[In the following essay, O'Connor delineates the connection between Paul Theroux's short stories “Zombies” and “The Imperial Ice House” and Rhys's unpublished story “The Imperial Road.”]

Toward the end of her life Jean Rhys offered many of the private papers and manuscripts still in her possession for sale through the booksellers Bertram Rota, Ltd. Their catalogue listed an unpublished story, “The Imperial Road,” with the notation: “Miss Rhys has stated that her publishers declined to include this story in Sleep It Off, Lady, considering it to be too anti-negro in tone” (7). The story was never published and its major components never appeared in any of Rhys's other work.¹ Though I was familiar with the manuscript, two stories in Paul Theroux's collection World's End spurred my interest in a closer reading of Rhys's unpublished one.

World's End contains two consecutive and connected pieces: the first, “Zombies,” is clearly a portrait of the elderly Jean Rhys and refers to the reasons why “The Imperial Road” was not published. Theroux's second story, “The Imperial Ice House,” renders a variant of Rhys's “The Imperial Road,” thereby tendering a further subtextual comment on its rejection by her publishers.

In “Zombies” Miss Bristow, an aged writer originally from the island of “Isabella,” lives in exile in England. She is courted by the literati who have recently rediscovered her and her work after a long disappearance. (“She knew the talk that people believed she had been dead for years. … She could not remember when people had listened to her so keenly. She began to write again” [27].) “Zombies” is related from the point of view of Miss Bristow, a fragile and fearful alcoholic. From her profession and history to her posture and presence, Miss Bristow immediately calls to mind Jean Rhys.

At a party Miss Bristow meets Philippa, a young editor from Howlett's, her publishing house. Philippa, who is “bright and dull” and who never fully understands Miss Bristow's sarcasm and irony, is anxious to please the now famous writer and to do well at the publishing house. Toward the end of the story, it is Philippa's job to report to Miss Bristow that Howlett's will not publish “the icehouse story” in Miss Bristow's forthcoming collection. As Philippa haltingly tells her this, Miss Bristow reflects on the volume as “an old woman's book, rather a monochrome, all memory, without adornment or invention” (36)—a suitable description of Sleep It Off, Lady, Rhys's last book of fiction. Though Philippa tells Miss Bristow that the story is “easily one of the best-written things” she's done, she finally agrees with her superiors, who will not publish it because “It's anti-Negro.”

I had no doubt that Miss Bristow and her story were based on Jean Rhys and her experience with the publication history of “The Imperial Road.” It also seemed likely that there might be a connection, in either style or content, between the second Theroux story, “The Imperial Ice House,” and Rhys's unpublished one. Certainly their titles were similar. A comparison of the Rhys manuscript and Theroux's story suggest no strong stylistic relationship but there certainly are thematic connections.

“The Imperial Ice House” is about a white newcomer to a Caribbean Island who, unaccustomed to the realities of life there, decides one day to haul a cart containing a large block of ice back to his plantation using the labor of three of his black workers. The ice melts; the cart, under its great burden, begins to break; the horse resists; and the black workers, first cajoled and then threatened by the planter finally, under the hot sun, on the lonely difficult road to the plantation, murder the planter with the icepick.

I was curious to know whether Theroux had ever seen Rhys's story or whether Rhys had seen Theroux's. And, even if Rhys was not aware of Theroux's reference to her and her work, I was interested in the underlying significance of this literary alliance, particularly because Jean Rhys, as a person and as a writer, seems to have attracted other writers who use elements of her personality and history as the bases for characters in their own fiction. These relationships have been written about by Martien Kappers-den Hollander and Paul Delaney, who in particular discuss characters based on Jean Rhys in the works of Rhys's first husband, Jean Lenglet, and in Ford Madox Ford's novel When the Wicked Man.²

Rhys used herself as the model for most of her protagonists and created other characters occasionally based on some of the writers who used her as a prototype.³ Rhys and all these writers lived or live in some form of exile: Ford on the Continent and in the United States; Lenglet in France; Plante in England; Theroux in Africa, Asia, and now, intermittently, England. Theroux's fiction, in World's End and other novels and stories, is often concerned, like Rhys's, with alienation, colonialism, and the experience of being a stranger. It may be that Theroux, Lenglet, Ford, and Plante share with Rhys uprootedness and continual homelessness—an experience that is voiced intensely in all of Rhys's writing and mirrored in the often sad facts of her life.

Paul Theroux's two stories make use not only of Jean Rhys as a person and writer but of her writing as well. I put some of my questions about his relationship to Rhys and about the two stories in World's End in a letter to Theroux. His response follows:

I did not know J. Rhys well but I did meet her a few times and had lunch with her, on a couple of occasions. Certainly the character in “Zombies” resembles her. I never saw “The Imperial Road” but of course knew about its rejection, and that fascinated me—I mean, the reasons. My own story is supposed to be connected, though you are the first person to inquire—which is why I am replying. I feel fairly sure that Rhys never saw my story.⁴

In an earlier letter I asked Diana Athill, Rhys's friend and publisher, similar questions. Athill's answer addresses both the quality of Rhys's story and the racial content, as well as her belief that Rhys knew nothing of the Theroux stories. She writes:

Whether or not Jean knew Paul Theroux, or his writing, I can't tell you. I'd guess not … I never heard her mention him.

It was the querulous tone of ‘The Imperial Road’ which made both Francis W[yndham] and me tell Jean that we liked it less than her other work. She often used to talk querulously, or indignantly, about black people, like any other old exiled member of the Caribbean plantocracy: why had they hated ‘us’ so much? Hadn't they been better off in her youth, when ‘we’ were running things? Look how they had ruined everything since then! Silly, sentimental liberals, she thought us. … She wasn't surprised when we disliked ‘The Imperial Road.’ … And I never told her what I really felt, which was that she had lost her grip on her style in that story. … In the story it was the voice of her ordinary, non-writing self that one heard. Her strength had ebbed.

I agree with Athill that “The Imperial Road” is not up to Rhys's best writing. In fact, the piece seems never to have been finished as a work of fiction.⁵ Though “The Imperial Road” does, at moments, transcend its incomplete quality, the story remains an essay in memory and recollection. But the manuscript reveals, perhaps more than Rhys's autobiography, some of her feelings in later life toward the island that figured so strongly in her fiction.

Like “The Imperial Ice House,” Rhys's story involves an unsuccessful trek across a Caribbean island. Both stories are concerned with tensions between the white plantocracy and the black workers. Unlike Theroux, however, Rhys here has no ironic distance from her protagonist.

The narrator of “The Imperial Road” describes a return trip she and her English husband took to her native island of Dominica. Like Rhys herself, the narrator had not returned to her island since she left as a young woman of “just about sixteen” (2). The couple make a brief visit to Roseau, the capital of Dominica, and then rent a house on the Atlantic side of the island. They spend about six weeks on the estate and when it is time to leave, the narrator convinces her husband that, instead of taking a launch to return to Roseau, they should walk across the island along the old Imperial Road—a thoroughfare built by the British and intended to link both sides of the island. Before beginning the hike, the narrator says, “I was perfectly certain that it must still exist” (11).

The couple start out with two guides: “a Martinique man” whom she describes as “the grimmest-looking negro I had ever seen” (11) and a black Dominican who “seemed quite pleasant … [and] a bit weak-willed” (12). At first things go “splendidly” and the wife feels as if she “were back in … [her] girlhood, setting out on some wonderful adventure which would certainly end happily” (12). But soon “the road wasn't a road any longer but a steep uphill track” (13). The narrator twists her ankle and is led by the two guides to the home of a woman who will rent them a mule. The woman, like most of the blacks in this story, is “decidedly unfriendly” to the white woman and, as she tends the wounded ankle, says, “I don't do this for you, for I know who you are and for one of your family I would do nothing. I do it for your husband for I hear that he's a good man and kind to all” (13-14).

Later, when the wife mounts the mule outside, she is thrown from it and begins to cry, only to stop when she notices the “Martinique man's expression of contempt” (14). Soon after, when the couple get caught in a sudden downpour, they and the guides finally come upon a large manicured estate rented by Americans, who welcome them and arrange for them to drive back to Roseau, where they stay again at the La Paz hotel and are given champagne and sandwiches in their room by its kindly owner, Violet. (Both the La Paz and Violet are the actual names and are referred to by both Rhys and Alec Waugh in their correspondence. The fact that Rhys changed neither points again to her not having turned this episode into fiction.)

As the couple goes to bed, the wife says, “I'm absolutely certain that wasn't the Imperial Road at all. It's quite impossible it should have disappeared without leaving any trace. That Martinique man must have took us wrong … for it to absolutely disappear isn't possible” (17). Her husband falls asleep and the narrator concludes the tale with these words:

I lay awake for a long time asking myself if I could conceivably have imagined this ceremony with the administrator in his best uniform, in gold lace, cocked hat and a sword (not I'm not [sic] sure about the sword, but I am about the cocked hat and uniform). The band played, the crowd cheered and he made a little speech declaring the Imperial Road across the island open to all traffic. I couldn't have imagined it and the Imperial Road couldn't have disappeared without a trace, it just wasn't possible. No Imperial Road or a trace of it. Just darkness, cut trees, creepers and it just wasn't possible.

(17-18)

This closing monologue is in marked contrast to the opening of the story, in which the narrator stands on deck as her boat approaches Dominica. She watches the mountains, marvels at their beauty and concludes, “Not changed. As I remembered” (1). This motif of remembering and forgetting, change and immutability nervously checkers the opening sections of the story. Again, at the opening, the narrator says of the bay at Roseau, “That was all as it had been I think” (1), and of the town she later says, “The whole town was changed though how exactly, I couldn't think” (8). Clearly Rhys's story in part deals with the emotional risk and danger the exile courts when she attempts to go home. Exile becomes more profound because, in addition to the physical removal from home that the exile experiences, returning home after such a long time delineates another remove: that caused simply by the passing of time, and the alienation this involves when compounded by the refraction of memory—a triple remove. The narrator in “The Imperial Road,” testing her memory about the way things were, reminds one of Joyce's letters from exile to Dubliners, asking for topographical details of the city of his youth.

The opening of “The Imperial Road” reveals the story's concern with and attitude about people of color. The first line begins: “I was on deck watching the Dominican mountains and talking to a young coloured man” (1). A little further on, the narrator, describing the La Paz bar, somewhat contentiously asserts:

The place was quite full of coloured men, no black ones. And here I must explain that for me coloured people were half white or quarter white. Black people were negroes. … I'd always understood that negroes and coloured people were very different indeed. Coloured people, I'd been brought up to think, were of all shades and all sorts; some were beautiful and very intelligent; some had the worst qualities of both races—they were often troublemakers and often treacherous. They hated.

(13-14)

The stance of the narrator here is defiant in its insistence that she will use the pseudo-scientific language of institutionalized racism, the delineation of groups into “black” or “negro” and “coloured,” reminiscent of the attempt in racialist societies to define a person's race by percentages of black “blood” using such terms as mulatto, octoroon, and quadroon.

Throughout “The Imperial Road” the narrator's perception is that the people of color she encounters are especially hostile to her because of her family's connection to colonialism and the plantation system dating from the time of slavery. The narrator's voice at times borders on paranoia, and the depiction of the blacks is reductive. Their words are imbued with hostility and they seem to pose a physical threat. But probably worst of all, the narrator's/Rhys's perception is that they want to deny a white colonial's claim to her past—represented by the “disappearance” not only of the Imperial Road but of other locations. She says, “for I soon gathered that any reference to Roseau of [sic] Dominica as it used to be was received either with disbelief or a pained annoyed expression. … Every time I suggested a road which might show off the beauties of Dominica … [the driver] said, ‘There's no road there’” (8-9).

Clearly, the actual Imperial Road—its inauguration, its existence—is important to the narrator; and it was important to Rhys too. This is not Rhys's only reference to the opening or the existence and disappearance of the Imperial Road. In a brief correspondence Rhys had with Alec Waugh, most of Rhys's letter to him is concerned with the road.⁶

In his book The Sugar Islands Waugh recounts his travels in the Caribbean and in a chapter on Dominica talks about the Imperial Road. He says that a “broad surfaced thoroughfare … was planned to link the windward and the leeward coasts,” but bad conditions and costs “curtailed and finally liquidated the enterprise” (90-91). Later the project was renewed but again, because of costs and inefficiency, it was abandoned so that “today [ca. 1949] … there is nothing to show except a track of cobbles through the jungle” (92). In another section of the book Waugh refers to Jean Rhys, describing her as a Dominican writer whose work he admires and whom he had met in England. Waugh's book prompted Rhys to write a letter to him (probably in the early 1950s). Though her letter reflects pleasure at his mention of her, in the main she addresses the question of the existence of the Imperial Road:

What happened, I wonder, to the 1st Imperial Road. That was nearly finished when I was a small child or supposed to be nearly finished. I can remember the opening ceremony. The administrator, whose name was Hasketh Bell, wore a cocked hat and cut a ribbon with silver scissors I think. Perhaps the next man disliked Dominica or the money dried up. …

But about the Imperial Road. We tried the walk from Hampstead … when we were there before the war. We did manage it and arrived at the Paz late at night and utterly exhausted.

Certainly I was. Violet whom you thought slow and lazy but I doubt if she is had two bottles of champagne on ice waiting for us. It was a lovely feeling then. So triumphant.

However, it was an awful walk. It rained all the time. A kind woman lent me a mule half way, and I feel off the first time there. Was a steep downwards bit of road.

The Martinique guide swore. Why a Martinique man? I don't know. But the Dominica one said, “Do not cry Madame.” The Dominicans can be very gentle. The country people mean. But the Martinique men are completely cynical. Did you notice?

(Campbell 59)

Some of the differences between Rhys's letter and her story indicate that Rhys may have tried to “fictionalize” the experience, either in the manuscript or in the letter. Certainly the letter treats the material in a more lighthearted manner than does the story. Rhys's letter is tinged with nostalgia and seeming attempts to impress Waugh with her intimacy with Dominica and its people. It is hard to know if the letter itself is fiction, whether the woman with the mule was “kind,” as Rhys tells Waugh, or hostile, as she writes in “The Imperial Road.” She says to Waugh that she and her husband completed the hike along the Imperial Road all the way to Roseau, their journey concluding with a feeling of triumph—certainly opposite to the sense of loss and consternation with which Rhys's story closes. But in both letter and story Rhys is consistent in clinging to the existence of the road—despite Waugh's specific explanation as to why it is no longer there.

Almost thirty years after her letter to Waugh, in her posthumously published autobiography, Smile Please, Rhys again insists that the Imperial Road was successfully completed. In the chapter “Zouaves” she writes about Mr. Hesketh (a slight change of the name Hasketh Bell in her letter to Waugh):

He improved the roads out of all knowledge and triumphantly carried through his better idea of an Imperial Road across the island so that the Caribbean and south Atlantic sides were no longer cut off one from the other.⁷

Rhys was sixteen when she left Dominica, forty-six when she returned there in 1936, about sixty when she wrote to Waugh, and almost ninety when she worked on her autobiography. For over half a century the Imperial Road remained an emblem for her: her encounter with its “non-existence” on her only return to Dominica and her later obsession with its “disappearance” point to its having special significance for her. Specifically, it was a “fact,” a concrete particular whose continuing existence could, in some ways, verify the myths of her childhood. It is a still point whose existence keeps “home” intact and which becomes a referent.

Furthermore, the Imperial Road—not only in its name—is clearly a colonial thoroughfare, one whose very opening Rhys recalls as accompanied by all the pomp and circumstance, all the ceremonial paraphernalia, of the already declining British colonial presence in Dominica. Its eventual failure as an enterprise, according to Waugh, was due not only to the inefficiency of Dominican economics but to the power of the landscape, the implacable natural force of Dominica—a force which Rhys has often, in her other work, associated with the blacks of the island and about whom she expresses the same mixture of feelings that she ascribes to the island itself. The Imperial Road is, at the least, a metaphor for colonialism, its disappearance signifying the end and failure of colonialism; but the denial of its ever having existed is, for Rhys's narrator in “The Imperial Road” a denial of the past, a denial that strips her of identity.

In “The Imperial Road,” Rhys re-explores the loss of home, the loss even of her colonial identity except as it is seen in the hatred she imagines the blacks hold toward her. And though that hostility may or may not have been imagined, the anger that Rhys's narrator feels from the blacks mirrors the narrator's own anger, an anger at the loss of home expressed, in this story, as a racism projected onto the black characters.

Athill's assessment that Rhys “had lost her grip on her style” in “The Imperial Road,” for the most part, is true. Yet the story remains interesting—especially when compared to the Waugh letter and the chapter in Smile Please—in terms of what it tells us about how Rhys worked with fact and fiction; about her conflicted attitudes toward people of color; and about how the experience of colonialism affected her throughout her life. When we recall Rhys's other published and unpublished comments about West Indians of African descent, remarks that describe them as the most enviable of people, the most sympathetic, or the most courageous, and a group to which she yearned to belong, we see in “The Imperial Road” a different facet of her relation to them.⁸

The publishing history of “The Imperial Road” raises an important question about the relationship between writer and publisher: whether material containing objectionable social attitudes and vocabulary should be denied publication. While Rhys's story is not fully developed, neither are many of the stories that appear in Sleep It Off, Lady, the collection from which this piece was omitted. One wonders if, at least in part, Rhys was correct when she said that the story was rejected because of its “anti-negro” tone.

If one judges from Theroux's letter in which he refers to “the reasons” why the story was not published, it seems that some literary people—Theroux at least—shared Rhys's perception. Certainly Theroux's story “Zombies” is in part about censorship and about the relationship between writers and their publishers. It and “The Imperial Ice House” serve as a kind of retribution for Rhys or, more universally, for “the writer.” Not only does “Zombies” publicize the publishing history of “the icehouse story,” but the appearance of the story itself following “Zombies” allows, at least in fiction, for Theroux to act as publisher, for the writer to triumph over the monitor. As a writer he “publishes” the unpublishable story written by Miss Bristow.

“The Imperial Ice House,” as Miss Bristow says to the publisher's representative, Philippa, “is not about race. It is about condition” (38): it is, like so much of Theroux's fiction, concerned with colonialism and its effects both on white colonialists and on the native populations they colonize. Rhys's story too is about colonialism—and about exile. For the exile the very notion of home begins to suggest homelessness and continual exile. Home itself becomes a triple image: as it may have been when first experienced; as it might have become through time passing; and as it exists through the inevitable distortion posed by memory. Ultimately, home “disappears.”

It is hard, finally, to ignore the word “disappearance,” so important in “The Imperial Road” and central to all the biographical accounts of Rhys's life: her “disappearance” from the public eye; the inability of admirers to locate her; the disappearance of her books from the public domain and, reflectively, her “rediscovery”—the location of the person Jean Rhys and her subsequent re-emergence as a writer. “The Imperial Road” is about identity. For Rhys too, the rejection of “The Imperial Road” must have signified, as it seems to have for Theroux, the relationship of the writer to the world, a relationship that can exist—for better or for worse—only through the facilitation of the publisher and the response of the public.

Notes

1. A minor episode was subsequently expanded by Rhys and published in Sleep It Off, Lady as “The Bishop's Feast.”

2. I discuss elsewhere (224 n. 3) David Plante's mixture of reporting and literary representation of Rhys in his Difficult Women.

3. As Kappers-den Hollander has pointed out, Rhys and her first husband, Jean Lenglet, had a writing partnership that involved not only their using each other as the basis for a character in a novel but their borrowing from and adapting each other's writing, he in Dutch, she in English.

4. The conclusions in this article are my own and do not represent a collaboration with Paul Theroux.

5. For example, early in the manuscript the narrator, referring to her husband says, “My husband (who I will call Lee) …”

6. This letter was discovered by Elaine Campbell, the text of which appears in her article. Campbell's short piece is essentially a presentation of Rhys's letter and a description of the circumstances surrounding the brief correspondence between Waugh and Rhys.

7. Interestingly, Mr. Hesketh also becomes one of those older male figures whom the adolescent Rhys imbues with a quality of forbidden sexuality.

8. See especially Rhys's unpublished Black Exercise Book in the McFarlin Library, Plante, and O'Connor.

Works Cited

Athill, Diana. Letter to author. 21 November 1984.

Bertram Rota, Ltd. Jean Rhys: Four Autograph Manuscript Notebooks with Manuscript and Typescript Short Stories. n.d. In the Jean Rhys Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Campbell, Elaine. “Jean Rhys, Alec Waugh, and the Imperial Road.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature (August 1979): 58-63.

Delaney, Paul. “Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford: What ‘Really’ Happened?” Mosaic 16 (1983): 15-24.

Kappers-den Hollander, Martien. “Jean Rhys and the Dutch Connection.” Maatstaf 4 (1982) 30-40. Reprinted in Journal of Modern Literature II (March 1984).

O'Connor, Teresa F. Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Plante, David. Difficult Women. New York: Athenaeum, 1983.

Rhys, Jean. Black Exercise Book. Unpublished manuscript in the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

———. “The Imperial Road.” Unpublished manuscript in the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma. There are two typescripts of “The Imperial Road” in the Library. This article refers to the second and longer version (18 pp. F'cap) dated March 24, 1974.

———. Sleep It Off, Lady. New York: Harper, 1976.

———. Smile Please. London: Deutsch, 1979.

Theroux, Paul. World's End. New York: Washington Square P, 1980.

———. Letter to author. 26 June 1986.

Waugh, Alec. The Sugar Islands. New York: Farrar, 1949.