=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

She said: 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.

That about sums up the life of Jean Rhys, who was born on a Caribbean island on August 24, 1890 and who died 88 years later on May 14, 1979. It all felt like an uphill slog.

Nothing came easy for her because just being alive was such a pain in the ass.

She said: I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.

Her full given name was Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams. At some point, we all ought to name ourselves, don’t you think?

Her father was Welsh; her mother was of Creole Dominican ancestry. She lived on the island, Dominica, until she was sixteen. Then she was sent to be educated in England.

Her education didn’t go well. Her teachers advised she go back where she came from. Her father died when she was twenty. Jean never got on well with her mother, or women in general. Men were simpler, more direct. If they hid their self-serving machinations, they didn't do it very well. Any smart woman could read a man easily. You always knew what you were getting into when you dealt with a man; that is, if you really wanted to know. 

She didn’t want to return to the islands so she found work as a chorus girl. Then she became a kept woman. She had an abortion that nearly killed her. When the man keeping her no longer wanted to keep her, she didn’t know what she was going to do. So she thought, “Let me try writing a novel based on my experiences.” The result was “Voyage in the Dark.” Of course, this didn’t mean she didn’t need to do other stuff to make ends meet. So she modeled nude. She did office work. She served in a canteen during World War I. She wasn't averse to exchanging sex for money when the need arose. No problem. You use what you have in this world to get by. That kind of attitude drives the typical feminist scholar crazy. That's why you don't hear as much about Jean Rhys lately as you should. Jean Rhys wouldn't give a rat's ass what a typical feminist scholar thought. Or anyone thought. That's why she's so great. She was, according to her editor and friend Diana Athill, like a cat, thoroughly true to her own nature.

Rhys met Ford Maddox Ford, who mentored her as a fledgling writer. Then he started having sex with her. Ford was living with another woman at the time. Rhys was married but Mr. Rhys, actually, Mr. Jean Lenglet, was in jail just then for some currency shenanigans. The Fords and Rhys all lived together for a spell. Rhys’s novel “Quartet” came out of this experience.

The “quartet” with Ford and his woman came to an end as these things do. Rhys would eventually marry two more times. Her longest marriage would be to Max Hamer who would also end up in prison for some kind of fraud. That marriage would last nineteen years. During her life, Rhys had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy would die before growing up.

She wrote a couple of more novels and a whole slew of short stories. But she dropped out of sight sometime in the 1940s and stayed off the radar, living in obscurity and sometimes poverty, until suddenly resurfacing with the publication of “The Wide Sargasso Sea” in 1966.  In case you lost count, that would make her 76 years old at this point. Her novel, a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” telling the “real” story of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, “the mad woman in the attic,” brought Jean the success and acclaim she’d always wanted. Alas, at 76, it came, in her words, “too late.”

“If I could choose,” she said, “I would rather be happy than write.”

But she couldn’t be happy and she couldn’t not write. That’s just the way it is.

She lived on for another dozen years, growing increasingly old, ornery, paranoid, alcoholic and accident prone. Even when people were around, and she was at least lucky to have indulgent devoted people looking after her, Jean Rhys was alone. Life, that is to say, the set of conditions of which it is comprised, was just not something that could ever satisfy her. As she said from the start, she didn’t feel she belonged here.

In her final years, she lived in a small Devon village that "not even drinking could enliven" and died in Exeter from a series of complications it would be too complicated to describe. She was a complicated woman.

On other people: “Trees, walking.”

On rooms: “A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.”

On the truth: “You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn’t. The truth is improbable; the truth is fantastic; it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.”

On writing: “I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.”

On novels and life: “I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape and life doesn’t have any.”

On irony: “You can get used to anything. You think: I’ll never do that; and then you find yourself doing it.

On making her mark, however fleeting, in this world she didn't much care for: "I will write my name in fire-red."

And so she did.