"I’ve thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, 'Damn it, I’ll sit down. I can’t go on. I’m tired of living here in the snow and ice.' So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up." –Jean Rhys, from a Paris Review interview
"You must go on. I can't go on. I'll
go on."
—Samuel Beckett
The Collected Short Stories: Jean Rhys. I'm on a Jean Rhys kick lately, reading everything I can get my hands on by and about her. This generous collection of short fiction spans Rhys's career, from her earliest known efforts to the last flickering light of her hard-won talent. They are the stories of a woman who was always something of an outsider, not only as a writer in the primarily male world of literature (especially back in the 30s and 40s), but, more importantly, as a human being. Rhys never really felt at home in the world and, as the above quote indicates, often felt inclined to leave it; yet, as she memorably notes in her story "Vienne", she lacked the courage to do so, "cheating" herself with that greatest illusion of all, hope.
Rhys drew much of her fiction from her own colorful life: her days as a chorus girl, kept woman, alcoholic, wife of men of dubious character and, finally, eccentric and lonely old lady provide some of the backdrop to her tales. There are glitzy parties with foreign diplomats, the grubby life of London girls sharing depressing flats during the Blitz, childhood remembrances of and returns in adulthood to the West Indies where Rhys herself was born and raised. Through all the variety of her experiences, however, one thing remains constant: her disgust and disdain in the face of the cold, judgmental hypocrisy of the vast majority of people in the world.
Sometimes she sees people as insects operating by blind instinct in some vast, impersonal hive; more often, she uses the metaphor of a machine, a machine that runs to no seeming purpose, each person a replaceable, expendable cog and Rhys herself a cog no more special than any other, except, perhaps, in being a self-conscious cog, a cog that is defective and worn-down, sure to be removed and discarded if anyone should happen to notice her. The weak, the unique, those who defiantly court ridicule and worse daring to make their own lives, herd and consequences be damned—those are the precious few who have Rhys's sympathy, those are the rare souls she champions.
No lover of society or humanity is Jean Rhys, at least not in the abstract, which lends her writing an unsentimental and thoroughly honest authenticity all too rare in serious "literary" writers, who often seem to feel a cultural responsibility to put an uplifting spin on things.
You don't read Jean Rhys to restore your faith in humanity or, for that matter, anything else. She's a downer, but a downer with style, who makes beautiful sentences out of despair. You might say the same for Beckett, except Beckett has a kind of gallows humor even at, especially at, his bleakest, which Rhys only occasionally displays.
Her later stories are spare, bleak, haunting affairs; a couple of them border on the supernatural, even on horror, as the veil between life and death becomes more transparent to Rhys. Sometimes they are not properly stories at all, but more like meditations, dark prose poems, one-act episodes that begin and simply stop without a real theme, much like life itself.
There are few writers who dare to put it down honest the way Jean Rhys does, who dare the reader to follow her into the cold gray country of existential exile that begins at the moment of our birth and grows ever more harrowing, despite the charming roadside attractions, as we continue on the one-way forced march that is our life until, at last, we reach the end, our grave. For this and for writing with the courage of her convictions, for not sugarcoating one single bitter pill, I love and respect Jean Rhys all the more. If I drank, I'd lift a drink up to the incorrigible old dame. Cheers, Jean! Well done!
Rhys drew much of her fiction from her own colorful life: her days as a chorus girl, kept woman, alcoholic, wife of men of dubious character and, finally, eccentric and lonely old lady provide some of the backdrop to her tales. There are glitzy parties with foreign diplomats, the grubby life of London girls sharing depressing flats during the Blitz, childhood remembrances of and returns in adulthood to the West Indies where Rhys herself was born and raised. Through all the variety of her experiences, however, one thing remains constant: her disgust and disdain in the face of the cold, judgmental hypocrisy of the vast majority of people in the world.
Sometimes she sees people as insects operating by blind instinct in some vast, impersonal hive; more often, she uses the metaphor of a machine, a machine that runs to no seeming purpose, each person a replaceable, expendable cog and Rhys herself a cog no more special than any other, except, perhaps, in being a self-conscious cog, a cog that is defective and worn-down, sure to be removed and discarded if anyone should happen to notice her. The weak, the unique, those who defiantly court ridicule and worse daring to make their own lives, herd and consequences be damned—those are the precious few who have Rhys's sympathy, those are the rare souls she champions.
No lover of society or humanity is Jean Rhys, at least not in the abstract, which lends her writing an unsentimental and thoroughly honest authenticity all too rare in serious "literary" writers, who often seem to feel a cultural responsibility to put an uplifting spin on things.
You don't read Jean Rhys to restore your faith in humanity or, for that matter, anything else. She's a downer, but a downer with style, who makes beautiful sentences out of despair. You might say the same for Beckett, except Beckett has a kind of gallows humor even at, especially at, his bleakest, which Rhys only occasionally displays.
Her later stories are spare, bleak, haunting affairs; a couple of them border on the supernatural, even on horror, as the veil between life and death becomes more transparent to Rhys. Sometimes they are not properly stories at all, but more like meditations, dark prose poems, one-act episodes that begin and simply stop without a real theme, much like life itself.
There are few writers who dare to put it down honest the way Jean Rhys does, who dare the reader to follow her into the cold gray country of existential exile that begins at the moment of our birth and grows ever more harrowing, despite the charming roadside attractions, as we continue on the one-way forced march that is our life until, at last, we reach the end, our grave. For this and for writing with the courage of her convictions, for not sugarcoating one single bitter pill, I love and respect Jean Rhys all the more. If I drank, I'd lift a drink up to the incorrigible old dame. Cheers, Jean! Well done!
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