SOURCE: "Jean Rhys," in Partisan Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, 1982, pp. 92-100.

[In the following essay, Bamber provides an overview of Rhys's fiction, literary career, and critical reception.]

Jean Rhys, who died in 1978 at age eighty-four, lived long enough to ride the wheel of literary fashion full circle. Taken up by Ford Madox Ford in the twenties, she was completely forgotten two decades later. In 1958 a British radio producer advertised for news of her whereabouts; Rhys herself answered the ad from Devon and subsequently resumed her literary career. Since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, there has been a steady growth of interest in her stories and novels. One by one all her books of the twenties and thirties have been reissued and enthusiastically reviewed; the final accolade came several years ago when A. Alvarez, writing in the New York Times, called her "the best living English novelist." Recently, articles of literary criticism have begun to appear on Rhys. Her readers seem confident that the job of evaluation is over and that her books may be treated as classics.

It would be interesting to know Rhys's own attitude towards her second wave of literary success. It was clearly gratifying to her at some level; under its influence she wrote the later stories published in the New Yorker and collected in Sleep It Off, Lady (1976). But Rhys was a woman more comfortable with failure than with success, and she apparently met her admirers with suspicion and some bitterness. She saw herself as an outsider, someone beyond the pale of respectable society; it is not surprising that she picked up on the unpleasant, rather than the pleasant, parts of her growing fame. Miriam Levine, the poet, interviewed Rhys in 1977 and reports that her conversation was, at least initially, prickly and self-protective. Rhys is quoted as follows:

I did a satiric piece on interviews called "Building Bricks Without Straws." They did a terrible piece about me in Women's Wear Daily. Mizener lied about me in his book on Ford. Some critic sent me this long article comparing me to Ann Radcliffe. You're not going to call me a Gothic novelist, are you?

Rhys is here playing the role she is most familiar with: Establishment Victim, in this case the victim of the literary establishment. Yet the literary establishment these days is unanimous in its enthusiasm for her work.

Rhys's sense of being an outsider must certainly have its roots in her personal history. Born in Dominica of a Welsh father and a Creole mother, she ran away to England at sixteen, married a French-Dutch poet and moved to France. In England she studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts; then she went on the road as a chorus girl. With Jean Lenglet, the first of her three husbands, she led an irregular life, borrowing money and sleeping on other people's couches, often in some sort of trouble with the authorities. A contemporary describes the world Lenglet shared with Rhys as "an underworld of darkness and disorder, where officialdom, the bourgeoisie and the police were the … enemies and the fugitive the … hero." In one of her fitful efforts to make some money Rhys at one point translated a few of Lenglet's feature articles into English and peddled them to Paris-based representatives of British newspapers. It was while she was acting as Lenglet's agent that she was herself "discovered" as a writer. The sympathetic wife of a London Times correspondent read Rhys's journals, typed them up for her, and sent them on to Ford Madox Ford, at that time the editor of the Transatlantic Review. Ford became Rhys's literary mentor, her lover, and the subject of her future work. The Left Bank (1927) is a collection of stories that Ford helped into print; Quartet (1928) is a about the period of time during which Rhys lived in a ménage à trois with Ford and his wife, Stella Bowen; and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930) looks back on the affair after its unpleasant ending. Her last prewar novel, Good Morning Midnight (1939), was written more than a decade after her relations with both Ford and Lenglet were over. At this point, Rhys was remarried to Leslie Tilden Smith, reader for a British publishing company. Yet in the novel Rhys returns to the events of her early married life, replaying them in the memory of her aging heroine.

Rhys's novels, all of them autobiographical, have one subject: the victimization and self-victimization of a woman drifting along the edges of artsy-bourgeois society. The Rhys heroine has no money, no family to speak of, no particular talents. Out of sexual desperation (for she is always spurned by the man she loves) she picks up men who turn out to be cads or gigolos. These encounters usually take place in Bloomsbury or the Left Bank; the atmosphere is of a café life, of cosmopolitan sterility. The heroine lives entirely in the present, and her ambition for the future is to get through the afternoon without crying. When she fails she says to herself, "Now, I'm a gone coon. I've begun crying and I'll never stop." The world shrinks to the size of the heroine's rented room—from which she makes pathetic forays for a brandy and to which she returns, as like as not, to be bullied for her failures by the landlady.

Notably absent from Rhys's account of her heroine is any analysis of her plight in political terms. The Rhys heroine is a natural victim, not a victim of sexual politics or class oppression. As an exile of obscure origins she is more or less classless; and although she certainly feels brutalized by men, she insists that "I'm even more afraid of women." The problem is extremely general: "People are such beasts, such mean beasts," says the heroine of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Elsewhere the formula is simply "life is cruel and horrible to unprotected people." The social analysis of Rhys's work stops with the assertion that there are outsiders and insiders, and that the one is entitled to resent the other. But even the resentment is fitful and limp. The Rhys heroine knows that she is largely responsible for her own unhappiness. Whenever something good comes her way—money, a man, the possibility of a good time—she instantly loses it through laziness, obsessiveness, or a kind of petty anger arising from her sense that it isn't enough.

Another notable absence in Rhys's work is the sense of place. We are told that we are in Paris rather than London, or vice versa, but it seems to make little difference. The outside world has withdrawn from the Rhys heroine. As long as there is a room, a street, or a restaurant for her to occupy, she doesn't bother much about the details. That is, of course, Rhys herself, in sympathy with her heroine's depression, makes no effort to find correspondences between the inner and the outer life. Her heroines experience the thinness of life and Rhys means for her readers to do likewise. Ford Madox Ford tells in the preface to The Left Bank how he tried to get Rhys to "introduce some sort of topography … into her sketches…." He goes on to say:

But would she do it? No! With cold deliberation, once her attention was called to the matter, she eliminated even such two or three words of descriptive matter as had crept into her work. Her business was with passion, hardship, emotions.

Rhys does sometimes include material that is interesting for its own sake: there are descriptions of the life of a Paris manikin, of a Bloomsbury group's horrible country vacation, of Left Bank parties. And in the first section of Wide Sargasso Sea she quite brilliantly works up the landscape of Dominica, where all relationships are as decadent as the lush, rotting vegetation. But the monotony of the heroine's feelings is more likely than not to fill the whole frame, foreground and background.

Ford's description of Rhys's "business" is worth pausing over. According to Ford, and to many of Rhys's contemporary readers, the point of Rhys's work is the intensity of the heroine's inner life. From time to time Rhys will indeed claim a kind of energy for her heroine; in Quartet, for example, the "longing for joy" is said to be a "mad thing in her heart … like some splendid caged animal roused and fighting to get out." But the characteristic gesture in Rhys's novels is actually the withdrawal of emotional presence in times of crisis, not the enactment of fierce emotional needs. The following exchange between heroine and her lover is typical:

"I want to help you; I want you to get on. You want to get on, don't you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"But my dear, how do you mean you don't know?… What would you really like to do?"

I said, "I want to be with you. That's all I want."

"Oh, you'll soon get sick of me." He smiled, a bit as if he were sneering at me.

I didn't answer.

"Don't be like that," he said. "Don't be like a stone that I try to roll uphill and that always rolls down again."

"Like a stone," he said. It's funny how you think, "It won't hurt until I move." So you sit perfectly still. Even your face goes stiff.

The withdrawal here is twofold. The heroine, Anna, withdraws from the lover, her face stiff with pain; and Rhys withdraws from the reader into ellipsis and Hemingway-style understatement. Neither gesture seems compatible with mad, splendid longings for joy. Both the author and the heroine characteristically avert their eyes from precisely the "passion, hardship [and] emotion" that Ford thought central to Rhys's project.

A more recent admirer of Jean Rhys, A. Alvarez, explains the novelist's technique as follows:

She is … far too pure an artist to allow herself the luxury of self-pity … The moments of drama and confrontation—when the subterranean terror and despair seem about to burst through-remain strictly moments, done briefly, without comment or fuss from the outside. Her mind flicks away from them, quick as a fly, and settles on some small detail off to one side: her makeup is wrong, the light falls oddly, a bell rings, a car hoots…. And this … is far more unnerving than any full-throated howl of anguish can ever be.

To Alvarez, the withdrawals of consciousness are precisely the point. According to Alvarez, it is just when the author abandons the effort to render the heroine's feelings that they become most vivid to us, just when the heroine abandons her claims on life that we become aware of the depth of her needs. And yet as we can see from the dialogue leading up to Anna's withdrawal, the disappearances of the heroine and her author do not come at "moments of drama and confrontation—when the subterranean terror and despair seem about to burst through." They come at moments when the linguistic and emotional energy is already low. Anna can't get a job, can't want a job, can only throw herself on the mercy of her helpful/superior lover: "I want to be with you. That's all I want." When Anna averts her eyes from the inevitable response to her meagerness, her withdrawal is not a sudden and striking gesture of giving up. It is another step in the continuous retreat that is the form and content of Rhys's work.

Anna is the heroine of Voyage in the Dark, Rhys's first novel. This book describes Rhys's first love affair and was initially written in journal form. In Smile Please (1978), Rhys's posthumously published autobiography, she comments on that affair as follows:

When my first love affair came to an end I wrote this poem:

I didn't know.
I didn't know.
I didn't know.

Then I settled down to be miserable.

But it still annoys me when my first object of worship is supposed to be a villain….

On the contrary, I realise now what a very kind man he must have been. I was an ignorant girl, a shy girl. And … I realise I was also a passive, dull girl. Though I couldn't control my hammering heart when he touched me, I was too shy to say "I love you." It would be too much, too important I couldn't claim so much.

Rhys here describes both her biographical self and the heroine of her autobiographical novels. Like her heroines, Rhys couldn't claim much. That is, she could not make her claims directly; she based them on her weaknesses and failures rather than on her strengths. Stella Bowen, Ford's wife at the time of his liaison with Jean Rhys, tells us that, in life as in her fiction, Rhys self-consciously played the role of the loser:

Ford's girl was by no means without generous instincts and her world had its own standards of chic…. Yet here I was cast for the role of the fortunate wife who held all the cards, and the girl for that of the poor, brave, and desperate beggar who was doomed to be let down by the bourgeoisie. I learned what a powerful weapon lies in weakness and pathos and how strong is the position of the person who has nothings to lose, and I simply hated my role! I played it, however, until the girl was restored to health and a job materialized, since we appeared to represent her last chance of survival.

Bowen's analysis rings true, right down to the constant sense of "last chance" that Rhys creates in her novels. The final disaster, desertion or death, is always just around the corner. In Quartet Rhys explicitly claims pathos as her defining mode, commenting on the Ford and Bowen figures as follows:

Of course, there they were: inscrutable people, invulnerable people, and she simply hadn't a chance against them, naive sinner that she was.

The outside world is knowing and invulnerable, the Rhys heroine is "naive," innocent in spite of her sins, pure because helpless.

Rhys's helplessness is often a kind of "weapon" in her fiction just as it was in her life. Her silences are not, unfortunately, the true absences that Alvarez takes them for but a form of pressure for the reader's sympathy. Rhys's retreats have a double message. We cannot be such beasts, she seems to say, as to refuse our sympathy to someone with such poverty of artistic means, someone so helpless to make her own case. There is a kind of emotional blackmail to Rhys's technique: she is like a woman who leaves the room in silent agony, indicating in every line of her body an absolute demand to be followed.

What is particularly disturbing is that Rhys seems to equate her femininity with her pathos, the one reinforcing the other. In Good Morning, Midnight, for instance, we hear of a "thin, scraggy and hunted" kitten: "Well, all the male cats in the neighborhood were on to her like one o'clock. She got a sore on her neck and the sore got worse…. In the glass just now my eyes were like that kitten's eyes." The heroine is called romantic names like Antoinette, Petronella, Julia, Sasha, Roseau. She is as vulnerable as the kittens, sad children, and gentle prostitutes who so often cross her path; there is no question but that the feminine should be protected. The men who don't pay up, the lovers who fail to provide a haven for the heroine, practically perceive themselves as cads and slink ignominiously from the novels. The one time a Rhys heroine is satisfied with the behavior of "people" in general is when they do homage to her femininity during a pregnancy:

My face is pretty, my stomach is huge…. People are very kind to me. They get up and give me their seats in buses. Passe, femme sacrée.

"Passe, femme sacrée," of course, is offered ironically; and yet to Rhys it is a kind of tragedy when, as so often, the feminine is not held sacred.

Rhys's last book, Smile Please, is a curious phenomenon. It was apparently undertaken to correct false impressions about the author's life. There were rumors that one of her two children was Ford's; not so, Rhys wanted us to know, both were Lenglet's. Her first lover was, as we have seen, a kind man, not a villain; Lenglet was arrested for currency violations, not robbery. But what developed from this impulse to set the record straight is a collection of fragments which are pointless, at best, and at their worst, quite ugly. Rhys finished only the first half of the book, the part on her childhood in Dominica; but even if we confine ourselves to that we must be surprised at what we are offered. Our attention is claimed for what cannot possibly interest us. We learn that Rhys had petits pains for breakfast while she was in convent school, not croissants; that she cannot remember how her father defined Nirvana; that when she first got a clothing allowance she bought herself a red tam-o'-shanter; that she loved the word "wisteria" and hated the word "cold." It is when she comes to the matter of race relations in Dominica that her book seems worse that shapeless. Rhys records her discovery that she was disliked by a black fellow student in tones of undisguised self-pity; and she includes this lethargically mean-spirited comment on the contemporary Caribbean situation:

When years later I paid a short visit to Dominica I went to the library of course. Instead of being empty it was crowded, a long queue before the librarian's desk. At first I thought it was a very touching sight, all the black hands, eagerly stretched out, holding books. Then I noticed how all the librarian, whom of course I knew, looked. As people filed past her she'd take the book, stamp it and give it back. No one looked at her and no one thanked her. They seemed to think that she was a machine and indeed there was something robotlike about the way she was working. Book after book and with each one she seemed to get more tired, look more ill. I wasn't at all surprised when I heard a few days later that she was dead.

I seem to be brought up willy-nilly against the two sides of the question. Sometimes I ask myself if I am the only one who is; for after all, who knows or cares if there are two sides.

Ludicrously, Rhys seems to imply that the spread of culture to the third world will result in the death of the Culture-keepers, overworked librarians. She doesn't mean it, of course; but what does she mean?

Smile Please includes an admiring foreword by Rhys's editor at Harper and Row, Diana Athill, and is followed by a chronology of Rhys's life and a bibliography of her books. In the middle are pictures of Rhys's grandfather's church in Wales, Rhys's first and second husbands, and Rhys's return to Dominica in the thirties. In other words, the book treats Rhys as a classic author. There is something incongruous in the contrast between the featherweight text and the solemn superstructure that surrounds it. As Phyllis Rose points out in the Yale Review, "her autobiography will win her no new readers." And yet it has been, for the most part, reviewed as respectfully as it has been packaged. Rose is one of the few reviewers as to admit that this book "demonstrates how not to write an autobiography" and that Rhys's talents as a writer have clearly been undermined by the fact that she was "frequently soused" while writing the book. Rhys, who was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1978, is an institution. We have apparently learned from her the trick of silent withdrawal from her failures.

Jean Rhys had a hard life. She grew up imagining that life was elsewhere—in England; when she got to England it was dingy, cold, and hostile to her ambition to become an actress. The most appealing picture of Rhys in Smile Please shows her posed in a tableau vivant with other young and pretty members of her troupe. But the energy and good humor of this moment faded during a grueling and humiliating tour of the north of England, and Rhys came to think of herself mostly in terms of her unsatisfactory relationships with men. Her first marriage ended in divorce; her second husband died seven years after her marriage to him. She lost a child, she herself was in poor health for the last fifteen years of her life. For the biographical woman who suffered all this we can have only sympathy. We are indeed "mean beasts" if we refuse to recognize in her an example of common human misfortune. But towards the heroine of her novels, towards the woman as she imagines herself, we may surely be permitted to feel some irritation and disapproval. Her unhappiness does not seem awful and inevitable, as Rhys's own unhappiness was. It is worn as a badge of honor, claimed as a position of power. The Rhys heroine considers her unhappiness a brilliant distinction. Sasha, the heroine of Good Morning, Midnight, tells us:

I'm not talking about the struggle when you are strong and a good swimmer and there are willing and eager friends on the bank waiting to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean the real thing. You jump in with no willing and eager friends and when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter. [my italics]

To sink is more interesting than to swim, to be friendless is to experience the real thing. If only Sasha would value her pathos a little less than she does, perhaps she would become less pathetic. The great modern poets of our futility and choicelessness persuade us, against our wills, that there is no alternative to our difficulties. The Rhys heroine, however, proudly refuses alternatives. Her situation, therefore, is not necessarily ours. Within the shelter in Endgame is the whole of the modern world; we cannot escape it. But we need only visit the rented rooms of Rhys's novels when we are feeling low or broke or pissy. Who would do time there if she could help it? Not Rhys, certainly, who remarked in an interview:

When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all…. You see, there is very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.

The desolation in Rhys's work, then, is not to be mistaken for the whole story. It is only how things look when we feel bad. The novels powerfully evoke a mood, but it is a mood we would ordinarily do much to avoid: depression. There is very little here to distance us from the bad mood of her work. This is the thing itself, much as we might hear it from a friend in trouble or, if we were in the business, from the couch.