VOYAGE IN THE DARK [1934]
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT [1938]
Hisham Matar, in his beautiful new novel, MY FRIENDS, referred to a few novelists who have written about being an outsider, among them, Jean Rhys. Born in the West Indies and best known for WIDE SARGASSO SEA, a regular on high school and college reading lists, Rhys published several small compelling novels first, featuring a stranger in a strange land. Her métier, and, as it turns out, her life, was loneliness, brought on by the challenge of living in an unfamiliar and often hostile culture. The challenge migrants and refugees across the globe face every day. Although her life, and her writings were terribly sad, they are also touching, and with a rhythm to the language all her own.
Of course, you get used to things, you get used to anything. It was as if I had always lived like that. Only sometimes, when I had got back home and was undressing to go to bed, I would think, ‘My God, this is a funny way to live. My God, how did this happen?’
Considered her most semi-autobiographical work, VOYAGE IN THE DARK concerns a young woman dispatched from the West Indies to England after her father dies. From the warmth of the Caribbean to the cold gray urban environment, she is confounded by a different way of speaking, different norms and lifestyles, and she is still quite young. An innocent.
I didn’t like England at first. I couldn’t get used to the cold. Sometimes I would shut my eyes and pretend that the heat of the fire, or the bed-clothes drawn up round me, was sun-heat; or I would pretend I was standing outside the house at home, looking down Market Street to the Bay.
Chasing a dream to be on the stage, she is befriended by a fellow chorus girl, and then by an older man of means, to whom she becomes dependent. After being fully cut off from her family, and with no skills to earn a living, she finds herself increasingly lost and alone and, eventually, turned out. The novel is a study in personal tragedy – in the despair of those without the emotional or financial support to survive – also the profound sense of loss, and longing, experienced by those who leave the comfort of the familiar behind. Confronted with a particularly devastating decision, and near death, and facing a desolate future, the novel portends Rhys own descent into depression and alcoholism.
That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things. That was when it was sad, when you stood by the bed and undressed, thinking, ‘When he kisses me, shivers run up my back. I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words. But something about the darkness of the streets has meaning.
In GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT, Rhys draws on her personal descent into unhappiness to create a lonely character consumed by memory and loss, struggling to survive, and questioning everything, including her own worth as a human being and as a woman.
Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary… Let’s say that you have the mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple – no, that I think you haven’t got the right.
Don’t let him notice me, don’t let him look at me. Isn’t there something you can do so that nobody looks at you or sees you? Of course, you must make your mind vacant, neutral, then your face becomes vacant, neutral – you are invisible.
A persona like this tends to attract the same, and even a lonely gigolo who captures her interest asks himself the same questions.
If someone had come to me and asked me if I wished to be born I think I should have answered No. I’m sure I should have answered No. But no one asked me. I am here not through my will. Most things that happen to me – they are not my will either.
Rhys uses repetition like poetry in her prose, and in the midst of even a dark scene, she will surprise the reader with lovely language. These punctuate, and also relieve, the intensity of existential thinking pervasive in this and her other lesser known writings.
I am lying in a hammock looking up into the branches of a tree. The sound of the sea advances and retreats as if a door were being opened and shut. All day there has been a fierce wind blowing, but at sunset it drops. The hills look like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills.
Here we are. Nothing to stop us. Four walls, a roof, a bed, a bidet, a spotlight that goes on first over the bidet and then over the bed – nothing to stop us. Anything you like, anything I like… No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us. A difficult moment when you are out of practice – a moment that makes you go cold, cold and weary.
She’s a writer who should be read, even if the landscape and the voice is desolate, and the nature of the story, despair. Another one of a kind backlist beauty.
Stay tuned for further reviews of the best of the backlist, with the best of the new best thrown in. Cheers.