Books: Jean Rhys and the human condition

Jean Rhys, in five novels, delved deep into one subject: alienation. People might want to pay attention.


Born in the West Indies (1890), Jean Rhys dreamed of England. Like many of her dreams, the reality would falter and fail to meet the expectations. This moment after expectations fail and hope fades was often the starting point in her writing.

I often wished I was like Estelle, this French girl who lived in the big room on the ground floor. She had everything so cut-and-dried, she walked the tightrope so beautifully, not even knowing she was walking it. I'd think about the talks we had, and her clothes and her scent and the way she did her hair, and that when I wnet into her room it didn't seem like a Bloomsbury bed-sitting room -- and when it comes to Bloomsbury bed-sitting rooms I know what I'm talking about. No, it was like a room out of one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translate from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read on epage of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old , wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music, everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds of that book.'
It was after Estelle left, telling me she was going to Pairs and wasn't sure whether she was coming back, that I struck a bad patch.
(from the short story "Till September Petronella")

Rhys' characters seem to be forever striking a bad patch. Pushed to the side and alone, they exist or mark time. They withdraw. And in their imposed seclusion and chosen seclusion, they discover new realities.

And the sympathy which would have maddened her from the happy, the fortunate or the respectable, she strangely and silently accepted coming from someone more degraded than she was, more ignorant, more despised. . . .
She climbed the stairs of the hotel holding tightly to the banisters, and undressed weeping gently but not unhappily.
Her intense desire for revenge on all humanity had given place to an extraordinary clear-sightedness.
For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy -- even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptiousness of misery.
That night Dorothy Dufreyne dreamt that she was dead and that a tall, bright angel dressed in a shabby suit and crimsom scarf was bearing her to hell.
But what if it were heaven when she got there?

So ends her short story "In the Rue de l'Arrivee."

Some find Rhys depressing. We find her writing not just precise and techically brilliant, but moving. In a world that grows ever more alienating, so few writers today bother to comment on that reality. What our fences no longer keep out, the increased volume of our TV silences.

"I'd never let myself be that alone," snapped one classmate to the professor as she sailed down the aisle, quickly speaking into her cell phone. But the loneliness Rhys writes of is a detachment, one that all the cell phone calls, text messages and computer log ins won't save you from.

If there's a lesson to be found in Rhys' novels Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight or Wide Sargasso Sea, it's that life can push anyone to
the side, to the fringes.

And as we flip through The Nanny Diaries or the latest John Grisham, we have to wonder what world they're writing of? Is not this increased alienation one of the most telling characteristics of our times? Are we not all being encouraged to stock up on enough X-Boxes, Play Stations and Gameboys so that we never need leave home?

There is a hunger in our increasingly "privatized" nation for community. A longing to be interconnected. Or, to put it in the jargon of today, a need to interface with one another. Instead of addressing this very real human condition, too many writers today are ignoring it.
At what cost? Novels, dying art form or not, traditionally charted the human condition.

When the nominees were announced for the fiction category of this year's National Book Awards, much carping was made over the fact that all five nominees were women, that they were all from the same area and that, gasp, none of the books had yet to become a popular best seller.

A point missed, an important one, was that all five authors (Kate Walbert, Joan Silber, Christine Schutt, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Lily Tuck) were in some form or another addressing the need for community and communication. Maybe to note that would require that the carpers actually pick up the books and read them. Perhaps that was asking too much?

Or maybe, just maybe, the classmate dismissing Rhys while immediately attempting to reach out (via her cell phone) is representative of a type of carper who doesn't want to admit to a problem that is very real?

It's much easier to attach that cell phone to your ear than it is to address the very real issue that on a campus surrounded by so many people, your first instinct is to make contact not with the people around you, but over the phone. Cell phones have quickly become the same safety blanket that Walkmans were in the 80s -- a way to shut out the immediate world around you.
The brave, fuck-you face you put on that says, "See, I am important, I matter or I wouldn't be speaking into this cell phone."

When a young adult escapes via a cell phone, it may not be a big deal. When carpers/commentators refuse to address the books written that merited nominations for the National Book Award, you have to wonder what's is going on?

And when the New York Times Book Review seems to exist largely to allow one side to review a nonfiction book written by someone on the other side (politics, scientific theory, etc.) and to promote the snide, superficial writings of the likes of Joe Queenan, you have to wonder what's going on?

Literature, good literature, can illuminate a moment, a situation, a mood, a condition. Maybe that's why it's being avoided like the plague in these "faith based" times? And should the editorial pages of the New York Times be lamenting the lack of literature currently being read when their own book review has largely abandoned covering it?

The editorial board needs to stop moaning and start insisting the paper's own book review section each Sunday start highlighting literature. Currently, if literature appears at all, it tends to be as a list of titles that the subject of a biography wrote. Start highlighting fiction or stop your carping because you can't have it both ways. Maybe the New York Times is prepared to live in a world literature no longer illuminates, but we're not so sure everyone is. Nor are we sure we could survive without the illuminations literature provides.

This was the affair which had ended quietly and decently, without fuss or scenes or hysteria. When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it.
(chapter six of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)