Jean Rhys : Life and Work
by Carole Angier
My rating 5 out of 5 stars
Having read the thin earlier version and this subsequent thick-as-a-brick edition, I strongly recommend the latter if time is on your side.
Life was brutal to Jean Rhys and she let us know it in her deliciously wry, self-deprecating, sometimes hilarious way. Her incompetence at life was magnificently offset by her profound talent for expressing and rationalizing that experience so succinctly in writing. Hence her being described by one literary contemporary as 'one of the finest British writers of this century'.
Life was brutal to Jean Rhys and she let us know it in her deliciously wry, self-deprecating, sometimes hilarious way. Her incompetence at life was magnificently offset by her profound talent for expressing and rationalizing that experience so succinctly in writing. Hence her being described by one literary contemporary as 'one of the finest British writers of this century'.
Some Rhys devotees are prone to the notion that there sits within each of us a 'touch of the Jean Rhys'. Such aficionados may argue that Jean's critics are merely expressing their own insecurities, displaying denial of their own vulnerabilities, by deriding Jean's absurdist take on life.
Indeed, Rhys detractors who have tagged her work a 'gloomfest' seem simply out of their depth to her adherents.
But frivolous pulp fiction was just not her brand, she would rather have starved (and almost did). She wrote not for the light entertainment of the masses. Her artistry remains, in parts, heartbreakingly beautiful. Her 'underdog' themes remain universal. Her poignant narrative is timeless, despite the evocative sense of the times she lived and wrote in (born 24 August 1890 – died 14 May 1979).
With a rare compassion, Carole Angier explores Rhys's fin de siècle white West Indies childhood, her time as an Edwardian London chorus girl, her devastating first love affair with one of England's wealthiest men, her bohemian life in 1920s Rive Gauche Paris, her all-too-fleeting 'money phase' in post WWI Vienna, her three bizarre marriages and the misfortune awaiting her husbands.
We understand Jean's loathing of the cold, grey early 20th century England she was sent to as a teenager, seen through her Caribbean-creole lens.
We feel for her in Holloway jail in middle-age, empathize with her being forgotten and thought dead by the literary world after going out of print in WWII.
We despair at the run down country shacks she inhabited in her solitary, dirt poor old age prior to the chance rediscovery and wide acclaim leading to her CBE (of which she remarked drily: 'It came too late').
Here was an alien who never quite adjusted but could never turn back. Forever displaced. We explore her compulsive drinking and its short- and long-term effects on herself and those around her.
The biography examines every Rhys work published, chapter and verse, plus much of what she wrote but did not publish. It analyses Jean's distinctive deep and narrow themes, her instinctive sense of form and astonishing use of imagery. It documents how each story and episode mirrors her own history.
It's always great finding a biographer who loves and understands her subject as passionately as you do. But nor does Angier balk at calling a spade a spade when it comes to Jean's glaring character flaws. I felt Angier's lay psychoanalysis went into overreach. I disagreed with certain of her second hand findings. But I remained hooked and fascinated.
My strongest issue is her coverage of Wide Sargasso Sea. As maddening as Rhys herself in tainting her exquisite body of work with this conceptually anomalous novel (loathed beyond words by some devotees), Angier allocates it an exasperating 42 page analysis chapter.
As Wide Sargasso Sea remains my one Rhys bugbear, Angier's ramblings on it just reawakened the torment. As with the novel, I climbed walls getting through this dissertation on it. The biographer pithily concedes that: "Some readers may feel, on the contrary, that Wide Sargasso Sea is too full of incident, that it is a Caribbean 'Gothic Novel', too close for comfort to melodrama" [p 556]. That tokenistic nod to us is frustrating. With critics and biographers duty bound to some modicum of objectivity, here we instead get just Angier's gushing subjectivity on the often contentious topic of Wide Sargasso Sea.
(Angier at least explains why she admits this novel's Part Two is not 'quite' as successfully executed as it could be, though that's little consolation if you feel the novel has no place in Rhys's body of work.)
Naturally, those on the opposite side of the Sargasso Sea opinion divide will revel in this chapter I despaired of. But those who disfavour the novel care not that it was Rhys's most commercially successful piece, the one to reawaken her in the public eye after decades of obscurity, making her briefly a bestselling phenomenon on the eve of her death, then a global industry posthumously. We care not for its raft of commercially-driven awards. Or for the hoi polloi romance readers' accolades of it being the Rhys 'masterpiece'. This group likely never read or understood her wider, defining body of work.
Regardless, this chapter's academic relevance is incontestable for students of Rhys literature, who should read other opinions for comparison anyway. My differing with its overall take on Sargasso is merely opinion and taste.
Since first reading Jean Rhys: Life and Work, I have returned to it numerous times after reading other works seemingly inspired by it, most notably Lillian Pizzichini's wonderful The Blue Hour (2009). There is always something I had not fully digested previously. Incomparable in length and coverage, Angier's work remains the definitive Rhys biography, well deserving its 1991 Whitbread Biography Award shortlisting, and winning of the 1991 Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction.
Not to be missed. Stock up on gin and luminal. Draw shut the curtains. You won't move until you've read every word.
