11

Good Morning, Midnight (1936–39)

“It is only lately that I answer unkindness with a raving hate—because I’ve got weaker. My will is quite weakened because I drink too much.”

—Jean Rhys, Green Exercise Book¹

DEFENDING HER OUTBURST in Evelyn Scott’s apartment in a letter sent from London in August 1936, Rhys admitted to her friend that she had drunk “a hell of a lot” during the last days of her stay. Reminiscing about that same New York visit many years later, Rhys said that she hadn’t been sober in Manhattan “for one instant.”² It’s quite likely that she did the damage to her foot in New York through a tipsy stumble, but it’s also conceivable that she was given an angry shove after launching into one of her unpredictable and vitriolic tirades. The injury, following her tumble while searching for the Imperial Road on Dominica, was serious enough to confine her to the Tilden Smiths’ twin-bedded cabin on the liner transporting them home to England.

Back in London by early June, Rhys found that the persistent physical pain of a badly swollen foot did nothing to improve her mood, nor to reduce her reliance on alcohol. While holidaying in her beloved Wales with Leslie and Maryvonne in late July—Lenglet had meanwhile joined the anti-fascist cause in Spain as a reporter—Rhys was rushed into a tiny local hospital: a “most alarming experience.” Back again in London, Leslie settled his wife into an expensive (and alcohol-free) nursing home off the Cromwell Road: “of all terrible streets,” an unappreciative Rhys complained. Depressed by her surroundings (“grim, clean, hard, cheerless, smug, smirking etc.”) and the unwelcome absence of drink, Rhys mordantly quipped to Evelyn that amputation would save trouble, while doubtless adding to “my chic. . . .”³

Leslie, meanwhile, was forced to face the consequences of their extravagant holiday. By the late summer of 1936, the legacy from his father had almost run out, as had the Bury Street lease. Fortunately, the prudent and relatively wealthy Muriel Tilden Smith was ready to support her improvident but beloved sibling. By mid-August, Rhys was able to exchange her nursing home for the snug Chelsea flat which, thanks to Muriel’s discreet generosity, Leslie and his wife would occupy for the next three years.

A blue plaque now records Rhys’s residence at 22 Paultons House, which was then a smart new building in bright red brick that stood at the shabbier end of the King’s Road in Chelsea. Today, Rhys sleuths may savour her posthumous blue-plaqued proximity to the smart townhouse in Paultons Square where Lancelot Hugh Smith’s favourite niece—a sculptor—has added some of her own equestrian bronzes to a legacy of her uncle’s collection of eighteenth-century porcelain and paintings. This was never Lancey’s home; back at the time when Rhys lived at Paultons House, her former lover had recently exchanged his family’s mansion in Roehampton for Garboldisham Hall, a handsome old Norfolk manor house within easier reach of Sandringham. While an ageing bachelor entertained the young princesses whose royal parents had been grateful beneficiaries of Lancey’s shrewd financial advice, Rhys found solace in strengthening connections to her Creole past.

IN AUGUST, ENGAGED in a war of words with Evelyn Scott, Rhys was told by a still furious Scott that she held a “distorted” view of how people behave. Responding on 10 August, Rhys carefully excluded Evelyn and her American friends before launching into a ferocious condemnation of English society’s “mean bloody awful hatred of everything that isn’t exactly like your mean self.”⁴

Rhys had picked quarrels with many friends since her return to England. She was also anxiously adrift in her search for a subject for her next novel. Installed at the new flat, she felt the daily reproach of a private study and writing desk that a thoughtful husband had provided for her use.

Two women provided consolation to Rhys during this fallow and unhappy period; it’s striking that they both had deep connections to the West Indies, where women were not judged irrational—or even insane—if they had a temper that sparked out like a lightning flash: “like a hurricane like a creole” as Antoinette Cosway remarks of her mother in Wide Sargasso Sea.

Phyllis Shand Allfrey, a generation younger than Jean Rhys, was the granddaughter of Dr. Rees Williams’s medical colleague, Sir Henry Nicholls; her 1953 novel, The Orchid House, would take its name from Sir Henry’s abiding passion for growing orchids. Back in 1936, returning to England after a short time in America, Phyllis became an assistant to Naomi Mitchison, the formidably well-connected author and activist through whom she met many left-wing intellectuals (including George Orwell), while becoming a regular contributor of poetry and articles to the new Labour Party-sponsored magazine, Tribune.

Years later, as founder and editor of the Dominica Star, Phyllis would appoint herself as Rhys’s personal Caribbean informant. Back in the Thirties, however, politics played little or no part in their friendship. Admiring Phyllis’s slender fairness and quiet elegance without sharing her political views, Rhys was delighted to find a London neighbour with whom to share her memories of the vanishing Dominica of her youth. Phyllis enjoyed telling island stories of her own; possibly, some of these tales inspired Rhys’s plans for a historical play set in Antigua, the island where Robert Shand Allfrey, Phyllis’s disappointingly unemployable white husband, had grown up.⁵ Rhys herself had briefly visited Antigua during the voyage out to Dominica: just long enough to decide that it was both flat and dull: “not a beautiful island.”⁶

Questioned in her later years about the writer whose literary fame—a little to her mortification—by then far outshone Phyllis’s own, Allfrey gave nothing away about Rhys’s drinking and her temper, preferring to recall the ballet treat her friend had bestowed on a thrilled seventeen-year-old Maryvonne by sweeping her daughter off to Moira Shearer’s stage debut in Endymion in 1939. Phyllis did, however, let slip one incident which betrayed—as she was perfectly aware when she disclosed the episode—Rhys’s enduring social insecurity. Invited to dine at Paultons House one night, Phyllis had dropped some casual remark about the commonness of the name Smith; a standoff about what was perceived to be a deliberate put-down of the Tilden Smiths (and perhaps even of the Hugh Smiths) had ended with Rhys’s angry refusal to cook dinner for their honoured guest that night.⁷

It would seem obvious for Rhys to have discussed with Phyllis her brother Owen’s mixed-race children, as three of Phyllis’s uncles, including Willie, Rhys’s childhood beau, had been rebuked or exiled for fathering children by island women. The likelihood is that Rhys preferred to discuss Owen’s illicit relationships with Eileen Bliss. Unlike Phyllis, who never forgot the social superiority of Sir Henry Alford Nicholls to a mere Dr. Rees Williams, Eileen was a woman with whom Rhys could reveal and revel in being her own true self.

Rhys always described this as her favourite photograph of Maryvonne, her uncomplaining and long-suffering daughter. (McFarlin)

The initial approach had been made by Bliss, an admirer of Rhys’s novels who obtained a personal introduction by applying to Horace Gregory, a scholarly poet and translator who had successfully experimented with reading sections from Rhys’s prose work aloud to his American college students at Sarah Lawrence.^* In September 1936, shortly after the Tilden Smiths moved to Paultons House, the thirty-three-year-old Bliss paid Rhys her first visit. The friendship that instantly sprang up between the two women would prove robust enough to last a lifetime.

ELIOT BLISS (Eileen renamed herself in homage to George and T. S. Eliot) was born and bred to English parents in Jamaica before moving to England, where the publication of her second novel, Luminous Isle (1934), had been sponsored by Vita Sackville-West.

A volatile depressive who suffered from long periods of illness, Bliss was a lesbian who wore her hair in an unfashionably close-cut crop, and who wrestled, like Rhys, with yearnings for a Caribbean world in which, as both women were acutely aware by the time they met, they possessed no authentic home. “When I try to explain the feeling I find I cannot or do not wish to,” Rhys once confessed to her orange exercise book, although she was happy to describe in her memoir the desire she had felt to lose her own pallid skin tone along with her inhibitions when she watched, as a child, the dark-skinned carnival dancers leaping and prancing along the streets of Roseau.⁸

Phyllis Shand Allfrey regarded herself, always, as Rhys’s social and intellectual superior; Eliot, from her very first encounter with Jean Rhys, was a shamelessly adoring fan. Everything about the writer and her Chelsea home had been perfect, Bliss told Rhys’s first biographer back in the 1980s, from the green bedsheets to the lovely portraits of Jean that decorated the walls; from the evident devotion of a tactfully invisible husband to the tasteful hair rinse (blue) that complemented the chicly dressed Miss Rhys’s sapphire eyes. Rapturously, Eliot reminisced to Angier about the delicious Caribbean meals cooked by her hostess; ruefully, she admitted that Rhys often drank more than was prudent. Perhaps unwisely, Bliss also recalled that kind Leslie had always been on hand to scoop the ladies off the floor at an evening’s end and carry them safely off to bed. Further details were neither sought nor provided.⁹

“GREAT IS THE truth, and truth will prevail,” Rhys inscribed in the copy of Quartet which she gave to Eliot Bliss, echoing the dog-Latin motto she had once drunkenly scrawled for Eliot across a bedroom mirror at Paultons House. This was Rhys’s abiding creed: to tell the truth. She saw it as her only chance to draw upon and survive the growing darkness within her: “the bitter peace” that she would describe in Good Morning, Midnight as standing very close “to hate,” and even, to death.¹⁰ The feeling was there; what eluded Rhys still, in the summer of 1937, was the way in which to give form to that theme.

“It’s hard to harbour illusions in a room by the month hotel.” That line might have come from Good Morning, Midnight, in which Rhys’s ageing avatar hides from the cruel eyes of Paris in just such a room. Rhys herself had read it in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s first novel, published in 1932. Voyage to the End of Night became one of her touchstone books; it was one of the few that she would always keep close to her.

Céline’s reputation as a racist bigot has obscured the wit, humanity and elan of his earliest work. Celebrated for the dazzling originality of Céline’s style, Voyage to the End of Night takes its readers into the depths of Paris and its heights. From the gloomy grey piers of the old encircling city walls, up to a Walpurgis Night fantasy above Sacre Coeur, out to the bravura description of the Seine and its fleets of tugboats with which the novel ends, Céline reinvented a Paris that Rhys drew upon as she created her own extraordinary version of a city that is both real and imagined. But it may also have been Céline’s use of a compellingly intimate narrator’s voice that Rhys was hearing as she began to think of how Sasha should speak. Fiercely; bitterly; wittily; suspiciously: it was Céline’s Bardamu who taught Rhys the difficult art of shifting moods in the space of a sentence.

Diary of a Country Priest, the novel written in 1935 by one of Céline’s greatest admirers, Georges Bernanos, exerted a more direct influence on the creation of Sasha’s personality than elements of Rhys herself. Recommending one of her most cherished French books to a literary friend in 1953, Rhys quoted Bernanos on an author’s need for scrupulous honesty. “Il faudrait parler de soi-meme avec un rigueur inflexible”—“It’s essential to be inflexibly truthful about oneself”—the lonely parish priest writes in his self-excoriating diary. Rhys’s patron saint was Teresa of Ávila, with her clarion call to rise above despair; the priest’s touchstone is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who preached the doctrine of universal grace. “Grace is everywhere,” are the young priest’s dying words; reaching up for the final embrace of a sinister lover whose white dressing gown is insistently compared to a priest’s robe, Rhys’s narrator is allowed to find her own cruel form of grace in death.

Rhys went to Paris alone in the autumn of 1937, while she was still planning her unwritten novel. She was just in time to catch the tail end of the International Exhibition that was housed in and around the new Palais de Chaillot. Today, the 1937 world fair is best remembered for Guernica, Picasso’s passionate elegy for the massacre—in the annihilation of an entire town—of his Basque compatriots. At the time, the crowds were drawn to an art-deco railway pavilion and a hangar-like Palais de L’Air, rather than to Le Corbusier’s city of the future by Porte Maillot, or the looming symbols of Nazi Germany (Speer’s gigantic tower crowned by eagle and swastika) and of Soviet Russia (two massive farmworkers). Rhys arrived in October, just as the fair was starting to close down. She returned to London with a portrait of a melancholy-eyed banjo player painted by a new friend, Simon Segal: the Russian-born émigré had sold everything he put on show in Paris in 1936 to a single buyer, an achievement which Rhys’s novel fondly recorded for her “Serge Rubin.” But Rhys also brought back to London a unifying image for her book. The International Exhibition provides a ghostly backdrop to a key scene in Good Morning, Midnight, but what is on show instead throughout the novel is Mrs. Sasha Jansen, formerly “wild Sophia”: the woman who—ludicrously, unflinchingly and entirely self-aware—escorts the reader to the dreary, predestined setting for her death.

Marya Zelli died at the end of Quartet; no hope gleams from the knife-like band of light that shines under Anna Morgan’s door at the end of Voyage in the Dark. Older, better-educated and superficially more worldly than her predecessors, Sasha Jansen is shown sleepwalking through a dying world—Rhys was not oblivious to international events—towards an equally bleak conclusion. (“So good night, Day!” is how the second stanza of Emily Dickinson’s 1838 poem “Good Morning, Midnight!” ends, in a gloom that leaves no room for doubt that it has reached its terminus.)

Rhys herself evidently knew Dickinson’s work well. Mrs. Jansen never mentions the poem, but it’s made apparent that she’s aware, from the moment that she chooses a hotel that overlooks a dead-end street (“an impasse”), precisely where she’s headed. (“Quite like old times,” the room seems to jeer. “Yes? No?”¹¹) The question Sasha faces is merely of method: how to reach her own dead end without too much indecorum, without too many of the sobbing fits that can never bring adequate relief. Her survival of a difficult past has evidently owed more to luck than to will: when she speaks of the good fortune of being saved (“rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river”).¹² Sasha already knows that “the real thing,” when it comes, will be when no friends are on hand to help: “When you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter.”¹³

Raw-nerved herself, Rhys endowed Sasha Jansen with her own paranoia. Everything and everybody becomes Mrs. Jansen’s cold-eyed judge. A clock, seeming to belch, giggles at her; windows distort into sneering eyes. It’s a shock to discover that she, in her once elegant fur coat (the coat from Vienna was becoming Rhys’s literary trademark), has faded into the shabby old soak perceived by others as “la vieille”: age haunts her like a vengeful spectre. Mirrors are as pitiless as the judging gaze of strangers: “Fly, fly, run from these atrocious voices, these abominable eyes. . . .”¹⁴ But Mrs. Jansen always holds the advantage over her perceived judges. Sometimes, she uses a witty form of mockery to strike back. “He arrives,” she comments of the man who will cause her to be sacked from her job at a fashion house, “Bowler-hat, majestic trousers, oh-my-God expression, ha-ha eyes . . . I know him at once.”¹⁵ Sometimes, as with the quietly spoken Rhys herself, Sasha’s anger knocks the reader backwards with the force of a physical blow:

One day, quite suddenly, when you’re not expecting it, I’ll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains. One day, one day . . . One day the fierce wolf that walks at my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out . . . One day, one day. Now, now, gently, quietly, quietly . . .¹⁶

While it’s not difficult to identify the resemblance to Rhys in Mrs. Jansen’s savage self-knowledge and the violence of her imagination, it’s naive to attribute to the author herself what Judith Thurman once interestingly described as a “squalid complicity” between Rhys’s narrator and Sasha’s predators: “their company, their protection, their money—in exchange for the pleasure she can give them as a victim.”¹⁷ Another early feminist critic, Judy Froshaug, proved equally illuminating when she praised Rhys’s uncanny understanding of minds that teeter on the border of insanity: “women who spend their lives balanced between despair and a sort of frantic hopefulness, women alone, women who beg to be loved but expect to be rejected.”¹⁸ For this aspect of Sasha, Rhys was drawing upon the darkest aspect of the only person of whom she knew enough to tell the truth: herself.

While Mrs. Jansen’s final days in Paris place her at an unquestionable distance from her creator, elements of Rhys’s own experiences are apparent throughout the novel. An account of Sasha’s loss of her baby boy enables us to glimpse how deeply Rhys grieved when her own son perished. The retrospective narrative which comprises Part Three of the adroitly structured four sections of Good Morning, Midnight summons up all the tenderness, innocence and anxieties of Rhys’s early married life with Jean Lenglet (the Dutchman Enno Jansen in the novel) in Paris and at The Hague.

Beyond all this, however, it’s rash to read Good Morning, Midnight as an artless account of Rhys herself, or even as a vision of the woman she feared she might become. Like her predecessors, Sasha Jansen is, rather, that ideal surrogate memorably posited in Rhys’s private exercise books as the damaged spirit to whom we can all relate: “the I who is everybody.” The casual reader might suppose that Rhys—who relished her comforts and liked pretty surroundings—had visited the Paris Exhibition while spending her nights among the brooms and mops of the servants’ floor at a down-at-heel hotel. (“Quatrième à gauche, and mind you don’t trip on the hole in the carpet. That’s me,” says Sasha.”)¹⁹ The likelihood is that Rhys stayed with a disapproving but always loving friend. Germaine Richelot is recognisable in the novel as Sidonie, whose kind attempt to find her hard-drinking friend a suitable room is interpreted by thin-skinned Sasha Jansen as condescension. (“God, it’s an insult when you come to think about it!”²⁰)

Deceptively concise—a mere 190 pages—Good Morning, Midnight reveals better than any other of Rhys’s novels the chasm that divided Jean’s chaotic life from the disciplined clarity of her writing. Behind Good Morning, Midnight, even more skilfully concealed than in Voyage in the Dark, lies the wealth of a cultivated mind. “Belle comme une fleur de verre” . . . “Belle comme une fleur de terre,”²¹ the words Sasha casually summons to describe two young fashion models, first appear in a poem by the surrealist writer, Robert Desnos. Rhys’s startling image of mascara-fringed, staring eyes, set on a whirling wheel of lights, is placed towards the end of the novel, presaging Sasha’s self-sought death. It derives from Man Ray’s Les Larmes (1932), the Paris-based artist’s close-up photograph of a heavily lashed eye weeping glass tears. Sasha’s long nocturnal strolls remind us of Rhys’s admiration for Baudelaire, Céline and George Moore, in whose finest novel, Esther Waters, she had read of the “strange mingling of enchantment and alienation that people experience in the city streets.”²² Rhys herself was also recalling the wanderings of the ghostly woman at the centre of Nadja, André Breton’s avant-garde novel of 1928. Rhys, not Sasha, was quietly referencing both Bernanos’s gift of universal grace to his dying priest and Molly Bloom’s celebrated monologue in Ulysses, in the final affirmative that the less literary Mrs. Jansen whispers as she reaches exaltedly up from the darkness of her bed for the last time: “Then I put my arms round him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: “Yes—yes—yes . . .”²³

A Beckett-like vein of black comedy and occasionally, pure slapstick, provides a steady counterpoint to the vortex of Jansen’s descent. Its presence is evident from Rhys’s opening page, when Sasha encounters a woman cheerily humming the tune of “Gloomy Sunday” while reading its score and tapping out the song’s rhythm on the tabletop. In 1939, Rhys didn’t need to inform readers that the melancholy Hungarian hit song of 1932 (later recorded by Billie Holliday) was known as “The Suicide Song.” At times, the jokes in Good Morning, Midnight are delightfully silly: “Very light,” remarks a chambermaid as she flicks on the switch in a sombre little room that faces an exterior wall. (Jansen had requested “a light room.”)²⁴ “They add, of course, a macintosh,”²⁵ Sasha quips when describing the penchant of Englishmen for making love while fully dressed. René, the gigolo with whom Mrs. Jansen develops an unexpectedly satisfying relationship, describes to her a house so grand that even the lavatory chain, when pulled, plays a tune. “Rich people,” he sighs. “You have to be sorry for them.”²⁶ Dropping her guard for just one moment, Sasha laughs with him, not at him. Briefly, their author permits two characters to enjoy a moment of perfect harmony.

BACK AT PAULTONS HOUSE early in 1938, Rhys began work on the novel almost at once. She kept at it for just under a year. Simon Segal wrote to urge his new friend (it’s unclear whether they had become lovers in Paris) not to despair and to keep in mind Baudelaire’s words about the strength born of grief. “Moi aussi je souffre souvent—toujours, beaucoup, croyez moi,” he comforted her. “Mais je l’aime, cette souffrance, car elle seule ne me trahit jamais, me donne courage et la belle colère . . .” [‘I too suffer often—all the time, and deeply, believe me . . . But I love my suffering, for alone of all things it never betrays me, it gives me courage, and my blessed rage’].²⁷ Rhys’s magpie mind seized upon the quotation and compulsively twisted it into another maxim, muttered by Sasha as she sits alone with her ghosts in her room, after turning down a promising teatime date at the Dome: “La tristesse vaut mieux que la joie” (“So sadness has it over joy”).²⁸

Distractions were few, but it was impossible, living in London in 1938, to be unaware of the shocking events that were taking place in Europe, or of the growing inevitability of war, something that can only have darkened the mood of a woman whose only child lived for much of the year on the Continent. Neither Rhys nor her daughter attended the funeral of Rhys’s Aunt Clarice, who died that year, but Maryvonne still enjoyed the long school holidays she spent travelling and camping with Leslie and her mother in Scotland, Wales and—just the once—Ireland: holidays on which her volatile mother, with her writing set to one side, always seemed to be happy and relaxed. Maryvonne would also remember 1938 as the year in which she was finally introduced to her mother’s wistful sisters: Minna, by then suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease, was being looked after in Acton by the same sturdy nurse who had nursed Minna and Brenda’s mother, and who still shared their home. It’s unclear whether Maryvonne also met luckless Owen and his hardworking wife, or her great-uncle, Neville, husbanding his frugally issued pennies up in Harrogate.

Replying years later to one of Good Morning, Midnight’s most ardent admirers, Rhys recalled that ending the novel had been her greatest challenge: “I tried and rewrote and rewrote but no use.” A bottle of wine had, so she airily claimed in 1956, produced the solution “from Heaven knows where” in the form of “the Man in the Dressing Gown.”²⁹ It’s a warning never to take writers at their word about the mysteries of the creative process. In fact, the sinister role that Sasha’s top-floor neighbour would play had been woven into the fabric of Rhys’s novel from its opening pages, when his “immaculately white robe” presents him both as “the ghost of the landing” and “the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion.”³⁰ His significance as a bringer of death is intentional, and clear.

Always a perfectionist, Rhys was reluctant to let go of her novel. Furious arguments took place. At one point, having threatened to destroy the manuscript, she hurled Leslie’s typewriter out of a window. Smith only dared carry the pages to the waiting publisher, Michael Sadleir of Constable, after his wife had fallen asleep. When Sadleir sent a contract for her signature, the couple were still quarrelling, or so Rhys would enjoy telling the story to close friends.³¹

Published in April 1939, on the eve of war across Europe, Good Morning, Midnight received dismal reviews. In America, it was summarily rejected and remained unpublished until late in Rhys’s life. Jean Lenglet, who admired the novel enough to translate it into Dutch, secured his former wife a valuable new critical admirer in Victor de Vriesland. In France, however, both Lenglet and Rosamund Lehmann’s brother John failed to find Rhys a publisher. Editors at Plon and Stock were not alone in raising their hands in horror: “le sujet (en ce moment surtout) effroye tout editeur”—“The subject matter (especially at this time) appals them all”—Lenglet wryly reported to his former wife. In England, Frank Swinnerton expressed his distaste for a novel which neither Norah Hoult nor Rebecca West, two of Rhys’s most loyal admirers, were prepared to review. “Oh dear—how sad, how painful it is to read,” Violet Hammersley protested to Rhys on 22 May.³²

Today, Rhys’s fourth novel is regarded by many as her finest work. Touchingly, the only two men who seem to have recognised Good Morning, Midnight as a work of genius at the time of its publication were its author’s husbands, both present and past. Home comfort was not enough. Almost thirty years would pass before Rhys would feel able to relinquish a novel into the hands of a publisher.

A FEW PERCEPTIVE reviews might have made all the difference to the career of Jean Rhys. In 1938 she had begun to collect ideas for a next novel. The fascinating evidence survives, both in a group of fictional recreations of her childhood that she scrawled within a much-used black exercise book, as well as in a seven-page typescript dating back to 4 December 1938. Revised over a period of almost three decades, “Mr Howard’s House” was typed on the onion-skin reverse sheets of what seems to have been Rhys’s final draft of Good Morning, Midnight. Here, in the cold cruelty of “Mr Howard,” and in a troubling dream of sacrifice and rejection, were planted the seeds of Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys called this group of fictionalised childhood memories, simply “Creole.”³³

Rhys’s return to Dominica in 1936 had stirred up many of her old memories. Buried deep within Good Morning, Midnight, one of Sasha Jansen’s strangest recollections is a reimagining of fourteen-year-old Gwen Williams’s encounters with her parent’s married friend, “Mr Howard,” in the Botanical Gardens at Roseau:

A man is standing with his back to me, whistling that tune and cleaning his shoes. I am wearing a black dress, very short, and heel-less slippers. My legs are bare. I am watching for the expression on the man’s face when he turns round. Now he ill-treats me, now he betrays me. He often brings home other women and I have to wait on them, and I don’t like that.³⁴

Unpursued in Midnight, this same trauma of sexual coercion resurfaced in the notes for “Creole”; it is possible that the account that Rhys gave here of her abuse by “Mr Howard” caused an older Rhys protectively to scribble across the top of “Creole”’s opening page: “Don’t on any account,” and then, with unexplained relief: “Thank God.”

The episode which follows directly on from “Mr Howard” in Rhys’s exercise-book notes towards “Creole” reveals that, long before Rhys began work on her fifth and final novel, she was pondering the injustice done by Charlotte Brontë to Mr Rochester’s first wife, a “mad” Caribbean heiress, in Jane Eyre. Her emotional return to Dominica in 1936 had provided a possible title from her voyage across the treacherous waters of the Sargasso Sea.

Rhys had first read Brontë’s novel as a schoolgirl at the Perse. She read it again in 1938. Pondering “Creole,” Rhys began to blend elements of the sinister Mr. Howard with “Raworth,” her own interpretation of Edward Rochester. Privately, she set down her idea of a troubling dream in which a young girl sees herself in bridal white, trustfully following a beckoning gentleman into a forest. Within the wood, without warning, the man turns on her; his face is “black with hatred.” The dream ends abruptly as the girl’s mother rouses her daughter from sleep.

Over three decades later, following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys acknowledged that she had embarked upon a first version of that novel (provisionally named “Le Revenant”) before the Second World War, commenting that Leslie had been very excited by what he then read. In October 1945, Rhys confided to Peggy Kirkaldy that she regarded “Le Revenant” as “the one work I’ve written that’s of much use.”³⁵

“Revenant” is generally taken to mean somebody who has returned from the dead: a zombie. All that survives from another idea Rhys had in the late Thirties, “Wedding in the Carib Quarter,” is a one-page plan of headings for chapters. A hint of that vanished work’s transgressive content survives in the words Rhys scrawled across the head of the page: “& a fearful warning too! That was! It went for keeps.” She added what seems to have been a similar warning to her future critics and biographer: “Attention Miss! Or Madam. No playing around with ME.”³⁶

“Le Revenant” vanished—ripped up during a marital squabble, Rhys would sometimes claim—but it’s significant that she squirrelled away two chapters for future use. One contained the dream encounter in the forest which had found its first form in the notes towards “Creole.” Eventually, that dream would play a crucial role in Wide Sargasso Sea.

HOLIDAYS HELPED ASSUAGE the bitter disappointment with which Rhys read the reviews of Good Morning, Midnight in April 1939. Following a visit to Wales and a brief summer sojourn at Taplow, a sleepy little town beside the Thames, she and Leslie returned to Chelsea. Seventeen-year-old Maryvonne was staying with them when war was announced by Neville Chamberlain on 3 September. Offered the choice of remaining in England or rejoining her father, she opted for Holland. Appreciative though she was of Leslie’s kindness and of her mother’s affectionate impulses, Maryvonne’s first language was Dutch and her first loyalty, at a time of potential crisis, was to the father she adored.

The farewells between mother and daughter were not dramatic: in the early autumn of 1939, nobody could imagine what horrors lay ahead.

*Gregory evidently appreciated the kinship to poetry in Rhys’s prose. His students were fortunate; her work is best experienced when read aloud, either in English or French.