1929, when Rhys started work on her second novel, one of the few fictional characters comparable to Rhys’s wayward Marya Zelli and Julia Martin was the surrealist poet André Breton’s Nadja, a woman who (in Breton’s words) “enjoyed being nowhere but in the streets, the only region of valid experience for her.” Breton had published Nadja in 1928, just before the UK publication of Postures (Quartet). It is unclear when Rhys first read the book, but she could still hold a discussion with a fellow admirer in her eighties about the merits of Nadja.¹⁵ Writing to a new American friend in June 1931, Rhys confessed that she liked Mackenzie above anything she had yet achieved. Seeking a French publisher, she sent a copy to Ford’s Paris agent, William Bradley.^§ Her pride was justified; Mackenzie reached a significant group of admirers. They included a talented Irish writer whose own wild personality matched that of Rhys at full tilt, but Norah Hoult—unlike Peggy Kirkaldy, Evelyn Scott and Norah’s own husband, Oliver Stonor, a novelist writing under the pseudonym of a Devon village, Morchard Bishop—was never to become a personal friend.

Peggy Kirkaldy (born Margaret Jacks) was a tiny and kind-hearted woman with a hot temper, a weakness for the racecourse and a devastatingly sharp tongue. Among writers, she was on good terms with Elizabeth Bowen, Jocelyn Brooke and Denton Welch, but her closest and most long-standing literary friendship was with Dorothy Richardson, author of the Pilgrimage cycle of novels. Always hopeful of becoming a writer herself, Peggy divided her time between socialising at her London house, and self-imposed seclusion—she felt that solitude helped her writing—at an isolated home on the Norfolk Broads.

By 1931, when Peggy first made contact with her, Rhys was living with Leslie Tilden Smith in Elgin Crescent, west London. Peggy paid a visit to the flat; the two women hit it off. Growing chummy over a glass—or two or three—Jean discovered a sympathetic listener to whom she could groan about Leslie’s sporadic attempts to restrict her drinking. Writing to Peggy later, Jean was treacherously frank about Leslie’s gift of an “awful” hat during a damp, joint excursion to Cambridge. Conscious that Peggy had smart friends, Rhys put on airs. Cambridge was described as “rather a darling place”; one early letter was signed “A bientot, as they say” (this from a woman who spoke impeccable French). More candidly, Rhys expressed her urgent hope of making some money with a third novel, one on which she had just embarked. Income was needed; when Rhys first met him, Leslie was already running short after borrowing heavily against his future inheritance (his clergyman father planned to divide a modest legacy equally between a prudent daughter and a spendthrift son). Freelance editing for a burgeoning publisher, however kind-hearted a one, was not well paid.¹⁶

The friendship which Rhys formed with the strong-willed and beautiful Evelyn Scott and her second husband, John Metcalfe, promised to be more important to Rhys’s career. A respected novelist and exceptional critic, Scott’s literary fame by the late Twenties was so great that her reader’s report on William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1928) had been published as a preface to a limited edition of the novel, together with its editor’s prediction that Mr. Faulkner’s star might one day rise high enough to glitter alongside Scott’s own. James Joyce had personally written to thank Evelyn for a discerning early review of Ulysses in The Dial.

Scott’s private life was equally remarkable. Three years younger than Rhys, she had eloped in 1913, aged twenty, swapping a shabbily grand life in Tennessee for a lonely hut in the wilds of Brazil. While there, Scott’s unhappy mother showed up and stayed on to create a threesome with Evelyn and her married—and much older—partner from the South, a promiscuous author, playwright and physician in tropical medicine called Frederick Creighton Wellman. Returning to New York, her affairs with Waldo Frank and William Carlos Williams had done nothing to hinder Evelyn Scott’s ascent in the literary world before her second marriage, in 1930, to the English-born Metcalfe.

An arresting portrait of Rhys’s influential American admirer, the novelist Evelyn Scott. (Used with permission of Denise Scott Fears)

In June 1931, writing to Rhys from the steamer bound for New York aboard which she and Metcalfe had been devouring Mackenzie, Scott announced her intention of winning American recognition for such a “rare, subtle and sensitive talent.”¹⁷ For a writer who had just begun work on her third novel with no certainty of which brave editor, during increasingly straitened times, would publish another unsparing tale of life on a downward curve, this was splendid news. Rhys wrote back on the same day that she received Scott’s enthusiastic letter, expressing gratitude and pleasure. The exchange marked the start of a friendship based upon mutual admiration: “My God, what a fine writer you are,” Rhys would exclaim after reading Scott’s fiercely strange novel, Eva Gay (1933). More than warm-hearted Peggy Kirkaldy, Scott became a valued literary advisor, while John Metcalfe (himself a writer of fascinatingly macabre short stories), a man who lived predominantly in England, would quietly establish his own close friendship with Rhys and Tilden Smith.

WRITING AN AFFECTIONATE letter to Leslie Tilden Smith’s daughter in 1968, Maryvonne described how dependent she had been upon Leslie’s kindness during the childhood holidays she spent with her volatile mother. He was “a marvellous man . . . I really loved him,” Maryvonne told Antoinette.¹⁸ But this declaration was made to Leslie’s own loving daughter. Elsewhere, Maryvonne would go out of her way to explain what fun her mother had been as a companion on the riverside excursions and camping holidays which formed a regular feature of Maryvonne’s annual summers in England. In 1931, when Maryvonne turned nine, the trio left London for a long summer spell at a rented bungalow beside the River Wye. Rhys was always happy in the Welsh borderlands which reminded her of her father’s attachment to Wales; the chuckle of the Wye’s clear water flowing steadily over a stony bed reminded a homesick writer of Dominica’s enchanting rivers. By the autumn, however, Maryvonne was back in Holland; shortly before Christmas, Rhys visited Lenglet and Maryvonne in Amsterdam.

The presence of Jean Rhys in her estranged husband’s home was unusually welcome. Jean Lenglet had spent much of his year of absence from Holland working on Sous les Verrous (Under Lock and Key), his own take on the Ford affair. “I found him . . . very unhappy,” Rhys remembered later. “He’d finished this very long and, yes, autobiographical mostly, novel in French, but made no attempt to publish it. So I took the mss back to London and worked at it with rage, fury and devotion.”¹⁹

Rhys went over her husband’s novel (which Lenglet, contrary to her later recollection, had already translated into awkward English), with all the scrupulous care she had lavished upon Carco’s Perversité. The use of prison imagery in her own Quartet inspired her choice for its English title: Barred. Honourably, since the novel did not present Rhys herself in a glowing light, she made only a few alterations to Lenglet’s portrait of his wife as Stania, a weaker and more subservient character than Quartet’s Marya Zelli. Rhys did, however, take care to establish that Stania never lived with her “protectors,” the Hubners, as she herself had lived with Stella and Ford. Given the libellous portrait that Ford had painted of Rhys as Lola Porter, a tempestuous and highly sexed Creole writer, in his most recent book, When The Wicked Man (1931)—and it’s difficult to suppose that the well-read Rhys was unaware of such a sensational fiction—she was generous to tone down the harshness of Lenglet’s portrait of her former lover.^¶ Perhaps Rhys was seeking to redress what she later described remorsefully as the “spite” of Quartet.

Published in the spring of 1932 by Desmond Harmsworth (following a string of rejections), Barred inspired a rave from Compton Mackenzie and drew respectful reviews from J. B. Priestley, Frank Swinnerton and one of Rhys’s most ardent admirers, Norah Hoult. Rebecca West declined to supply a review, pointedly saying that she looked forward soon to reading another of Jean Rhys’s own works. Rhys’s involvement in her husband’s novel was no secret: Lenglet had added a touching foreword under his pen name of Edouard de Nève, in which he thanked Jean Rhys, as the author of two “beautiful” novels, for sparing the time to foster “this gloomy child of mine.”

Translating Barred drew Rhys away from working at her third novel. Provisionally, she named it “Two Tunes,” a reference to its dazzlingly persuasive exposition of her growing belief that the dreamworld of the past and the activity of the present co-exist, simultaneously, within a single conscious realm. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Julia Martin vividly recollects a moment from her Brazilian childhood (the memory, of course, belonged to Rhys’s own and ever-vivid Dominican past) when a terrified child scents invisible danger in a sunlit forest glade. Now, in the novel that would become Voyage in the Dark, Rhys dived more deeply into her Caribbean past, exploring the episodes and images that she could best employ to haunt—and eventually, overwhelm—young Anna Morgan. Rhys’s use of the first person marked a technical advance in her ability to forge an immediate connection with her reader. The eerie authenticity of Anna’s voice conceals from our eyes the chasm that lies between Rhys, the creator, and the tragic, untutored girl.

Voyage in the Dark was written during the long aftermath of the US stock market crash when Leslie became almost as penniless as Rhys. Money problems were behind the couple’s impulsive decision to move to Berlin; in Germany, the exchange rates would work in their favour. The plan fell through when the Tilden Smiths’ Jewish contact ominously vanished from view. As a result, Leslie and Rhys were still living in London early in 1933, when Lenglet asked for a quick divorce in order to marry an attractive and intelligent Dutch writer. Well regarded as a novelist in her day, Henriëtte van Eyk shared Lenglet’s admiration for Rhys’s work.

Rhys gave her consent, but not without reluctance. Lenglet had been the first to encourage her to write. He was part of her life, the father both of her lost baby son and of the living, loving Maryvonne. Granting a divorce felt especially strange at a moment when she had just finished translating and revising Barred, Lenglet’s own account of their shared past.

The news of Lenglet’s marriage plans came at a time when Rhys was struggling to maintain authorial control of the emotions stirred up by her deep immersion in the past. Before Voyage in the Dark, Jean had never written with such passionate intensity about Dominica, an island which grew ever more alluring to her amidst the angry despair and cynicism of England in the early Thirties. “It was as if a curtain had fallen,” she wrote in Voyage’s opening line, recalling London’s cool disdain for a gauche little girl newly arrived from an outpost of the Empire. A few pages later, Rhys used the same consciously dramatic image to set her two stages, past and present. “A curtain fell and then I was here.”²⁰

The dipping, gliding past–present progress of Voyage in the Dark is impeccably managed from the first moment of shy embarkation—the pick-up of a couple of chorus girls on a promenade at an English seaside town—to its unflinchingly bleak destination. “This thing here—I can’t believe it’s the same sun, I simply can’t believe it,” Anna tells herself in the midst of remembering how, as a child whose closest friend was a free-spirited black girl, she had hated the colour of her own white skin.²¹ Taken to England’s Savernake Forest by her well-meaning lover—Walter Jeffries imagines it will remind her of the tropics—Anna does indeed slip back into her earlier life on the edge of a wilder, virgin forest in the Caribbean. (“We used to sit on the veranda with the night coming in, huge. And the way it smelt of all flowers.”)²² Finally, as Anna undergoes a botched abortion—the operation would end Miss Morgan’s short life in Rhys’s preferred first version—the past sweeps the present away in a bravura passage which runs all Anna’s distant memories together, pulling her under while the treacherous voice of her protector rings like a hollow bell through the rising dark. “My darling mustn’t worry my darling mustn’t be sad . . . he said it’s nearly four o’clock perhaps you ought to be going . . . You ought to be going he said.”²³ Rhys’s debt to James Joyce, as apparent here as in the extraordinary conclusion to her fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, reminds us that an early section of Finnegans Wake was published as “Work in Progress” in the transatlantic review. Copies of Ford’s cherished magazine had been Rhys’s intimate companions for at least a year during her affair with him in Paris.

In later years, trying to explain her writing process, Rhys cited Charlotte Brontë’s famous description of the novelist (or poet, since Brontë was thinking of her sister, Emily) whose duty it is to work passively, “under dictates you neither delivered nor could question.”²⁴ Omitted from this romantic view of inspiration guiding the pen was the considerable emotional strain that writing imposed. Voyage in the Dark would become Rhys’s finest achievement yet; it was also by far her most demanding.

Drink, always a reliable source of brief good cheer, impeded the novel’s progress towards its end. Desperate to reach completion, Rhys turned down an invitation to join Lenglet and Maryvonne for a last family week in Holland during the spring of 1933. Instead, leaving Leslie to spend some welcome time with his own daughter at the still unmarried couple’s new flat on Adelaide Road, just north of Regent’s Park, Jean retreated alone to the quiet Sussex seaside town of Rottingdean.

As a cure for booze and the blues, Rhys’s industrious month in a room above a seaside teashop was a success. Having arrived “crazy with depression,” she slept well in the sea air and read nothing more stressful than P. G. Wodehouse’s latest contribution to the Blandings Castle series while she worked at Voyage. “If I could make one more effort I could finish it I think,” she wrote to a sympathetic Evelyn Scott. “One more—You know—You do know don’t you.”²⁵

Scott, a heavy drinker herself, did know, and sympathised. “Haven’t touched a drop for a month,” Rhys bragged at the end of her seaside vacation—but then undercut the boast: “Won’t it be fine when I do.”²⁶ Rhys never concealed her fondness for alcohol and she never renounced it for more than a few weeks—just long enough to demonstrate her iron will.

The Thirties was a decade remarkable for the heaviness of the drinking that went on, especially in Prohibition America. Nobody thought any the worse of Rhys for getting drunk, until drink unleashed her demons. “I’m not one to whine like some women do,” she told a writing friend in later life: “I attack.”²⁷ Attacking could mean delivering a punch, a string of expletives or a sudden disgusted jet of saliva. Leslie, a heavy drinker himself, tried to subdue her by silent disapproval, a tactic which Rhys angrily described as “his hanging judge’s face.”²⁸ When that failed—and it invariably did—Tilden Smith reverted to screaming back at her. Sometimes, their verbal battles ended in blows. “She [Rhys] and my father had terrible rows,” his daughter later confirmed.²⁹

In September 1933, the Lenglets’ divorce was finalised. Tilden Smith would wait until February 1934 to propose. Rhys, who accepted at once, remembered both the proposal and the quiet ceremony at a London registry office as times of rare, unqualified joy. While marriage did not mark an end to her professional relationship with Lenglet, an active supporter of her writings, the wedding signalled Leslie’s personal commitment to his Ella as a beloved partner, as well as a writer of extraordinary talent. Their squabbles continued. Until the very end of her long life, Jean Rhys preserved an undated scrap of paper recording the conclusion to one of the many physical and verbal battles that rifted her marriage to Leslie, but never broke it. “To an afflicted one,” it read. “Nothing have I to give for you. Only my heart, my true heart—forgiving and loving Leslie.”³⁰

LESLIE, WHO TYPED out the new novel, faced the difficult task of finding a publisher for a work which demonstrated that Jean Rhys had defied the requests of her reviewers for a little less squalor and gloom. Jonathan Cape rejected Voyage (still called “Two Tunes” at that point) as too depressing, while Jamie Hamilton—despite an enduring respect for Jean’s work—asked for cuts that Rhys felt would wreck her delicately calibrated book. As a devoted supporter of Patrick Hamilton, the hard-drinking author best known today for Hangover Square, Michael Sadleir of Constable was used to publishing bleak books: his friend’s most recent fiction had borne the unappetising title: Plains of Cement. Sadleir took Rhys’s novel, scheduling it for the autumn of 1934, prior to the US publication in March 1935. He imposed two conditions: he wanted 2,500 words cut from the elaborate Joycean sequence at the end and he wanted Anna Morgan to be kept alive.

Rhys complied about the deletion, but it seems likely that—after preserving and obsessively revising the original manuscript—she later made use of the omitted pages for her descriptions of madness in Wide Sargasso Sea.³¹ She disagreed more strongly with the publisher’s insistence that Anna should survive her last grim ordeal. Artfully, she subverted Sadleir’s wishes by her deft use of the ray of light—a crucial last image—that is visible from Anna’s sickbed. To Anna, the light appears as a sword: “the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out.” In the novel’s closing words, she weighs hopefulness against despair. “I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again . . .”³²

As Rhys’s revision subtly intimates, death has already reached poor Anna and death will strike her down.

WHILE LESLIE SEARCHED for a willing publisher, the couple’s resources dwindled. It was not for family feeling alone that—shortly after their winter wedding ceremony—Rhys introduced Leslie to her favourite brother, Owen Rees Williams, who was back in London after unsuccessfully attempting to set up a fruit farm in Australia. Charmed both by Rhys’s delicate beauty and by her unexpected willingness to sit down on the floor and play trains with their small son, Owen’s wife Dorothy revised her initial opinion when Rhys asked for a loan. Speaking to Rhys’s first biographer, Carole Angier, Dorothy Rees Williams recalled how she had warned her easy-going husband that she would walk out on him rather than give his sister a single cent. (“If you send that woman one penny I go out that door and never come back.”)³³ Dorothy, the most forthcoming interviewee that Angier spoke to in Jean’s family, missed no opportunity to condemn her sister-in-law after that first unfortunate encounter.

Leslie and Rhys had never lived grandly. In the first months of their marriage, they struggled to cover the modest rent for two adjoining bedsits in Bloomsbury’s dilapidated Brunswick Square. During the summer of 1934, they took a further step down the property ladder by moving out of town to “Luxor,” a tiny bungalow near Shepperton, on muddy little Pharaoh’s Island (presented to Horatio Nelson as a fishing retreat on the Thames after his victory on the Nile). “Luxor” lay between “Rameses” and “Assouan.” Writing to Evelyn Scott on 10 June, Rhys playfully commented on a disrespectful homage to the Egyptian gods: an image of Osiris painted by a previous inhabitant onto their new home’s lavatory door.

To Maryvonne, now twelve, this was a time of uncomplicated happiness. Her mother had married a kind and affectionate man; she liked living at Luxor; a late summer camping excursion to Wales’s Brecon Beacons was remembered for wonderful family games of charades. It might be hard to imagine—Maryvonne would proudly comment on a radio programme, almost fifty years later—just how brilliant her late mother had been at playing roles. She could even do Long John Silver! But “you can’t imagine her like that. No, she was an actress really.”³⁴

Constable paid only £25 for “Two Tunes” in July 1934, but the death of Rhys’s maternal Aunt Brenda netted her a welcome £100 (most of Brenda’s modest legacy went to the younger niece and namesake who had taken care of her in Acton), while the death of Leslie’s mother at the end of that same summer produced a welcome financial injection of £2,500 (£180,000 in today’s money). Always materially generous when she could afford to be, Rhys lavished treats upon her daughter—“everything a child could wish for,” Maryvonne later recalled: “books and ballet, music, pantomime and circus.”³⁵ Shortly before Christmas, Rhys went into Harrods, bought smart pyjamas for Leslie and a much-coveted mouth organ for her daughter—and then forgetfully left them behind, on a cloakroom chair. Not surprisingly, they disappeared. And her thoughtful gifts were to have been such a surprise! Twenty years later, Rhys still felt mortified.

Lost presents sound like an oversight, but Rhys’s mind may have been unsettled by disappointment. The autumn reviews of Voyage in the Dark, the most compassionate, understanding and tragic portrait of a woman that she had yet created, were the best and most extensive that Rhys had so far received. One perceptive fellow novelist, Clemence Dane, writing in Dublin Magazine (January 1935), singled out the author’s power “to express the emotions and bewilderments of the inarticulate” which is central to Rhys’s presentation of Anna, the most innocent of her heroines. Nevertheless, while The Lady’s reviewer (8 November 1934) believed it would give that magazine’s readers a clearer understanding of how even a “nice” girl might be driven into prostitution, regret was still persistently being expressed at such a fine female writer’s obsession with “dreadful” and “difficult” subjects. For the future, Rhys’s own literary voyage looked to be heading into uncharted waters.

A more likely explanation for Rhys’s odd act of carelessness in Harrods was that she had begun drinking so heavily during 1934 that she couldn’t write.³⁶ And without her writing, she went to pieces.

Rhys’s distraught state militated against new opportunities to establish herself in the London literary world. Rosamond Lehmann was among the keenest admirers of Voyage in the Dark. At the beginning of 1935, Lehmann wrote Rhys a flattering letter, suggesting that they should meet. This was an opportunity that was not to be passed up. Lehmann’s own first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), had been an instant bestseller; since then, she had become a force to be reckoned with in the publishing world. Invited to visit the Oxfordshire home which Rosamond shared with her husband, Wogan Philipps, and their baby girl, Rhys was initially hesitant. Reassured by Leslie that the meeting would be well worth the difficulties of an elaborate cross-country journey by train and bus, she agreed to make the trip.

Eagerly anticipated by Rosamond, Rhys’s visit to Oxfordshire was a disaster. All ready with their questions, Rosamond, her actress sister Beatrix, and their friend, the widowed, elegant and sharply intelligent Violet Hammersley, together let fly like a firing squad. An unnerved Rhys, fidgeting unhappily with the gloves which she considered essential for a lady’s social visit, provided her terse responses in a carefully enunciated whisper. After an awkward hour, she asked to be taken back to the railway station.

Rosamond’s second attempt to befriend Rhys was equally unsuccessful. Set for May 1935, it conflicted with celebrations being held to honour George V’s twenty-fifth (and penultimate) year on the throne. Rhys, whose face bore alarming bruise marks from an unmentioned battle with Leslie when she finally showed up, seemed obsessed by the pros and cons of showing the royal procession to the nation on Pathé newsreels. Books, to Lehmann’s disappointment, were not discussed, and neither were the bruises. A further encounter, scheduled for 14 June at the popular Café Royal, brought a new setback when a dishevelled Leslie Tilden Smith shambled through the cafe’s elegant doors to offer Rosamond a rambling tale about a car crash. Although unharmed, Rhys was said to be too distraught for a social outing. Empathising—she, too, had recently been in a motor accident—Lehmann sent best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Plainly, Rhys liked Rosamond or she would not herself have proposed a further attempt at establishing a friendship. Invited for an early autumn visit to the flat on Bury Street, just off Piccadilly, into which the Tilden Smiths had recently moved from their faux-Egyptian bungalow on the Thames, Rosamond was greeted by a wan-faced Leslie. Ushered in, the immaculately dressed visitor found herself staring at a dishevelled Jean, sprawled across a sofa, glass in hand as she taunted her silent husband for looking—as well he might—downhearted. “Poor Leslie,” she kept saying, “poor, poor Leslie. He looks so miserable and wretched and ill. . . .”³⁷

Departing as swiftly as she could, Lehmann felt more sympathy for an embarrassed Leslie than his intoxicated wife. She didn’t know the couple well enough to wonder whether perhaps Leslie had been playing an unkind game of his own when he ushered her into the flat, rather than sending their visitor away with a polite excuse. If his wife shamed him, so could he shame her.

Lehmann never learned the truth about that second cancelled meeting with Rhys at the Café Royal. There had been no car crash. On 13 June, the Tilden Smiths had been arrested for causing a disturbance (by fighting each other) in Soho’s shabby Wardour Street at four in the morning. It seems that the gentle Leslie could hit back. The mutual damage inflicted by punches and flailing fists was bad enough for a doctor to be called to the police station where the couple were jailed for the rest of a short night. Charged at Bow Street the following morning, Rhys pleaded not guilty to the charge and signed herself as “Ella Tilden Smith, Journalist” before a thirty-shilling penalty was handed down. Leslie, after chivalrously taking full responsibility for the incident, paid the fine.

Twenty years later, Rhys would combine the jubilee celebrations of 1935 with her humiliating arrest as she set to work on one of her finest short stories: “Tigers are Better-Looking.” But it was the Leslie-like “Mr Severn” whom she chose to despatch to prison for a night, adding only a cryptic “GR” on the wall of his cell to signify his creator as the former Gwen Rees.

A COMPLETE ABSENCE of documentation in the form of letters or diaries makes it impossible to know how much responsibility for the couple’s rows can be assigned to Rhys, and how much to her outwardly calm husband. Confirmation of Rhys’s own volatility emerges earlier in 1935, and from an unexpected quarter. Bringing his daughter to England for the Easter holidays, Jean Lenglet had spent a few days at “Luxor.” Any ménage à trois is risky; emotions at the house ran high. Fictionalising the occasion in a 1937 novel, Schuwe Vogels (Shy Birds was not published in England and may never have been seen by Rhys), Lenglet characterised Rhys as a violent and obscene-tongued wife whose alcoholic depression culminates in her death (by drowning in a river). Tilden Smith’s daughter, Antoinette, who visited the island hideaway during Lenglet’s stay, later confirmed that tempers had indeed run high. Peace was temporarily restored after Lenglet’s departure; back in England for the summer holidays, Maryvonne was carried off to south Wales’s beautiful and isolated Gower Peninsula in a newly purchased car for what she would remember as an idyllic week alone with her mother and Leslie.

The death of Leslie’s father in September 1935 unlocked the remaining portion of his son’s inheritance. “Luxor” was promptly abandoned for the Bury Street flat—just off Piccadilly—to which Rosamond Lehmann paid her memorable visit. The flat was well located, but neither a new home nor Leslie’s decision to spend his newfound wealth on taking his wife back to the Caribbean could shake off Rhys’s despair. The drinking continued—and so did the rows. Jamie Hamilton, acting in his capacity as Leslie’s part-time employer, visited discreetly while Rhys was on her own. He mentioned remarks that had been made at the office about Leslie’s battered face; prospective clients were not favourably impressed when greeted by bruises and black eyes.

The hint of a threat hung in the air. Reluctant to sack an excellent editor and literary advisor, Hamilton decided instead to provide a diversion. In June, he had asked Leslie to edit a memoir written by two nephews of Winston Churchill. Based in part on their recent experiences of public school, and laced with anecdotes about an eccentric upbringing, Out of Bounds was co-authored by Giles and Esmond Romilly. Leslie and young Esmond had got on rather well. It was Hamilton’s idea that Esmond should become a paying guest at Bury Street.

Aged seventeen, their new lodger enchanted Rhys. Handsome, wilful and clever enough to dazzle her with his political views, Esmond had recently got himself thrown out of a fascist rally for causing a disturbance. Later, he would elope with Oswald Mosley’s adamantly left-wing sister-in-law, Jessica Mitford. Rhys was working on an early draft of “Till September Petronella” when Esmond arrived at Bury Street. Might her characterisation in that long short story of the charismatic composer Philip Heseltine as the captivating but also dangerous Julian Oakes offer readers a glimpse of the way Rhys responded to wild young Romilly? Working on her fiction always improved her spirits, but it’s likely that Esmond himself helped to effect a change of mood as the year drew to a close. But the real boost for Rhys came from the prospect of returning, at last, to her island birthplace.

VOYAGE IN THE DARK had provided the spur to Leslie’s generous impulse to splash out on a Caribbean adventure. How could anybody who had lived at Rhys’s side as she lovingly recreated a Caribbean past for Anna Morgan not believe that a return to Dominica would make her happy? First-class tickets were purchased for a passenger ship leaving Southampton in February 1936. Just back from seeing her sick daughter (Maryvonne had contracted measles) at her new convent school in Holland, Rhys wrote a farewell from Bury Street to Evelyn Scott. As usual, all was in chaos. A fused light had plunged the couple into darkness; they were packing by the erratic glimmer of a few candles that Leslie had wedged into a biscuit tin.³⁸

Rhys’s letter to Scott doesn’t disclose whether Esmond was still with the Tilden Smiths at the time of their departure from England; by the time they returned, the young man had left England himself, to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It’s unknown whether Rhys read at the time of his premature death in 1941, when Romilly’s plane vanished over the North Sea while undertaking a raid on Germany, but she always spoke of him with tenderness. Her own son, had he lived, would have been just two years younger than Esmond.

*“This was idiotic of me,” Rhys later told Sonia Orwell of the impulsive decision to send her daughter to the school in South Norwood. “Because I’d liked my convent I imagined that a convent was a kind and pleasant place to be” (Jean Rhys to Sonia Orwell, 3 May 1971, McFarlin 2.8.f6).

†In 1929, Elsie Phare (later Elsie Duncan Jones) spent a few months in Paris, where she met Samuel Beckett and also Jean Rhys, who unexpectedly volunteered to type out her dissertation on English Royalists in exile. Later, Elsie blamed Rhys’s abysmal typing for her failure to gain a fellowship (Elsie Duncan Jones obituary, Independent, 23 October 2011; Professor Peter Davidson, her former pupil, confirms the details: Davidson to author, 20 December 2020).

‡Rhys’s first working title, “Wintry Orchids,” hinted through its glacial invocation of a famously sexual flower (the courtesan Odette in Proust’s novel wears a corsage of orchids) at Mr. James’s chilling kindness to Julia, his former mistress. Possibly, a vase of orchids had preceded the drooping tulips she sees in her lover’s Mayfair home after he—once again—bails her out.

§Bradley’s friendship with Ford did not stop him talking to Rhys, when she visited Paris in September the following year, about a publisher for “Triple Sec.” Rhys excused herself, claiming that she had “borrowed enough” from it for her work-in-progress (Voyage in the Dark) to render the original unsaleable (JR to WB, 3 February 1931; 21 September 1932; 1 October 1932, William H Bradley papers, HRC).

¶Rhys’s first biographer, Carole Angier, suggests that Ford’s curious novel When The Wicked Man (1931) balanced his vicious fictionalisation of a creole character who displays all of Rhys’s intemperate violence and rage with a gentler presentation of her, within the same novel, as Henrietta Felise. Ford’s biographer, Max Saunders, has convincingly since shown that Henrietta Felise was based upon Ford’s later lover, Elizabeth Cheetham (Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, Vol. II, OUP, 1996, pp. 296–7).