SOURCE: "Jean Rhys on Herself as a Writer," in Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Calaloux Publications, 1990, pp. 109-15.

[In the following excerpt, Gregg compiles letters and autobiographical sources in which Rhys comments on the craft of writing.]

Writing gave shape and meaning to Jean Rhys's life: "Until I started to write, and concentrated on writing, it was a life in which I didn't quite know what was going to happen" [interview with Mary Cantwell, Mademoiselle, October 1974]. Rhys brought unswerving commitment and a relentless capacity for hard work to her writing. In an interview in her later years [with Thomas Staley, in Jean Rhys: A Critical Study, 1979], she referred to her reclusive lifestyle: "I don't see how you can write without shutting everything else out."

In conversations with David Plante Rhys emphasized the sacrifices demanded of her craft:

You have to be selfish to be a writer . . . monstrously selfish [in Paris Review 76, 1979].

Nothing ever justifies what you have to do to write, to go on writing. But you do, you must, go on.

Trust only yourself and your writing. You will write something marvellous if you trust yourself and don't give up. . . . People think they can sit down and write novels. Nonsense. It isn't done that way. It is not a part-time occupation, it's your life.

Only writing is important. Only writing takes you out of yourself [David Plante, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Germaine Greer, 1982].

You should know it all. You should know . . . all the big, big writers. .. . All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake. It is very important. Nothing else is important. . . . But you should be taking from the lake before you can think of feeding it. You must dig your bucket in very deep. . . . What matters is the lake and man's unconquerable mind [Paris Review].

Implicit in this statement is Rhys's recognition of the connections between reading and writing and the writer's duty to study her precursors, a responsibility that demands rigorous intellectual application. Yet she also suggests that she is an amanuensis:

I'm a pen. I'm nothing but a pen.

And do you imagine yourself in someone's hand?

Of course. Of course. It's only then that I know I'm writing well. It's only then that I know my writing is true. Not really true as fact. But true as writing. That's why I know the Bible is true .. . the writing is true, it reads true. Oh to be able to write like that! But you can't do it. It's not up to you. You're picked up like a pen, and when you're used up you're thrown away, ruthlessly, and someone else is picked up. You can be sure of that: someone else will be picked up [Paris Review,]

Rhys's persistent preoccupation with this aspect of her work is also revealed in her letters:

I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line [Jean Rhys, Letters, 1931-1966, 1984].

In responding to criticism that her work was dated, Rhys argued that such an opinion was invalid, insisting that a work of art must be grounded in the material and the particular world in which the writer lives:

Books and plays are written some time, some place, by some person affected by that time, that place, the clothes he sees and wears, other books, the air and the room and every damned thing. It must be so, and how can it be otherwise except his book is a copy? [Letters.]

Rhys's observations point to her awareness of the essential dichotomy of the artistic enterprise—the particular individual rooted in time and place, her vision informed by a particular reality, and the recognition of the impersonal nature of art. She expresses the nature of art as inspiration or language—impersonal and ecumenical—and its contradictory complement, solitary meditation. The artistic enterprise consists not in suppressing the personality but in opening it up and converting it into what Octavio Paz in Peras del Olmo describes as the point of intersection between the subjective and the objective. This conjunction results in the "destruction" of the artist even as she endures within the work of art. What will endure is not the writer but the artistic product and the language. Yet the work of art cannot exist without its creator, who continues to sacrifice herself to the artistic process in trying to achieve the perfect work:

I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else [Letters.]

In a career spanning more than fifty years, Rhys insisted repeatedly upon the connection between simplicity and artistic truth: "I have written upon the wall, 'Great is truth and it shall prevail.' Simplify—simplify—simplify" (ca. 1939). She believed that even artists operating within the conventional framework of English society were often challenged by the need to tell their truth but bowed to the domination of the prevailing ideology. Referring to English society as a kind of ant civilization, she pointed to the connection between art and life and the damaging constraints which convention imposes upon literature:

I believe that if books were brave enough the repressive education [of the ant civilization] would fail but nearly all English books and writers slavishly serve the ant civilization. Do not blame them too much for the Niagara of repression is also beating on them and breaking their heart. [British Library, Folio 152].

In the 1950s, a period in which Rhys produced little, she continued to read extensively. In a letter to fellow writer Morchard Bishop she reacts fiercely to what she perceives as a dangerous attempt to control and coerce the production and reception of works of art:

I read a letter in the Observer last Sunday from some editor . . . promising to accept a story up to the standard of Boule de suif [by Maupassant]. Well I should damned well think he would. And Hemingway's [The Old Man and the Sea.] Why not add Prosper Mérimée's Carmen for good measure. . . .

Poor Boule de suif. They won't let her rest. . . .

The thing is, I very much doubt whether any story seriously glorifying the prostitute and showing up not one but several English housewives, to say nothing of two nuns!—their meanness, cant and spite—would be accepted by the average editor or any editor.

And La Maison de Tellier [Maupassant]—well imagine. . . .

Of course I may be quite wrong. . . . But I do read a lot and have a very definite impression that "thought control" is on the way and ought to be resisted. But will it be resisted?

Why say as Mr. Green does, "I demand a positive and creative view of life"? What is that? And why demand a view of life? Not his business, surely.

It's all very well to talk about The Old Man and the Sea, but what about Hills Like White Elephants or A Way You'll Never Be. . . . Would those be up to his "positive and creative" standard? [Letters.]

Rhys's ideological position and working aesthetic is to create "books written in short, simple sentences depending for the effectiveness on the intensity of the feeling of the author" ("The Bible Is Modern," n.p.). A study of the process of her literary composition, emendations of manuscripts, replacements of one stylistic variant with another, suppressions, and elaborations can further elucidate the way she uses form as ideology.

In her letters (often to impatient editors or to Selma Vaz Dias, who "rediscovered" her and adapted some of her work) Rhys repeatedly refers to the labor involved in her artistic creation: "I do toil, you know, and even a short story is written six times or more before I am satisfied. .. . Of course some things have to be done over and over before the words are in the right place" (Letter to Vaz Dias, December 1963).

Rhys discloses that to get the right word in the right place she must search for each word individually; "I [think] very hard of each word in itself" (Plante). Rhys's strategy recalls that of her mentor, Ford, who insists that the writer's mind has to choose each word and her ear has to test it until she has it right. The insistence on the mot juste extends even to Rhys's finished work. When Vaz Dias adapts Good Morning, Midnight, the author advises her that every word must be exact:

This is about the end of Good Morning, Midnight. . . . It's fine—except that .. . I don't think "rustle" is the right word for a man's dressing gown. . . . Taffeta rustles and so do stiff silks, I suppose, but wouldn't a man's dressing gown be a heavy silk? Please don't think me pernickety but every word must be exact [Letters.]

Before giving permission for the reprinting of her early works after the success of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys was "very anxious to make a few alterations in Postures which they are going to publish as Quartet. . . . These alterations are all cuts of words or sentences." Of Voyage in the Dark she observes, "the revisions .. . are small but important, making it a better book for now, 1964" [Letters.]

In her lifetime, Rhys was acutely aware of the attitudes of critics and commentators to her work. She reacted with outrage when she thought that she was denigrated because she was a woman:

I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well .. . if it were my last breath I'd say hell to it and to the people who do it [Letters.]

In her fiction, Rhys's scathing attack on British society's attitude to women is rendered especially in "I Spy a Stranger," a short story written during World War II. The piece bears affinities with the works of Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own,) Dorothy Richardson, and Katherine Mansfield.

Despite similarities of techniques, styles, motifs, and thematic concerns, Jean Rhys does not fit easily or completely within the body of modernist writing or women's fiction of her generation. Jean D'Costa points to the difficulties created by Rhys's particular voice [in "Jean Rhys, 1890-1979," in Daryl Dance, ed., Fifty Caribbean Writers, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986]:

A reader new to Rhys usually puzzles over her viewpoint looking both ways across the channel and the Atlantic, she seems for and against both perspectives. Her insider-outsider's treatment of England, France and the Caribbean gnaws at comfortable ethnocentricisms.... Looking for some kind of familiar ground, the reader tries to fit Rhys into available models of contemporary fiction, and fails. . . . She belongs to no recognizable school; fits into no ready-made slot.

Rhys's fiction belongs, as she did, to worlds whose mutual understanding has "the feeling . . . of . . . things that. . . couldn't fit together." The dissonances of seemingly different worlds inform the Rhysian novel, finding coherence in her art.... All her work is charged with a sense of belonging in many wheres at once.

As a white female West Indian, her cultural heritage would have bequeathed an odd double vision born of the place of the white West Indian in her native land. She was white but not English or European, West Indian but not black. She was taught the language and customs of a land she had never seen, England, while living in and being shaped by the reality of the West Indies. Her sense of belonging to the West Indies would necessarily be charged with an awareness of being part of another culture. The ambiguity of being an insider/outsider in both the metropolis and the colony shaped Rhys's apprehension of the world and was further complicated by the complexity of the West Indian society in which she lived—the ambivalences inherent in the color-class relationship and the simultaneous existence of different cultural modes, Creole, black, and indigenous. The interaction among the groups was regulated by strict social and political norms, but at a psychosocial level the relationship was syncretic. In Dominica, the Creole culture consisted of a blend of French and English, further complicating the social and historical setting. Out of this reality and as a means of rendering her vision of the world, Rhys developed an ideology of secular individualism and psychological privacy combined with a self-image of isolation expressed through "the solitary, observing, experiencing self which is present in all her fiction.

The relationship between her personal history and the nature of her art is mediated by the writing itself. In talking about herself as a writer, she observes:

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 . . . 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 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 [Plante, emphasis added].

If Rhys uses her life as a pretext for art, she insists repeatedly that life and a book are very different. Among her major strategies are pastiche and parody. .. . In analyzing the functions of parody and pastiche in contemporary English writers, Robert Burden offers a useful definition [in The Contemporary English Novel, 1979], which applies to my understanding of Rhys's attitude to the literary traditions, styles, and principles of Europe and to her relationship with them:

One of the fundamental purposes of parody in literature has long been that of literary criticism; that is to say, the literary technique of parody often preempts the activity of the would-be literary critic by offering within the text degrees of self-interpretation. It focuses on the limitations, personal or historical, of past forms; it often does this by suggesting the obsolescence of "previous" styles. . . . Parody is distinguished as a mode of imitation in a subversive form. This distinguishes it from pastiche, which implies a non-subversive form of imitation, which depends on systems of borrowing: a patchwork of quotations, images, motifs, mannerisms or even whole fictional episodes which may be borrowed, untransformed, from an original in recognition of the "anxiety of influence." Pastiche may be the result of the conscious recognition of influence and of the fact that the condition of writing is in fact a condition of re-writing. .. . It may be used to stress the ironic awareness that language, literary forms, themes and motifs regularly come to the writer in, so to speak, second-hand form.

In the Rhys canon, pastiche and parody represent a builtin discourse with the European literary tradition and the ideological framework that defines, constricts, and to some extent distorts her as woman, artist, and West Indian.

The use of pastiche and parody is combined with the relentless honing of language to "deconstruct" the literature and language to which she is heir and to expose their absences and render her own ideological and critical position. In using and criticizing the literary resources of Europe while aiming for the simplest and clearest form of expression, Rhys creates a space for her work and for the works of later writers who also experience a "nothingness" in terms of the metropolitan canon.

Writing was the imperative of Jean Rhys's life. In her bleakest moments, she drew courage from the role writing played in her life:

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is already that to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death [Smile Please, 1976].