21

“Mrs Methuselah” (1973–76)

“I rode a swing—swing high, swing low. That’s been my life.”

—Jean Rhys to Mary Cantwell, Mademoiselle, October 1974

THE PERSONAL HIGHLIGHT of Rhys’s eighty-third year was the transformation of a barely habitable bungalow in Devon into a cosy cottage. The miracle was worked by freckled, red-haired, outspoken Jo Batterham—a favourite niece of Francis Wyndham’s friend, the landscape and portrait painter Derek Hill—with the help of an attractive and well-read young woman called Virginia Stevens.

During the colder months of each year, from 1972 onwards, Rhys’s regular perch in London, chosen and paid for by Sonia, became the Portobello Hotel in Stanley Gardens, Notting Hill. First taken there by Francis to meet a writer whom she and “Gini” Stevens revered (the couple had already—unsuccessfully—attempted to doorstep Rhys during a visit to Devon), Jo was thrilled to see the painting of a rose hanging above the writer’s bed. The artist, as Batterham explained to her hostess, was Jo’s own father, a notable interior decorator; Rhys had purchased the picture on impulse a week earlier while visiting John Hill’s recently acquired showroom with the ballet critic, Richard Buckle.^* Jo Batterham had inherited her father’s talent; before leaving the Portobello that evening, she volunteered her services as an unpaid advisor on the transformation of Rhys’s Devon home.

Rhys’s initial aspirations were touchingly modest. She wanted bright colours on the walls, to remind her of the Caribbean; she needed a comfortable spare bed for the use of her visiting daughter. Above all, she wanted to see an end put to the gaunt, ramshackle shed which had once served as an occasional garage for Edward’s car. Rhys’s wish was granted; by the summer of 1974, the hated shed had been demolished and replaced by a sweet-smelling cedarwood sleeping annex that could double as a writing room. A creature of habit, Rhys always preferred to use her kitchen table as a desk.

Rhys could joke about herself to close friends as “Mrs Methuselah,” but age was taking its toll. Towards the end of 1973, the year in which she brusquely terminated several handwritten correspondences, rheumatism defeated her ability to operate a pen for longer than a few minutes at a time. This, for a woman who had always written her work by hand, presented a serious problem; Jo’s partner Gini Stevens volunteered to do what she could to help solve it. While Jo Batterham, caring for a young son at her Putney home, directed the bungalow’s improvements from afar (the village builder, Mr. Martin, carried out her instructions), Gini began driving down to Devon for ten days of each month to work as Rhys’s unpaid amanuensis. The task wasn’t easy; recalling her role for a magazine article in 1974, Stevens conjured up the relentless commitment of Rhys at work, “dictating version after version to me, sometimes continuing for a five or six hour stretch, ruthlessly paring everything that is not essential.”¹ A grant was eventually obtained by Diana Athill to cover Gini’s time and travel costs, but it wasn’t surprising that the young woman sometimes skipped a visit.

Rhys became extremely fond of Gini. By the summer of 1974, she had found a way to keep Stevens close to her by appointing an enthusiastic amateur to replace the experienced Olwyn Hughes as the agent for her early works and short stories. (John Smith of Christy & Moore continued to represent the later books.) Gini took her new role seriously; within weeks, she had proudly reported to Diana Athill her successful advance sale of the world rights to Rhys’s still uncompleted final stories. Untutored in the ways that publishers operate, Gini had no idea that Deutsch themselves expected to sell the tales abroad and take a commission. Scolded by Diana, Gini found an unexpected supporter in Francis. Mistrustful of “stingy publishers,” Francis told an apprehensive Rhys that Gini and she should stick to their guns.²

Clear evidence of the warmth of Rhys’s feelings for her two new friends emerges from the fact that—anxious to escape from chilly Devon in the bitter autumn of 1973, when a rash of strikes and a steep rise in oil prices led to national restrictions on energy use—Rhys invited herself to spend a month at Jo Batterham’s spacious home in Putney.³ Much admired (and still fondly remembered) by Jo’s small son, Luke, for her purple hat, her pinkly powdered cheeks and her handsome gift of a £1 note for every drawing that an artistic little boy became unsurprisingly eager to present, Rhys made a charming guest. Away from the usual London pressure to put on a performance, she relaxed. According to Jo Batterham, she drank with enjoyment, but never to excess. Back at the Portobello Hotel for a more challenging post-Christmas sojourn in the city, Rhys relied on alcohol to help her face the ordeal of interviews, photoshoots and—least appealing of all—the literary gatherings her publishers required her to attend. It was—as she well understood—the price to be paid for Sonia’s generosity in paying her bills.

Listening to people who remember Rhys’s mid-winter residences at the Portobello Hotel during the early 1970s, it’s clear that, in England at least, Rhys was becoming a literary cult. Expected to amuse in return for being feted by social networkers, authors and grandees, she often drank too much. Quieter events were always preferable. Rhys loved to dress up for an early-evening hotel visit from Francis or Sonia. She enjoyed going out to a cheerful bistro lunch in Chelsea with David Plante and Rachel Ingalls. She never rejected a chance to be swept around the West End shops and salons by a new young friend, Diana Melly, owner of a vividly hippified camper van often driven by Diana’s boyfriend, Jeremy d’Agapayef.

In a small group, Rhys could always hold her own. Introduced to an admiring Glenda Jackson at an Italian restaurant lunch that was hosted by the actor Peter Eyre, she delighted the actress by unexpectedly praising her consummate comic timing, having become a keen follower of Jackson’s appearances on the Morecambe & Wise Show. It’s likely that Rhys relished a threesome lunch with Edna O’Brien, for which Mrs. Melly’s handsome young lover was bidden to stay, while Diana—Rhys’s kind chauffeur that day—was blithely dismissed.

Rhys’s bookshelves, sharply observed by Alexis Lykiard on his visits to Cheriton Fitzpaine, now included copies of several novels by O’Brien, standing alongside the Liverpool Poets. Did she even notice the absence of poor Diana from the lunch table of O’Brien, a writer who was then being considered as an adapter of one of Rhys’s novels for the screen? Self-absorption remained one of Rhys’s most striking characteristics. Peter Eyre, the mellifluous-voiced young actor who had arranged the lunch with Glenda Jackson, never forgot the strangeness of carefully painting Rhys’s ageing face with theatrical make-up in order that—or so Eyre assumed from her serene farewell when his nerve-racking task was completed—Rhys, seated at her hotel dressing table, drink in hand, might commune alone with the ghostly reflection of a younger stage self. On more sociable occasions, Eyre was permitted to escort Rhys to a ballet matinee or to squire her to Don Luigi, her favourite Chelsea restaurant. The rules for these intimate suppers never changed: Eyre must arrange a corner table, dimly lit, from which an unapologetically inattentive Rhys could weave a romance about herself and one of the other restaurant guests, preferably a distinguished older man, dining alone. She ate, Eyre recalls, with the gusto of a woman of half her age.⁴

One of the most disappointing experiences of Rhys’s two visits to London during that chilly winter of fuel rationing in 1973/74 was to be told—after the prolonged but exquisite pleasure of being robed in couture for a Vogue profile—that the silk dresses and jackets were mere borrowed plumage, not gifts. Back in Devon at the end of February and grumpily perusing the words for “My Day” that she had written to accompany the profile, Rhys’s spirits were lifted by news from Francis Wyndham. A major appreciation of her work was about to be published in the New York Times Book Review; an elated Francis was ready to predict the result: “One of those fantastic American successes which mean lots and lots of money.”⁵

Al Alvarez was an influential and regular writer for the American literary pages. Published as the Book Review’s lead piece on 17 March 1974, his critical assessment of Rhys’s work described both Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea as masterpieces, before declaring their author to be, quite simply, “the best living English novelist.” Wyndham was right; Alvarez’s impressive tribute changed his old friend’s fortunes in America almost overnight. A fresh flurry of film and interview interest gratified Rhys less than the news of immediate bulk reprints of Good Morning, Midnight, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Wide Sargasso Sea. Quartet, out of print in the US since 1957, was snapped up and reissued; 100,000 copies were hastily printed of Voyage in the Dark.

One of my own favourite pictures among the many taken of Rhys in her later years, this accompanied Julie Kavanagh’s interview. (Willie Christie)

Alvarez had beaten Wyndham to it. Having cannily despatched an advance proof of his appraisal to Rhys in early February, he had received her pleased response four days later. Eager to interview her for Ian Hamilton’s magazine The New Review (in which “Sleep It Off Lady” was due to make its debut that October), Alvarez paid his first visit to Cheriton Fitzpaine at the end of March. Stockily handsome, with a razor-thin strip of moustache, Alvarez was a man whom Rhys found both empathetic and physically attractive. Rhys had read the poetry of her equally reclusive neighbour, Ted Hughes. She was a greater admirer of the self-laceratingly honest work of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. It’s possible that Alvarez and she discussed The Savage God, Alvarez’s recent book about suicide—notably that of Sylvia Plath; it’s more certain that they discovered a shared love of poetry. (Alvarez was one of the few people to whom, during five years of confiding and affectionate friendship, Rhys would regularly send copies of her own poems.) A more personal interest—as Alvarez loved to tell the story—was apparent in the way that Rhys had gazed into his eyes during their first meeting, while insouciantly caressing a slender stockinged calf. His description of glimpsed layers of frothy white petticoats (as Rhys saucily crossed her still elegant legs) was more imaginative. Frilly petticoats were never Rhys’s style, but Alvarez’s own embroidery nicely captures the hint of flirtation in the air.

THE YEAR 1974 marked the climax of Rhys’s success, bringing with it a rush of new requests for interviews. A handful of the supplicants made it through; few of them managed to pierce the armour of their subject’s reserve. “I was having rather a troublesome time,” was all Rhys would admit to Julie Kavanagh, a bright young journalist interviewing her for the influential US paper, Women’s Wear Daily, when Kavanagh asked about the years in postwar England during which Rhys had vanished from public view.⁶

Rhys’s reticence with Kavanagh may have been due in part to a serious bout of summer flu. Just a month earlier, Mary Cantwell was granted one of the most revealing interviews Rhys ever gave, for Mademoiselle, an American magazine that was aimed at a target audience of educated young women who read as avidly as they pursued the latest fashions. (Joan Didion guest-edited one issue; Sylvia Plath drew on her time working as a Mademoiselle intern for her boldly autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.)

Cantwell’s interview with Rhys in the summer of 1974 coincided with one of Maryvonne’s visits to the Devon cottage; Rhys was communicating, however indirectly, with her daughter when she told Mary Cantwell about the “awful misery” she had felt over the loss of her first-born child; her baby son. Cantwell herself was more struck by Rhys’s image of herself as a woman who dreaded social gatherings: “I’m a person at a masked ball without a mask” was how she described it. Sipping sweet vermouth and soda while her fingers restlessly flicked the on–off switch of a tiny electric heater, Rhys struggled to explain to an attentive Cantwell how the troubled leading characters in her novels always evaded the net of any conscious plans that she herself had made for them, seeming to act and speak of their own volition. How, then, could Julia Martin, Sasha Jansen or Anna Morgan be seen by readers as mere versions of herself? Perhaps Maryvonne scolded her mother for drinking alcohol outside mealtimes; unexpectedly, Rhys suddenly confessed to her visitor that—having once had what she considered “a good head”—she could no longer drink without consequences.⁷

If none of Rhys’s friends picked up on that hint in Cantwell’s illuminating interview—it’s hard to imagine either Francis Wyndham or Diana Athill as readers of Mademoiselle—it may simply have been that they knew better. Rhys had spoken of her characters as moving beyond her control; she herself could not bear to be placed under restraint. Covertly watching the octogenarian writer methodically swilling down a lethal two-handed combination of whisky and champagne, glass after glass, as she sat on a sofa alone, apart from a cluster of chattering party guests, the young writer James Fox (he was one of Wyndham’s literary protégés) once caught Rhys’s eye. What he saw there disturbed him; it was a “hell-bent, give me more pain and just watch me” stare of black defiance. And up to her lips went yet another glass.⁸

Since 1967, Rhys had resisted all pleas for television interviews; in the early autumn of 1974, she relented. Setting the crown on a remarkable year was Tristram Powell’s documentary tribute for Omnibus. Shown in late November, with a pensive, slender Eileen Atkins playing an amalgam of the women of the novels, the programme concluded with an interview granted by a visibly nervous Rhys. Powell, who places Rhys alongside Lucian Freud and Beryl Bainbridge as a genuinely reluctant performer, regards that reticence as evidence of a rare artistic integrity.⁹

Rhys’s nervousness with such a practised interviewer as Tristram Powell may once again, in an autumn when she was struggling with the aftermath of her summer flu, have owed something to ill health. Shortly after thanking Sonia Orwell, on 15 November 1974, for all her help over the past years (“you are the most generous woman in the world,” Rhys would exclaim as Sonia offered to finance the purchase of a west London flat for her young granddaughter), she was rushed into St. Vincent’s, a London nursing home where she would spend the next two months. Rhys was still at St. Vincent’s when Selma Vaz Dias started threatening a lawsuit over the absence of any reference to herself in Tristram Powell’s documentary. Had Francis Wyndham objected to being left out of the programme, an impatient Peggy Ramsay demanded? Wasn’t there enough reward for Selma in knowing that she, too, had contributed to the revival of her old friend’s career? Perceptively, but with an excess of candour, Peggy commented: “It’s as if you want to become Jean Rhys.”¹⁰

Nineteen seventy-four had been a glorious year in terms of recognition, but the occupational hazards of success took Rhys away from her writing. Diana Athill remained anxious about the slow progress of the story collection that her pet author had contracted to supply to Deutsch by the following spring—and to which Gini Stevens had already sold the world rights from under Diana’s affronted nose. Athill caused a lengthy delay of her own when she decided at the last moment, in the spring of 1975, that one of Rhys’s personal favourites must be excluded. The tale in question was “Imperial Road,” Rhys’s barely fictionalised account of her quixotic endeavour, back in 1936, to demonstrate the completion of a road that had, in truth, foundered after seventeen treacherous miles.

Rhys had been labouring over various versions of “Imperial Road” for thirty years, but times had changed dramatically in the Caribbean during the 1970s. A house boldly rebuilt upon the scorched foundations of the Lockharts’ home at Geneva had recently been burned down; “Black man time is come! White man had his fun!” ran the opening line of a calypso song for Roseau’s carnival in 1974.¹¹ Fired up by the accounts from Dominica that arrived in news clippings sent by Phyllis Shand Allfrey, living out on the island, Rhys nobly urged Francis Wyndham to publicise the environmental threat posed by unscrupulous British timber firms to Dominica’s magnificent rainforest;^† it was not, however, the time to start celebrating Britain’s past presence on the island. To Diana, Rhys’s clearly autobiographical story read like an endorsement of colonialism. She ruled it out. Rhys, outraged and miserable, ceased to work.

As so often in Rhys’s later years, a tricky moment was quietly resolved by Francis Wyndham. While reluctant to get involved in Rhys’s championing of her beloved island’s rainforest, he promised to get “The Imperial Road” published as an independent story in the Sunday Times, for which he worked.^‡ Wyndham then offered the services of Sonia and himself as first readers of the stories that Rhys had been intermittently dictating over the past two years to Gini Stevens. He chose shrewdly: Sonia Orwell had earned her editorial spurs on Cyril Connolly’s Horizon—and Jean trusted her.¹²

Soothed by Wyndham’s assurance that all would be well, Rhys returned to work on one of her finest late stories in the summer of 1975. Writing to Phyllis Shand Allfrey back on 16 May 1973 about her longing to “lay my bones” in Dominica, Rhys had told her Caribbean-born friend of a poem called “Return,” written and then lost during her first lonely months of living at Maidstone. Rhys described “Return” to Phyllis as a poem about going back to Dominica and only realising that she was already dead “when no one recognises or sees me.” As always with Rhys, no sign of the long gestation (“I’ve tried over and over again to rewrite it,” she told Shand Allfrey) was visible in “I Used to Live Here Once,” the exquisitely simple ghost story of just such a return that she finally dictated to Gini Stevens in the summer of 1975.¹³

The stories for Sleep It Off Lady (Rhys’s first collection since Tigers are Better-Looking, back in 1968) were delivered to an anxious Athill in the autumn of 1975. Alone in Devon, and increasingly prone to anxiety, Rhys started to worry about the large sums of money that her new—and her first—financial advisor, Michael Henshaw, was now handling on her behalf. Henshaw was a charming man who represented a dazzling list of writers and actors, but his methods were often highly unorthodox. Weaving dreadful scenarios in which the cottage was to be confiscated and she herself sent to prison (shades of Jean Lenglet and Max Hamer), Rhys blamed the shock of a dawn raid on the cottage by a sinister—evidently imaginary—official for a fall which cracked one of her ribs. “I was NOT drunk!” she joked to Francis in October, while gallantly declining to add that she was in considerable pain.¹⁴

Reading on through this same surprisingly cheerful letter, Francis discovered the source of Rhys’s good humour. An unnamed literary admirer from New York was courting her. Should she boldly cross the Atlantic? Visiting her with champagne and flowers at the grim West Kensington care home where Sonia had lodged her temporarily incapacitated old friend, a frisky Al Alvarez encouraged Rhys to dream. Why should a still beautiful woman not set herself up in a comfortable apartment in Manhattan for a while and allow herself to be adored? Alvarez himself would take charge of her social life; her unnamed beau would see to all of the glorious rest. But who was he? Rhys wouldn’t say.

The identity of Rhys’s American suitor remained unrevealed. Conceivably, she misread the courtly manner of Frank Hallman, an American Southerner who was in the process of publishing her Vogue piece (“My Day”), together with two autobiographical fragments, in a special edition of 750 copies. To Rhys, Frank’s generous flood of gifts (stockings, French scent, silk scarves) may have looked like courtship; it’s entirely possible that a grateful Hallman—Rhys had personally managed to sign most of the insert sheets during his brief visit to Devon earlier that year—did encourage the idea of a trip to New York. What Rhys failed to grasp—she perhaps was never told—was that her swain was happily partnered by Richard Schaubeck, his devoted companion until Hallman’s tragically premature death in the spring of 1976.

Rhys’s plans for New York were pure fantasy; an eighty-five-year-old with a cracked rib was not fit to go travelling anywhere, except in her dreams. In dreary times, however, confined to a hotel for ailing senior citizens, the thought of a solicitous admirer offered consolation. Tongue-in-cheek, Rhys often referred to the unnamed East Coast “suitor” as her last lover.

ONE OF THE oddest items tucked away in the stiff rows of boxes of Rhys-related papers and manuscripts held in the McFarlin Library at Tulsa dates from Rhys’s autumn at the Kensington care home. Written in scrawled red biro on lined foolscap paper, it is defiantly titled “Shades of Pink.” Closer inspection reveals an unexpected first collaboration between Jean Rhys and David Plante.

Rhys had first encountered Plante’s name when they both contributed stories to a Penguin anthology published in 1969. In 1970, when they were introduced to each other by Sonia Orwell, the personable young writer from Provincetown quickly became a friend. Difficult Women, Plante’s controversial 1983 character study of himself in his relationship with three extraordinary and forceful women (Sonia Orwell, Germaine Greer and Jean Rhys), opened with the startling episode which took place five years after that first meeting, in December 1975, when he paid his first visit to the dreary west London hotel at which Rhys remained confined. Oddly, Plante had received no warning that Rhys, well prepared for the occasion by Sonia, was expecting a professional meeting at which she would dictate material for her memoir to an obliging friend.

Plante’s far-from-artless memoir presented Rhys at the hotel as a recent acquaintance, an ancient mariner who was drinking hard while relating interminable tales of her childhood in the Caribbean. Rhys rambled on; Plante, matching her drink for drink, listened. Eventually, the physically diminished and still disabled Rhys hobbled into the bathroom. The next thing Plante heard was a pitiful wail; Rhys’s skinny posterior had been trapped in the well of her own bathroom lavatory. The fault lay with Plante, as he realised too late: having previously made use of the old lady’s loo, he had neglected to re-lower the seat.

Eight years later, working up that disastrously mismanaged encounter for public consumption, Plante omitted to mention that his hostess was expecting him to take dictation for her memoir. Instead, he offered a brutally candid portrait of a snorting, spitting, dishevelled Rhys in decline. “Shades of Pink,” the unpublished and never completed work on which Rhys invited Plante to collaborate, was her own more generous attempt to wrest a comic story from a mortifying incident, one which had been replete with misunderstandings. Plante himself was transformed into urbane “Maurice Denis,” visiting a youthful “Lucy Nicholson” at the recognisably odious hotel. Plante’s version dwelt on a puddle of piss on the bathroom floor; the knickers hanging around Rhys’s ankles; the “battered” hat perched askew on her lolling head. Rhys’s version presents a moment of sheer comic delight as Lucy rises up into her saviour’s arms from her porcelain well with buoyant exhilaration: “like a cork out of a bottle.”¹⁵ The surviving fragment of “Shades of Pink” offers a late example of Rhys’s unique capacity in her fiction both to mock and to transcend herself in portraits that are only ever partially autobiographical. Plante was charmed and a little shamed by Rhys’s generous interpretation;¹⁶ Diana Athill was not amused. The project was dropped.

Early in 1976, when Rhys was happily restored to her beloved suite at the Portobello, Plante paid his forgiving old friend a further visit. It was on this occasion that a chastened David (Sonia Orwell had given him a stern dressing-down for his inept handling of Jean at the West London hotel) first volunteered to transcribe Rhys’s memoir. Some progress was made until—anxious to establish a logical sequence for the random episodes which Rhys provided—Plante requested an oral chronology. To a sensitive author, it seemed as if a pushy young man was attempting to take control of her most personal project. Rhys lost her temper. All talk of a collaboration was dropped.

Rhys’s black mood had lifted when she wrote on 15 February to tell Francis Wyndham that she had been enjoying Antonia Fraser’s adaptation of Rebecca for radio. Antonia’s version of elegant, suave Max de Winter was declared to be Rhys’s ideal: “a dream of a man.”¹⁷ Romance was on Rhys’s mind once more; just as she began researching the possibility of a jaunt to New York and her mystery lover, a second and far more serious fall landed her, first, in hospital and then—to her dismay—back in a London nursing home. The medical report was grave: in addition to four cracked ribs, two dating back to the previous autumn, the X-rays revealed an enlarged heart. Rhys’s days of independence were over. From 1976 on, age-friendly accommodation would be required whenever she visited London; down in Devon, discreet feelers were put out for a suitable nurse-companion.

Joan Butler, Jean’s country neighbour, produced a solution that would not impinge too much on Rhys’s enduring desire for privacy. Janet Bridger was a forthright young Canadian district nurse who, after five years of working for an Inuit community, had settled in Devon. Janet was willing to spend four hours a day at the cottage doing whatever was required, including discreet supervision of Rhys’s intake of alcohol. Several visitors to the cottage were startled by Bridger’s gauchely truculent manner (Jo Batterham detested her), but there was no doubting Janet’s commitment. Her first year with Rhys went quite well.

The problem of where to find West Country help with transcribing the dictated memoir was solved by the discovery in a nearby village of Michael Schwab. Helpful, efficient and handsome to boot, Michael was willing to double as Rhys’s driver—Mr. Greenslade had decided to retire after his wife’s death—and typist. By July 1976, Rhys was feeling strong enough to dictate the entire section of the memoir that deals with “Meta”—the violent nurse who had so terrified little Gwen Rees Williams—in a single, exhausting session. Like Gini Stevens, Michael Schwab was astonished by the contrast between Rhys’s fragile appearance and her capacity to dictate and revise aloud for hours on end.

Every ounce of Rhys’s waning creative energy was now devoted to completing the memoir. Diana Athill, having efficiently secured grants to cover Michael Schwab’s driving expenses and time, advised the New Yorker that the four stories they were planning to publish ahead of Sleep It Off Lady would be the very last that they would receive from the weakened author. For Deutsch, to whom Jean Rhys had become a lucrative investment, it was crucial that she should stay alive long enough to finish the memoir; for Sonia, expressing her thoughts discreetly to Diana Athill in March, the time had come to hope for a merciful ending. Aged almost eighty-six, Rhys surely deserved a peaceful death?¹⁸

A little wishful thinking was involved on Sonia Orwell’s part. While Francis Wyndham was increasingly preoccupied by the need to care for his ageing mother, Sonia herself had fallen victim to an unscrupulous accountant. The hospitable house on Gloucester Road was put up for sale; the days of bankrolling Rhys’s holidays in London were over. Vaguely conscious that something was amiss, Rhys took good care—as indeed she always had, year after year—to thank her “darling Sonia” for “ALL you’ve done for me.”¹⁹

Happily, Jean Rhys’s own improved financial position meant that she no longer depended on the generosity of friends like Sonia Orwell. Everything she produced now carried a perceived value and was received accordingly. Sleep It Off Lady, published in October 1976 by Deutsch, and in November by Harper & Row in the US, was the first work she had produced since the outstanding collection titled Tigers are Better-Looking in 1968. Francis and Sonia had both gone over it, as had Diana Athill; none of them had been able to get around the fact that a collection which included several stories on which Rhys had been working, on and off, for three decades, together with a handful which had been written on various topics over the past five years, did not make for a well-integrated whole. The title story was widely praised, while both William Trevor and the New York Times Book Review’s Robie Macauley thought “I Used to Live Here Once” was among the finest, and certainly the most concise, ghost stories they had ever read. (It’s a little over 400 words.) Kirkus Reviews described the collection as “sketches” and, rather crushingly, a “force mineure,” while praising the “desolate allure” which their reviewer identified as Rhys’s trademark.²⁰

Rhys’s plans for a memoir had been at the forefront of her mind when she wrote “Overture and Beginners Please” and “Before the Deluge”; these highly personal stories were the only two to describe her first years in England at school and then on tour. Writing, dictating and revising a group of stories that drew upon her Dominica childhood, while feeling her way towards the best voice in which to narrate her memoir, Rhys seems also to have worried about which remembered episodes were suited to which genre. The best answer, as with the almost purely autobiographical “On Not Shooting Sitting Birds”—clearly more appropriate to a memoir than a story collection—was not always found.

Rhys’s discretion meant that little was yet known about her early life. Nobody reading the new collection could have been expected to guess that “Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose,” Rhys’s troubling story of a little girl being molested by a distinguished older gentleman, was based upon fact. Neither were her readers to know how much personal detail had been worked into “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers,” the story of Mr. Ramage on which Rhys had been working on and off ever since her return to Dominica in 1936, when she first heard about the English settler’s mysterious death at his isolated home.

A fierce perfectionist, Rhys herself was dissatisfied by the collection. Her comment to an admiring Oliver Stonor about one widely praised late story, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” was that “I missed it somehow.” It reflected her feeling about them all. Writing to Francis (Wyndham shared Stonor’s liking for Rhys’s odd little tale about the shearing of a plain woman’s proudly displayed golden locks) she disparaged the collection as “the ‘So-So Stories’” (for which Wyndham scolded her).

Rhys’s growing readership disagreed. In America, especially, sales of her novels continued to soar. While Peggy Ramsay’s telephone clamoured with requests from Hollywood, American universities had also begun to show a keen interest in Rhys’s manuscripts.

Oliver Stonor had been acting on Rhys’s behalf for some time as the middleman in sales of her hotchpotch of literary papers to Bertram Rota, the London antiquarian bookseller and dealer. Rota’s own book expert, John Byrne, now stepped in to facilitate a more substantial purchase for the McFarlin Library in Tulsa, where an ambitious young academic named Thomas Staley was in the process of creating a centre for women’s studies. In the autumn of 1976, while Diana Athill replaced Rhys’s trio of agents with one of her own choosing (the erudite and raffishly charming Anthony Shiel), Tom Staley visited London and offered a thousand guineas to acquire the bulk of Rhys’s work. Staley was an attractive man. Rhys’s granddaughter, who was shooed away from paying a visit of her own when Staley arrived to discuss the details of the deal, suspects that her still flirtatious grandmother feared competition for the attention of a new admirer. Rhys may also have wished to conceal from her hard-up family just how much money was passing into her hands.

Rhys had spent most of her summer in Devon dictating episodes from her memoir to Michael Schwab. Back in London at the end of 1976, and staying in a service flat near Sloane Square, she summoned David Plante back for a second attempt at collaboration. Some progress was made; it seems to have been during this brief interlude that Rhys humbly described herself to Plante (when compared to her beloved Russian authors) as a mere trickle feeding into the great lake of fiction. Once, apparently, she broke into a perfectly conceived evocation of the lost mornes (mountains) of her beloved Dominica. To an enthralled Plante, her description sounded improvised; Rhys’s habit of careful mental preparation suggests that she already knew every word that she narrated by heart.

The problem for Rhys of working with David Plante was that he, too, was a writer. His first attempt to extract a chronology had appalled her; now, seeking to impose a structure on the flood of episodes with which Rhys inundated him, Plante asked permission to reshape them. Having painstakingly snipped Rhys’s sentences apart and reconnected them into a more logical narrative, Plante read her the result aloud. Hearing what he took for a whisper of approval, he carried his revised manuscript home to type it up.

Both Diana Athill and David Plante were good storytellers. Both of them dined out on the drama of their friend’s response. Diana, arriving at Rhys’s flat later that same evening to see Jean safely into her bed, encountered a wild creature, untameable in her fury, swearing, drunk and sobbing that her book had been stolen from out of her hands. Never again would she work with David Plante!²¹

Rhys’s attitude to her work was protective; her anguish at the sense that the memoir had been tampered with is not in doubt. No longer impoverished, she was even willing to fork out £500 to pay David off for his forfeited effort. But she did not want to lose Plante’s friendship; Diana was specifically instructed to make the payment through Deutsch, as if the decision had been all their own.

Rhys had always been volatile. It was only a matter of weeks before a nervous David was recalled and forgiven. Work resumed; for the time being, there were no more outbursts. Towards the end of February 1977, the partly completed memoir was sealed by Plante within two sturdy envelopes on the outside of which he wrote, under Rhys’s directions, that the contents were to be destroyed if anything should happen to their owner. Authorising the statement, Rhys carefully inscribed her name twice over, once as Jean Rhys and then as “E[lla] G[wendoline] Hamer.”

Why such an anxious precaution? In 1977, after over thirty years of living entirely in England, Rhys was making preparations to leave the country. Her health was poor; her bones were increasingly brittle; she was in her eighty-seventh year: anything might happen. If disaster struck, an unfinished, orphaned memoir that presented her younger self to the world without the mask of fiction was in need of the best protection that a mother could provide for a work to which Rhys by now felt as tenderly close as a pregnant mother to her unborn child.

*John Hill had taken over Abbott & Green, a Wigmore Street shop famous for its William Morris–style wallpapers.

†Phyllis Shand Allfrey had resumed contact with Rhys in 1973, when a film crew arrived in Dominica to scout locations for Wide Sargasso Sea. It would be another twenty years before a film was made, using Jamaican locations. A BBC version followed in 2006.

‡Although “The Imperial Road” was never published in the Sunday Times, it survives in multiple drafts. Rhys intended it to form part of her memoir. Diana Athill, who finished editing Smile Please shortly before Rhys’s death, decided, once again, to exclude an unfinished work for which her enthusiasm had always been scant.