19

No Orchids for Miss Rhys^* (1966–69)

“I’ve always hated personal publicity (Why necessary?). Only the writing matters.”

—Jean Rhys to Francis Wyndham, 21 July 1960¹

“BLOODY BUT UNBOWED,” was how Alec Hamer described his sister-in-law to Diana Athill shortly after Max’s death in March 1966.² Nevertheless, the shock had hit Max’s seventy-five-year-old widow hard. Only a miracle could save her now, Rhys informed a still irate Selma Vaz Dias on 18 March; to Maryvonne, who returned to Holland shortly after the funeral, she made a more direct appeal. “I am very lonely . . . perhaps you will be the miracle that will bring me to life.”³

Valiantly, given her economic circumstances, Maryvonne made three separate visits to England that year. Unable to commit herself to becoming her mother’s carer, as Rhys wished, Maryvonne thought that books might help to assuage sadness, especially since the travelling library van had stopped visiting Cheriton.

Maryvonne’s initial choice, A Moveable Feast, failed to please a reader who deplored the self-serving nature of Hemingway’s recollections of Paris; V. S. Naipaul’s exquisite A House for Mr Biswas, sent along by Francis, was greeted with more enthusiasm. Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (Athill’s choice, after second thoughts about the suitability of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) was pushed aside as Rhys gave thanks for the more welcome arrival of a £50 (£950 today) advance for Wide Sargasso Sea, with a further £200 to be paid on publication.

Athill had prudently reserved herself a room at the Ring of Bells inn when she visited Cheriton to gather up the completed “Sargasso” in March 1966. Entering Rhys’s bungalow for the first time during that brief descent on Devon, she was shocked. Brought up at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk—a secure world of nannies, ponies and family prayers—Athill found it impossible to imagine that a recently widowed woman in her early seventies (Jean had long since lopped several years off her true age) would wish to continue living alone in such circumstances. Rhys, always ready to condemn Cheriton to critical outsiders, initially welcomed well-organised Miss Athill’s offer to find her a more congenial abode. No time was wasted; by May, Diana was negotiating with the administrators of a new housing development at Chingford, a quiet community on the fringes of Walthamstow in north-east London. Sonia Orwell and Francis Wyndham both approved the scheme, while Edward Rees Williams generously volunteered to cover the required £1,000 deposit (£18,750 today). It occurred to none of them, even though Rhys clearly dreaded the move, that she actually liked being a hermit. “I was never very fond of a mob,” Jean admitted to her new confidante Sonia Orwell, in November 1966, adding that of late her attitude had grown more extreme: “I’m really afraid of most people.”⁴

Conscious that the Royal Literary Fund’s newly agreed annual payment of £300 would not go far in keeping Rhys from penury, the efficient Diana also managed to secure for her pet author the modest pension due to a naval serviceman’s widow. Sixty pounds a year wasn’t princely, but every penny mattered to a woman who was regularly going without meals in order to fund her weekly purchases from the village pubs. (“Whisky is now a must for me,” Rhys informed her disapproving daughter on 4 July, and she meant it.)

Wide Sargasso Sea was to be published in October. From April onwards, Rhys’s loyal support team united with Deutsch’s ebullient new publicist, the Viennese-born Ilsa Yardley, to plot a campaign that would ensure maximum exposure both for the book and its reticent author. Francis Wyndham, from his influential perch as a commissioning editor of contemporary culture for the new colour supplement at the Sunday Times, arranged for Rhys to have her first post-publication interview with Hunter Davies, author of the newspaper’s popular Atticus column. Sonia Orwell undertook to obtain coverage on “The Critics,” the best-known radio review programme of its day. Advance copies were personally delivered by Sonia and Francis into the hands of all the literary opinion-makers whom they knew, together with duplicates of the prescient appraisal of Rhys’s significance that Francis had published back in 1950 in Tribune. Recipients included Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, John Lehmann, Raymond Mortimer and Beatrix Miller, editor of English Vogue (and Francis’s friend since his days at Queen). The word was spread that a remarkable author had seemingly returned from the dead, bringing with her a masterpiece; a work of genius; everything, in fact, was done to ensure that Rhys’s name would reach every corner of London’s intimate literary world well before the day of Sargasso’s publication. Small wonder, then, that Diana Athill told Sonia Orwell on 10 October that Wide Sargasso Sea would go “splendidly,” or that Sonia shared Diana’s optimism about their “well-laid plans.”⁵

Selma Vaz Dias, as long promised, received an early proof copy from the publisher; on 30 July, John Smith independently sent an early copy to the formidable Peggy Ramsay, with news that the novel’s author was due to become the centre of “a little cult.”⁶ It’s unclear whether Smith was aware that Ramsay already represented Vaz Dias, who meanwhile hastened to send her own copy to the BBC, accompanied by her vision for “Mrs Rochester” as a radio play, starring Selma herself.

The BBC wasted no time in rejecting Selma’s proposal. Salt was rubbed into her wounds by a report from Rhys that Olwyn Hughes’s approach to Woman’s Hour had proved more rewarding. A radio abridgement was to be commissioned, but not from Selma; the central role of Antoinette Cosway was to be played by Nicolette Bernard, a talented actress who had recently starred in an award-winning television production, One Free Man, with Oliver Reed. For Selma, the final straw was the news that Elizabeth Hart, a young film producer, wanted to option After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. Hart did not wish Selma either to write the screenplay or to play Julia Martin.

Pleading to Selma on 16 September that she needed “all the cash I can lay my hands on,” while reminding her friend of the half-share in any profits that she would receive, Rhys’s tone became nervously conciliatory.⁷ Uselessly so; two months later, without consulting Rhys, Selma wrote to inform the disconcerted producer of Woman’s Hour that she alone controlled all Rhys’s dramatic rights. Nicolette Bernard was declared unworthy of the central role; enclosed with Selma’s letter was her own taped reading for the part of “Bertha,” the name that Vaz Dias still persisted in giving to Antoinette. An equally aggressive letter about the planned filming of Mackenzie was seemingly despatched to Elizabeth Hart.

Selma did not achieve her aim, but she did destroy Rhys’s moment of opportunity. Woman’s Hour hastily abandoned their project, while Elizabeth Hart withdrew her offer; John Smith, exhausted by the difficulty of dealing with an emotional Selma’s demands, threatened to resign as Rhys’s primary agent. Smith relented (Christy & Moore would still be representing Rhys well into the 1970s), but the future for Rhys’s work, in any form other than print, did not appear bright.

Solace was on hand. Wide Sargasso Sea was to be launched with a conspiracy afoot to ensure that Rhys should enjoy her first taste of public success. Edward offered to pay first-class train fares to London for Rhys and Maryvonne, while Diana booked, for the duration of Rhys’s London visit, a smart service flat in Belgravia. Twenty, Chesham Place (now the Hari Hotel) provided access to a pleasant restaurant and—crucially—an excellent bar. Maryvonne, back in England for the third time since Max’s death, passed along reassuring news of the lightened atmosphere at Rhys’s bungalow. It was all quite marvellous, she relayed to Diana. Rhys was so happy, and Maryvonne herself was willing to do whatever was required of her in order to ensure that everything went smoothly, from running errands to—in rueful acknowledgment of Rhys’s volatility—acting as her scapegoat.⁸

Rhys meanwhile busied herself with drawing up a list of the loyal friends whom she wished to receive finished copies of her novel. Gladys Raymond, the robust but goodhearted postmistress whom Rhys had attacked and whose boisterous young family were an ongoing source of complaint, ranked high on the list. Perhaps a proud novelist wanted a sceptical neighbour to know that she wasn’t only drinking when she sat up late at night. It’s more likely that Rhys’s complaints about Mrs. Raymond to urban friends masked a grudging respect for one of the few women able to match Rhys—expletive for expletive—in bandying insults.

No record survives of what form the book launch took or what Rhys decided to wear—pink, lilac and pale blue were the colours she now felt suited her best—but it’s certain that she prepared herself with fastidious care: clothes, like make-up and wigs, were increasingly deployed by Rhys as a protective uniform. The occasion was sufficiently crowded for Diana Athill to succeed in keeping a frustrated Selma at bay. Five days later, however, Vaz Dias made a lengthy journey from her new home in Golders Green for the express purpose of visiting Jean Rhys at Chesham Place. Rhys, holding court from her bed, struck her visitor as looking both “decorative and demure”; describing her impressions to Diana Athill, Selma added an ungrudging tribute to her old friend’s astonishingly girlish complexion: “What a skin!”⁹

WIDE SARGASSO SEA has become the best known of Rhys’s works. An immediate success is easy to assume, especially since an award led to its swift republication as a Book Club choice (adorned with the same crudely lush depiction of a bridal Antoinette imprisoned in a green jungle that André Deutsch had finally chosen—against Rhys’s wishes—for the cover of their first edition^†). Nevertheless, despite all the careful preparations, reviewers did not rush to embrace Wide Sargasso Sea. In the Guardian, Shusha Guppy’s sensitive praises for “a mirror in which women can see their own inner selves” were undercut by her odd misreading of Antoinette’s eventual fate as a consequence of her “predatory temperament.” In the Sunday Times, Kay Dick dismissed the book as an awkward annotation of Brontë’s novel: “only Jean Rhys’s grip on tragedy saves Wide Sargasso Sea from melodrama.” Alan Ross, accustomed to the harsher voice of Rhys’s wartime stories, condescended to the book in The London Magazine as mere “romantic evocation.” Nobody picked Rhys’s novel for their Christmas Book of the Year. Instead, Margaret Drabble chose Maureen Duffy’s The Microcosm (ahead of its day in its portrayal of life in a lesbian club), while Rebecca West opted for The Journal of Beatrix Potter. All perfectly nice, as Rhys ruefully reported to Eliot Bliss, but it seemed a shame that only one reviewer of the pack—Rhys didn’t say which—had appeared to grasp what her novel was about. Whisky, meanwhile, provided more reliable good cheer than sniping critics—“and what the hell! It isn’t what the doctor ordered.”¹⁰

What was it that an evidently disappointed author thought the reviewers had missed?

Rhys’s frequently declared intention had been to redress the injury done by Charlotte Brontë to the white Creole class of which Rhys herself was a member. But a prequel novel necessarily set in the years that followed the abolition of slavery had also forced Rhys to confront the question of her own family’s complicity in that act of human enslavement. Many of the stories upon which Rhys drew derived from her great-aunt Jane Woodcock’s unreliable family memories, but the book’s deep connection between Antoinette, a slave-owner’s daughter brought up in Jamaica, and Rhys herself, whose Lockhart forebears had owned and trafficked slaves on Dominica, is never stated. The critics of 1966, unconscious of Rhys’s family history and only vaguely aware of the small, remote island on which she was born, read her novel without subtlety. They saw it as a romantic and deeply felt reworking of an aspect of Brontë’s greater work. Today, the richer underlying themes of Wide Sargasso Sea are more readily perceived when firmly anchored within the book’s colonial context.

The novel’s best secret lies in its use of historical names as almost soundless evocations of a hidden past. Rhys’s quiet braiding into her narrative of the name of the dispossessed Bertrand family, first owners of Geneva and of Hampstead, seems to weave an imaginative union between “Bertrand” (the gentle “nameless boy” despised by Rochester) and Hampstead’s carefully identified “Bertrand Bay” as the settlement from which the novel’s Jamaican freed slaves emerge to punish their former owners. Grandbois, Rhys’s name for Antoinette’s honeymoon retreat on another island which is still patently Dominica, clearly references the old Kwéyòl name, “Gwan Bwa,” for the inaccessible refuges of the maroons or escaped slaves, deep within Dominica’s interior of mountains and rainforest. Locked away by a husband who scorns and seeks to banish her (“She was only a ghost. A ghost in the grey daylight”), Antoinette refuses to become another in that anonymous throng of nameless sufferers, that nearly inaudible incantation from the depths of the Great Forest.

Rhys devised subtle ways to suggest her family’s complicity in slavery and colonial persecutions. “Now we are marooned,” Antoinette’s mother says, after her horse is poisoned, it would seem, by “the black people [who] stood about in groups to jeer at her, especially after her riding clothes grew shabby (they notice clothes, they know about money).”¹¹ The use of that word, “marooned,” deliberately connects the Cosways to the slave community of maroons who, in Jamaica as in Dominica, fled for refuge to the island’s interior. Maillotte Boyd’s name—or so Rhys had implied in Voyage in the Dark—was picked from an authentic list of the house-slaves who had once worked for Rhys’s promiscuous forebear. We learn from Antoinette that her malevolent cousin, Daniel Boyd, has adopted the name Cosway in order to goad the planter who became his mother’s white lover;¹² the possibility lurks that Antoinette’s closest childhood friend, Maillotte’s daughter Tia, may be her own darker-skinned half-sister. When Tia tearfully throws a stone at Antoinette’s face after the torching of Coulibri, the Cosways’ home, she evokes the crime—the throwing of a stone that merely grazed the cheek of a plantation owner—for which a slave had been hanged in 1844. Alighting at Massacre for his island honeymoon, Rochester—his obtuseness is stressed throughout Rhys’s novel—never bothers to discover that the little harbour’s name records the slaughter by British and French troops of a hundred indigenous islanders in 1674. It’s not by chance that Rhys bestows the name of her father’s favourite small estate near Massacre on the “little half-caste servant” Amélie, whom Rochester casually beds in the thinly partitioned room next to that of his wife.¹³ Significantly, only the English outsider, Rochester, refers to the girl as a “half-caste.” His rape is not only of a vulnerable young girl, but of one of Rhys’s favourite homes.

Antoinette herself appears to be less a portrait of the young Jean Rhys than a distilled incarnation of Rhys’s intense memories of the fiercely beautiful island to which, in her imaginings, she forever sought to return. That should come as no surprise when we remember that Rhys, throughout the painful decade that she spent labouring over her final novel, was simultaneously writing and revising the handful of Dominica-related stories that would eventually be grouped together in Sleep It Off Lady (1976). “Heat”; “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers”; “Fishy Waters”; “The Bishop’s Feast”; “Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose” and the haunting little ghost story, “I Used to Live Here Once”: these were the fictional tales which helped Jean Rhys to confront and tame the enduring ghosts of her own past on an island in the East Caribbean.

HUNTER DAVIES, INTERVIEWING Rhys at Chesham Place for the Sunday Times in late October 1966, had been forewarned by Francis Wyndham that Jean Rhys was unusually reticent. Even so, ushered into the presence of a smartly dressed old lady (Rhys was now seventy-six), Davies was startled both by the hesitancy of her responses and the extreme quietness of her voice. Miss Rhys was “strange, shy, very dignified,” Davies wrote in the Atticus column published two weeks after the launch of Rhys’s novel; her book struck him—like herself—as interesting but odd. Rhys was better pleased by the accompanying photograph of herself in her heyday, dressed up for a day out in Vienna, than by the article’s jaunty heading: “Rip van Rhys.”¹⁴

Widely read at the time, that chatty profile by Davies enabled Joan Butler, a briskly practical widow who lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine, to connect his description to the pale old lady she had often seen tottering alone through the village, shading her face from the sun (or perhaps from inquisitive strangers) with a broad-brimmed hat. Calling at the bungalow for the first time early in 1967, Butler received a cautious welcome. Over time, however, a pattern of fortnightly visits enabled Joan Butler to help supervise Rhys’s welfare, while acting as a useful source of information on their friend’s well-being to Diana Athill and Sonia Orwell. Intellectually and politically far apart (Butler’s views were closer to those of the left-wing Max Hamer’s than his widow’s), Joan nevertheless established with Rhys an undemanding friendship on which the age-weakened writer would increasingly come to rely.

More welcome to Rhys than Joan Butler’s extended hand in the aftermath of her novel’s London launch was a typically generous letter from Sonia Orwell asking what sort of an all-paid winter holiday would suit her best. The invitation was thoughtfully accompanied by a bottle of whisky and followed up, to Rhys’s delight, by an elegant, tissue-wrapped dress in her favourite shade of pink. Rhys’s gratitude was profuse.

Until the launch, Rhys had known George Orwell’s widow only as an occasional and kind-hearted correspondent who had proof-read the section of Wide Sargasso Sea published in Art and Literature, along with several of her best short stories. Meeting Sonia in London in the autumn of 1966, Rhys felt instantly at ease with a generous, intelligent and opinionated woman with blue, slightly bloodshot eyes, a blazing smile and a love of Paris that equalled Rhys’s own. Their rapport was immediate; Rhys was never exposed to the more hurtful side of Sonia Orwell’s personality, or to that of the occasionally capricious and petulant Francis Wyndham. Francis and Sonia: here were two friendly allies who liked one other and understood Rhys well enough to be outraged when Athill suggested that pretty clothes were wasted on an old woman. A degree of frivolity—as they understood and Diana did not—was essential to Rhys’s happiness, and even to her work.¹⁵

Where Diana Athill excelled was as a wily and intelligent editor who fought Rhys’s battles with the skill of a fencing champion. All her considerable adroitness was required to negotiate a way past Rhys’s ill-considered—and, by now, greatly regretted—agreement with Selma Vaz Dias. Selma’s interference with Woman’s Hour had proven disastrous; on 1 December, an apprehensive Rhys confided to Athill that Selma, without consulting her, had approached the BBC with a revised adaptation of Voyage in the Dark. Remembering Selma’s casual attitude towards two of the novel’s characters—Maudie and Laurie—Rhys feared sabotage. “I know how easily my books could be utterly spoiled,” Jean wrote, forgetting that she had once remarked that she didn’t care what became of work that had already been published. She added that she no longer trusted Selma “very far. Not at all!!!” The following day, Rhys expressed bitter regret at having signed away artistic control over her own work; not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, she claimed that the agreement made with Selma was no more than a joke.¹⁶

Sonia Orwell, whom Rhys regarded as the kindest of all her literary friends.

To Selma, the agreement was solid and legitimate; the worry for Rhys’s publisher was that Vaz Dias’s interventions could easily destroy any chance of Rhys’s novels ever being staged or filmed. Action had to be taken. While Rhys’s thoughts were focused on a post-Christmas holiday at Brighton—Sonia promised her a hotel room stocked with new books (carefully pre-selected by Jennifer Ross), champagne and fresh flowers and (this came “tops” in Jean’s opinion) freedom to spend all day in bed—Diana made her move.¹⁷

It remained a source of pride to Selma that she was still represented by her old friend Peggy Ramsay, then London’s best-known theatrical agent. Conscious that no agent likes to relinquish their cut of a deal, Athill cannily opened negotiations by reassuring Ramsay on 2 February 1967 that the financial division agreed between Rhys and her client was not in dispute. Only in the tricky area of artistic control, Athill explained, did Selma need to be kept “right out of the matter.”¹⁸

Diana’s masterstroke was simultaneously to sidetrack Selma by deferentially seeking her professional advice on the possible future for Rhys’s works on stage and screen. “It seemed to me,” the flattered actress wrote to Ramsay on 5 February, while making plans to visit Peggy for further discussions about her own role in Rhys’s future, “that you were the most suitable and reliable person to deal with the situation.”¹⁹

Selma’s letter arrived too late; by 3 February, alarmed by Diana’s account of Selma’s reckless interventions, Peggy Ramsay had changed sides. Evidence of her abrupt shift of allegiances survives in an extraordinary letter fired off by Peggy on that same day. Writing to Bryan Forbes, she urged the film director to beware of “a madwoman” called Selma Vaz Dias, lest she should wreck his proposed production of Wide Sargasso Sea with her preposterous demands. A baffled Forbes wrote back to explain that he had neither read the novel nor considered filming it. He had no wish, having read her warnings about the alarming Selma, to make an offer.²⁰

Uninformed of these crafty intrigues, Rhys herself learned only from Diana that her worries were over; Selma had agreed to renounce authorial control. What Rhys did not yet know was that Diana had won her a powerful new ally. The impressive bulk of the British Library’s Ramsay files concerning Jean Rhys bears witness to the birth of an improbable but enduring friendship.

IT’S SURPRISING TO find that Diana Athill chose Jean Rhys for her confidante in 1967 about her ongoing and increasingly unsatisfactory love affair with Waguih Ghali, a volatile young Egyptian exile whose wittily original novel about life in Cairo, Beer in the Snooker Club, she had edited for André Deutsch. Grateful for Diana’s help over Selma, Rhys offered her lovelorn editor the consolation—Diana enjoyed literary social events as much as Rhys detested them—of accepting on her behalf the Heinemann Foundation Award, bestowed by the Royal Society of Literature, of which Rhys now became a belated fellow. The ceremony took place in July 1967. Reporting on the august occasion to Rhys, Diana mischievously passed along the news that she and Sonia had listened to Rebecca West going into raptures over a writer she had recently ranked below Beatrix Potter. When an old and celebrated poet got drunk and fell flat on the floor, nobody at this distinguished and mildly eccentric gathering had turned a hair.²¹

While stoical about the lame reviews of Wide Sargasso Sea, and professedly indifferent to the warmer critical reception of two older novels (Deutsch had cautiously waited until 1967 to publish Rhys’s revised editions of Voyage and Midnight), Rhys confessed to Sonia Orwell that she felt discouraged by the “tepid” response to the new collection of stories that were published during that same summer.²² Rhys’s disappointment was understandable; Tigers are Better-Looking contained some of her finest wartime writing, but critical interest in Rhys’s work was already—and to her frustration would remain—focused upon the connection between the author herself and the less literate, more victimised women about whom she wrote in her novels. The idea of “the Rhys woman” had begun to take root.

Overshadowing the summer of 1967 was the alarming prospect of leaving Devon for Chingford. Hints were dropped by Rhys of her growing unease. Maryvonne had repainted the inside of the bungalow, making it appear delightfully bright and cottage-like, her mother told Sonia, while sighing to Francis at the prospect of leaving her garden and view of the fields beyond.²³ To Diana, the vigorous organiser of her proposed new life (Diana had even begun to buy suitable pieces of furniture), Rhys meekly apologised for causing trouble. All would be worth it to see Rhys living nearer to London, her efficient editor smiled.

Rhys was unexpectedly rescued from her predicament by eighty-four-year-old Edward Rees Williams. On 7 October 1967, transparently relieved, Jean passed the news along to her mortified editor. Anxious about the fate of his own promised investment, Edward (“kind man,” his sibling cooed) had undertaken a five-hour journey from Devon to Essex in order to view the Chingford flat. He was guided around a show apartment before learning that no other had yet been built and that only Diana and he himself had expressed any interest in making an advance purchase. Rhys’s flat did not, as yet, exist.²⁴

Writing to Sonia in late October, Rhys openly rejoiced. The cancellation of her dreaded move was all she could have wished for: “my best plan now is to stay down here and take holidays.”²⁵ The hint was hardly subtle; Sonia promptly invited Rhys to bring her family along for a pre-Christmas holiday at her own agreeable house in west London. The offer was gladly accepted.

THE BIGGEST SURPRISE of 1967 was the news, announced early in the summer, that Raymond Mortimer and Margaret Lane had chosen Wide Sargasso Sea for the year’s top book award. Winning the £1,000 (£18,270 today) [W. H.] Smith Award guaranteed a prominent week-long display of the chosen novel in every branch of what was then Britain’s leading book chain. Telling Diana Athill on 7 October that the Smith award had really “got to” Maryvonne, Rhys wondered whether her daughter might be allowed to accept the prize on her mother’s behalf at the customary celebration dinner? The answer—to the disappointment of both Rhys and Maryvonne—was no. Rhys’s timid request for Selma Vaz Dias to be invited to the prize-giving dinner was similarly squelched when her publisher (André couldn’t stand Selma) instructed her to choose between Miss Vaz Dias or himself.

Back in the 1960s, the [W. H.] Smith Literary Award was as big an event as the Booker or a Pulitzer. Rhys was becoming quite famous. The experience was not one that gave her a superabundance of pleasure: “not fair!” she protested to Francis after being chased into her favourite hairdressing salon by an especially determined photographer.²⁶ Any happiness that she did feel was blighted by her awareness of the growing resentment of Selma Vaz Dias.

An autumn spent witnessing her friend’s success had hardened Selma’s determination to have what she regarded as her fair share of the spoils. She had rediscovered Jean Rhys; jealously, she scanned the papers for any article about Rhys that failed to mention the role that she herself had played in bringing Rhys into the public eye. In mid-December, while Rhys and her family (even Job came over from Holland for a few days) became the appreciative guests of Sonia Orwell at her house on Gloucester Road, Selma accused Francis Wyndham of exploiting Rhys’s name for personal gain, while neglecting ever to mention herself. It must have given Francis a moment’s quiet satisfaction to inform Miss Vaz Dias that he was not responsible for editorial cuts in newspapers, and that every penny he earned from praising an author he so much admired went straight to Rhys herself.²⁷ For the moment, Selma was silenced.

Maryvonne’s relationship with Selma was more delicate. Initially, Rhys’s daughter had been pleased to learn of Selma’s Dutch origins and grateful for the offers of cost-free hospitality which Vaz Dias generously continued to extend to her. But Maryvonne shared Francis’s distaste for Selma’s assumptions about the vast wealth that Rhys had supposedly accrued. Responding to a barrage of accusations in early December, Maryvonne explained that, while money concerns were actually making her mother “incredibly” anxious and tense, what Rhys most lacked now was peace and quiet: “. . . But I expect you have already had a row.”²⁸

Staying at Sonia Orwell’s home in December 1967 proved to be neither peaceful nor quiet. Rhys’s granddaughter still recalls her own nervousness at the smartly chattering guests who trooped through Sonia’s home or hosted parties for Rhys at their own splendid residences. She points out that Sonia’s unstinting kindness had included social coaching for a shy girl of nineteen.²⁹ It had included a chance to see Tom Stoppard’s arrestingly witty play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Did Sonia want clever Ellen to discover a connection between Rhys’s brilliant reinterpretation of an aspect of Jane Eyre with Stoppard’s artful reworking of Hamlet?

The chance for Rhys to spend most of the day at 153 Gloucester Road, resting and reading in a pleasant back bedroom overlooking a garden (while seeing her family splendidly entertained), was restorative and comforting; writing to thank Sonia later, a grateful Rhys said that the room’s tranquil outlook had lulled her back into the security of childhood. By February 1968, however, Rhys’s overdue receipt of a £1,200 bursary from the Arts Council^‡ had resulted in her once again being targeted by Selma, declaring that everybody was getting rich “(except me)” from a talent which she, Selma Vaz Dias, had personally “nursed and nurtured and coddled for years.”³⁰

Admirably, Rhys refused to lose her temper, allowing herself only the secret satisfaction of recommending to her friend a new book about that ultimate drama queen, Sarah Bernhardt. Instructed in return—the tone was almost a command—to buy two paintings by Selma of her “Mrs Rochester” (at forty-five guineas apiece), Rhys made her reluctance clear by asking instead for a flower painting, while adding with patent hopefulness: “(You don’t do flowers do you?).” A painting of flowers was immediately despatched; the requested £25 payment was as promptly made. But Selma remained displeased; a full year later, Peggy Ramsay gathered that Rhys had wretchedly underpaid Vaz Dias for the tremendous effort required to produce “my one and only flowerpiece.”³¹

Selma’s steady drip of complaints had no significant impact on her former friend’s spirits. Writing to Francis Wyndham in the spring of 1968 within hours of dealing with one of Vaz Dias’s challenging letters, Rhys prattled happily about her current interest in biography—she was reading Henri Troyat’s life of Tolstoy (in French) alongside Lytton Strachey’s older life of Queen Victoria (in English). To Francis, her favourite literary confidant, Rhys also admitted her worry that her finally completed story “Overture and Beginners Please” had greatly exceeded the London Magazine’s request for a lively little reminiscence of her schooldays. Once embarked, she had found the pull of the past impossible to resist.

Autobiography was clearly the direction in which Rhys was now heading. While her market-conscious publishers would have welcomed another novel, nostalgic short stories and the beginnings of a memoir were all that they seemed likely to cajole from a writer who was nearing eighty. The need to capture and set down her early memories had frequently distracted Rhys from working on Wide Sargasso Sea; now, the moment had come to sharpen and perfect those alluring fragments of recollection. Diligently and patiently, Sonia, Francis and Diana united to encourage the ageing author, often typing out her work themselves and always praising what they were shown. At times, perhaps because Rhys’s progress was so slow, they were a little too uncritical where her last stories were concerned.

Self-absorption, always essential to Rhys’s work, increased as she grew older. Maryvonne, writing to Leslie Tilden Smith’s remarried daughter in the spring of 1968, confided that her mother had “a supreme egocentric view of life”; Rhys’s daughter nevertheless knew her mother well enough to understand that passionate self-engrossment was “a must for her kind of writing.”³²

An unforgiving solipsism was indeed central to Rhys’s work, but it could make her a difficult friend. In May, while affectionately reassuring Rhys about the existence of an eager audience for her planned collection of tales of long-ago Dominica, Francis Wyndham arranged for “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers” (Rhys’s story about the settler Mr. Ramage’s retreat into eccentric seclusion) to be typed by himself. Rhys wanted more. Recalling the distant days when little Gwen Williams had used a special “swizzle stick”^§ to mix evening cocktails for her father and Ramage, she demanded just such a stick for her evening drink. Patiently, Francis tracked down and despatched an expensive glass cocktail stirrer, from Harrods to Cheriton; all wrong! Rhys groused. This was not in the least what she wanted! For a start, the stick must be wooden . . .

There were times when even the fondest of Jean Rhys’s London friends felt relieved that she preferred to live in distant Devon. Absence made it possible for them to retain real tenderness for a stubborn old woman whose child-like need for sympathy and attention could—and increasingly often, did—become relentless. What almost certainly would have killed off such unstinting affection was the greater trial of daily proximity.

*The McFarlin archive contains an undated draft letter Rhys wrote in response to an essay George Orwell published in Horizon, October 1944. “The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish” praised James Hadley Chase’s gruesomely brilliant novel of 1939, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, while describing the extreme violence of its imagined world as the “distillation” of a fascist society in which monstrous deeds, if boldly executed, become the norm. (Jean Rhys to George Orwell, McFarlin, 1.1.f3.)

†Deutsch never returned the four cherished paintings of Geneva by Brenda Lockhart (Rhys’s aunt), which Rhys had sent to Diana Athill for possible use on her novel’s front cover. Rhys’s frequent claims that the paintings had been stolen from her were dismissed by her friends as histrionics, but her aunt’s watercolours were Rhys’s very last family link to Dominica. The paintings formed part of Tom Rosenthal’s sale of the André Deutsch archive to Tulsa between 1988 and 1994.

‡Under pressure from Sonia Orwell, this long-promised bursary had been personally signed off in January 1968 by Charles Osborne for the Arts Council. On this occasion, Osborne was quietly making up for the fact that he had mislaid one of Rhys’s finest stories, “Tigers are Better-Looking,” in the files of the London Magazine, when he was working for the Rosses as an office junior.

§A Caribbean “swizzle,” as drunk by Jean Rhys’s father and his friends, is made by mixing gin and chartreuse with squeezed lime, sugar, a dash of Angostura bitters—and lots of crushed ice.