{"id":48280,"date":"2013-03-12T12:30:50","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T16:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=48280"},"modified":"2013-03-13T15:13:08","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T19:13:08","slug":"street-haunting-with-jean-rhys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/12\/street-haunting-with-jean-rhys\/","title":{"rendered":"Street Haunting with Jean Rhys"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jean+Rhyslarge\"<\/a>

Illustration credit Joanna Walsh<\/small><\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The author Jean Rhys had trouble finishing her stories. Rhys told her editor and friend Diana Athill that \u201cending a novel based on things that had really happened … was difficult because a novel must have shape, and real life usually has none.\u201d In Rhys\u2019s later years, spent struggling with her autobiography and idly drinking in her Devonshire bungalow, her memory was faulty. The problem wasn\u2019t just that she couldn\u2019t remember; Rhys told Athill that she sometimes felt \u201cmore like a pen being used than like a person using a pen,\u201d a startling insight that perhaps led Athill to write, in the foreword to Rhys\u2019s unfinished autobiography, Smile Please<\/i>, published posthumously in 1979, that her friend had \u201cused up\u201d her life in fiction.<\/p>\n

Wide Sargasso Sea <\/i>(1967) was Rhys\u2019s final book, the one that made her famous late\u2014\u201ctoo late,\u201d she said. Set in the early nineteenth century, Wide Sargasso Sea<\/i> was Rhys\u2019s great historical vendetta, in which she furnished a life for the West Indian \u201cmadwoman\u201d Charlotte Bront\u00eb dismissed to Rochester\u2019s attic in Jane Eyre<\/i>. I began where Rhys ended, reading her last novel at sixteen in an English class at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, England, a few doors away from the Perse School for Girls, the posh private school Rhys had attended on moving to England from Dominica in 1907. Jean and I went to school on the same street a hundred years apart, sixteen-year-old sisters in the same place at a different time. Cambridge had changed, but Jean stayed with me. Neither of us liked school, and we both knew what it was like to be derided by a Perse girl; Jean for her Creole accent, and I for being a Hills Road student (in keeping with informal tradition,\u00a0our schools maintain an absurd rivalry). <\/p>\n

In a free period, I would walk down Hills Road until the opening of Station Road, a dead-end street that brought an influx of people from the train station at its bottom: business executives back from meetings in London, students searching for their bicycles, tourists looking for the Cambridge University colleges or a Starbucks. Opposite this busy street, tucked away like a secret, were the botanical gardens where I read Wide Sargasso Sea<\/i>\u00a0amid fragrant, tropical plants in a less than tropical climate, and moved Jean with me into the sticky greenhouse when it rained. I thought of her whenever I passed the iron gates of Perse or saw one of their girls or boys—now accepted to the institute, though \u201cPerse girls\u201d has stuck in the sixth formers\u2019 vocabulary—in their purple blazers waiting for the train home. I wondered whether Jean wore purple, too; how the uniform would have shrouded her slight frame, and complemented the blue planets of her eyes, said to have made an impression on those who met her.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t until I moved to London\u2014where I read and reread Rhys\u2019s best novels: Quartet<\/i> (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie<\/i> (1930), Voyage in the Dark<\/i> (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight<\/i> (1939)\u2014that I knew what Jean meant to me. I had gone to London to read English at university, choosing academia over drama school, though I wasn\u2019t sure that it was what I wanted, and to be with someone I thought was all I needed. I imagine that when Rhys arrived in London in 1909 to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, it was more determinedly, perhaps to the whoosh<\/i> of a metaphorical theatre curtain, as Anna Morgan landed in the London of Voyage in the Dark<\/i>, \u201cas if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again.\u201d But for Anna, as it was for Rhys, London became a place of rejection. Anna\u2019s shortcomings as an actress echoed the author\u2019s own; Rhys\u2019s term at RADA was short-lived: her teachers, like the horrible Perse girls, scorned her Creole accent, and thereafter, she fell into a routine of chorus girl roles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The reality and the dream were always separate. Life slipped into a series of repetitions, the same stagnant play performed every night and matinee. Of Anna\u2019s stint as a touring chorus girl, Rhys wrote, \u201cYou were perpetually moving to another place which was perpetually the same. There was always a little grey street leading to the stage-door of the theatre and another little grey street where your lodgings were, and rows of little houses like the funnels of dummy steamers and smoke the same colour as the sky.\u201d Paris was more of the same as her characters\u2019 lives slotted into a similarly weary template. For Sasha Jansen, the heroine of Good Morning, Midnight<\/i>, \u201clife, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of caf\u00e9s where they like me and caf\u00e9s where they don\u2019t, streets that are friendly, streets that aren\u2019t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I never shall be, looking glasses I look nice in, looking glasses I don\u2019t, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won\u2019t, and so on.\u201d Rhys\u2019s slender novels are full of elegantly rambling sentences like these\u2014always dithering to get somewhere, like her characters.<\/p>\n

I thought of Jean again when I visited Paris, walking past the now offensively expensive caf\u00e9s flanking the Left Bank. At their multiple tables, I pictured multiple Jeans sipping from glasses of vermouth paid for as they were in her books, by sleazy Frenchmen and expat Americans. More likely, Jean\u2019s drinks were ordered for her by Ford Madox Ford, with whom she lived briefly in Paris. Rhys wrote the story of that affair in Quartet<\/i>, wherein Ford appeared as an incorrigible sexual tyrant, Hugh Heidler, and her heroine, Marya Zelli, his unhappy mistress. And love was just as wretched to Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie\u2014<\/i>a cruel joke of a title, since it was, in fact, Mr. Mackenzie who left her. Back in England, another marriage\u2014my parents\u2019\u2014was falling apart, but I had booked the trip to Paris months before, and couldn\u2019t disappoint the friends I was traveling with. As we strolled the grounds at Versailles, waited in the long queue for the Eiffel Tower, and for the Mona Lisa<\/em> at the Louvre\u2014another chick who looked like she wanted to be elsewhere\u2014I was happy and unhappy. I didn\u2019t want to be in this beautiful city, but I didn\u2019t want to be home, either; I understood a little of what Jean felt.<\/p>\n

One day, I saw her. I was studying a stack of books at Shakespeare & Co., when I felt a pair of eyes watching me. I looked up and saw her cartoonish eyes under a coiffured hairdo framing her lovely face, resting on her hands in that pose writers assume in the jackets of their books. But Jean wasn\u2019t alone; she was with Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, among other \u00e9migr\u00e9 writers that had flocked to Paris, and whose caricatured faces now festooned Shakespeare\u2019s walls in mock frames. I was excited to have run into Jean,\u00a0to see that she had been remembered here, and that, though she hadn\u2019t found home in Paris, a part of the city had given her one.\u00a0It also seemed marvellously appropriate that I should find her when I needed her most, in a bookshop.<\/p>\n

One gets the sense that Rhys was always trying to break out of a pattern whilst framing a larger one, to fit things together in life as she was in her fiction. When we meet them, Rhys\u2019s characters have already made big geographical moves, so what\u2019s left are all of life\u2019s little choices; her heroines perpetually flit between inside and outside, room and street, yes and no. Because the lives of Rhys\u2019s characters map onto the author\u2019s\u2014Marya, Julia, Anna, and Sasha are the real pen pushers of Rhys\u2019s story\u2014they\u2019re always bumping into each other at these crossroads. Sasha believes that indifference\u2014\u201cwhen you don\u2019t care any longer if you live or die\u201d—is bliss. \u201cAs soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it.\u201d Though indifference doesn\u2019t exist in any Rhys novel. \u201cI do believe that life\u2019s all laid out for one. One\u2019s choices don\u2019t matter much,\u201d she told The Paris Review<\/i>. \u201cIf you can adapt, you\u2019re all right. But it\u2019s not always easy if you\u2019re born not adapted, a bit of a rebel; then it\u2019s difficult to force yourself to adapt. One is born either to go with or to go against.\u201d At the close of the novel, as she lies back in bed, welcoming a sleep from which we know she won\u2019t stir, Sasha crosses the ultimate street as she utters her answer to death, a resounding \u201cYes…\u201d Rhys, who was \u201ca bit of rebel,\u201d and pushed the oxygen mask from her face at the end of her story, chose the same. For all their passivity in searching for indifference, Rhys\u2019s heroines always hold out possibility. They aren\u2019t relenting or hopeless, but persistent women fighting for a better life, or, where there isn\u2019t one, death—which isn\u2019t \u201cno,\u201d but \u201cyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that my love of Jean Rhys began with Wide Sargasso Sea<\/i>, though it didn\u2019t end there. Where that book put Rhys on the literary map, I wanted to get lost with Jean again in the metropolis of her earlier fiction. Boarding a plane at Heathrow last summer, I thought I had left her behind for New York, a city that Rhys never wrote about at length but one in which I find her time again. She\u2019s with me on the L train, at the corner table of my favorite Greenpoint dive, at the caf\u00e9s where they like me and don\u2019t. Jean\u2019s here now in my room in Brooklyn, and when I step outside, she\u2019ll walk with me through the streets I occasionally still get lost in, thinking and dreaming about home, wondering where exactly that place is.<\/p>\n

Chloe Pantazi is a freelance writer, and a graduate student at NYU\u2019s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. Her writing has appeared on Flavorwire, Hyperallergic, and Rockfeedback. She lives in Brooklyn via the UK, and you can find her on Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author Jean Rhys had trouble finishing her stories. 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