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As far as I know I'm white--but I have no country really now.
Jean Rhys
Like Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys left the Antilles at the age of sixteen. Except for one brief stay in the 1930's, she never returned to the island of Dominica, the northernmost of the Windward Islands. The remainder of her life (1894-1979) was spent in England.
The Collected Short Stories (1987) of Jean Rhys contains many vignettes about the island. (A quarter of the 50 pieces collected here are in some way related to the Caribbean.) "Vignettes," for the most part, not short stories. The title's stress on "stories" is misleading.
One of those sketches ("Heat") describes the explosion of Mt. Pelée on the nearby island of Martinique in 1902. This eruption, estimated to have caused between 30 and 40 thousand deaths, brings to mind the reports I have read of the brooding threat that currently hangs over Montserrat. At the time Rhys was only 8 years old but she can accurately describe the lightning that illuminated the center of the ash cloud in the night sky, apparently a common phenomenon caused by the stream of charged particles rising from the crater.
During the 1920's and 30's Rhys published 4 novels:
Quartet (1928)
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930)
Voyage in the Dark (1934)
Good Morning Midnight (1939)
Then followed a great silence of nearly 25 years. At the age of 70 she finished her last novel:
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
This final work is set entirely in Dominica. Apparently Voyage in the Dark--about a woman in England who is recalling her childhood in the West Indies--can be read as a sort of companion volume. There have been at least a couple of posthumous publications (besides The Collected Short Stories) that include an autobiography she was working on at her death and a collection of her letters:
Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979)
The Letters of Jean Rhys (1984)
Howard Moss, an American poet and essayist, has written a very insightful description of the experience of reading Rhys' writing. It was through Moss that I came to Rhys. I have so much trust in his judgment that after seeing the essay, "Jean Rhys: Going to Pieces," in Minor Monuments (1986), I went looking for her books. (In the 'books-about-books" genre this collection of essays by Moss is top-notch. The sections on Chekhov are particularly good.)
What Moss accurately pinpoints is how lightly these early books tread on the world of mental disintegration, always forestalled, a never-completed, full capitulation to insanity: "Miss Rhy's specialty is neither action nor madness but the precipitants that precede them." Because Moss places so much value on Rhy's skill at delineating these instigations toward the edge he is vaguely unsatisfied by the final novel wherein the heroine actually succumbs to madness. His uneasiness isn't so much targeted at the plot line. In Wide Sargasso Sea the world of magic, of possession and witchcraft, is explicitly introduced in Rhy's work and it's this element that makes him uncomfortable. Magical forces compel one to act, just as the insane believe themselves to be moved by powers beyond their will, and suddenly all of the earlier work, much of which went psychologically unexplained or only vaguely suggested, is now cast, shadowed, in this framework of demonic powers that motivate the central character. And, I'm speculating, obeah is too easy, too strange, too unbelievable an explanation for Moss' mind.
This nexus of madness and witchcraft is no minor monument in my own personal Department of the Interior.
For the moment though, let me limit myself to talking about the primitive side of things. Because this is a persistent thread in much of the literature of the Americas, not only intertwined with the epic confrontation with the native peoples of the continents, but also present in the savage traditions of the Africans who used their supernatural powers to wage centuries of war against the slave masters.
Where Jamaica Kincaid has harnessed these forces to rage against her mother and all that this woman has come to symbolize, Jean Rhys' never seemed to make her enemies completely visible as individual entities. The world is pitted against her--all of it. Incapable of finding a discernible target to oppose, the meager powers that she commands are all turned on herself. As a pure victim, one wholly at the mercy of any and everyone, Rhy's can’t quite see others--the perpetrators--in a way that Kincaid can. They have an unconvincing individuality, even though you sense they are complex personalities born of family histories, class structures, and particular choices. Because everyone is aligned in this existential conspiracy to demean her, Rhy's tormentors can be cardboard representatives of gender, economic standing, educational attainment, nations, or any other hierarchical division. Yet, even so, they seem to find and execute their evil purposes without prompting or instructions from headquarters.
What a great book, this novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. What a frightening unwinding of the mundane bedrock of consciousness. The spare course of the action can be described as follows: we meet Julie at the very tail end of her failed relationship with Mr. Mackenzie. Although he has provided her with a small amount of money, it's clear she will not get back on her feet. Using virtually the entire sum, she leaves Paris and returns to London, determined to borrow from anyone she can. She gets in touch with an old boyfriend, falls into a haphazard relationship with Mr. Horsfield, and contacts several family members, all within the first few days of her return. Within a week, her invalid mother, who has been cared for by Julie's sister during the past six years, dies.
These morose events are narrated in brisk, concise bursts that give the impression of swift movement, but what devastating insights are handed out in each paragraph. The characters are seen both inside their thoughts and through their dialogue. Often these interior and exterior realms meld into a single flow, indistinguishable from each other. Moments of compassion are few and far between, made even more poignant for their rarity. It's a harrowing chronicle of descent.
The volume of letters goes some way toward widening the narrow fissure between the fiction and the life but the life was clearly grim enough. The correspondence is drawn from a window of thirty-five years and yet I was struck by the small number of principal correspondents: a daughter, a couple of emotionally charged women loosely attached to the arts, a publisher and his assistant trying to resuscitate her career. These are largely the years of poverty and reluctant retreat from the writing life. The desperateness of many of these messages highlights her circumstances as well as the importance of these pen pals for this writer. But in these letters there's more than a clinging vine though. Perhaps even a quality of heroism.
-July 21, 1997
