10

A la recherche, or Temps Perdi (1936)

“I suppose going back to Dominica is foolhardy but I want to so much—I can’t help risking it. You can imagine the wild and fantastic plans and hopes.”

—Jean Rhys to Evelyn Scott, December 1935¹

WAVING THE TILDEN SMITHS off at Southampton—the port where Rhys had first stepped foot on English soil nearly twenty years earlier—were members of both their families: Leslie’s recently married daughter arrived with her husband, while Rhys was given bouquets of flowers by her two sisters and brother, Owen (Edward, the eldest, was still working abroad as an army medical officer). Rhys struck them all as unusually animated and happy; judging by her boast to Evelyn Scott of “fantastic plans and hopes,” she may have dreamed that day of returning to Dominica for good.

Most of what we know of the couple’s journey comes from two long typewritten letters sent by Leslie to his daughter back in England. He reported the voyage out as tranquil, marred only by Rhys’s suspicion that one of the SS Cuba’s passengers, a boisterous young Italian woman, was making fun of the Tilden Smiths. After steaming through the Sargasso Sea, rank with the floating brown sargassum weed from which it takes its name, the Tilden Smiths disembarked at the exuberantly colourful town of Fort-de-France in Martinique, where they met up with the Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty, “typing away for dear life,” Jean reported to Evelyn, “and delighted with the West Indies, the only place left not yet written up he said.”² The following week, the couple sailed on to St. Lucia, where the widowed Evelina Lockhart—a cherished young bride when Rhys last saw her—welcomed them to the little hotel which she was being paid to run by its absentee owner.

Leslie’s letters read as though he would gladly have prolonged their stay at Hotel Antoine, where Rhys showed at her best as a valued literary advisor to a mildly eccentric young cousin, Emily (always known as Lily) Lockhart, who proudly displayed a magazine to which she herself was the sole contributor.³ But Rhys, understandably, was impatient to reach Roseau. She hadn’t been home for twenty years; how much would remain unchanged?

To Leslie, settling into the best rooms at the La Paz—the town’s only hotel—Roseau appeared charming, with its wide harbour, busy market square and the tranquil Botanical Gardens. To Rhys, change was visible everywhere. Her family’s house was boarded up; Kingsland House, the elegant former home of her father’s medical colleague, Sir Henry Nicholls, had been converted by his daughters into a pension from which—to Rhys’s dismay—a visiting lady writer despatched invitations for literary chat. The haughtily exclusive Dominica Club looked but a ghost of its former self; almost all the white pioneer settlers who had once regarded themselves as lords of the island had sold up and left. One resident told the visitors the curious story of Mr. Ramage (someone whom Rhys had known as a child), who was found dead at his remote property during the 1920s, still clasping a shotgun. Mr. Ramage’s mysterious death followed a mob attack, allegedly triggered by the frightened crowd’s ghostly encounter with a “white zombi.”⁴ The eerie image of a tall, pale old settler, brandishing a gun, stayed with Rhys. It seems to lie behind her account of the English Mr. Mason’s confrontation with an angry mob of arsonists in one of the most dramatic scenes in Wide Sargasso Sea.

Alone, Rhys visited the old Victoria library where as a girl she had loved to sit reading on the shady veranda; here, a distant cousin still wearily presided over the massive desk to which books were brought by the island’s schoolchildren to be stamped. The building, although unchanged, was overshadowed by the larger and adjacent Carnegie-funded library which had been built during the year that Rhys left the island to the design of Dominica’s former administrator, Sir Henry Hesketh Bell. Alone still, she visited her former school to take tea with a greatly aged Mother Mount Calvary, the nun who had formerly been in charge of the convent. Here, too, everything—including her welcoming hostess—seemed diminished. Wishing to please an elegant visitor dressed in her best hat and gloves for the occasion, the old lady reminisced about the various ways that Rhys’s father had always assisted the convent. Later that day, standing beside the Celtic cross that marked his neglected grave in the nearby churchyard, the doctor’s daughter thought of the many ways in which kind, easy-going Willie Rees Williams had helped islanders and settlers alike. Nothing was recorded; all was forgotten. In her memoir, years later, Rhys confessed that she had shed tears that day.

Creating a careful map of the island for his daughter’s benefit and his own amusement, Leslie had to rely upon Rhys’s memory for the accurate placing of his two careful “x’s,” marking her father’s two hill-country estates up on the island’s west coast. No one could direct the Tilden Smiths to Amelia, nor Bona Vista; the little plantations of Rhys’s girlhood lay buried under two decades of luxuriant, smothering forest. But Geneva: surely Mitcham House must survive? Having hired the grandest available car in Roseau for a pilgrimage to the old Lockhart home, Rhys was advised to employ a guide. “I thought, “A guide to Geneva for me. How ridiculous.” However, there was a guide, we went quickly by car, and he seemed to know exactly where to take me.”^*5

It may have been from their guide that Rhys first heard about the ruinous changes that had taken place on the island. Some of these distressed her more than others. Hurricanes and crop disease had devastated Dominica’s fragile economy during the postwar years; growing racial anger had been fuelled by the brutally insensitive act of segregation meted out by the British Army to the black islanders who had crossed the world in 1915 to fight—and die—for Britain and the Empire. Rhys was surprised but relatively unconcerned to learn that a new non-white middle class had taken charge of the island, while the white plantocracy, its regime never so secure as those of the sugar barons of Barbados and Jamaica, had shrivelled away. Phyllis Shand Allfrey, the niece of Rhys’s childhood sweetheart Willie Nicholls, had briefly returned to Dominica in 1931 only to discover, as she would write in her autobiographical novel, The Orchid House (1953), that her own class had become “the poor whites, we no longer have any power.”⁶

The chief cause of distress for Rhys came from discovering the recent fate of her own family home. Four years before her return, there had been outrage when it was discovered that the British Colonial Office was increasing taxes on the island’s black population to subsidise generous salaries paid to the handful of white officials who remained at Roseau. Following a mass resignation by the angry members of Dominica’s legislative (all black) council, the British administrator invited two white planters to take their place. Within a month of his new appointment, Rhys’s cousin, Norman Lockhart, the white owner of Geneva, was taught a harsh lesson when Mitcham House was raided and torched.

Some tokens of the old Geneva estate survived for a shocked Rhys to see: a mounting block; a few blackened walls; the sugar works’ massive iron wheel, shipped out in the 1820s from Derby, England. The rest had gone: “There was nothing, nothing. Nothing to look at. Nothing to say. . . .” When Rhys knelt by a river to scoop a palmful of clear water into her mouth, the guide warned her: “Very dirty, not like you remember it.”⁷

Following this wrenching experience, Rhys found it distressing to remain close to the places she had remembered best. A Lockhart connection still carried weight among the island’s tiny white community. Strings were pulled; funds were tendered: by the end of March, the Tilden Smiths had bought themselves six weeks of isolation on a partly abandoned estate in the far north of the island, complete with maid, cook and overseer, and its own spectacular beach. The estate was called Hampstead.

WRITING WIDE SARGASSO SEA two decades later, and conflating the ruined Geneva of 1936 with the events that she believed had taken place there back in the 1830s, Rhys would also draw upon other and far less melancholy memories, of Hampstead. For here, to her astonishment, she discovered an almost exact replica of her lost home. Even the history carried startling echoes: once again, the Swiss family of Bertrand had been supplanted by members of the Lockhart family. Inscribing each of the little holiday snaps taken by Leslie of his wife (flaunting a faultless figure in her chic one-piece bathing suit), Rhys carefully recorded the fact that the beautiful beach at Hampstead was still called Bertrand Bay.

Despite Hampstead’s isolated position, it was within reach of a couple of white families who were keen to welcome visitors from England. The Aspittels of Melville Hall proved pleasant but unexciting; a more interesting encounter was promised by an invitation from the Napiers of Pointe Baptiste.

Rhys had been fascinated by the exotic past history of Evelyn Scott. She showed less interest in the backstory of headstrong Elma Gordon Cumming, daughter of one of Scotland’s largest landowners, who left her husband to run away with Lennox Napier, a literary-minded outcast from her own world who had spent time in Tahiti. Disgraced by their notorious affair, the Napiers had fled from England, eventually settling in Dominica because—in part—of their need for a warm climate. (Lennox was more fragile than his sturdy wife.)

Pointe Baptiste, the house that the Napiers had lovingly created to overlook twin beaches—one was of black sand, one of the finest pale coral—was and is like nowhere else on Dominica. Distinguished visitors—from Noël Coward to Patrick Leigh Fermor—would fall under the spell of the immense sea-facing veranda that fronts a light-filled, beautifully proportioned house packed with unexpected treasures: carved masks from Tahiti; a screen painted by the polymathic French chef Marcel Boulestin; a library stocked with French literature, including (the small volumes still sit on the library shelves) a well-thumbed first edition of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Here, surely, Rhys would feel herself perfectly at home?

The reason for the Napiers’ hospitality soon became clear. Elma Napier was in search of a publisher. Jamie Hamilton had sent her—at the autocratic Mrs. Napier’s insistence—the negative fiction-reader’s report on which his rejection of her recently submitted novel, Duet in Discord, had been based. Mrs. Napier had since gleaned that Leslie Tilden Smith was an editor (but not that he worked for Hamilton); Leslie, not his wife, was the object of Elma’s lavish attention during the Tilden Smiths’ visit to Pointe Baptiste. The price of a delicious lunch was made explicit: Mr. Smith must provide a glowing report for Mrs. Napier to flourish before reluctant publishers. It’s unclear whether Leslie complied, but Elma’s novel was published by Arthur Barker—under the pseudonym Elizabeth Garner—a few months after their encounter.

Rhys was understandably displeased by Mrs. Napier’s attentiveness to Leslie, while ignoring his wife. Unburdening herself in a letter to Evelyn Scott, she wrote with withering scorn of a neighbour who is “by way of being literary” and who has “done her war dance at me. (Tomahawk in hand, smile on face).” There was one piece of good news: “She’s going to England next week thank God.”⁸ Elma Napier was equally scathing. Responding over a decade later to a query from Alec Waugh about Rhys’s literary reputation in Dominica, Elma promised to “try and read her. None of us has ever heard of her.”⁹ The hiss of poison-tipped arrows is almost audible.

Rhys’s happiness at Hampstead glows out of Leslie’s tender photograph of his wife gazing down at him from a tree-strung hammock. A continued exchange of friendly cards between Rhys and Dora, the Hampstead housekeeper, suggests that a comfortable relationship had been established; Leslie’s lengthy letters to his daughter communicate an ease-filled sense of peace. Ella was working again, he reported with evident relief, adding that she was really well (his code for sober) and “simply loving the place.”¹⁰

Rhys at Bertrand Bay, now known as Hampstead Bay, and relaxing in a hammock .

Leslie was the admiring photographer. (McFarlin)

Rhys, nevertheless, had set her heart on undertaking two major expeditions during their long stay in the north. She wanted to visit the territory that had been granted to the island’s earliest settlers—the Amerindian Caribs now known as Kalinago—back in 1903. And she wanted to cross the island on the great Imperial Road which everybody claimed (wrongly, so a stubborn Rhys would enduringly assert) had never been completed.

Ever since childhood, Jean Rhys had been intrigued by the fate of Dominica’s earliest surviving inhabitants. Following her return, she had learned about the Caribs’ recent exposure to what they reasonably perceived as insulting behaviour. In 1930, after two Caribs were erroneously shot for suspected smuggling, their people’s compensation had been, not the badly needed hospital they requested, but a police station from which to spy on them. When a handful of angry protesters burned the station down, the British navy retaliated by flashing searchlights across the Caribs’ terrain each night from the deck of an offshore warship. Feelings of resentment ran high.

It’s reasonable to suppose that Rhys gave an accurate account of her visit to the Carib community in “Temps Perdi,” a story she first began to contemplate during her final weeks at Hampstead. Arriving on horseback at a circle of thatched Carib huts, the Tilden Smiths were advised on how best to conduct themselves:

“There is a beautiful Carib girl,” the policeman said, “in the house over there—the one with the red roof. Everybody goes to see her and photographs her. She and her mother will be vexed if you don’t go. Give her a little present, of course. She is very beautiful but she can’t walk. It’s a pity that.”¹¹

Anger at the policeman’s condescension simmers beneath the surface of Rhys’s prose. Later, the disillusioned visitor tells the reader that a stiff drink helps fend off any compassionate impulse. After a swig of rum, “nothing dismays you; you know the password and the Open Sesame. You drink a second; then you understand everything—the sun, the flamboyance, the girl crawling (because she could not walk) across the floor to be photographed.”¹²

Rhys’s second expedition, with a compliant Leslie tagging along behind their two local guides, began with a drive south down the island’s east coast to Hatton Garden, one of the island’s many abandoned estates. It was here, a few miles beyond the site of the modern airport, that Rhys believed the final stretch of the Imperial Road had emerged from the tropical jungle. Signs of an old pavé, or paved track, a leftover from Dominica’s eighteenth-century French past, strengthened her argument. Off the travellers set, plodding alongside the brown–green waters of the winding Pagua river, advancing ever deeper into the island’s seemingly impenetrable forest. Leslie grew silent. Rhys fell and twisted her foot. Relentless rain poured down from a dark sky. The sense of her own folly grew unbearable, but Rhys could not bear to yield: “Nothing left of the Imperial Road? Nothing? It just wasn’t possible.”¹³

It seems that Rhys did convince her husband of the road’s existence, however irritable the long-suffering Leslie must have grown during a pilgrimage along muddy paths that had to be hacked out of the jungle by the cutlasses wielded by their quietly disdainful guides. Seventeen miles short of Roseau, the exhausted group finally reached the original road’s end at Bassinville; and still, Rhys remained adamant. Completing his island map and anxious not to anger his wife, Leslie dutifully represented an Imperial Road that had almost spanned the island.¹⁴

Back in Roseau, and on the verge of making their first—and last—visit to America, the Tilden Smiths were called upon by the island-born children of Rhys’s brother Owen. Leslie was proud to report to his daughter that Rhys had confronted an “awkward” family situation with uncommon grace. Approached by Ena, the oldest of her unknown nieces, his wife had been affectionate and—insofar as Leslie’s rapidly shrinking funds permitted—generous. Oscar, the oldest boy, asked for more. He had grown “downright beastly,” but Rhys had “marvellously kept her temper.” Bringing the interview to an end, Ella had presented Oscar’s younger sister with a generous handful of notes and coins. “And you,” she had instructed her disgruntled nephew, “can go.”¹⁵

EN ROUTE TO New York in the early summer, the Tilden Smiths were full of hope. Evelyn Scott had already helped Rhys to move from Paul Revere Reynolds (with whom she had fallen out) to another leading American agent, Carol Hill; writing to Leslie, Scott had expressed a determination to do her very best for the writer whom she felt most proud to know. It’s probable that the two women had met up in England during 1935, when Evelyn was spending much of her time with John Metcalfe at a Suffolk cottage in Walberswick (affectionately known at the time as Bloomsbury-by-the-Sea); by February 1936, Scott had temporarily rejoined her previous husband, Creighton Wellman, in New York. Since then, she had been urging Rhys to visit and promising to arrange useful introductions. Having helped John Metcalfe only a couple of years earlier to whip through a windfall legacy of £20,000, Evelyn was unlikely to have encouraged the Tilden Smiths to curb what had become an enjoyably spendthrift existence.

Arriving in New York in June for a three-week stay, the Tilden Smiths rented a suite at the top of a charmingly Frenchified hotel near Washington Square. Rhys got all her teeth crowned and went shopping for the expensive clothes which always provided her protective armour against a (seemingly) critical world. Evelyn, meanwhile, arranged a cavalcade of social events, leaving little time for the quiet restaurant suppers which were an unsociable writer’s preferred form of entertainment.

Having stumbled and twisted her ankle while trying to find the Imperial Road, Rhys now suffered a second and more serious fall. It seems likely to have taken place during the very last days of her visit to New York, when she was increasingly relying on alcohol to get her through the ordeal of a hectic social schedule. Groups, however courteous their intentions—and the New Yorkers were eager to welcome Evelyn’s friend—always frightened Rhys. (“The damned way they look at you, and their damned voices,” she had made Anna Morgan say of the English in Voyage.) Performing on stage had never inhibited her (except, understandably, when she was asked to mimic a hen laying an egg). The prospect of putting herself on display in society required courage of a kind Rhys lacked: “as a well-trained social animal I’m certainly not the goods,” she would ruefully confess to Evelyn after her return to England.¹⁶

It may have been the combination of physical pain, drink and nervousness that caused Rhys’s volatile temper to erupt during the final week of her visit. Piecing together what happened from the few letters that Evelyn Scott and Rhys exchanged thereafter, it seems that the Tilden Smiths were invited to Evelyn’s home for a farewell family supper. Evelyn believed that she heard Rhys say something casually brutal about the misshapen hand of Manly, Wellman’s son; Rhys remembered only that Manly had been combative and that Evelyn took his side. “So I blew up,” Rhys wrote in the plaintive half-apology she sent from London in August, and “once I got going old griefs and grievances overwhelmed me.”¹⁷

The explosion may not have been entirely Rhys’s fault. In 1936, Scott herself was going through a personal crisis, exacerbated by the fact that her much-loved second husband John Metcalfe, back in England, had entered a period of severe depression. Money was short and—following a cool reception for her most recent novel—Scott was fighting her own emotional battles. During the same year of her rift with Rhys, Evelyn also quarrelled with one of her closest American friends, Lola Ridge. Writing to Emma Goldman during the following spring, Scott acknowledged with sorrow that, “between the near tragedies in personal affairs, the intensive labour and pressure about livelihood, I have simply dropped interchanges of correspondence with even my dearest friends.”¹⁸

It seems that both Rhys and Scott were at fault. Their friendship, one of the most significant in the prewar period of Rhys’s literary life, was never resumed, after a last volley of angry exchanges in the late summer of 1936, and by 1942, Scott, suffering from increasingly severe bouts of mental illness, had almost no allies left. To those who remained, including her loyal husband, Evelyn Scott always expressed pride in having known and helped such a remarkable writer as Jean Rhys.

*Leslie’s retrospective account to his daughter suggests the Geneva visit took place towards the end of their stay, but it’s hard to believe Rhys had resisted the temptation while staying in Roseau.