18

An End and a Beginning (1964–66)

“Disaster seems to be so much her element.”

—Diana Athill to Alec Hamer, 3 March 1966¹

RHYS’S CAPACITY TO endure hardship, ill health and mental breakdowns was remarkable and would remain so until the end of her life. On 28 July 1964, the same day that her brother wrote despairingly to Diana Athill about the remote chances of the novel ever being completed, Rhys wrote to her daughter from the Exe Vale Hospital to announce that, despite having felt “rather rotten for some time,” she was now on the mend.

Gruesome stories about Britain’s recently nationalised asylums in the 1960s aren’t hard to find, but Rhys was not insane and—as earlier at Holloway prison’s psychiatric wing—she was treated reasonably well. By 2 September, defying medical advice to convalesce, Rhys was back at her bungalow and hatching plans to travel to London. No mention was made of staying with Selma Vaz Dias after their falling-out; instead, a Kensington hotel was booked by Diana Athill, who also made plans for a celebratory lunch with her author. Determined to keep the visit short, Rhys left Cheriton accompanied only by a small suitcase and her latest revisions to the efficient Mrs. Kloegman’s typescript.

The day after Rhys’s arrival in London, she had a heart attack. Giving Diana the bad news, the hotel in Kensington reported that Rhys had almost died. She spent the next month in a west London hospital; visitors included her cousin Lily Lockhart, a worried Maryvonne, and Esther Whitby, who had not forgotten the stubborn old lady she’d met in Devon. Selma, anxious to make legal her informal agreement with Rhys, gained only a whispered apology from a patient who felt “too rotten” for a business discussion.² Visiting the hospital on that same day, Diana Athill later claimed that she heard Vaz Dias describe their mutual friend as a former prostitute. While it’s reasonable to suppose that Rhys had occasionally accepted cash for favours when she was hard-up, would a singularly broad-minded woman really have described her stricken friend in such a way? Might Selma merely have suggested a link between Rhys and vulnerable, desperate Anna Morgan at a time when she herself was adapting Voyage for radio? Whatever was actually said, it gave Rhys’s forceful editor a reason to turn against Vaz Dias for good.³

Rhys’s condition was serious—she would require heart medication for the rest of her life—and the process of recovery was slow. Writing to Diana Athill from a pleasant nursing home at Caterham in Surrey towards the end of the year, Rhys mentioned a bundle of corrected pages for Part Two (the honeymoon section which is set on Dominica) that had been left behind at the bungalow. Fearing that the long-awaited novel might never reach completion, Athill asked Edward Rees Williams to collect whatever he could find and bring it to London for her to edit. Presented by him with a jumbled bagful of indecipherable pages (Rhys took an almost wilful pride in the fact that nobody but herself could read her drafts), Miss Athill conceded defeat. The bag of papers was silently returned to Cheriton after Edward’s visit to his sister’s sickbed. Rhys was never told.⁴

By the end of January 1965, Rhys was installed at the Caroline Nursing Home in Exmouth, a seaside town within easy reach of her brother’s home at Budleigh Salterton. Complaining to Maryvonne on 25 February about Edward’s thoughtlessness at expecting her to share a room with two strangers (economy had played its part), Rhys sounded what would become a wearyingly familiar note. How much she would have preferred to pay a loyal daughter to become her mother’s nurse! Surely Job Moerman could spare his wife in a time of such maternal need?

Rhys had not lost her wits, but her health remained precarious. John Smith, the agent found for her by Vaz Dias, felt uneasy when a commanding Selma instructed him to prepare a formal written contract between herself and his elderly, ailing client. Cautioned by Smith against signing anything she did not entirely understand, Rhys nevertheless readily put her signature to what now became a legal agreement. Rhys was no businesswoman; she never saw anything wrong with rewarding her friend’s endeavours. Only on the subject of “Wide Sargasso Sea,” as the novel was now known to all but a stubborn Selma (still clinging to the abandoned title “Mrs Rochester”), did she remain inflexible. Nothing—not a page, not a word—was to be sent to Miss Vaz Dias until the work was complete, and until she herself had authorised the action.

By March 1965, Rhys had returned to Cheriton. Her neighbours were kind. Forthright Mrs. Raymond carried her letters to the post; Mrs. Stettiford and Mrs. Greenslade took turns to cook Rhys’s lunches; bunches of spring flowers were left by well-wishers at the bungalow door. If she felt strong enough, Alan Greenslade was always ready with his taxi to drive her over to Tiverton, where Max still lay, unspeaking, scarcely conscious of his grim surroundings. His wife’s dutiful visits to the hospital became increasingly rare.

Low in spirits and struggling to continue work on the novel, Rhys received news from an unexpectedly ebullient Selma. While it did not surprise her to learn that the actress’s adaptation of Voyage had been rejected by the BBC (Rhys herself had never been able to see the novel as a radio play), Jean was delighted to hear that her friend’s waning stage career had received an unexpected boost. A controversial new tragi-comedy called The Killing of Sister George was due to go on an extensive try-out tour before opening in London. Beryl Reid and Eileen Atkins were to play the leads as a bizarrely dissimilar same-sex couple: Selma Vaz Dias was cast as their neighbour Madame Xenia, a comic clairvoyant. The role was just what she wanted; life was on the up!

In the summer of 1965, the two old friends were independently pulled into terrible downward spirals. While Selma was enduring the considerable humiliation of appearing, night after night, in what felt to Sister George’s beleaguered cast like a doomed production (Frank Marcus’s treatment of butch lesbianism, however entertaining, did not go down well in the provinces), Rhys’s spirits also plunged, and for reasons she could not explain. Terrified of being returned to the asylum, she retreated into silence. It would take almost a year for her to feel able to refer to “the perfectly awful time between March and October last year.” It had been an experience, she would confide in 1966 to a sympathetic Olwyn Hughes, which “I wouldn’t live again for millions.”⁵

Almost no evidence survives of that long, black summer in Devon. Edward, himself nursing a dying wife, was possibly unaware; concerned letters to Rhys from Diana and Francis were left unanswered. A hint of the depth of Rhys’s unhappiness finally emerged in a frantic August appeal to Maryvonne (“please if you can come”) from a mother who admitted that she had become too sad even to write. That in itself, Rhys wrote, was perhaps the worst part of what had befallen her.⁶

Maryvonne became her mother’s sole confidante during an interval of darkness which Rhys described to her daughter on 15 September as like living in a nightmare. By October, somebody had persuaded Rhys to visit a doctor. Armed with new medication (no more scarlet pills), the seventy-five-year-old author struggled to pull herself together with a new regime of early nights and a pre-dawn start, fuelled by strong tea and a nourishing pack of cigarettes.

It helped. Gradually, Rhys became cheerful enough to start weaving fantasies about an entrepreneurial new career for her deft-fingered daughter: why should Maryvonne not make the fortune she lacked (the unfortunate Moermans had remained penniless ever since their return from Indonesia) by opening her own Quant-style boutique! Rhys was only half joking when she put in an early request to be made her own special dress, a very last one, pretty as the ones in Vienna that she had once so adored. Rhys had always believed that beautiful clothes brought her good luck: might the solace of a new outfit restore her will to write? Inspired, she summoned the obliging Alan Greenslade to take her on a clothes shopping visit to Exeter, where she invested in a smartly fashionable trouser suit.⁷

Superstition; a new outfit; different pills: whatever achieved it, the spell had been broken. By 15 November, a relieved Diana Athill was in receipt of a fresh batch of revisions and inserts. Responding, she complimented Rhys on being a “perfect” writer. Athill’s admiration had grown all the more heartfelt for witnessing the struggle Jean Rhys had endured to complete a novel that would ultimately contain no more evidence of effort than the glitter of light on dark water:

Diana Athill at her last home in Highgate, two years before her death. The smile and bright clothes marked the point at which she had decided I was worth her time. (Author picture)

“Do you think that too,” she said, “that I have slept too long in the moonlight”?

Her mouth was set in a fixed smile but her eyes were so withdrawn and lonely that I put my arms round her, rocked her like a child and sang to her. An old song I thought I had forgotten:

Hail to the queen of the silent night,

Shine, shine bright Robin as you die.

She listened, then sang with me:

Shine, shine bright Robin as you die.⁸

“I SPY A STRANGER,” one of Rhys’s most troubling and brilliant stories about madness, was published for the first time by Art & Literature in January 1966: its warm reception heralded what promised to become a remarkable year. Writing to Francis Wyndham for the first time in several months, Rhys (still unaware of her friend’s role as a literary adviser to the magazine’s board) proudly passed along the joyful news that the magazine had purchased three more of her stories from the 1940s: “The Sound of the River,” “The Lotus” and “Temps Perdi.” Rhys’s happiness was increased by the fact that Art & Literature paid unusually generous fees.⁹

Signs were emerging that the hard work put in by both Francis Wyndham and Diana Athill to raise awareness of Rhys’s writing was paying off. Back in the 1960s, the publishing world remained small and clubbable; while Francis plotted with the kind and well-connected Sonia Orwell at Art & Literature, Athill made use of the same social network to ensure that Rhys would be in line for prizes and awards. It was she who approached the widely loved publisher Jamie Hamilton, an influential figure who had known Rhys ever since the publication of Quartet. Horrified to learn of the financial difficulties amidst which the elderly writer was apparently producing a masterpiece, Hamilton immediately agreed to act as her sponsor. The result, as Diana happily announced to Rhys on 15 February 1966, was that she could now rely upon receiving an annual payment of £300 (worth only a little under £5,000 today) from the Royal Literary Fund.

Grateful though she was (Jean wrote an appreciative note to Hamilton, following an affectionate letter from Leslie Tilden Smith’s former employer), Rhys was too engaged in the last stages of revision to pay much attention to events outside the novel. Diana, like Francis, would often be consulted about the best way to tell Antoinette’s unhappy story. Rhys herself took the decision, at this late stage, to rip up a scene describing the Thornfield house party. In Brontë’s novel, the house party takes place while Bertha Mason is locked away in the attic; for Rhys, writing from Antoinette’s perspective, it was not only a distraction, but unsuited to her own and discrete version of Mr. Rochester. Out it must go, reduced to Antoinette’s incurious awareness of “strange people in the house . . . laughing and talking in the distance, like birds . . .”¹⁰ The novel was almost done; just a few more days were needed . . .

However deeply immersed in her work Rhys was, she must have been growing aware that the literary world had started to wake up to her existence. Olwyn Hughes, without mentioning that she was the sister of the reclusive widowed poet who lived near Rhys in Devon, had driven down to Cheriton towards the close of 1965, in order to present herself as an agent with excellent connections at the BBC. Selma Vaz Dias had achieved nothing in this particular line since her own visit to Devon in 1963; Rhys, blithely disregarding her previous agreement with Selma, instantly offered Hughes the right to represent both her short stories and her first two novels. Meanwhile, Arthur Mizener, the future biographer of Ford Madox Ford, declared his willingness to help get Rhys’s early novels republished in America. Gathering that an elated Jean now seemed to have acquired no fewer than four agents (Selma Vaz Dias, John Smith, Olwyn Hughes and now Mizener), Francis Wyndham prudently forbore to comment. Rhys, as he had learned, never listened when her spirits were high.

Trouble emerged, not from mild-mannered John Smith, but from the intervention of an unexpectedly furious Selma at what she perceived as an encroachment by Olwyn Hughes on her own legitimate right to represent Rhys to the BBC. True, there had been a signed agreement, but it had led to nothing, Rhys reassured a puzzled Miss Hughes on 25 February; a little guiltily, she added that poor Selma wasn’t well. What about a compromise arrangement, one by which Selma could be given first reading rights of any stories that Olwyn could place with the BBC? And, of course, she must have a share of any payments. “I will write to Selma tomorrow,” Rhys promised, confident that she could dispel her old friend’s rage.

The anger with which Vaz Dias greeted Rhys’s proposed defection to Olwyn resulted in part from her own misfortunes. Resoundingly booed from Bristol to Hull and beyond in The Killing of Sister George, Eileen Atkins and Beryl Reid gamely stuck by Marcus’s play until—during its early London run-up—a carefully selected gay audience finally got the joke. A deadly provincial flop was transformed into one of the hottest tickets in town (and, eventually, a long-running hit). But Selma had been unable to cope with the strain of being jeered at, night after night. By the time the play crawled into London, another actress was playing Madame Xenia. Sister George would become a milestone in the ascent of Reid and Atkins; for Selma Vaz Dias, it marked a bitter ending to a prestigious stage career. Apart from a new interest in painting, leading to several well-received exhibitions in Paris and London, Selma now had little left to boast about, other than her starring role as the first discoverer and proud representative of Jean Rhys.

Answering Rhys’s hopeful request that Selma should cede her agent’s role to the younger and more experienced Olwyn Hughes, Vaz Dias coldly reminded her friend of the legal status of their own agreement. A second pleading letter from Devon went unanswered. In Selma’s view, the matter was closed. She was not to be replaced.

Selma’s silence coincided with ominous news of Max. On 3 March, a distraught Rhys wrote once more, begging Selma to make peace with Olwyn and relating the Tiverton hospital’s warning that Mr. Hamer could die at any moment. “I keep a tight hold of myself,” she added pleadingly, “or I’d crack [up] completely—again.”¹¹

Alec Hamer and Maryvonne reached Cheriton in time to be with Rhys on 7 March, the date on which Max Hamer, a shrivelled ghost of his former sturdy self, died. The cremation—a large number of bouquets testified to Max’s popularity in the village—took place at Exeter two days later. The east wind felt sharp as a knife. Back at her kitchen table later that same day, Rhys wrote to Diana Athill. The novel was finished. A dream had revealed it to her as a baby, puny, but safely delivered and lying in its cradle. Rhys’s work was done: now, “I don’t dream about it any more.”¹²

Athill, visiting the bungalow at the end of March to make note of any final revisions before she herself carried the pages back to London, was astonished by Rhys’s calmness. Later, back at her cousin Barbara Smith’s home in Primrose Hill, where Diana shared a top-floor free flat with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord, Athill read “Wide Sargasso Sea” once again. Later still on that same night, she wrote to praise its author as “a rare and splendid creator.” She meant it. Talking to me in the last year of her life, Athill emphatically described Jean Rhys as the only “genius” she had ever known. I asked about V. S. Naipaul, another author she felt proud to have helped. Athill paused to consider before granting that “Vidya” was indeed “a bit of a genius. But not the real thing. Not like Jean.”¹³

And what was Jean’s reaction to Max’s death? Did his widow grieve? Writing to Diana shortly after the funeral, Rhys admitted only that she was finding it hard to believe that he was gone. She mourned him in her own way and on her own terms. It was during the bleak early spring of 1966 that, according to the Cheriton gossip tree, a few small boys gathered to laugh and throw stones at the little old lady whom they saw standing in the road outside Landboat Bungalows with a row of medals pinned across her chest. “Wings up! Wings up!” she shouted at the sky, before she shuffled out of view behind the high green hedge that screened her home from public view.

Fact or myth? It’s a strange story. Why would Rhys shout “Wings up,” when Max had served in the navy? Leslie had been a pilot in his youth. Jean Lenglet had helped the fliers of wartime planes to escape the Nazis. Had she conflated three lost husbands in a confused moment? Was she troubled by the giggling children, or even by the handful of stones they flung at her? Possibly. Possibly not. What mattered, seemingly, was the offering of a personal homage to Max Hamer, a man who, for all his faults, had never ceased passionately to love his wife.^*

*Rhys herself related this curious incident several years later to her friend David Plante, who included it in the account of his own relationship with the elderly writer which he published in Difficult Women (Gollancz, 1983).