After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys. What happens to a woman who's been accustomed to getting through life using the power of her beauty and mystique when her beauty starts to fade and her mystique seems more like desperation? That is essentially the question Jean Rhys illustrates in this short, emotionally brutal, and utterly no-nonsense novel.
Julia Martin hasn't exactly left the Mr. Mackenzie of the title—in fact, he's dumped her, as men often will with mistresses when they tire of them. Julia has been in this position before; after all, she's on the far side of thirty and she's been living from man to man since her teens. The difference this time is that she sees that the horizon is narrowing and the future darkening. There aren't too many more Mr. Mackenzies appearing on the vanishing point where the last one came from. There is only the vanishing point.
With the money he's given her as a parting gift (more like a go-away now bribe), Julia blows most of it on new clothes and leaves Paris. She returns to England where what remains of her attenuated family resides, among them a younger sister and a dying mother. She looks up an old flame. She hooks up with a potential new suitor. But it's clear that she's no longer a very hot commodity. What is to become of her? Her desperation alternates with indifference. She drinks quite a lot. She wanders the streets. She hangs out in bars and cafes. She's soaked in ennui. She's often too exhausted and depressed to even get out of bed.
As a younger woman, Julia was used to men coming unasked to her aid. She realizes now that it wasn't gallantry or compassion that drove them. She had something they wanted. Now that she has less of what they want, they aren't nearly so generous, and not at all magnanimous. Now she sees them sizing her up, doing cost-analysis. To ask for help straight out is unthinkable; it means not only risking almost certain failure, but a dollop of humiliation on top of it. "When you were in trouble," she's learned the hard way, "the only possible thing to do was to hide it as long you could." In other words, you pretend you don't want what you desperately need to survive. People like people who don't appear to need them.
So she makes herself up, puts on her best clothes, and makes the rounds of the clubs, but her heart isn't in it. She visits her younger sister who has devoted the last several years of her life to caring for their bed-ridden, all but paralyzed and comatose mother. Her sister resents the freedom with which Julia has lived her life—the freedom and also, as she sees it, the irresponsibility. That resentment is masked by a moral censure that Julia feels pouring off the rest of her family, and the rest of respectable society as well. She's an outcast from "decent people" who look upon her as a fallen woman. But who are these "decent" people but those afraid to live true to their desires, like her sister, or out-and-out hypocrites like Mr. Mackenzie, who live them out in the shadows?
"If all good respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it," Julia violently erupts in a rare moment of much-needed self-defence and defiance. What a line! And from a female author, no less. Has any writer—male or female—ever dared to express so unapologetically such a seething, unadulterated, and virulent misanthropy? Or delivered with such devastating succinctness a more damning condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of the human race? I'm reminded of Caligula who was said to have expressed a similar disgust, wishing that the people of Rome had a single neck so that he could have them all executed with a single stroke of the executioner's sword.
And yet, Julia can also wake up hungover after a desultory night of dispiriting debauchery feeling that "every day is a new day. Every day you are a new person." It is her vacillation between the possibility of perpetual reinvention and renewal and the hopeless vortex of despair threatening to pull her under once and for all that we are left with at the end of the novel.
What does Julia do "After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie" is anyone's guess, but considering that all of Jean Rhys's fiction followed rather closely from her own life experiences, we aren't left without a clue. Rhys herself was a survivor—of bad marriages, loneliness, literary neglect, and alcoholism— who lived long enough to see her reputation as one of the centuries most interesting authors revived following the unlikely comeback publication of her novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" in 1966; it proved to be her most successful book; at the time, she was 76 years old. She died 13 years later, at the age of 89, this woman who often felt like "a doormat in a world of boots," a literary icon, proving that, at least sometimes, the doormat outlasts the boot.
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