Difficult Women

In november, Jean came back to London. She was put into a small flat in Chelsea, just across the Thames from where I lived in Battersea. She had a young woman to help her with her bath and dressing, and her friends to prepare lunch and dinner, and to entertain her. She didn’t like the flat. The walls of the sitting room were green. Bad luck. She was quite sure it was a mistake to have come up to London, but she so hated Devon in the winter; maybe, though, she would return to her cottage when she recovered a little from her trip.

She had, over the summer, dictated more of her autobiography to a young writer who lived near her in Devon. This more consisted of memories of her early life on the West Indian island of Dominica, where she was born. It would make up the first part of the autobiography. She asked if I would continue to help her if she stayed in London. I was writing myself, but I said, “Yes, of course.”

Often, crossing Chelsea Bridge on my way to her, I would think: You don’t want to go to Jean’s, you want to stay home to do your own writing. Also, I had very little money, and thought I should use the time I was with Jean to do a translation job, or write blurbs or book reports for a publisher.

Helping her became difficult. She needed a drink to start, a drink to continue, and yet another, and after two hours she was muddled, couldn’t remember what she’d been saying, and she’d repeat, over and over, that, say, Victorian knife-sharpeners were terribly good, you just stuck the knife in and turned the handle and the knife came out sharp and clean, so you didn’t have to clean it on wood, and the knives were much better than stainless steel ones—which showed that in many ways the Victorians were very clever, not what people think now. But people don’t understand. No one understands. No one! I was never quite sure what she wanted to go into the autobiography and what, drunk, she was simply talking about. I put in everything I thought interesting, condensing it often to a sentence fragment to insert somewhere later: the Victorian knife-sharpener her father brought from England so the help wouldn’t have to sharpen the knives on wood. A flash of anger would sometimes pass through her eyes when I’d read a passage to her to make sure I’d got it right, and she’d say, “No, that’s not right.”

In a little black briefcase that opened into a file, she kept the many bits and pieces of the autobiography, plus earlier writing on yellowing, torn paper. I wanted to go through these and sort them out, but I couldn’t presume; they seemed in the file to be very private. The time came in our work, however, when we needed to organize the autobiographical pieces. Versions of the same section, or detached paragraphs, confused her; she would ask me to read the different versions, she would choose what she thought the best, and then tell me to tear up the others. I tore up wastepaper baskets full. She seemed to get satisfaction from this, as if getting rid of something was a great clarification. (And, in fact, she told me that to her writing was a way of getting rid of something, something unpleasant especially. She asked me once to write down for her a short poem that was going round and round in her head: “Two hells have I / Dark Devon and grey London— / One purgatory: the past—” And after I wrote it down she said, “Thank God, now I can forget that.”) After as much clarification as could be made by tearing up, there still remained a mass of bits.

Jean often talked of the “shape” of her books: she imagined a shape, and everything that fit into the shape she put in, everything that didn’t she left out, and she had left out a lot. She could not see the shape yet of the autobiography. Some chapters were together, some were in fragments, and she wasn’t at all sure of the order of the chapters, much less the fragments in the chapters. We spent days trying, in our minds, to fit together pieces; Jean would often say, “It can’t be done. It’s too jumbled.” To remember the pieces, we gave them names. I might say, “Well, Jean, this bit about your mother, don’t you think it should go into the Mother chapter?”

One evening, as I was sitting with her while she ate her soup, I said, “Jean, why don’t I do a paste-up of what’s already been done of the autobiography?”

She said, “Please put it all in chronological order and cut out all the repetitions.”

I took the entire autobiography with me. Crossing Chelsea Bridge, the feeling came over me, as it often comes over me to jump when I am at a height, to throw the folder into the river. In my small study, before the gas fire, I spread pages and parts of pages on the floor. I cut out paragraphs which Jean had wanted to save from what she wanted to throw out. I cut in half a section called “The Zouaves.” I pasted the pages and paragraphs and sometimes single sentences in what I thought the right order on to large sheets.

The next day I brought the paste-up to Jean and read the whole thing straight through. She said nothing. As I read, I saw her, her head tilted to the side, glance sideways from time to time at the page.

In the morning her editor rang me. She said that Jean had got into a frightful state after I left, so frightful the editor hoped she would never have to see anyone in such a state again. She was drunk and swearing and thought I had destroyed her book; she thought, too, I would lose it. She was particularly upset that I had cut in half a section called “The Zouaves.” She said, “It’s David’s book now, not mine.” Her editor asked if we could have lunch the following day.

I spent all that day and the next morning typing out the paste-up. I put the two halves of “The Zouaves” together. Before I went to lunch, I stopped by Jean’s flat and left off the new typescript.

She said, “Of course it is, and if I don’t like it I’ll tear it up and throw it away.”

I decided on my way to lunch that I would have nothing more to do with it. I thought Jean might have instructed her editor to say as much; but, in her office, she gave me a cheque for £500. Jean’s editor said the cheque was from the publishing house; later, Sonia told me that in fact it came from Jean, who had instructed her editor to tell me it came from the publishers.

I did not mention the autobiography again to Jean. I saw her often, as it was the holiday season. On New Year’s there was a champagne party in her flat. She, sitting in the midst, raised her glass and said, sadly, “Oh well, another year.” She was wearing a long silver dress. Her friends were about her.

Shortly afterward, when I went to give Jean her evening soup, I found a close friend with her, in a haze of smoke. We all talked for a while, then the friend left. Jean asked me, timidly, if I could continue to help her. I was reassured, and thought: Well, I wasn’t paid off. I wondered if she had been discussing it with the friend.

“Then,” I said, “I dropped a glass on the kitchen floor and it didn’t break.”

She shook her head. “No, never. They’re sheep. Sweet. I appreciate them. But they’re sheep, they follow after. And I never thought about money or fame. You mustn’t ever think of money or fame. The voices go if you do. I don’t think about anything but my writing.”

She laughed. “I always thought I was different. I always thought I was a freak, that I felt things they didn’t feel.”

“Yes, all of them. I’ve always felt best when I was alone, felt most real. People have always been shadows to me, and are so more and more. I’m not curious about other people—not about what they do, a little about what they think—and the more dependent I become on people, as I must, the more I shy away from them. But you like people, don’t you?”

“You are in person,” she said, “but I don’t know if you are in your writing.”

“People don’t like me,” she said. “I know they always try to put me down. They think I’m not nice.”

I said, “Sonia, who is totally honest, once said to me, ‘Oh David, no one thinks you’re as nice as you try to be.’”

“Yes,” she said. “I shouldn’t be. A mystic would say I shouldn’t be. But I delve and delve. I don’t know other people. I never have known other people. I have only ever written about myself.”

“Monstrously selfish,” she said. “But you’ve also got to realize that if you’re going to be that selfish you can’t expect anything from anyone.”

She spoke in a flat, tired voice. “I’m a prisoner. I can’t go out to shop, I can’t prepare my own food, can’t bathe alone, or make my bed. I worry that people resent my depending on them. And they do, of course they do.”

“But do you in any way feel justified in accepting help because you’re writing?”

She raised her hands and dropped them. “Oh, that: writing. No, nothing ever justifies what you have to do to write, to go on writing. But you do, you must, go on. You hear a voice that says, ‘Write this,’ and you must write it to stop the voice. I don’t hear any voices any more. My last collection of stories was no good, no good, magazine stories. I wasted two and a half years on that book. Not good. Oh, the reviews say it’s good. But you know when you’ve done something good, and those stories are no good. I can’t do it any more.”

She said, “Let’s have more drinks, honey. I know I’m not supposed to, but—the sins of the flesh and drink are very minor sins, aren’t they?”

There was very little drink left. I had to run out to buy another bottle of gin and of sweet vermouth.

She was sitting in the middle of the couch. She said, when I sat on my chair, “David, what will I do with my life?”

“I want to go away, I want to do something really wild, really really wild. What shall I do? I’m a prisoner.”

Her small body appeared to me more hunched and twisted than ever, and locked in that position, so when she moved even her head her entire body, rigid, moved too, in jerks.

“I once tried to commit suicide,” she said, “a long time ago. I cut my wrists. The doctor when I got to him sewed me up as if he’d done it six times before that same evening. I thought he’d be angry with me, send me to an asylum, but he didn’t say anything to me.”

“Yes,” she said, “the Polovtsian Dances. I saw Prince Igor once in Nice.”

I put the record on, just at the part I knew she liked; the music was filled with the crackling and popping of scratches. She raised her gaunt arms high as the music pounded, and seemed to be punching the air above her head with her fists, her head lifted to look up, tears pouring down her cheeks, and she said, “It’s so alive! It’s so marvellous!”

The moment the particular dance she liked ended, she lowered her arms, wiped her eyes with her hands, and said, “That’s enough of that.”

When I next went to work with her, I found her, on the divan, surrounded by cosmetics: compacts, lipsticks, creams. She was rubbing colours from a little flat box of many different shades of eye makeup on to the back of her hand. She was excited. “Look at this,” she said, “someone sent me all this. It’ll keep me happy for weeks.” I asked her who had sent it all, but she couldn’t remember. I sat next to her, and we discussed the shades of makeup that might best suit her. She took out her compact to look in the mirror and try a shade; I was worried that with her shaking hands she’d get it in her eyes. She smeared some on a temple. Looking at herself in the little round mirror, she raised her upper lip as in a sneer. She dropped her hand.

“You know,” she said, “being attractive is alien to women, so when they try the strain shows.”

She asked me, before we got to work on her autobiography, if I would help her with some correspondence. I got her to a chair by the desk and I opened a drawer to a heap of torn-open letters. She put on her spectacles, and reached out for a letter from the heap, examined it closely without, I thought, reading it, and handed it to me. Some letters were from acquaintances. We discussed whether she should answer them, but as all the letters said the sender would be in touch again, Jean asked me to tear them up. When we came across statements from publishers or letters from her accountant, she would put her hands over her eyes and say, “I can’t, I can’t.” She never knew who her foreign publishers were or what, exactly, was happening to her books; and she never knew, no matter how often she was told, how much money she had, except, she was sure, that it was very little. Letters from fans she asked me to read out to her and as I did she looked wistfully sad. If the letters enclosed reviews, she asked the title and the first line, then said, “Tear it up.” When the title was “The Dark Underworld of Women” or “The Woes of Women” or had “women” in it in any way, she’d grab the review from me and tear it up herself and throw it in the basket, laughing, and say, “No, I’ve had enough of that!”

It is impossible to say what Jean’s attitude was towards any subject. She seemed to have little interest in reactions to her work from serious readers, and I think she found it improbable that any opinion of hers should be taken seriously in the world; and yet she raged that no one paid any attention to her, no one at all. I wrote down some of the things she said about women: “I’m not at all for women’s lib. I don’t dislike women exactly, but I don’t trust them. You can never tell them what you really think, because if they know what you think they’ll do you down. I’m not, I’ve never been intimate with them. It’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I’m not like other women, that I lack feminine qualities. I’m not, and I have never been jealous, for example, never, and women are very jealous of one another.” And: “Don’t tell anyone this. Women are kind, but they do for you what they want to do, not what you want to do. They can’t imagine that you may want something quite different from what they want. Men at least try to do for you what you want.” And when women who were not close friends spoke to her, she looked at them with a superior and wounded tolerance as she listened, and said in response, simply, “Perhaps.”

To have argued with Jean about her opinions would have been mad: she simply would not have understood if one had said, “But Jean, don’t you wonder why you say that about women?” In terms of psychology (she said she had never read Adler, Jung or Freud, didn’t know what they were about, and didn’t want to know) or social studies (she wouldn’t have understood what a social study was), she never asked why her main female characters acted as they did: they just did, as she did. There is about them a great dark space in which they do not ask themselves, removing themselves from themselves to see themselves in the world in which they live: Why do I suffer? When Jean said she delved and delved into herself, I didn’t understand; it was certainly not to question her happiness, or, more, unhappiness, in terms of the world she lived in, and certainly not her prejudices. These prejudices were many, and sometimes odd: Protestants, Elizabethans—

When the time came for dictating, Jean said she wanted to do something unrelated to the book. I settled her on the divan with a drink. She began, “Today, I realize I am old, irretrievably old.” I wrote. As she dictated, I became angry, and I kept asking myself: Why am I wasting my time with this? The long paragraph was banal and affected, and the more banal and affected it became the more she wept as she dictated. She said, “A sort of despair,” in a sentence, and when I read the sentence to her, she said, “Cut the ‘a sort of’ and leave just ‘despair.’” She said no one helped her, she was utterly alone. She said she had had to come up to London on her own, when, in fact, Sonia and her editor had gone to Devon to stay in the village for three days to get her ready, and drove her up to London to the flat they had found for her. She asked me to read the whole thing out. She said, afterward, “Well, there are one or two good sentences in it.” I wondered how much of the “incredible loneliness” of her life was literature, in which she hoped for one or two good sentences—all, she often said, that would remain of her writing, those one or two good sentences. I thought: She is false, and I am false for being here. I was annoyed, not because Jean was being unfair (one of her most commonly used expressions was “It’s not fair!”) but because she was being totally unimaginative; I expected more from her.

She said, when I gave her another drink, “Trust only yourself and your writing. You will write something marvellous if you trust yourself and don’t give up.” And though I clasped her free hand and squeezed it, I became more angry—with Jean, but mostly with myself. She went on, a little drunkenly, about writing. She said, “People think they can sit down and write novels. Nonsense. It isn’t done that way. It’s not a part-time occupation, it’s your life.” I resented what she said, thought everything she said was false, and didn’t want to hear it; I sat across from her, drunk myself, and listened.

She put her glass down. “All right,” she said, “I’m ready to do some work on the autobiography.”

“Below the lonely house was the distant sea and Roseau Bay, and in the bay there was sometimes a strange ship flying the yellow flag, and we knew there was contagion on board. Rising up behind the house was untouched forest and, further up, a range of mountains, Morne Anglais, Morne Colle Anglais, Morne Bruce, Morne Diabletin. Morne Diabletin was the highest, and covered in mist. It had never been climbed because the summit was rock, and round the summit flew large black birds called devil birds. We could see the rain coming over the mountains and ran for shelter before it fell on us. There were a great many storms with forked lightning and thunder and great wind and heavy showers of rain, after which it cleared instantly, and the sky was blue again. When it was clear, the smell was fresh and sweet, and the sea below and the mountains above were bright.”

I thought: This is beautiful, and it is because of this that I am working with her.

But the paragraph underwent many different changes. She kept saying, “It should be vague, more vaguely remembered.” After a while, I was writing it with her, and she seemed to like the collaboration.

She said, after the paper and pencil were put away, “You know, what I’m trying to write about, my life in Dominica, happened almost a century ago. I remember songs my great-aunt taught me which her mother had taught her. It all goes such a long way back.” With another drink, she said, “And what is Dominica like now? They say there are no roses in Dominica now. There were, I remember them. They gave such a scent to the air.” She suddenly shouted, “Lies! Lies!” She bared her teeth. “A pack of lies. And who cares? Who does anything? Terrible things people do. Getting rid of the roses in Dominica. I hate the word ‘people.’” She spat the word out. “People! I hate people! I hate everyone. I think they’re all enemies. Terrible. No roses in Dominica. Who got rid of them? I know. I know. Up the Dreads. Yeah, the Dreads. They’re in London, too, and they wear dark glasses. In Dominica they live in the forests. They’re taking over. And who cares? Who gives a damn? Who? No one understands! Well, so what? I’ll be dead soon.”

I let her rage. Often she would open her compact, always with difficulty, and I’d watch her look in the little round mirror to powder her nose and cheeks and pull and push the hair around her face, her lips pursed with bitterness.

She suddenly stopped talking and looked at me for a moment in silence, blurry-eyed, then asked, “Why do you come to see me?”

She said, “I feel I can say anything to you, that you do understand, a little, just a little. Why do you come? Is it curiosity?”

We didn’t work the next time I saw her. One of Jean’s close friends helped me to take her to a beauty clinic. She had been saying that no one understood how her morale depended on makeup and pretty clothes. She wanted her face done up and her lashes dyed black. The clinic was at the top of a very long flight of stairs, which we took one at a time, pausing at each step. In the rather severe grey waiting room, Jean said, “This looks serious.” A young woman came for her, and I helped her up another flight of stairs into an alcove with green velvet curtains, then left to do shopping, and came back after an hour. She looked exactly as I had left her. In the car back to the flat, she said, “I am a fool.” Then she giggled and said, “Well, I’ll never go back there again.”

I stayed with her for a few hours. We didn’t work. She talked calmly about herself and, for the first time, about her family: her two older brothers, her elder sister, her younger sister. Her eldest brother, she said, studied medicine in Edinburgh, then went to India. The other brother, who had many illegitimate half-caste children in Dominica before he left (some still wrote to Jean and called her “dear Aunty”), went to Canada, then Australia, then East Africa, and finally died in England, “falling down a flight of stairs somewhere.” Her elder sister, when young, went to stay with an aunt and uncle in the Bahamas, on a holiday, and stayed and stayed, until, Jean said, it was obvious she was not going to return to her own family. Then Jean herself, who left the West Indies when she was sixteen to study at a girls’ school in Cambridge, was written to by her mother after her father’s death and told there was no more money and that she should return; but Jean stayed in England and “sort of drifted away” from her family. Her younger sister came to England with her mother. Jean had hardly seen either of them. She wasn’t in England when her mother died. Her sister, whom she never saw in later life, had died a few years before.

“Sometimes,” she said, “but I know it will all have changed.” She remembered something. “Honey, will you get from the top of the desk a piece of folded paper?”

I did, and gave it to her; she unfolded the paper to reveal three dried black leaves.

She said, “They’re voodoo. Someone, I can’t remember who, gave them to me. They’re from Haiti. You put them under your pillow and you dream the solution to your problem. You can’t drink too much and you can’t take sleeping pills. I must try it tonight. I won’t say I believe, and I won’t say I don’t believe.”

She had the solution to her problem when I saw her again. She would do something really wild and go to Venice. Two close female friends would go with her. Jean asked me to come next time with two huge manila envelopes and a stick of sealing wax. We put the unfinished autobiography into the envelopes, sealed them with melted wax, and I wrote on each TO BE DESTROYED UNOPENED IF ANYTHING SHOULD HAPPEN TO ME, and she signed, with both Jean Rhys and E. G. Hamer. The envelopes were to be given to her accountant.

The work put aside, my following visits with Jean were chatty, and when I asked her about her life it was simply to get her to chat, and she did, with ease. I did not write anything down afterward in my diary, except this: “Jean told me she remembered seeing Sarah Bernhardt on the stage, in the last act of La Dame aux camelias. It was after Bernhardt’s leg had been amputated, and she did the whole thing on a chaise longue. Jean recalled her saying, ‘Je ne veux pas mourir, je ne veux pas mourir,’ and a man in the seat next to Jean, tears streaming down his face, said, ‘But she’s just an old woman with one leg.’ Jean herself began to weep; she took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her eyes and said, laughing, ‘I’ll bet my tears are ninety per cent gin.’ I felt close to her.”

Sometimes we talked about writers, and she admitted, with no sign of great regret, that she hadn’t read Balzac, Proust, Fielding, Trollope, George Eliot, James, Conrad, Joyce. She couldn’t read Austen, she had tried. She had read a lot of Dickens. She had read, and remembered in great patches, the English Romantic poets, and Shakespeare. Her favourite writer, she said, was Robert Hichens, who wrote turn-of-the-century melodramas; she said his books took her away, especially The Garden of Allah. But when friends brought her his novels from second-hand book shops she left them in a pile. She read, instead, thrillers, and in her late life she read almost nothing else but. In Chelsea, she read, over and over, a novel called The Other Side of Midnight, and she said, “It’s trash, perfect trash, but it takes you away,” and made a sign as of going away, far off, with her hand. She said it was very important for a writer to have read a great deal at some time in his life. I presumed this was when she was a girl in Dominica, when she read books from her father’s library and from the public library, where she sat on a veranda to read, with a view of the sea. While she was on tour in music hall the girls read The Forest Lovers, and Jean read it too. It was about a couple in the Middle Ages who ran away into the forest because everyone disapproved of their love, but they always slept with a sword between them. The sword, Jean said, was an endless topic of conversation. (“What a soppy idea. What’d they do that for? I wouldn’t care about an old sword, would you?”) The Forest Lovers was the only book Jean read for years. She must have read when she started to write, though I am not sure what. She spoke very highly of Hemingway, and she knew many modern writers at least well enough to comment on them. About Beckett, she said, “I read a book by him. It seemed to me too set up, too studied.”

Shortly before she was to leave for Venice, amidst all the organization, she developed a slight cold. She thought she shouldn’t go. The doctor said she could. On my last visit before she left, she was wrapped in a quilt, and had a silk scarf tied as a turban around her head. Her cold, she said, was worse. She really thought she couldn’t go to Venice. She said she’d been reading a guide book about the city which said it was full of rats. She looked at me as if she had found out something everyone had deliberately kept from her to give her a false impression, and she had now found out the truth for herself. I said, “But there are a lot of cats.” She raised her eyebrows.

When I left her, telling myself I shouldn’t, I fantasized that Jean would die in Venice, the typescript of the unfinished autobiography would be destroyed, and I would be left with the handwritten pages of dictation. I, alone, would have Jean Rhys’s secrets.

This was in late February 1977. In November of the same year Jean returned to London for the last time. She stayed for months in the house of friends, where she had a bedroom and sitting room with pink floors. The friends helped her buy new dresses, and in her new dresses she sat in the sitting room off her bedroom and received visitors. But she would say, “I don’t want to see anyone,” and, ten minutes later, “No one ever comes to see me.”

We resumed work on the autobiography. She had done very little on it over the summer and autumn, but she had made a mess of it. I sorted it out. Each time I came back it was messed up again. I would put it in order, with clips; she would ask to see it, the whole thing would fall apart in her lap and to the floor, and she would say, “I don’t know if this will ever be finished, it’s in such a mess.” Finally, I put each section, or chapter, in a different coloured folder, wrote in big letters the names of the sections on the folders, and numbered them. If, however, there was more than one version of the section in the folder, she would become confused; I had to make sure there was only one copy, and the previous working copies I tore up and threw away in Jean’s presence. This tearing up and throwing away satisfied her for a time.

The days were dark grey and rainy; we had to light the lamps shortly after lunch, when we began the work. I read, countless times, the sections she wanted to hear again, and at the end she always said, “That needs more work,” but she never got around to doing the work unless I said, “All right, let’s do it now.” As often as I read certain passages to her, she always wept at some and laughed at others; she might have been hearing them for the first time. I thought: Yes, she’s right, it will never be done. Many days, she couldn’t work.

I began to take the separate sections home and I worked on them in my study; she knew this, and approved at least to the extent that, when I read them out to her on my next visit, she said, “That’s all right.” Very slowly, we finished chapters, and these were typed in triplicate. I threw away the working copy, put the top copy and the carbon in the folder, and gave Jean’s editor the third copy, as I thought that now the work, however little there was of it, should be preserved. Sometimes she had me rework the top copy, and the corrections I transferred to the carbon, then threw the top copy away. When, at times, she asked where the top copy of a chapter was, I would try to explain what I had done, but she didn’t understand, and she simply raised her hands. I was worried that she thought I was stealing from her.

One day, when she said she was too tired to work, we talked; but I was tired, too, and found it difficult to keep up the talk. I had now heard Jean’s stories many times.

She said, “Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else. Do you promise you won’t tell anyone? Promise me.”

“You’ll think I’ve told it to you before, and I have, part of it, but not all. I told you, didn’t I, how my third husband Max and I settled, having failed to settle in other places, in the cottage in Devon. I accepted it without seeing it, partly because Max wasn’t well, and we would be peaceful there. There were four small rooms. It was scantily furnished, and at first I thought it was rather nice. There wasn’t much in the sitting room except a desk and a good chair in front of the desk. There was a big bed and also a dressing table in the bedroom. By the time I put our armchairs in the sitting room, however, it began to look very crowded. I took a dislike to it then, and lived in the kitchen mostly. And after I discovered that the kitchen was haunted by spiders and mice, the feeling of peace left me. I was trying to write Sargasso Sea at the time, but I had been interrupted time after time, and in this cottage I quite gave up.” Jean rubbed her forehead and looked down. “As usual, I took refuge in bottles of wine, and would get pretty drunk every night. Instead of getting better my husband got definitely worse. He kept falling, the way I keep falling now. At last the doctor insisted that he should go into hospital. I protested violently against this, but it was quite useless. Max died in hospital. I was left completely alone.” Jean let her hand fall to her lap; she kept looking down. “Alone, when I had nearly finished a bottle of wine, I’d pin on all the medals Max had had, for he had been in the RAF in the First World War, go out of the door, and shout, ‘Wings up! Wings up.’ I think I must have been pretty nearly crazy at this time.” After a pause, Jean shook her head and her body, as with a shiver. “Never mind about that,” she said.

After another pause, she said, “One day there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there was a young man I didn’t know. When I asked his name and if he wanted to see me, he said, ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m your friend.’ Then I vaguely remembered that one evening, when I was tormented by a pack of little boys while I was shouting, ‘Wings up,’ he had chased them away. So I asked him in and offered him a drink. I am still completely puzzled as to why this young man came to see me. He told me that he worked in the road outside, and would I speak to him if I saw him? I said of course I would, and I did keep a lookout for him after that, but I never saw him.”

It began to get dark in the room, and I turned on a lamp with a sheer pink scarf draped over it.

“After my husband died, I was determined to run away. It was winter, and a friend got me a room in a very nice house in, I think, Earls Court. He had chosen a large, rather pleasant room, and I had a moment of happiness when they brought me in tea and smiled. I remember looking out of the window as I poured the tea, and thinking that I had escaped. Unfortunately, the heating failed, and the whole place got icy cold. I stupidly went to take a shower. I pulled at the shower, but the water was completely icy. The landlady ended by sending for the doctor. He said I had had a heart attack, and I was in St. Mary Abbots Hospital for two weeks. After the hospital I went to a convalescent home for two weeks. Then I went to a nursing home in Exmouth for another two weeks. It was while I was there that I began to want to finish Sargasso Sea, and decided that the cottage was a quiet place where I might be able to go on with it. Sitting at the long table in the kitchen, I did manage to fill two exercise books, but when I stopped and reread what I had done, I discovered that I had written one short chapter, and then about six more versions of it. It wasn’t the chapter that appalled me so much as the fact that every one of the versions was the same. I had merely written the same thing over and over again, not changing a word. After that I gave up. It seemed to me that it would be impossible ever to write again. I had no money; it would be quite useless for me to borrow money from my brother to go up to London. I had only a few books, which I knew almost by heart. I spent my time walking up and down the passage, afraid of the spiders and the mice, and all the people in the village. I think it was one of the worst times of my life.

“One day the clergyman of the village called on me. My brother had given me an introduction to this man’s wife, whom he knew, but after I had been several months in the place, they hadn’t taken the faintest notice of me. So I was rather astonished at his appearing, and still more astonished that I liked him very much. He didn’t talk of religion at all. I had heard of this man. He was supposed to have thousands of books in his rectory. Someone also told me that he was a great scholar. After that first visit, he came back almost every week. He even began to knock in a special way, so that I would know who it was and open the door. I think that the reason I began to value his friendship so much was that he had never read any of my books and doubtless would have thought them ephemeral if he had. At last I told him about the fear that was surrounding me now and that it was getting worse all the time, that I had begun to hate human beings, that I had to force myself to go out at all. Week after week he came. He told me over and over that there was nothing to fear. Now this is what I never told you before, what I’ve never told anyone. He asked me one day if I would take Communion. I said I didn’t know if I believed. He said, ‘You were baptized, weren’t you?’ I said yes. So the next time he came he came with Holy Communion, with the host, and I got down on my knees, stuck out my tongue, and he placed the host on it. And then, you know, I started to write, and I finished the novel. If there was any fairness in the world, I would have dedicated it to him, but of course I didn’t.” Jean was silent, her hands in her lap. She raised them and looked at me. She said, “Only writing is important. Only writing takes you out of yourself.”

On our work days, there was no inspiration. Jean quickly became drunk. I became drunk with her. The work sessions degenerated into her shouting, “Lies! Lies!” And she would look at me, her face hard, and say, “You don’t understand.”

She immediately sat back, her face softened, and she said, softly, “I don’t mean you.”

I gathered, then, that when she said “you” she meant a very general “you”: people.

When she said, “You know what you must do. Do you? You must know, and you must do it.” I wasn’t sure if she meant what I or what people must do. “You know what you must do in your writing,” she said. I became reassured: she was going to say that I must in my writing save all civilization. But she stared keenly at me, expecting me to reply to her repeated, “Don’t you know?” I smiled. She said, “You must tell the truth about them.” She slammed her hand down on the arm of the chair. “You must tell the truth against their lies.” My anger gave way to sudden sadness.

She saw the sadness in my eyes. She said, “When I was a little girl I was always saying, ‘That’s not fair, that’s not fair,’ and I was known as socialist Gwen. I was on the side of the Negroes, the workers. Now I say, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ about the other side, because I think they aren’t treated fairly.”

Her face, it seemed to me, became that of a little girl. She looked at the floor. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know any more.”

Sometimes, in my reading, she would ask me to cut a passage I thought good. Often, I convinced her to keep it in, though she said it should be cut because she didn’t understand it. One passage she wanted to cut, which I said really should stay in, was that as a child she imagined God was a big book. But a passage about her mother, which she said she simply could not understand, she insisted on leaving in:

She would often stick up for what she called their rights. We had a large mango tree which took up most of the room in the small garden. The fruit was round, small and very sweet. But the branches hung over the wall in such a way that when it bore fruit anyone in the street could get it. My father was furious as he liked mangoes and he couldn’t bear to think that little boys stole them. He sometimes threatened to put broken glass along the top of the wall or buy another, fiercer dog. “Scap’s no good,” he’d say. My mother said, “You can’t stop them from picking fruit if they are thirsty, they have a right to.” “What right?” my father said; “those are my mangoes.” “They have a right to it,” was all my mother would say. She often talked like this about their rights, as she maintained that though all babies were sweet, black babies were much prettier. There still remained, however, this wide, cold gulf between her and them which she made no attempt to cross. She was a contradictory woman and as I grew older I stopped wondering what she thought and why.

There were two breezes, the sea breeze and the land breeze. People said that they called the land breeze the undertaker breeze. But I never thought that. It smelt of flowers.

She often had me check to make sure a passage she thought of using in her autobiography hadn’t already been used in one of her novels or short stories. I did my best, but I, too, couldn’t always remember.

When I arrived at the house and before I left, I sat with the friend with whom Jean was staying, and we talked, obsessively, about Jean.

I found the friend in tears once, sitting at the kitchen table. She said, “I feel I’m becoming like her. Yesterday she said to me, ‘It’s eight o’clock, thank God, now I can go to bed,’ and at nine o’clock I was saying to myself, ‘Thank God, now I can go to bed.’”

“She fell in the bathroom last night, getting up to pee. It was a struggle. I had to roll her on to a blanket and drag her back to her bed. But she’s all right now.”

Jean was in the bathroom when I got to her sitting room. I waited for her. She came out, unsteadily. She was wearing large pink bloomers, tied at the ankles, a white silk blouse, and her pink wig, put on backwards. She smiled when she saw me. I went to her, kissed her. She stood holding the back of a chair, and she appeared thoughtful.

“You know,” she said, “I was just thinking about the differences in our writing. I can’t make things up, I can’t invent. I have no imagination. I can’t invent character. I don’t think I know what character is. I just write about what happened. Not that my books are entirely my life—but almost. You invent, don’t you?”

On the slow way, she said, “Though I guess the invention is in the writing. But then there are two ways of writing. One way is to try to write in an extraordinary way, the other in an ordinary way. Do you think it’s possible to write in both ways?”

“I think so.” “I think what one should do is write in an ordinary way and make the writing seem extraordinary. One should write, too, about what is ordinary, and see the extraordinary behind it.”

She dropped down among the bright pillows of her chair. “I have never, never got what I felt and thought into words.”

“And yet, when you dictate a sentence to me, I study it and think, this sentence should be banal and sentimental, and it’s in fact original and tough. Why is that?”

“Yes,” she said, “I tried to get that. I thought very hard of each word in itself.”

I said, “Sometimes I think your writing is not only about your life, it is your life. I mean, you’ve had a few very intense experiences in your life, all isolated by great space and silence. Your words are like that, intense events which occur in space and silence.”

I didn’t want to start working. The best of Jean was not, now, in her writing, but her talk about writing. With one drink, however, she started, “Lies! Lies!” and when we tried to work her dictation was incoherent. I took down sentences, sometimes words, to compose at home scrappy paragraphs. We were meant to be working on her later life. I was determined to finish at least a first draft. The deeper she got into her later life, the more incoherent she became. After half an hour, she couldn’t work.

I told her about a dream I had had about a woman at a market stall from whom I, hungry, asked for a bun, and she said, “They’re very expensive,” but I said, “It doesn’t matter,” and as I was reaching into my pocket for the money she gave me the bun and money from her own pocket, and I suddenly understood that in the country I was in when you bought something you were in fact paid to take it.

Jean laughed. She said, “Dreams mean the opposite of what they say. That woman was me. You think I’m giving you something in the dream, but, deep down, you feel I’m taking something from you.”

The autobiography was coming together in a rough way. The first part, which dealt with her life in Dominica, was at least in a completed draft. The second part, her life in England and France, had big holes.

In the black file which Jean had with her were yellow scraps of earlier stories; we went through them, and some of these, because they were her life, we transferred to the second part of the autobiography. Among the scraps was an old brown-covered notebook, half the pages torn out. Jean took it out.

“I don’t know,” she said, “if this should go in. I wrote it, a kind of diary, a long time ago, when I was living in a room above a pub called the Ropemaker’s Arms in Maidstone.”

She made a face. “Max was in Maidstone prison. I have always been attracted, I suppose, to thieves and saints, not that they were thieves exactly, and they weren’t saints. I didn’t know, and I don’t know now, why my first and third husbands were sent to prison. I don’t know much about my husbands, and I don’t know much about my parents. Perhaps I wasn’t curious. My daughter once told me my first husband, Jean, was in the French Intelligence. I didn’t know. Max was married before, but whether he had any children or not I don’t know—perhaps a boy or girl. Men used to come to the house. I didn’t like them, especially one. I didn’t know what Max did with them. He went to prison. Enough. I’ve enough letters with the heading HM PRISON. I visited him. One prisoner said to me, ‘It’s all right for people like me, we should be here, but not for people like him.’ The warder with the one leg was nice. Max got a bit of money in prison and he saved it to buy me chocolates. The whole thing was so beastly I try not to think about it. I know the real villain, that one man I especially couldn’t stand, went free. Max never recovered.” She held the notebook out to me. “Anyway, I wrote this in my room. I called it ‘Death Before the Fact.’ Do you know that? It’s from St. Theresa. In my room were two black elephants with long curving tusks on the mantel, and from the window I saw laundry and cabbage stumps. Will you read it to me? You’ll see how long ago I wrote it, because the handwriting is clear.”

I read. Jean had put herself on trial. She saw herself, defenseless, answering the questions of a judge who condemned her to a simple fate: to be unhappy, to write, and to die.

On the margins of the pages torn out were words, and these I typed out too, though I decided I would not tell her I had done so.

My dear . . . I’ve just . . . worrying . . . to help . . . a little . . . to me . . . know . . . Leslie . . . called . . . Edward . . . with . . . why they . . . took such . . . will be free . . . We are supposed . . . London . . . money . . . that I . . . lives . . . for a little . . . I can’t . . . them . . . me . . . all . . . I didn’t want . . . went . . . because . . . down . . . Hell . . . I do . . . place . . . the . . . tell . . . was . . . just before Max . . . approached by . . . a radio play . . . and I would . . . from . . . I can’t . . . well . . . going . . . here . . . person . . . But I fear . . . hopeless . . . do so . . . looking . . . live . . . My Dear Edward . . . The enclosed . . . Will you . . . I have . . . you please . . . is likely . . . careful . . . but . . . I . . . you . . . allowance . . . I gave . . . worried . . . living . . . where . . . I get 36/6 a . . . Admiralty . . . from the P . . . from . . . that is . . . but . . . for the . . . 30/ . . . as . . . by . . . I . . . by . . . out . . . So I’m going to . . . I married . . . know because . . . Brenda . . . to be . . . to get . . . it . . . died I . . . sincerely wish I . . . So I’ll . . . oh how I wish . . . of waiting . . . I . . . been . . . stresses . . . to see . . . and leave . . . approve of them . . . safeguards . . . that my . . . only be . . . think . . . I’m afraid the . . . gone on . . . I . . . after . . . kind things . . . so badly . . . to feel . . . else . . . has . . . dread . . . year . . . looking . . . be fair . . . you’d paid . . . lasted . . . friendly . . . after hearing . . . still . . . Strauss . . . As for the other . . . home that . . . a looney-bin . . . that at all . . . Brenda and . . . you must . . . necessary . . . You . . . who . . . I . . . myself . . . do . . . myself . . . after . . . A . . . only . . . he . . . them . . . Did you, either of you . . .

When I came back and read the typed-out diary to her, she thought she wouldn’t include it in the autobiography. I insisted she must. She said, “All right, if you cut certain passages.” I cut them, but include here only this:

Do you wish to write about what has been happening to you?

No, not yet.

You realize that you must?

I doubt whether it is as important as all that. Still I will write it, but not today.

Softly, softly, cathee monkey.

I asked, guiltily, I suppose, as I had not only written about her in my diary, I had now stolen from her, “Do you mind people writing about you?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I know people will try to uncover everything about me after I die to write it all down.”

The February days continued the January days of dark grey. Jean was not well. She didn’t know what to do. Perhaps she should return to her cottage in Devon where a nurse would take care of her, as she was utterly incapable of taking care of herself. The second part of the autobiography was still scrappy towards the end. I promised I would go down to Devon in the spring to help her; she smiled at me as she might smile distantly on all promises.

On my last visit, Jean was in bed. She had a plaster on her forehead covering a bruise she’d got from falling. She looked frail.

She said, “I want to tell you about an experience I had once.” It was as if she had been thinking of it for a long time and had finally decided to tell me.

She said, “I’ve tried to write it, but have never been able to. It shows how inadequate words are. In Paris, some close friends suggested and paid for a holiday for me in the South of France. I went with another girl. This was in the Thirties. We went to Théoule, near Cannes. One day, alone, I had a bathe in the sea, then lunch. As I knew the bus to Cannes, where I wanted to go to shop, was leaving soon, I ate my lunch quickly, and I didn’t have any wine. But I missed the bus, and thought, oh well, I’ll walk, it isn’t a long way. At La Napoule I felt tired and left the road to sit by the sea. You could do that in those days. I can’t describe what happened. No words, no words, there are no words for it, except perhaps, in a still unknown language. I felt a certainty of joy, and terrific, terrific happiness, not only for me, but for everyone. I knew that the end would be joy. I felt, too, a part of the sea, the sun, the wind. I don’t know how long I was there, but after a while I got up, went back to the coast road, and walked to Cannes. I went to a café for coffee. There was a big tree outside the café. I sat and I looked about and I thought: Why do I hate people? They’re not hateful. When I got back to Théoule I of course said nothing to my friend, but my happiness for everyone lasted, lasted, perhaps three or four days.”

“If you want to,” she said, and she repeated it again as I wrote. Afterward, she looked out of the dark window on which rain was falling, and said, “Is there anything else I have to tell you? No, I don’t think so. Anyway, none of the rest matters.”

She smiled. “Well, how can one be sure unless one has died? But I think there must be something after. You see, we have such longings, such great longings, they can’t be for nothing.”

“Oh, whatever faith I have I find expressed in man-made things, and to me the greatest expressions of faith I’ve ever seen are Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.”

“My books aren’t important,” she said. “Writing is. But my books aren’t.”

I put it on the bed beside her and with her spectacles she looked through the few scraps of old paper left in it. She took out a sheet.

“This is what I want to give you,” she said and handed me the sheet. “It’s the outline of a novel I wanted to write called Wedding in the Carib Quarter. I won’t write it. Maybe you will.”

She wrote on it, in large shaky letters that looked like Arabic script: “Think about it. It is very important.” She gave it to me.

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