JEAN RHYS: A CRITICAL STUDY

Transcription

1 JEAN RHYS: A CRITICAL STUDY

2 By the same author APPROACHES TO JOYCE'S PORTRAIT: TEN ESSAYS (editor, with Bernard Benstock) DOROTHY RICHARDSON ULYSSES: FIFTY YEARS APPROACHES TO ULYSSES: TEN ESSAYS (editor, with Bernard Benstock) THE SHAPELESS GOD: ESSAYS ON THE MODERN NOVEL ITALO SVEVO: ESSAYS ON HIS WORK (editor) JAMES JOYCE'S PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

3 JEAN RHYS A Critical Study Thomas F. Staley ~ MACMillAN

4 Thomas F. Staley 1979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1979 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Staley, Thomas F. Jean Rhys 1. Rhys, Jean - Criticism and interpretation 823'.9'12 PR6035.H96Z/ ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 To Mary McNulty Staley

6 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii I Art and experience I 2 The Left Bank 20 3 Quartet 3S 4 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark SS s Good Morning, Midnight 84 6 Wide Sargasso Sea I oo 7 The Later Writing I 2 I Notes I32 Selected Bibliography I 36 Index 139 vii

7 Preface The curious literary career of Jean Rhys has been touched upon frequently by the popular press and weekly reviews. The discovery and rediscovery of'lost' writers and new-found reputations is judged newsworthy, for stories such as hers confirm the collective mythologies of the struggling figure of the writer in the modern world, and thus feature articles with full picture spreads appear in the colour supplements of the Sunday Times and the Observer. The high and low points of her bizarre life and career have been recorded and misrecorded by nearly a dozen interviewers. In England, she became for a brief time a minor cult figure, posing for fashion shots in the mass media; in America, she has been featured in 'W', the chic production of Women's Wear Daily, and Ms. 1 Lurking behind these poses of a woman in her mid-eighties commenting on clothes and her own painful hegira from the West Indies, to the provincial towns of England, half a dozen European capitals, and finally to a remote cottage in Devon, is the novelist who struggled off and on for years with her art against devastating disappointments and what seemed certain failure. These colour photographic portraits bring home to me Susan Sontag's accusation that there is something predatory in photography-the subject is somehow violated. Even with success and great age, Rhys has not escaped the image of her own fictional heroines. Only after Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, when she was seventy-two, and won the Smith Literary A ward, did any substantial literary recognition come to her. Its success resulted in the republication of all of her novels by Andre Deutsch, and, later, the reprinting of them by Penguin, which broadened her reputation and enhanced critical acclaim to the point that A. Alvarez in the New York Times Book Review called her, quite simply, 'the best living English novelist'. The background of this belated attention is interesting in itself, especially in the light of the increasingly serious study of the nature of the feminine consciousness as it expresses itself in literature and of women novelists generally, but a detailed account of her life ix

8 X Preface and literary reputation is not the primary task to which I have set myself. I wrote this book with the idea that it would be the first full-length study of Jean Rhys and her work to be published. Such a prospect has obvious advantages and disadvantages. I saw it as an advantage, but I am well aware that Rhys is a writer of such enduring quality that this study is only a beginning. My aim, then, is to offer the first lines of a critical dialogue and trace with some depth her achievement. With this purpose in mind, I have not made large claims for her contribution to modern fiction, nor have I developed a thesis or confined the study to a singularity of critical or thematic approach; such undertakings as these are left to others. As I explain in some detail later, I have attempted with mixed feelings to provide an account of the factual details ofjean Rhys's life in the first chapter, because I believe it is necessary to know something ofher unusual life and especially the formative influences in order to appreciate more substantially her achievement. I could not have put the facts ofher life together even as sketchily as I have had it not been for the help of the following: John Byrne, Charles Cox, Gerry Franken, George Lawson, Anne Smyser, Oliver Stoner, and William Tilden-Smith. Above all, I am grateful to Jean Rhys herself who allowed me to ask hundreds of questions, many of which were painful for her, during two long interviews. Details of these interviews appear in an endnote to Chapter 1. Brian Murray and R. C. Reynolds' bibliography, soon to be published in the Bulletin of Bibliography, was useful, and Murray's preliminary catalogue of the extensive Jean Rhys Collection at The University of Tulsa was also helpful. My colleagues in the Graduate Faculty of Modern Letters at The University of Tulsa, Gordon Taylor and Winston Weathers, read most of the manuscript and were extremely helpful. To Darcy O'Brien and Bernard Benstock I owe special gratitude for their suggestions and insights, and to Maureen Modlish I am grateful for her intelligent help with the final draft of the manuscript. Bernice Coyle typed every word of every phase of the gestation process through to the final draft as she has done all of my work for the past nine years, and continues to raise typing to an art. Research grants from The University of Tulsa Research Office made it possible for me to pursue work for this book in England on two different occasions. I am grateful. My students in a seminar on the 1930s posed and sometimes answered the questions that drew me to

9 Preface this study, and to them I will always be grateful, for I believe firmly that teaching and research enrich each other, if indeed they are not at their best one and the same. For blunders, errors, and omissions, I am solely responsible. Xl August, I 978 Tulsa, Oklahoma Thomas F. Staley

10 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Andre Deutsch for permission to use copyright material from the following works of Jean Rhys: Quartet (originally published as Postures) After Leaving Mr Mackenzie Voyage in the Dark Good Morning, Midnight Wide Sargasso Sea Tigers Are Better-Looking Sleep It Off, Lady For permission to publish from an earlier version of Chapter 4, I am grateful to Twentieth Century Literature and the editor, William McBrien. xiii