15

A House by the Sea (1957–60)

“The shadow is yourself that follows you, watching.”

—Jean Rhys to her daughter, Maryvonne, 14 January 1958, quoting from her own unpublished fragment of a children’s story for Maryvonne

Rhys’s view from Rocket House, Bude: the causeway which connects Breakwater Road to the Atlantic. What inspiration did Rhys draw from seeing views like this while she worked on early drafts of Wide Sargasso Sea? (A souvenir postcard owned by the author)

AT THE TIME that Francis Wyndham’s letter reached Jean Rhys, the Hamers had been living for three uncomfortable months at Rocket House, their new canal-side home in Bude.^* Rhys had been initially attracted by the little modern house’s romantic perch against a wall of black rock; just beyond it, the narrow strip of Breakwater Road broadens into a causeway of large, smooth stones, built to hold back a fierce and often dangerous sea. The large windows on the lower floor of Rocket House offered dramatic views across broad, sea-swept sands to a towering cliff and, set into the protective curve of a hillside, the town of Bude.

The move to Rocket House had started badly when Max slipped and cut open his head on a steep flight of stone steps leading up to Breakwater Road from an iron bridge that crosses the canal. In May, when Francis’s letter arrived at this challenging abode (the Hamers only remained at Rocket House for as long as they did because the rent was so low), Max was still slow on his feet and troublingly shaky.

Rhys’s excitement about her new home was short-lived. After three months at Rocket House, she began complaining to faraway friends and family—never to her West Country neighbours—about the house’s chief drawback for an antisocial woman. Bude, in the days when it was easily reached by rail, was a popular seaside resort. From May through until the end of summer, Breakwater Road—leading up to the pretty and popular cliff route to Widemouth—offered one of Bude’s favourite walking paths for holidaymakers and day-trippers. The windows which offered fine views across the beach also offered a chance for curious passers-by to peer in.

By 1957, many of Rhys’s friends had died. One of the few who remained was Peggy Kirkaldy, with whom Rhys had recently renewed contact, but Peggy had terminal cancer. Cheerful as ever, Mrs. Kirkaldy wanted to know how Rhys’s unwritten novel was progressing. “Dear girl you must do your book,” Peggy wrote, urging Rhys not to fight against the impulse to settle down to work: “it is not to be denied.” We no longer possess all the kind letters from Rhys in which, in turn, she tried to prepare her dying friend for the inevitable. “You comfort me,” Peggy told her on 4 September, adding, pathetically: “—I am so scared.”²

The late 1950s proved to be one of the most challenging periods in a life that was seldom easy for Rhys. True, Selma Vaz Dias’s broadcast had been widely heard and admired; true, it had inspired a brief flurry of interest and curiosity about an author widely assumed to be dead: “very tactless of me to be alive,” Rhys dryly commented to Selma in November 1957. “No savoir faire. (Dam [sic] little savoir vivre either.)’³ In 1957, Rhys herself was sixty-seven years old. She was poor, she was isolated—and she was burdened with the care of a seventy-five-year-old man whose health was failing. A friendship of the quietly nurturing kind that Francis Wyndham now began to provide offered her a lifeline.

Rhys was not a habitual preserver of other people’s letters: a shame, since her lost first exchanges with Francis Wyndham might have told us how much her new friend disclosed about the long history of his interest in her work. Wyndham’s introduction to it had come back in 1948, while talking with two artist friends, Anne Dunn and Lucian Freud; Dunn had read Voyage in the Dark in Paris, before reading it aloud (in Ireland) to an enthralled Freud and then sharing their excitement with Francis.⁴ Copies of Rhys’s novels had become rare during the postwar years, but in 1949, another close friend of Wyndham’s, Jennifer Fry, picked up for him (once again, in Paris) a used copy of Good Morning, Midnight, a novel to which she also introduced her husband, Alan Ross.

By the end of the Forties, a discriminating clique of admirers of Rhys’s work had formed (another fan was the novelist Julian Maclaren-Ross); encouraged by them, the twenty-six-year-old Francis Wyndham decided to draw attention to a forgotten—and possibly dead—writer, one whose work he had come to revere. His essay, “An Inconvenient Novelist,” published in December 1950 in Tribune, remains one of the shrewdest appraisals of Rhys that we possess and the first to point out how integral a blackly deadpan, self-decrying wit is to Good Morning, Midnight, the darkest of Rhys’s novels. Having hidden herself away in Wales after Max’s conviction, Rhys had been unconscious of that generous appreciation before she started, seven years later, to correspond with its author.

As meticulous as Rhys herself, and even more restricted in his output (a novel, a collection of essays, two books of short stories), Wyndham was a writer and editor who almost seems destined to have become Rhys’s staunchest ally. A carefully critical reader, he shared Rhys’s passion for French literature. (Wyndham’s Francophile great-uncle, Sydney Schiff, translated the last volume of Proust’s masterpiece under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson.) Having joined André Deutsch as a literary advisor shortly after the firm’s modest birth in 1954, Wyndham, by 1957, had persuaded Deutsch—as well as André’s long-suffering colleague (and former lover), the steely and intelligent Diana Athill—to publish the first works of another Caribbean writer, V. S. Naipaul. Much though Athill often later liked to claim the credit for discovering both Naipaul and Rhys, the original impetus had come from Francis; it was Wyndham, rather than Athill, whom Rhys would slowly learn to regard as her most trusted literary confidant.

An uncharacteristically dapper Francis Wyndham, teacup in hand. (Used with permission of James Fox)

Looking back on his long friendship with Jean Rhys after her death, Wyndham fondly recalled the shared—and sharply ludicrous—sense of humour which lay at the heart of his relationship with a woman easily old enough to have been his mother. Only in her correspondence with Francis—to whom amphetamines were as much a daily necessity as whisky had become to Rhys—could Jean feel free to be smartly flippant about her life in Bude. In one characteristic letter, she compared Carson McCullers’s celebrated novel to dismal Rocket House (a very sad former cafe indeed), before pondering how best to conceal a recent and substantial deposit of empty whisky bottles from public view. Diana Athill would prove to be patient, thoughtful and talented; (her well-received collection of short stories and her fine first memoir of a doomed wartime romance, Instead of a Letter, would be published before Wide Sargasso Sea appeared). But it was to Francis, between jokes and confidences, that Jean Rhys first began unfolding thoughts and ideas about how best to shape her own slow-growing novel, almost as if in conversation with a second self.

By March 1958, a year after the move to Rocket House, a little progress had been made with Rhys’s still untitled work. “Mr Wyndham” was informed that the first two parts would be set in the Caribbean, shortly after the abolition of slavery: “Part III England. Grace Poole, the nurse or keeper speaking.” The voices were still eluding Rhys, but she was evidently optimistic about the unwritten novel’s progress: “Can you give me this year?”⁵ Francis’s response does not survive, but it’s certain that he remained encouraging rather than directive. As a younger protégé of Wyndham’s would later explain, what really mattered was to earn his approval: “his praise, his excitement and his responsiveness to the book meant more than anything.”⁶ Wyndham’s responsive and unstinting support for what would sometimes seem to be a hopeless project meant everything to Jean Rhys.

The news that Francis was to leave Deutsch in 1959 was far from being the devastating blow that an apprehensive Rhys initially supposed. Employed for five years at Queen—where he doubled as both theatre critic and literary editor—before joining the newly formed Sunday Times magazine in 1964, Wyndham made use of his formidable array of friendly connections to operate as Rhys’s unpaid agent and publicist. Rosamund Lehmann’s brother John, editor of the London Magazine, was already himself a warm admirer of Rhys’s work. To Francis, it was clear that the publication in such a respected literary magazine of a handful of Rhys’s short stories—a genre in which he rightly felt that she excelled—would help to ensure a warm future reception for her still unfinished novel. For Rhys, the fact that John Lehmann was ready to pay her forty guineas for a single story would prove especially alluring.

The only other source of money to be looked for in hard times was the BBC. Even after the 50 per cent division of proceeds with Selma Vaz Dias (a division which both women considered fair), Rhys’s share of the performance and repeat of Good Morning, Midnight had been handsome. Jean may have wondered why Peggy Ramsay thought Selma (her client) should be identified as the work’s sole author for a German production the following year.^† What mattered in the immediate future was that Selma, possessed of invaluable contacts at the BBC, was willing to act as her advocate.⁷

These were still the honeymoon years of Rhys’s complex relationship with Vaz Dias. While she readily supported Selma’s plan to adapt another of her already published novels (Voyage in the Dark) for a radio performance, her friend’s persistent interest in the unwritten Wide Sargasso Sea was becoming more problematic. Rhys herself never doubted that what she was writing would be a novel, but Selma always insisted on seeing “Mrs Rochester” as a work for radio, with herself in the leading role. These contrary perceptions of what Rhys was engaged in doing are apparent in the ongoing correspondence between two strong-willed women; so is the fact that Jean was anxious to do almost anything to avoid a confrontation. Somehow, she evidently hoped, the predicament would resolve itself. Selma would adapt Voyage; Rhys, meanwhile, would complete her novel: all would be well.

Writing about her personal life to Selma, Jean confessed her despair about the dire living conditions (damp was the worst problem in a concrete-walled building) at Rocket House. Writing to her beleaguered daughter in Amsterdam, she struggled to sound cheerful. Job Moerman’s abrupt decision to leave his final posting to Surabaya in July 1957 had been well advised; a few months later, 40,000 Dutch citizens were expelled from the newly independent Indonesia by President Sukarno. The price of that hasty departure was the loss of Job’s employment and all sources of income, while treatment for Maryvonne’s recurrent lung disease incurred substantial medical bills. By 1958, when Job finally found work in Rotterdam, the Moermans were penniless; Maryvonne started working night shifts at a mail sorting office, while caring for a nine-year-old daughter and helping Jean Lenglet’s ageing Polish wife to nurse her ailing husband. (Lenglet never fully recovered his health, following his experiences during the war.)⁸

In the autumn of 1957, shortly before her hospitalisation, Maryvonne managed to save enough money for a short visit to Rocket House, just long enough for a relieved Jean to report to Selma that her long absent daughter was “nice and not a bit like her mum—thank God.”⁹ In her subsequent letters out to Rotterdam, Rhys stayed carefully light-hearted. Playfully, she lamented the absence of warmth on what she mistakenly called the “Cornish Riviera,” or else shared the wonders of a new hair cream with a daughter whose own thatch of light brown hair had begun to turn grey as she neared forty.¹⁰ Mocking her own folly, Rhys described her just reward for buying herself a cheap sundress to bask in an English summer: “at once the sun went in and a wind blew from the Arctic—(Good morning midnight!)’¹¹ Cheerfully, she relayed Max’s endearing naivety about her use of hair dye. “This morning the first thing he said was “Your hair is getting back to its natural colour. Thank heaven”! Natural!! So I shook the bottle and put on some more natural brown.”¹²

When thinking about her granddaughter, Rhys always identified little “Ruthie” with her own younger self. “About Ruthie, she’s there in my head all the time,” she told Maryvonne (much as Julia Martin had remarked of her own remembered childhood in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie). Learning in the spring of 1958 that a new school in Amsterdam would expose her grandchild to an unknown group, this sense of empathy overpowered her. “I hate them,” she wrote back to her daughter in April (meaning not friends, but groups) “and fear them like I hated termite nests at home.”¹³ On such occasions, Maryvonne refrained from comment. Perhaps, she understood how impossible Rhys found it ever to banish the memory of childhood terrors which time had magnified.

Surviving letters do not suggest that Maryvonne heard much about her mother’s new novel. Francis Wyndham, during the late 1950s, received sporadic progress reports. Selma, alone, was allowed an occasional glimpse of the truth. “I will not disappoint you,” Rhys had reassured her in the spring of 1958.¹⁴ Nine months later, she had settled into a bizarre but productive working routine: “One day drunk, two days hangover regular as clockwork.” The result—at last—was a first draft: “The first draft, you’ll think. After nearly two years.” Regrettably, no early draft survives.¹⁵

In March 1958, while asking Francis if she could defer submission for another year, Rhys had described the embryonic book as being divided into three parts, the first two of which would be set in the West Indies during the 1840s. By May 1959, she had changed her mind. Part Two had shifted to the attic at Thornfield Hall in which Antoinette Cosway, like Bertha Antoinette Mason in Jane Eyre, is eventually incarcerated. Rhys now envisaged this central section as an episode of ominous darkness: “‘the slow approach of night’ in that awful room,” Rhys wrote to Selma, casually misquoting Milton.¹⁶

Rhys’s dark vision of Part Two owed something to the atmosphere of gloom at home. Two years on, Max had not recovered from his plunge on the steep stone steps below Rocket House; in June 1959, Rhys gratefully assented to Selma’s offer to nurse him back to health for a fortnight at the hospitable Eglis’ London home, a suggestion which Max—he hated ever being separated from his wife—firmly declined.¹⁷ Instead, acting on the persistent prompting of her brother-in-law, Rhys offered Selma the more congenial task of acting as a literary advisor to the charming and quietly ambitious Alec Hamer.

Two years younger than his brother Max, and often confined to his London home by the need to care for a disabled daughter, Alec had kept well clear of the Hamers during Max’s imprisonment at Maidstone. Alec nurtured writing ambitions of his own, however, and it may have been the broadcast of Good Morning, Midnight which caused him to renew the fraternal connection. By January 1959, the relationship had grown friendly enough for Alec Hamer to offer to act—and to be accepted—as Rhys’s informal editorial advisor.¹⁸ Rhys clearly valued Alec’s judgement; he would be the first person permitted to read the first (lost) draft of Wide Sargasso Sea. When her brother-in-law asked for help in getting some of his own stories adapted for broadcasting, Rhys didn’t hesitate. Selma never did succeed in getting any of Alec’s works on air, but the two of them became close friends. “Fred”—the name by which Frederick Alexander Hamer was always known to Vaz Dias—became such a regular feature of Selma’s letters to Rhys that it’s tempting to wonder about the exact nature of the relationship between an aspiring London-based writer and a glamorous actress whose marriage (according to her daughter and granddaughter) had never been exactly monogamous. Certainly, when Selma visited her in the summer of 1963, Rhys thought it quite natural to suggest that she should bring along Alec, not her husband.

A pleasing distraction from Rhys’s struggle with the novel emerged towards the end of the summer of 1959; Francis was able to report that John Lehmann was eager to publish “Till September Petronella.” (It appeared in the January 1960 issue of the London Magazine.) The novel-length story Rhys based upon her awkward 1915 holiday with Adrian Allinson, Philip Heseltine and Philip’s girlfriend had already been drastically cut by Rhys. Heseltine had died back in 1930, but Rhys took care to protect the reputation of his surviving fellow pacifist and conscientious objector by pre-dating events to the summer of 1914. Francis, meanwhile, seized the opportunity offered by Lehmann to publish an accompanying glowing tribute to the story’s author. Sent a first draft of Wyndham’s introduction, Rhys offered only one proud correction: “I am not a Scot at all. My father was Welsh—very.”¹⁹

By December 1959, Rhys had returned to plotting (and re-plotting) her novel. Scant but intriguing evidence that she had consciously begun to connect her own Lockhart ancestry to the life of Antoinette Cosway emerges from the compelling fact that she suddenly sent Selma a Christmas clutch of annotated photographs of Bertrand Bay, dating from her stay at the Hampstead estate, in the north of Dominica, in 1936. It is from the ominously deserted huts of former slaves at “Bertrand Bay” that Antoinette and her stepfather, Mr. Mason, ride back at sunset to Coulibri, the house that will be destroyed by fire that night. The house at Hampstead, rather than the charred remains of Geneva, offered Rhys her blueprint for Coulibri, the troubled, atmospheric island home in which readers first encounter the young Antoinette. Progress, however gradual, was being made.

IN FEBRUARY, 1960, the Hamers left Rocket House for good. The final straw had come the previous spring when a local woman suddenly dug up all the pretty wild flowers that Rhys had loved to see growing close to her door. “Oh she’s a devil,” an indignant, nature-loving Rhys wrote to her old friend Eliot Bliss. “How glad I shall be to depart.”²⁰

Fifty miles south-west of Bude, along the north coast of Cornwall, lies Perranporth, the home of Winston Graham, who was putting the little seaside resort into his fourth novel about Poldark during the unhappy six months that Rhys and Max spent as his neighbours. Graham never met the Hamers, and thus escaped the potential difficulty of being entertained in a minute and pitifully inadequate house that poor Rhys once jauntily compared to a horsebox. Unheated, “The Chalet’s” sole washing facility was a small handbasin. Outside, cold March rain fell in driving sheets onto flat land which—as Rhys discovered with dismay—had recently been approved for a social housing development. A modest row of village shops lay half a mile away, at the far end of a muddy track across treeless fields.

This was not what advertisements for a sunny and warm garden home had led the ever-hopeful Hamers to expect. To Selma, Jean admitted that “a terrible weariness” was preventing her from working on the novel; to Francis, while hoping for his eventual opinion on “a chapter here and there,” she only sighed about the incessant wind and rain. Maryvonne, approached as a potential typist for the ten-year-old story which her mother had partly set at Holloway prison (John Lehmann, having accepted both “Till September Petronella” and “The Day They Burned the Books,” was eager to publish more of her work), heard about Rhys’s terror of causing a local scandal: “the people here are terribly narrow-minded,” Rhys confided to her daughter, “and they gossip like crazy.”²¹

Four months at Perranporth drove Rhys, in final desperation, to seek help. Edward and Gertrude Rees Williams, arriving in May after a testing hundred-mile drive from Budleigh Salterton on tiny, winding lanes, found the Hamers penniless and on the verge of collapse. Rhys was in tears, Max was ill and the Chalet’s roof was leaking.

Edward Rees Williams was not an imaginative man, but he did have a strongly developed sense of duty. Rhys was taken out to a comforting lunch in Perranporth by Gertrude, who then delighted her sister-in-law by buying her a pretty broad-brimmed hat; Edward, meanwhile, sat down for a manly chat with Max. Before returning home, Rhys’s brother gave her his solemn promise of help, an oath which he made good on within a month. By July, a home for the Hamers had been purchased on the outskirts of Cheriton Fitzpaine, a rural north Devon village lying within an hour’s drive of Budleigh Salterton.

Economy, as well as the need for rapid action, had influenced Edward’s purchase. Six Landboat Bungalows was a bargain only because it had recently been deemed unfit for habitation, a flaw which Edward promptly set out to remedy. Jean, learning that she would soon have her own kitchen and even a bathroom, grew as happy as a child. The yet unseen bungalow was immediately renamed “The Ark.” Joyful letters were despatched to Selma, Francis and Maryvonne about romantic plans to embellish “The New Jerusalem” with sumptuous bargain fabrics of crimson and gold. “I do think Edward has been kind,” Rhys enthused to Maryvonne in October 1960, adding what now became the mantra of her letters, that a perfect nest had been provided in which to complete the hatching of her novel.²²

The novel’s progress at Perranporth had not only been delayed by poor accommodation. In May 1960, just before Edward’s errand of mercy, Rhys had suggested that Francis might show the London Magazine “Let Them Call It Jazz,” “a bit of a crazy story” which she artlessly represented as a new work. A delay in revisions, together with the magazine’s dismaying loss (by Charles Osborne, an office junior with a bright future) of another submission, “Tigers are Better-Looking,” meant that neither story would appear in the magazine until 1962. In the meantime, Rhys’s spirits were lifted by the news that Francis had successfully placed another story, “Outside the Machine,” in a respected annual collection called Winter’s Tales. William Sansom, a writer whose style Rhys admired, had apparently sent Francis an enthusiastic letter about “Till September Petronella.” The poet and highly regarded founder-editor of New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson, intended to include Rhys in a new twentieth-century survey of world literature.^‡ Better still, over in the US, both Simon & Schuster and Viking had expressed an interest in acquiring Good Morning, Midnight.^§

“I don’t know how to start thanking you, but I do indeed feel so very grateful,” Rhys wrote to Francis on 31 May, before blithely announcing that she intended to set the novel aside and to work, instead, on a series of Caribbean stories set in the time of her childhood.²³ An old and frequently rewritten story about her father’s former friend, Mr. Ramage—eventually to be published under the ironic title “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers”—was now presented as a recent discovery among her papers.^¶

Francis Wyndham rarely put his foot down, but he did so now. On 14 July 1960, while still living at Perranporth, a chastened Rhys promised to desist. “I do understand that the book ‘Sargasso Sea’ is what is wanted,” she wrote. “As soon as I am safe and sound” (at the bungalow purchased by Edward), “I will work very hard and finish it. Not too late I hope.” As for writing a collection of Dominica-related stories: “I won’t talk about it any more.”²⁴

*“Rocket House” suggests that the site had originally been used to alert the local lifeboat service when a ship was in distress. The house still stands, above the broad canal along which mineral-rich sea sand used to be carried inland, to use as a fertiliser for fields.

†The 1958 Radio Bremen production was rewritten and shaped for performance by a large cast.

‡Grigson’s ambitious project seems not to have been completed.

§US interest evaporated and Good Morning, Midnight remained unpublished there until 1970.

¶Nine years later, Wyndham negotiated the story’s first appearance (as “My dear darling Mr Ramage”) in The Times Saturday Review, 28 June 1969.