I went to Devon in May to see her. I didn’t stay in Jean’s garden shed, but with her only close friend, a retired teacher, in the next village. The teacher’s great heroes were Karl Marx and Groucho Marx; in the past she had had arguments with Jean about politics. She said Jean was not liked in the village because, years before, she had told some little boys she would cut them into pieces, which gave her the reputation of being a witch. “But she’s suffering now from senile persecution. We can’t judge Jean from the way she’s been these past years. It’d be like judging the whole of Hardy’s life from his last years.”
In rain, I went to Jean’s cottage before noon. The cottage, behind a high hedge, had been constructed during the war for evacuees. Jean came slowly to the door. As I kissed her, she said, “I should have rung you to tell you not to come.” I said, “It doesn’t matter if we don’t work on the book. It’s lovely to see you.” “Oh, me!” she said. Then she looked down at the passage floor.
We sat in her little lounge.
She said, “It’s all gone wrong, the whole country. Rain, rain, weeping for England. How I hate this country. How I hate this cottage.”
I always wondered when she spoke like this if I should agree with her, if what she wanted from me was to agree with her; and I wondered, too, if I should try to cheer her up, if that’s what she wanted.
I said, “But it’s a pretty cottage.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “pretty, but I want out, I want out, I want to take a pill and die.” She dropped her head against the back of the chair, her mouth open, her eyes staring, as if she suddenly had died; then she shook her head, looked about the room, and said, “Where is our lunch?”
Her nurse prepared Jean’s favourite lunch, curry and rice, which we ate at a little kitchen table. We drank very little.
Back in the lounge, Jean in a chair and I on a stool by her, I started to read straight through the autobiography, a lot of which I had memorized from so many readings.
“‘Smile, please,’ the man said, ‘not quite so serious.’”
Jean stopped me. She said, “Now tell me honestly, David. Is this worth doing? I don’t think it is. It’s no good. It’s dull. It has no life in it. And even if it did, what does it matter? Who cares?”
I said, “Jean, you told me writing is very important, and I tell myself that when I think, What does it matter?”
“I never understand you and your writing,” she said. “I mean, I cannot imagine your writing coming from you. You’re so, well, outgoing, and your writing is so, well, inward.”
I didn’t ask her to explain. I said, “Come on, let’s do some work.”
She looked at the floor for a while, then said, “Read me a little.”
I read. She asked me to cut words, sentences, paragraphs. She sighed often and quickly became tired; her head sank more and more. I left before it was dark.
The following day she couldn’t work. She raged, and in her rages she shouted, “It means nothing, it means nothing, writing, nothing, nothing!”
I stayed only a short time.
The retired schoolteacher said, “Go back to London. You really can’t do much for Jean now.”
I had been asked by a friend of Jean’s in London, who had bought and had reupholstered in yellow a chaise longue Jean had specially wanted for her sitting room, to get a cheque from Jean to pay for it; when the next day I did ask Jean for this, she shouted, “I have no money! I have none! They all want to take money from me!” I suddenly thought: She may think I have come for money. I helped her make out the cheque, worried that she might later forget what it had been for, and accuse me of asking for it for myself. I sensed, while I was with her, the small trust she had had in me turn to suspicion; and I imagined I began to act suspiciously in trying to act large-spirited.
Without drink, Jean raged. Who cared about writing? Who? And why should anyone care, because it didn’t matter.
I sat by her and said nothing.
She said, “David, you’re young. You have your life ahead of you. Don’t listen to what I say. Don’t listen to me, I’ll depress you.”
That afternoon I left her to return to London. I had an hour in Exeter before my train and I went to the cathedral. I sat in a chapel. I felt very low. I knew that in my outer bright believing heart I had been false to Jean, because in my inner dark unbelieving heart I had loved her as a writer. I thought, But she might forgive me my cheap literary curiosity, she might even condone it; she might, perhaps, tell me that my literary interest, not only in her but in the world, was the deepest possible interest. And then it came to me that Jean was dead, because she was dead as a writer.
•
A year after Jean’s death in 1979, I was at a table in a little glassed-in room in the Special Collections Department in the Library of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, looking through a selection of her papers. She had sold them to the Library—what little she had left, as she once told me she’d thrown out piles of manuscripts and typescripts—and I looked to find what I hadn’t seen before.
In a large grey file box I found two notebooks. They were torn and smudged and covered with cigarette burns. The handwriting was round, looped, large—her early writing.
One notebook had on its back cover a stamp: Cartoleria Pistoj, Firenze. I wondered if Jean had ever been to Florence and bought it there.
I read:
you know its awful bad I just live for the time when I can have a drink & cheer myself up a bit
there’s lots to that
Well he said to me like that get out he said Get out where I said—I don’t care where he said but get out
Go on the friend said—her eyes were wandering
I looked at him I said If I was to tell you what I think of you I would blow you out of the window I said You can go to hell I said.
You cant go somewhere when you’re there already I said
There was no punctuation. It wasn’t clear who was talking. Was this, I wondered, a bit of diary or note-taking for fiction?
The second student’s notebook had a map of Britain on the inside cover. At one end were pages written in her earlier handwriting, and, the notebook turned upside down and over, at the other end were pages written in her later, feeble hand. Between the two were blank pages.
I found many bits of poems, ballads, patois from Dominica. And in both notebooks I found, over and over, the first line of what she had hoped would be her autobiography. “Smile please the man said not quite so serious.”
Then I read this, which I do not believe she used in any of her fiction:
This vision came when I was walking along in the hot sun thinking then not thinking & being intensely happy for I existed no longer. but still the trees & the soft wind that smells of flowers & the sea & I was the wind the trees the sea the warm earth & I left behind a prison a horrible dream of prison & my happiness impossible to write of it active laughing with joy—Do you see now oh then it was just a dream of prison
& got to La Napoule
Yes of course what a fool I was worrying like that the certainty
I don’t know how long this state of bliss lasted then suddenly I was back in myself but the happiness was not quite gone & I walked into Cannes had a coffee at that café caught the bus back still happier than ever in my life though just the shadow the remembrance of the other happiness
This happened walking along the road from Théoule to Cannes one hot day in August about two to three o’clock I was quite well & I had had no wine at lunch as I was late for the bus to Cannes & hurrying up and I think I caught the one o’clock bus
. . . Only through books sometimes I can get it