SOURCE: An interview in The Paris Review, No. 76, 1979, pp. 219-37.

[In the following interview, which was conducted shortly before her death, Rhys discusses her life and writing career].

[Rhys]: We moved here [to Devon] because I wanted a place of my own. We bought it—my late husband and I—sight unseen because anything was better than rooms. That's all we'd been in. A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is. It was difficult here at first. The gales came through the crevices. The mice were everywhere. A frog in the bathroom. Then when I first came here, I was accused of being a witch. A neighbor told the whole village that I practised black magic. I got very cross, but gradually it all died down.

[Vreeland]: What a shock it must have been when you first arrived from the West Indies.

Of course, I hated the cold. England was terribly cold when I first came there. There was no central heating. There were fires, but they were always blocked by people trying to get warm. And I'd never get into the sacred circle. I was always outside, shivering. They had told me when I left Dominica that I would not feel the cold for the first year—that my blood would still be warm from the tropic sun. Quite wrong!

Where did you go to school?

It was at Cambridge, the town, not the University. The east wind comes right across from . . . Russia, I suppose. I used to lie in bed and shiver and shiver, wondering why I'd ever dream of wanting to see daffodils and snowflakes. Then the maid would bring me this hot water bottle. It was very sweet of her. Oh, I found England bitterly cold.

And the people?

I didn't find them terribly warm. I was so unhappy in England. I was delighted to get away.

Where did you go after Cambridge?

I left school early because I wanted to become an actress. While I was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, my father died in the West Indies. My mother wrote me that she couldn't afford to keep me at school. But I didn't want to go back to Dominica. I knew I'd miss my father too much. So I joined the chorus of a show on tour around England.

How did your family in Dominica react?

There wasn't much they could do about it. Anyway I believe in fate.

But you could have gone back. You did have the choice.

I suppose so. But I wanted to be an actress. I was a very bad actress, but that's what I wanted to be. I do believe that life's all laid out for one. One's choices don't matter much. It is really a matter of being adapted. If you can adapt, you're all right. But it's not always easy if you're born not-adapted, a bit of a rebel; then it's difficult to force yourself to adapt. One is born either to go with or to go against.

In your first written but not your first published novel, Voyage in the Dark, the heroine is also born in the Antilles. She becomes a chorus girl who travels about the dreary towns of the English provinces, is deflowered by a rich Englishman who cares for her, who then abandons her. Did you write it as a form of purgation?

I wrote it because it relieved me. I never wrote for money at the start. I wrote the makings of Voyage in the Dark long, long ago. I wrote it in several exercise books and then I put it away for years. Someone described the result as "unpublishably sordid but with great sensitiveness and persuasiveness"—so I went on to other things. Then, twenty years later, fate had it that I tackle it again. I hadn't really written a book; it was more or less a jumble of facts. From the notes I'd done ages before I managed to put together Voyage in the Dark.

And is it still y our favorite ?

I suppose so. Because it came easiest.

The contrast of the sunny Caribbean landscape with the bleak English one is very moving in Voyage in the Dark. Mango trees; hammocks; mauve shadows; purple sea, and the fight not to have a dark patch under your arms while putting on your gloves . . . the business of being a lady. One gets brilliant flashes of what it must have been like.

It's all a bit romanticised. Now I'm trying to do it again as it really was. For my memoirs. I hope I've succeeded. It may be a bit dull, perhaps.

But the colors weren't romanticised, and the smells . . .

No, it's a very beautiful place, Dominica, and that wasn't romanticised. The mountains are lovely; but it hasn't got any nice beaches, none of those lovely white beaches the tourists love. It's a volcanic island . . . the beaches are black.

What did you do all those years when you weren't writing?

When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy. Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's 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. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes. I think it was Somerset Maugham who said that if you "write out" a thing .. . it doesn't trouble you so much. You may be left with a vague melancholy, but at least it's not misery—I suppose it's like a Catholic going to confession, or like psychoanalysis.

Did you keep a journal?

Not exactly. I wrote things down. Not each day. More in spurts. I would write to forget, to get rid of sad moments. Once they were written down, they were gone.

Is it always a sadness for you to write ?

No. Writing can also be very exciting. When you're really in the mood to write, you write without apparently wanting to. But it doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes it's a struggle, and it's very tiring.

What is the story of the publication of The Left Bank?

It's an odd story. My first husband was a poet, half-French half-Dutch. He had been on the Disarmament Commission in Vienna after the first World War. There were two Japanese officers in the Allied Commission. But one was supposed to speak French and couldn't, and the other was supposed to speak English and couldn't. So they both got secretaries who were in fact interpreters and translators, and that was the job my husband got, to the one who was supposed to speak English, Mr. Miyaki. Someone in his office became interested in my writing and showed my stories to Ford Madox Ford. Ford cared terribly about writers. If he thought anyone had any good in him at all, he'd go to any lengths to help, pulling every string he could to help. He did that for any amount of people. He really got D. H. Lawrence started, and a lot of the writers who are not so well known.

In his introduction to The Left Bank, Ford praised your "singular instinct for form, " which he says is "possessed by singularly few English writers and almost no English women writers. "

The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.

Were there others beside Ford who helped you as you started to write?

The whole atmosphere of Paris helped, and I learned to read French pretty well. All that no doubt had an influence on me. But Ford helped me more than anybody else: "Do this!" "Don't do that!" He insisted on my reading French books and I think they helped me a lot. They had clarity. Ford always said that if you weren't sure of a passage to translate it into another language. If it looked utterly silly, one got rid of it. English can be so imprecise. Ford published several of my stories in the Transatlantic Review, and he helped me with money. He really helped. It was he who found the publisher for The Left Bank. After that there was a quarrel and I never saw him again. He went to America to live.

Hemingway takes a lot of swipes at him in A Moveable Feast.

I think it's a spiteful book. He bullies everybody. Ford wasn't at all the way Hemingway described him.

Then he wasn't pretentious and snobbish and evil-smelling .. . ?

Not at all. And back then Hemingway wasn't catty. He always seemed to me as if he were enjoying himself terribly. He was a very nice-looking young man. But in that book, he was disparaging about everybody—Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, everybody. I didn't like it at all.

An actress recently asked to play Marya in a film version of Quartet hesitated because she said she found it dated—dated in that today Marya would have some other option than having to live à trois with the Heidlers. She could take a job. . . .

In those days, if you were English, or supposed to be English, and you were in Paris and didn't know French well, it was pretty well impossible. I mean what job could you get? One of the things the Heidlers tell Marya when she goes there is that they'll find her a job. "Come stay with us for a little bit. Sooner or later we'll pull a string and find you a job." That was how they convinced her. In England you could get some sort of job, but in Paris it wasn't so easy. You might get a job as a mannequin, or in a shop, but then you wouldn't know the prices, or anything. Of course, it did all happen in the twenties.

It happens today. Three people in a trap.

Yes, much the same sort of thing, perhaps, slightly changed. I think, that as usual, people will do what they have to do. That's where fate comes in.

Why did you leave Paris finally and settle back in England?

I was told "You must go to London to sell Quartet." I didn't want to particularly, but everyone said I must; so in the end I did. I went right to London, then back to Paris for a short time to write After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and then I came back to England, remarried and stayed.

In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Julia Martin finds herself alone and broke in Paris in such an apathy that she can only lie in bed, allowing her decisions to be made by chance: "If a taxi hoots before I count to three, I'll go to London, if not, I won't. "

Don't you think that by the time she arrived at that stage, she was rather tired? I mean you can get very tired. And then it is rather a temptation to just lie down and see what happens.

And pull the covers over your head.

That's right. I did that as a child. I was so afraid of cockroaches and centipedes and spiders.

They're so large in the Indies.

But that was nothing like my fear of obeah. That's West Indian black magic. I remember we had this obeah woman as a cook once. She was rather a gaudy kind of woman, very tall and thin and always wore a red handkerchief on her wrist. She once told my fortune and a lot of it has come true. My life was peopled with fears. I think that's one of the reasons I don't go back. Maybe my big reason.

But you wrote a wonderful story about going back to your convent school there after twenty-five years.

I did go back once. For a very short time. But all my nuns had gone. Everything's very changed. I'm trying to do an autobiography now and I find it very difficult to remember when I was a child in the West Indies.

You wrote that you have such a great memory . . . that you can shut your eyes and remember conversations . . .

That's what I've tried to do, but it's a very long time ago now.

You write in Quartet that when you tell lies people think it's a cri de coeur, and then when you tell the truth, nobody believes you.

That's always so. I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth.

Then you really haven't a problem of veracity with your childhood in the book.

If I had a problem I doubt that anybody would contradict me. I don't think anybody's alive to contradict me. I try to be more or less truthful, though I suppose the whole thing's a bit romanticized.

You wrote in Voyage in the Dark that the fantastic is what you don't do, and the real is what you do.

I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real.

And the difference between romance and reality?

Reality is what I remember. You can push onto reality what you feel. Just as I felt that I disliked England so much. It was my feeling which made me dislike it. Now I make a lot of the nice part of the Indies, and I've sort of more or less forgotten the other part, like going to the dentist who only came to the island every now and again. I'm trying to write the beauty of it and how I saw it. And how I did see it as a child. That's what I've been toiling at. It's such a battle. I can't waste much more time on it.

Have you written of your relations with the black people in Dominica?

That's very complicated because at the start I hated my nurse. A horrid woman. It was she who told me awful stories of zombies and sucriants, the vampires; she frightened me totally. I was a bit wary of the black people. I've tried to write about how I gradually became even a bit envious. They were so strong. They could walk great distances, it seemed to me, without getting tired, and carry those heavy loads on their heads. They went to the dances every night. They wore turbans. They had lovely dresses with a belt to tuck the trains through that were lined with paper and rustled when they moved. Then, my chief worry was that I was expected to get married. I thought, my God, what will I do? At first I doubted that I'd ever get a proposal. Then I knew I was bound to marry, otherwise I'd be an old maid which would be perfectly awful. That worry made one very self-conscious. But the black people didn't worry a hoot about that. They had swarms of children and no marriages. I did envy them that.

Did you have young friends who were black?

No, it was more divided then. There were a lot of colored girls at the convent I went to. I didn't always like them—but I was kind of used to them.

Was the incident real in The Wide Sargasso Sea when you go swimming in a pool in the woods with the black girl, Tia?

That might have happened. But the girl never stole my dress as we bathed. That was fiction.

Although you are one of five children, one gets the feeling you had a lonely childhood.

Yes, I never saw much of them. They left early and came to England. One brother went to India and spent his life there. I didn't see him at all. The other wandered about rather. He went to Canada and Australia and East Africa, then he went back to the West Indies. In Australia he got married, came to London, fell down the stairs and died. I don't think he was drunk or anything. My other brother said, "Just like Orin, he would die in a melodramatic way."

You say your motto is "not harrowing. " What does this phrase mean for you?

Don't surprise or amaze or make me angry, or make me sorry about something. Lots of words that used to be quite common one doesn't hear any more. It's sad about words which meant quite a lot. I mean a word like "splendid." Nobody says a thing is "splendid." You never say a thing is splendid, or a person is splendid. Do you? Splendor's gone. Magnificent is gone.

How do you work now?

I can't write any more. My hand is unsteady, so I have a very nice girl who comes along twice a week, sometimes three times, and I dictate to her. It was difficult at the start.

Do you ever try dictating into a tape recorder?

No, because mechanical things always go wrong with me. If they possibly can, they do. If there is a thought or an idea that has been worrying me, I try to write it out, and try very hard to make it clear. Then when she comes I can dictate it to her. Of course it's by no means the same thing as writing.

Is it an all-consuming occupation when you feel you must write ?

It seems as if I was fated to write . . . which is horrible. But I can only do one thing. I'm rather useless, but perhaps not as useless as everyone thinks. I tried to be an actress—a chorus girl—and the whole thing ended when I was handed a line to say: "Oh Lottie, don't be epigrammatic." But, when the cue came, the words just disappeared. That was that. I was interested in beauty—cosmetics—but when I tried to make a face cream, it blew up.

Someone wrote that you have been fighting oblivion since the twenties, do you think this true?

I'm not fighting oblivion now. I'm fighting . . . eternity? I feel very isolated. I'm not sure men need women, but I'm sure that women need men. But then loneliness is a part of writing, isn't it? Though week after week, if you never see anyone, it can become rather trying. If there's a knock at the door, I expect some wonderful stranger. I fly to the door. But it's only the post man. I've got myself a bit depressed over this autobiography. When I began it I wrote a lot about the years after I came to England and I was more or less grown up, and of being in France, and [a] lot of that. And then I got this idea that I wanted to write about the West Indies as they were, as I remembered them. And I find it very difficult, also I feel that nobody's going to believe me.

Has anyone seen it?

My editor's seen a sort of rough copy of it and she likes it, but it wasn't right. And I haven't got it quite right yet. Another worry is that I can't seem to find a title.

Did you always have a title before you started a book?

I've always known it before, but this time I can't. I've got a title, but the publisher's not pleased with it. They want to call it Smile Please, but I want to call it And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. That's what I feel is happening. Of course, I don't know. I only know what I read in the papers.

You write in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie that it is always places you recall in your memory, not people. Is that still the case?

That was a character in the book who says that. I remember some places very well, but I think I remember people better.

Was Paris your favorite place to be?

In the twenties Paris was a very interesting place. Of course, I was delighted to get away from England. I like Paris. I made friends. Whenever I had some money, I'd shoot back to Paris. Paris sort of lifted you up. It's pink, you know, not blue or yellow; there's nothing like it anywhere else.

You went back after you wrote Good Morning, Midnight.

Oh yes, I went back in 1939, just before the war. The publisher was awfully pleased with the book. He rang me up to tell me how pleased he was, and I was very hopeful. But then war was declared, almost immediately, and they didn't want books . . . I was forgotten and I gave up writing.

Absolutely?

I didn't write for a long time. And then I wrote some short stories. And then there was this thing about doing Good Morning, Midnight on the BBC radio. And then I started The Wide Sargasso Sea.

Where did the idea come from of reconstructing Bertha's life—the Jane Eyre heiress who sets fire to the house and jumps from the parapet?

When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester's first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I'd try to write her a life. Charlotte Brontë must have had strong feelings about the West Indies because she brings the West Indies into a lot of her books, like Villette. Of course, once upon a time, the West Indies were very rich, and very much more talked about than they are now.

How about films of your books ?

Films are always going to happen but then they never do. They had an option on The Wide Sargasso Sea. They even went out to the West Indies to see where they were going to shoot it and even picked the house. Now I'm very skeptical. The director and the scriptwriter went out, that was several years ago . . . They made all sorts of arrangements, but some backer pulled away. They seem to think it would be a very expensive film. I really don't see why.

Whenever you have costumes or houses that burn up, if s expensive, and you have two houses that burn up.

But extras are very cheap. I suppose they have to take photographers, cameras, people . . . costs rather a lot, but I don't see that it would be too much more expensive than any other.

Have you any desire to go to Paris?

I'll never go back now. I went back to the West Indies and I hated it. No, I think "Never Go Back" is a good motto.

There's a title for your book. Never Go Back.

But that's just what I'm doing. I am going back.

What are you reading now?

I'm reading a book of Daphne du Maurier. She's a good writer; I like the man who wrote From Russia with Love . . . Ian Fleming. He's one who can take you away from everything if you're bored and sad. Some books can really take you away. It's marvelous. Thrillers are my great thing now. I must say Americans dream up such awful horrors. But I'd like to get away myself. I'm always thinking of some place to run away to, like the desert, or Morocco. But I haven't got a car; so I can't drive. It means I'm always stuck here. But you know, one gets into a groove.

But why not go to Morocco this winter?

Do the women still wear veils there?

Yes, many still do.

They aren't very kind to women in Morocco, or perhaps that is exaggerated. One thinks of it as being exaggerated.

Au fond, / think women really run things there, though it would not seem as if they do.

They are just as smart in France. It really doesn't look as if they are running things. But they often have control of the money. Not always, but often.

You once wrote in The Lotus that people live much longer than they should, especially women.

I'd planned to die at thirty, and then I'd push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty. You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It's difficult. Too much trouble. I've thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, "Damn it, I'll sit down. I can't go on. I'm tired of living here in the snow and ice." So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.

And the book, that's the reason to go on now, no?

But you know I'm beginning to feel that I don't want to do a mental striptease any more. Which would mean tearing up all I've written. I don't mind writing about when I was a child, but I don't quite know why I should go on writing so much about myself. I've had rather a rum life, but I was thinking the other day, would I go through it all again. I think not. I guess I write about myself because that's all I really know.