17

The Madness of Perfection (1960–63)

“The difficult thing is the only worthwhile thing.”

—Jean Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, September 1963¹

HOW LONG HAD Wide Sargasso Sea been gestating within Jean Rhys? The truest answer might be all of her life. A more specific answer would be that Rhys’s first references to the Sargasso Sea and its depths, beneath a rank cargo of floating, brownish weed, date back to 1936, the year she returned to her homeland, Dominica. At Bude, memories may have been triggered by a similar brownish weed that still floats on dark water above what Rhys described as a “weir” separating Rocket House from the little resort’s tidal beach.

In the autumn of 1960, just after the Hamers’ move to Cheriton Fitzpaine, when gently pressed about the progress of her novel, Rhys sounded a note of cautious optimism. “It may go better here,” she wrote to Francis Wyndham (who had by then left André Deutsch to work for Queen magazine).²

Wide Sargasso Sea’s rebirth at Bude in 1957 had coincided with Max’s deterioration in health. Having suffered what seems to have been a first stroke in 1958, he grew much worse in 1959, during the couple’s final months at Rocket House. The subsequent move to Landboat Bungalows had brought no improvement; it wasn’t long before Max was having to spend weeks—and sometimes months—at the nearby hospital in Tiverton (formerly the town workhouse) and in its recovery wing for convalescents, the Belmont. National Health Service care for the elderly was far from perfect in 1960s Britain. Inevitably, Max’s growing unhappiness affected a wife who still loved him. Slapping down a well-meaning but occasionally tactless Diana Athill with less than her usual courtesy, Rhys once snapped back that—whatever Miss Athill might suppose—Max was “not a bundle of old rags to me—he is Max. (Nice. Was. A stoic.)”³

In December 1960, contemplating what would become a typical Devon winter—with a sick husband, a view across vacant and waterlogged fields and icicles hanging by the bathroom wall—Rhys valiantly joked to Maryvonne about being perceived as a comic old eccentric, one who might scandalise her daughter by suddenly showing up in Rotterdam in a bright red wig and purple dress.^*

To Selma, whose career by then had begun to ebb, Rhys argued that sadness (“the shadow of light as it were, this black melancholy”) was the necessary price of life and experience. “I know it so well, my God, it goes everywhere with me—but almost despair my dear,” she added. “Though never quite.”⁴

Although disheartened by the lack of easy access in Cheriton either to books or whisky (“Woe. Woe.”), Rhys’s spirits were lifted by Francis Wyndham’s good news in the new year of 1961: the Sunday Times and the TLS, when reviewing Winter’s Tales, the annual anthology in which Francis had managed to place one of a clutch of stories Rhys had sent him, had both praised “Outside the Machine” as an exceptional work. Reassured, she sent Francis her revision of “Let Them Call It Jazz.” The story was still in her handwriting: the experiences of a mixed-race woman in Holloway prison hadn’t seemed prudent material to share with any local typist, even back in Perranporth (where Rhys had tried to recruit Maryvonne as an overseas secretary), and certainly not in conservative Cheriton. Understanding her concern, Francis—who rarely performed such a service for a friend, however gifted—typed it out himself.

Rhys’s fierce dispute with the local farmer about his obstructive fence had opened the way for a new friendship when Alwynne Woodard stepped in to make peace. The vicar’s calming visits had helped Rhys to resume her writing. By the beginning of the autumn of 1961, she had grown confident enough to show—and even read aloud—the opening of her work-in-progress to her brother-in-law. The orderly Alec Hamer, while shocked by the chaos in which Rhys habitually wrote—“it’s the way I work—always,” she explained to Francis on 11 October—had liked what he heard. Nevertheless, as Rhys admitted, the novel remained a long way from completion. Each week, so Francis gathered, she formed the intention of despatching a chapter to London. “But. Well, but—”⁵

Wyndham, while pleased by the evidence that progress was being made, was disturbed by the news that Rhys was in low spirits. “I’ve been seeing a lot of the collective face that killed a thousand thoughts lately,” she admitted in this same October letter, “and sometimes there is blue murder in my wicked heart.”⁶

Rhys chose not to tell Francis Wyndham that she had again been drinking heavily. Within a day or so of writing to him, she had ripped up a chapter of the novel. Alarmed by one of her lightning outbursts of rage—when angered, the ageing Rhys could still spit, bite or scratch a perceived opponent—Gladys Raymond (a postmistress who lived in one of the Landboat bungalows) summoned the vicar.

It was this visit which had led to Alwynne Woodard’s decision, after reading some of Rhys’s handwritten pages, to help their author in any way he could. By 17 October, Rhys was cheerfully telling Wyndham about her renewed determination to “fix the book up, write it legibly and sooner than you’d believe.”⁷ The cause was some “wonderful” pep pills that a sympathetic doctor—presumably the helpful vicar’s own physician son-in-law—had recommended.

Mandatory drug regulation was still in its infancy during the early 1960s. Jean Rhys was not the only creative person who became innocently addicted to prescribed anti-depressants and amphetamines: Selma Vaz Dias suffered noticeable and adverse effects after being given “Marplan” (an anti-depressant) by the controversial psychiatrist William Sargant.⁸ From the first, Rhys spoke gratefully of the “bright red pills” and the immediate surge of energy—she compared the sensation to flying—that they produced. In December 1961, she relied on them as she struggled to cope with a double blow. It was while Rhys was facing her husband’s first protracted absence (Max was referred to Tiverton Hospital for examination and rest by the same kindly doctor who had prescribed her medication) that sad news reached her from Holland. Jean Lenglet, the father of her only child, the fascinating, brave and literary-minded man whom she had loved most enduringly, the loyal supporter of her work long after their marriage had ended, was dead. Although long anticipated, the shock of his loss was deeply felt by Rhys at a time of actual and emotional isolation. Pills helped; in need of more, she had only to ask for a repeat. When Max was released from hospital at the end of December—a concerned Edward Rees Williams had been paying regular visits to his sister during her weeks alone at Landboat—Rhys welcomed him wearing a bright red dress to match her uplifting scarlet pills.

It’s impossible to know how much the improvement in Rhys’s spirits resulted from her new medication, but by the spring of 1962, despite bad flu and a harsh winter that had frozen all the pipes and flooded the streets of nearby Tiverton, she was back at work on the novel. Doubtless, she had also been cheered by the knowledge that some of her finest stories were at last appearing in print. Alan Ross was now editing the London Magazine, subsidised by his rich and cultured wife, Jennifer Fry. “Let Them Call It Jazz” had appeared there in February, while later in the year—following its long disappearance within the magazine’s office files—the rediscovered story “Tigers are Better-Looking” was finally due for publication.

Alan Ross unwittingly provided Rhys with a fresh source of stimulation for the novel she was at last identifying regularly as “Wide Sargasso Sea.” As part of a collection of commissioned essays about how various writers had found their vocation, Ross encouraged Rhys to contribute a brief article on her early years in England. Provisionally titled “Leaving School,” the piece would evolve into one of Rhys’s most directly autobiographical stories, “Overture and Beginners Please,” while laying the ground for her long-planned memoir. Ross had promised a generous fee. More importantly, the subject matter had the unanticipated effect of forcing Rhys to confront her own first response to Jane Eyre.

Charlotte Brontë’s novel had been a set book at the Perse School in Cambridge—half a century ago—when Rhys first read it. Even in her seventies, Rhys still remembered with pain how she herself had been nicknamed “West Indies” and treated by her fellow pupils as “a Savage from the Cannibal Islands.”⁹ A hurtful parallel was easily established by thoughtlessly cruel schoolgirls between an easily riled young “Savage” from Dominica and Bertha Antoinette Mason, bred in Jamaica and crudely portrayed by Brontë as a red-eyed and bestial creature who “snatched and growled like some wild animal.”¹⁰

Mining her memories of the Perse for “Leaving School,” Rhys thought often and hard about the crass injustice of Brontë’s representation of Bertha Mason. Rhys did not, as she explained in several long letters to Francis Wyndham, deny that calculated alliances were historically made between English fortune-hunters and Creole heiresses, or that some of those unfortunate young brides had proved to be emotionally unstable. Her own identification was with Bertha’s role as an outsider. “Creole of pure English descent she may be,” Rochester remarks of Antoinette, “but they are not English or European either.”¹¹

Unstated but implicit in Rhys’s letters to Francis Wyndham and Diana Athill in 1962–63 was the growing evidence that the writer’s own delicately calibrated mental stability increased her empathy with Antoinette (or “Bertha,” as Antoinette’s husband in Rhys’s novel inexplicably insists upon renaming her). A hint of the depths and complexity of Rhys’s feelings emerges from the fact that her own private title for Wide Sargasso Sea for a long time was “Before I Was Set Free.” Freedom, for the twenty-year-old Antoinette, is to be gained only when she dreams of leaping from her husband’s blazing roof into the waiting arms of Tia, her dark twin and nemesis: “. . . I saw the pool at Coulibri. Tia was there. She beckoned to me. And when I hesitated, she laughed. I heard her say, You frightened?”¹²

“Bravo!” wrote Rhys in a letter, after describing her heroine’s dream of a self-willed death. “You must earn death,” Jean had instructed herself in her diary at the Ropemakers’ Arms. Here, in the final pages of her novel, as she transforms Bertha Mason’s gothic death-plunge into an act of courage, Rhys and her character appear to merge into a single being. “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do,” Antoinette asserts in the book’s last lines as she wakes from a dream of setting Thornfield on fire. The words she uses offer an unmistakeable echo of those in which Rhys would regularly pledge her own solemn purpose and vocation: to write and—like Bernanos—to write with unflinching honesty about the only truth she knew. Her self.

WRITING HER NOVEL still felt “like pulling a cart up a very steep hill,” Rhys sighed to Maryvonne in March 1962. By now, however, she had at last secured access to a typist who was prepared to take dictation—a new experience for Rhys—while helping to transcribe her shambolic pages of manuscript.

Alwynne Woodard had been the negotiator of this new arrangement. While taking bottles of whisky to Rhys’s cottage to add cheer to their long and often daily chats, the vicar had realised how much of his new friend’s time was taken up by the difficulty of revising almost indecipherable handwritten drafts of her own work. During the autumn of 1961, Woodard thought he had discovered a solution. Morris Brown, an aspiring television playwright, had rented Pond Cottage, a stone-walled farmhouse at nearby Witheridge, as a quiet occasional retreat for himself and his wife while he worked on a life of Jesus for the BBC. Katherine Brown, marooned on an isolated Devon hilltop, had time on her hands. Intrigued by Woodard’s accounts of a local author who was at work on a remarkable novel, she offered to act as Miss Rhys’s unpaid typist.

All began well. In December 1961, Woodard conducted Rhys to the Browns’ farmhouse. The couple were warm and welcoming; Jean, gloved, hatted and smiling, was at her courteous best. An arrangement was set up for day-long visits, during which Rhys read aloud from her handwritten draft. A patient and efficient typist, Katherine Brown admired what she heard enough to suggest introducing Rhys to their Yorkshire-born friend Olwyn Hughes, should she ever need an agent (a recommendation which Olwyn herself would follow up some four years later). Less wisely, she and her husband began contributing ideas to the novel-in-progress. This was unacceptable. In September 1962, Rhys sheepishly admitted to Francis Wyndham that her latest handwritten submissions were the result of a row after the well-meaning Browns had started “suggesting this and that—I just ran away (as usual!).”¹³

The winter of 1962/63 proved to be one of the coldest on record; trapped in a small, cold house with thin walls, the Hamers quarrelled furiously. Early in April, Max’s doctor despatched his patient to a quiet clinic on the south Devon coast. “Whatever you call me I love you and only you and always shall,” a forlorn Max wrote in the only note to his wife which she chose to preserve.¹⁴

Jean Rhys, throughout that harsh winter and bitter spring, continued recklessly popping red pills, washed down with whisky while she tried to combine work on her novel with a long first draft of the autobiographical “Leaving School” for the London Magazine. Writing belatedly to thank Eliot Bliss for her welcome Christmas gift of cash, Rhys admitted that she had come “damn near a complete crack up for the first time in my life.”¹⁵ One unfortunate outcome of that “crack up” seems to have been that Rhys—having renewed the connection—finally lost the services of her friendly typist.

No clear account exists of what went wrong with the convenient arrangement that Alwynne Woodard had set up with Katherine Brown. Writing to Diana Athill in May 1963, Rhys began by suggesting that Morris Brown had been shocked by overhearing her dictate Mr. Rochester’s seduction of his wife’s maid (described to Athill as “that very tame affair with the coloured girl.”) Less disingenuously, she admitted that Katherine Brown’s husband had annoyed her by his habit of walking in and interrupting her attempts to dictate. Angry words were apparently exchanged. Brown nobly agreed to banish both Christ and himself to a remote garden shed, but the initial warmth had gone. When Rhys attempted to renew the arrangement with Pond Cottage towards the end of May, she was fobbed off by the Browns with weak excuses.¹⁶

Given the circumstances, Francis Wyndham must have been astonished to receive at last and without warning what he described to Diana Athill on 4 May 1963 as “the makings of an extraordinary book.”¹⁷ The “makings”: Athill, while sharing her former colleague’s delight in the exceptional quality of the novel’s opening section (Mrs. Brown had typed out the chapters leading up to Antoinette’s marriage), agreed with Francis that the rest (the long honeymoon section set on an unnamed Dominica had not yet been written) remained unresolved. Publication, despite André Deutsch’s own unconcealed impatience—following six years of Rhys’s unfulfilled promises—would have to wait.

Max, sent home in May, suffered another stroke. Back once more at the Tiverton Hospital that June, her husband grew so thin and forlorn that Rhys, making one of her weekly visits, burst into tears. “How could the nurses be so inhuman?” she stormed to Selma Vaz Dias on 24 June; why wouldn’t they let the poor man smoke in bed? It comforted her to learn that life-enhancing, exuberant Selma and Alec Hamer—anxious to see his brother again after Rhys’s alarming reports about Max’s failing health—aimed to visit Cheriton together at the start of July. Diana Athill had meanwhile contrived a temporary typing solution: her younger colleague, Esther Whitby, had volunteered to go to Cheriton in late July, in order to work with Rhys on her latest revisions. Conscious of her author’s drinking habits, Diana Athill thoughtfully supplied Esther with an escape from unwelcome pressure; Mrs. Whitby, Athill imaginatively explained in advance, was suffering from a temporary allergy to alcohol.

Selma and Alec suffered from no such constraint; to Rhys, their visit from 3–5 July 1963 was an unqualified delight. Her guests—they stayed at the Ring of Bells, the prettier of Cheriton’s two inns—seemed to enjoy each other’s company as much as they took pleasure in hers, although Alec, finally visiting the hospital in Tiverton, was appalled by his brother’s decline. Rather than discussing progress on her current novel, as Rhys had dreaded, Selma wanted only to talk about her persistent hope of adapting, for a multi-voiced broadcast on the BBC, Voyage in the Dark.^†

Intent upon making Voyage sound authentic, Selma had brought along Clifton Parker, a suave and well-regarded composer for whom she wanted Rhys to sing the old Kwéyòl songs that flicker through Anna Morgan’s memory in the novel.

Mr. Parker put his considerable charm to good use during his visit to Rhys’s home. The tape recording that he made at Cheriton survives in the Rhys collection held at the McFarlin Library in Tulsa. Eerily and sweetly, a light and lilting voice quavers out into the dusty air, hesitates, then starts again. “It’s not quite right,” Rhys says. Her voice sounds plaintive; evidently, she’s on the verge of tears. Parker’s voice speaks gently, reassuring the singer about how well she’s doing. “You got every word absolutely right, except bon dieu,” Selma’s richer voice chimes in. “I know,” says Jean. “I know.” Comforted, she begins to sing: “My belle ka di . . . no, that’s not right.” Silence falls. The tape whirrs, crackling. Unexpectedly, the tremulous voice gathers new strength, before Rhys changes her tone and bursts into a rollicking ditty; the words tell the story of a bad, greedy woman from Grenada who’s being told to take her gold earrings, pack her bags and go home. “Doggee doggee go bone” runs the chorus and, halfway through it, Rhys bursts into giggles. “I don’t know . . . something like that . . .” She pauses with a question in her voice, hesitating, waiting for the approval that will surely come, like a child.

But she’s performing, I suddenly realise; she’s an actress, performing for an actress. And, sitting quite alone in the University of Tulsa’s dimly lit McFarlin Library, in the late afternoon, listening to the soft and charming voice of a seventy-two-year-old woman who is also—very definitely—conscious of a flattering masculine presence in the room, I find myself smiling in delighted recognition. “A siren” was how Francis Wyndham once described Jean Rhys; just for a moment, I understand exactly what he meant.¹⁸

THE SUCCESS OF Selma Vaz Dias’s visit to a friend she hadn’t seen for six years had much to do with the fact that—following three years of a shrinking stage career, illness and a period of depression treated by therapy and heavy medication—the actress appeared to be restored to her impulsive and charming best. Giddy with relief that she was not to be persecuted about her unfinished novel and well plied with whisky, Rhys thought nothing of signing a scrap of handwritten paper which assigned to her friend 50 per cent of any future payments for the use of Rhys’s work, together with the right to exert complete artistic control.

The financial division was unusual only in extending beyond Selma’s personal involvement;^‡ far rarer was the case of a writer handing over artistic control to a single person. At the time, in a blur of drink and euphoria, it all seemed to make perfect sense. In 1963, Rhys’s own name was still only known to an elite group of admirers; armed with her hastily scrawled signature, and still at ease in a world to which Rhys’s own connections were limited, Selma promised to become a zealous promotor of her less celebrated friend’s work.

And so—for a short time—Vaz Dias proved to be. Immediately after her return from Devon, an elated Selma began talks with the BBC about her ongoing adaptation of Voyage, while warning a naive Rhys not to go signing agreements with anyone until a suitable literary agent had been located by her truest friend. Finding one didn’t take long; within a fortnight of her Devon visit, Selma had persuaded John Smith of the well-regarded Christy & Moore agency—their clients included Georgette Heyer and George Orwell—to visit Rhys at Cheriton. A letter written by Smith on his return to London advised Selma to expect a percentage from the forthcoming publication in a Hungarian magazine of “Let Them Call It Jazz”; Rhys’s new agent evidently foresaw no difficulties with the financial division that had been—however informally—agreed between a pair of friendly ladies.

Shortly after Selma’s visit, her blithely announced decision to mould together two of Voyage’s most dissimilar characters caused Rhys to regret that impulsive relinquishing of her own right to artistic control. If Selma failed to distinguish between “Laurie”—a tough call girl whom Rhys, in 1963, compared to Mandy Rice-Davies, a star witness in the trial of Stephen Ward—and “Maudie,” a soft-hearted chorus girl aspiring to a quietly respectable marriage, what might she not do to destroy poor, half-formed Antoinette? Rhys’s pleas on behalf of Laurie and Maudie were ignored; so were the comparisons of herself to an anxious mother cat trying to protect her kittens with which Rhys resisted sending any part of the unfinished novel to her persistent friend. Rhys underrated Selma’s determination. “Mrs Rochester” was their baby, in Selma’s view, and Vaz Dias was determined to have her share in that precious infant’s future.

Selma had already left Devon when—following Rhys’s insistence—a greatly weakened Max Hamer arrived home from the Tiverton clinic on 11 July. “I do not forsake people,” Rhys wrote the following day to the daughter she had so often abandoned in orphanages. To Diana Athill she wrote that it was impossible to leave Max in a place where he was so unhappy: “Besides I miss him.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, and not only for her own sake, Rhys returned Max to the Belmont clinic for a few days at the beginning of August. She was about to be visited by Esther Whitby, an unknown editor from André Deutsch. Max, a proud man, would hate to be identified by a stranger as a mere bedridden invalid.

The morning after Mrs. Whitby’s arrival—the Woodards had offered to lodge Esther at the rectory—the vicar drove his guest up the narrow lane to Landboat Farm.

Almost sixty years later, Esther remembers her sense of shock that such a frail old lady could endure such a home: “the wretched little back-to-front bungalow was entirely charmless.” The visitor’s first day was spent in creating a working copy out of the litter of unnumbered pages that lay in scattered heaps around and about Jean Rhys’s chair. The second and third days were given over entirely to taking dictation as Rhys read in a tiny voice from the illegibly scrawled (and overscrawled) pages of manuscript. The intensity of Rhys’s quest for the perfect phrase was no less remarkable, in Esther’s view, than the obstinacy with which the author refused to relinquish a single page.²⁰

Back in London, Mrs. Whitby was eagerly interrogated. Selma Vaz Dias, invited to lunch with Diana Athill and Francis Wyndham shortly before her own summer visit to Cheriton, had represented Jean Rhys as a tall, thin, gothic-looking woman. (Selma’s bizarre account was almost unchanged from the one she had written for the Radio Times back in 1957.) Their faith in Selma’s veracity waned after Esther described a small, pale, white-haired and neatly dressed lady who cried often and lunched—if at all—on chocolates. Pressed further by Diana about Rhys’s eating habits, Mrs. Whitby thought she remembered having seen an unwashed egg cup by the sink. Their intriguing author apparently drank very little; she had not at any time—as Esther took care to stress—been drunk.²¹

Esther Whitby’s industry paid off; a month after her visit, a provisionally complete version of Part One of the tripartite “Wide Sargasso Sea” reached London. Rhys herself, however, was entering a period of acute paranoia.

The summer of 1963 was the first time that Rhys had been exposed to long periods of isolation while living within a watchful village since her unhappy wartime months at West Beckham. Writing to Selma on 6 September, she expressed her fervent longing for Max to return from hospital and help stave off “this terrible anxiety and loneliness.” As at West Beckham, it seemed that everything and everyone was against her: she felt convinced that she was “hated.”²² Maryvonne, urgently summoned from Holland, found her mother tearing up pages of manuscript and constructing barriers against invisible rodents (a detail put to good use later in Rhys’s portrait of lonely Miss Verney in “Sleep It Off Lady”). Edward, seeking a medical opinion, was advised that his sister was not insane, but in need of a rest-cure. Rhys agreed. “Je suis cassé” [sic] (I’m worn out) she informed Francis. A rest was all that was required.²³

Francis Wyndham did his best to help stave off the encroaching darkness. Accompanying his generous personal gift of a cheque for £100 (£2,100 today), intended to pay for a fortnight at a rest home, he produced what should have been a delightful piece of news. Art and Literature, a new international cultural magazine, was funded by Anne Dunn, the wealthy friend who had first introduced Wyndham to Rhys’s work. Now, Dunn and her editorial colleagues (John Ashbery, Rodrigo Moynihan and Sonia Orwell) were requesting something by Rhys for their first issue (March 1964). Francis’s suggestion that they should publish the opening section of “Wide Sargasso Sea,” together with an introduction written by himself to Rhys’s work, was received by the magazine’s board with delight.²⁴

Rhys’s reaction was disappointing. Ignoring the purpose of Wyndham’s cheque, she set it aside as a future gift for her hard-up and overworked daughter, out in Holland. The idea of a magazine’s publishing what she herself considered to be unfinished work goaded Rhys to a whole new level of hysteria. Innumerable revisions must immediately be made—but how? Should she attempt to continue working amidst the scandal and hatred that she firmly believed now surrounded her in Cheriton? Should she abandon Max (still in hospital) and accept Selma’s tempting offer of a quiet workroom at her comfortable Hampstead home? How (crescendo) should she find the time!

Haunted by worries about invading vermin, scandal-spreading neighbours, extensive revisions and the need to be on hand for poor Max, Rhys dithered. “We long to receive you into the bosom of our family,” Selma cooed soothingly from her London home on 21 November; five days later, however, she rashly instructed Rhys to bring with her the long-awaited extract from “Mrs Rochester.” Alarmed, Rhys backed off, pleading that she could only work at home; besides: “I am ill.”²⁵

A well-meant invitation soon developed into a battle royal; in the early spring of 1964, the projected visit to Hampstead was still being discussed when Selma abruptly accused her friend of betrayed promises, while an aggrieved Jean pointed out that her suitcase had been packed for the journey to London since before Christmas. The fault was not of her making, Rhys concluded in a tone that brooked no dispute: “the only definite dates were cancelled. By you. By wire.”²⁶ The sense of injustice was angry and mutual; silence descended between the two women for the next nine months.

Always meticulous, Rhys was still frantically correcting Part One of her novel and firing off entreaties for more time when John Ashbery wrote to explain that her latest list of changes had missed the new magazine’s deadline. The extract (edited by Sonia Orwell) was published in the March edition of Art & Literature; while it is close to the final version of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys had yet to introduce several key episodes, including the visit subsequently paid by Antoinette to her imprisoned and deranged mother. Wyndham’s accompanying introduction made mention of Ford Madox Ford’s admiration for Rhys’s style, while Francis himself drew attention to the fact that “the elegant surface and the paranoid content, the brutal honesty of the feminine psychology and the muted nostalgia for lost beauty, all create an effect which is peculiarly modern.”²⁷

The ground had been prepared: all that was necessary now was for Rhys to complete her novel. Jean’s valiant effort to meet that challenge was impeded by a despair that neither pills nor whisky could assuage. Max had spent the Christmas of 1963 in hospital; alone once more, his wife’s sense of being trapped within a hostile and judgemental community escalated into hysteria. Off in London, both Francis and Diana were besieged by wild, voluminous letters, a bombardment that they struggled to answer and did not always even bother to keep.

Once again, the understanding Alwynne Woodard came to the rescue. Early in March 1964, a distraught Rhys was carried off to the rectory and encouraged—to the considerable irritation of Woodard’s wife—to treat it as she would a hotel. As at the kindly Willis Feast’s Norfolk rectory, meals were left outside a cherished guest’s door; Rhys’s time was all her own. After dinner, escorted to Woodard’s study and snugly installed beside a crackling fire, Rhys talked about her novel. She had been missing male company; warmed by the vicar’s understanding manner and encouraged by his intelligent interest in her progress, she blossomed.

Diana Athill had already made the suggestion that Rhys should create a period of happiness for Rochester and Antoinette before an estrangement which, in the novel’s original version, had struck both Wyndham and Athill as too abrupt to carry conviction. Talking the novel through with Woodard, Rhys came to appreciate the shrewdness of Athill’s observation. Part Two, rewritten in Rochester’s voice and showing that he was initially consumed with passion—but never love—for his beautiful young bride, was first worked out during these pleasant evenings at the rectory. By the end of March, Rhys felt cheerful enough to satirise her slow progress to an anxious Francis by borrowing an apt line from Oscar Wilde’s best-known play. “I never knew anybody take so long to dress,” Algy twits his friend Ernest, “and with so little result.” (Rhys was by then aware that Francis’s grandmother, Ada Leverson, had been the playwright’s beloved “Sphinx.”)²⁸

That April, back at the bungalow, Rhys sat up all night, every night, either at the kitchen table or huddled in bed, navigating her way through the “wild sea of wrecks” that had floated into her mind in the form of the latest and most powerful of her spontaneous poems. Writing “Obeah Night”—so Rhys disclosed to Francis Wyndham on 14 April 1964, in a letter containing that long, remarkable work in full—had finally enabled her to look through the eyes of Rochester at his bride, the young woman whose mind forever flutters, like Rhys’s own, on the dark brink of madness.

Narrated by the man Rhys still called both “Rochester” and “Raworth,” “Obeah Night” is the self-aware poem in which Antoinette’s husband justifies his own cruel plan to lock his white Creole bride away, after her suspected transformation into a zombie. (“Did you come back I wonder,” Rochester asks himself after his anxious young wife visits her old nurse, Christophine, in order to obtain a love potion: “Did I ever see you again?”)²⁹

Later, Rhys would shift the cause of Rochester’s altered view of his wife onto the stories he is told by Antoinette’s malevolent older cousin. It’s from the embittered Daniel Cosway that he first hears tales of rumoured madness in Antoinette’s family;^§ tales, even, of her affair with an islander: “a terrible thing for a white girl to do” in those times, as Rhys explained to Francis Wyndham in that same impassioned letter of 14 April. “Not to be forgiven.”³⁰

By April, Rhys was living entirely within the world of her novel; the present-day world entered her letters rarely, when she grumbled at hearing dustbins being emptied outside. Weeds grew up over the windowsills. A kitchen chair was propped under the inside handle to the front door to keep well-meaning neighbours out. Max Hamer lay mute and unvisited inside the hospital that he would never again leave. His wife couldn’t bear even to take time off to buy herself food. She simply could not stop.

All the signs of another approaching crack-up are apparent in Rhys’s letters, as both Wyndham and Athill must surely have seen with dismay. “Yes I need a holiday,” she admitted to Francis in her long, wild letter of 14 April; “all this write write write all night and food such a bore,” she told Athill two weeks later. “Not so-o good.”³¹

Even under pressure, Rhys could prove surprisingly efficient where work was concerned. When Diana announced that she had found a competent typist in London, Rhys laid down the law, insisting that Mrs. Kloegman must always submit three copies, ready to be marked up with her own ongoing (and seemingly, never-ending) revisions. Advised that Deutsch intended to republish two of her novels, she somehow managed to complete a light edit of both Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight within a single week.^¶

Such moments of clarity were becoming rare and Rhys knew it. On 15 July 1964, she told Francis about having been “in a very blue mood lately,” with “awful pits of despair.”³² A few days later, she attacked one of her Landboat neighbours. Difficult though it is to imagine a small woman in her mid-seventies endangering anyone’s life, Rhys’s behaviour seemed crazy enough to raise the alarm. Edward was summoned for an urgent discussion by a concerned Alwynne Woodard. By the middle of July, acting on professional medical advice, Edward had reluctantly consigned his sister to the Belvedere clinic (formerly Ward 12) at the Exminster branch of the Exe Vale Hospital, still better known by its old name as the Devon County Lunatic Asylum. The decision had been “sad but inevitable,” Edward wrote to a dismayed Diana Athill. At this dark stage, he could not predict whether his sister would ever resume work on her novel. “But let’s hope . . .”³³

*Rhys just beat Jenny Joseph to it with her comic image: Joseph’s celebrated poem, “Warning,” with the now famous opening about an older woman wearing purple and a red hat, was published the following year, in 1961 (Jenny Joseph, Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 1992).

†It’s possible that Selma had been influenced by hearing the multi-voiced performance of Good Morning, Midnight on Radio Bremen in 1958.

‡In 1957, for example, Peggy Ramsay drew up what was then regarded as a standard contract, dividing 50 per cent of the rights to Tito Strozzi’s Play for Two between Strozzi’s translator, Smylka Perovic, and the adapter, Selma Vaz Dias, who became one of Peggy’s first clients (private collection).

§Rhys never forgot having heard such tales in her own family. It was said that one of her mother’s aunts had been “insane.”

¶Deutsch’s sudden interest in republishing the earlier novels before the appearance of Wide Sargasso Sea was prompted by Alan Ross’s interest in doing just that himself (possibly at the suggestion of Francis Wyndham, who was eager to build awareness of Rhys). When Ross dropped the project, so—until the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea had secured a market for their client’s work—did André Deutsch.