WIDE SARGASSO SEA

"I often wonder who I am and where is my country, and where do I belong..." Antoinette Cosway, "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

(Jean Rhys, photo courtesy the Classics Club)

WIDE SARGASSO SEA

The Oxfam in Truro has a shelf of interesting books. I always find something. This time I found “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys. For a pound.

The thumbnail I knew: the prequel to “Jane Eyre”, the backstory of Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic” in Brontë’s novel. I was unprepared for what I read.

“You want to know about my mother, I will tell you about her, the truth, not lies?” Then she was silent for so long that I said gently, I know that after your father died, she was very lonely and unhappy.

"And very poor; she said. 'Don't forget that. For five years. Isn't it quick to say. And isn't it long to live. And lonely. She was so lonely that she grew away from other people. That happens. It happened to me too but it was easier for me because I hardly remembered anything else. For her it was strange and frightening. And then she was so lovely. I used to think that every time she looked in the glass she must have hoped and pretended. I pretended too. Different things of course. You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We were alone in the most beautiful place in the world, it is not possible that there can be anywhere else so beautiful as Coulibri. The sea was not far off but we never heard it, we always heard the river. No sea. It was an old-time house and once there was an avenue of royal palms but a lot of them had fallen and others had been cut down and the ones that were left looked lost. Lost trees. Then they poisoned her horse and she could not ride about any more…”

This is Antoinette Cosway speaking to the man she’s been contracted to marry, Mr. Rochester. His family needs Antoinette’s Creole (white, native West Indian) family money. She does not want to marry him. In fact, just that day the former housekeeper of the crumbling Cosway plantation house, consulting her ‘obeah’ or ‘voodoo’ connections, warned Antoinette not to marry Rochester, but to ‘run away’. But she does not, and in the next scene, Rochester starts to call her ‘Bertha’, remaking her as he contrives to force her consent to marriage, then return to England with him and her money as his property.

Jean Rhys returned to her origins late in life when she wrote “Wide Sargasso Sea”. Coulibri stands for Domenica, the island in the Windward Island archipelago in the Caribbean island where Rhys was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in 1890 to a Creole mother and a Welsh doctor father who doted on her. Her mother, on the other hand, did not believe her daughter should receive any education and habitually flogged her, often because her daughter’s free spirit provoked her resentment.

At 12, Ella or Gwen loved nothing more than bathing naked in the volcanic depths of one of the spring-fed pools on the property. An outsider among the expatriate colonial community who aped English manners, Gwen spent most of her time playing with islanders, often former slaves or children of slaves, often homicidally angry. They made Gwen an object of ridicule, mocked her whiteness, and played pranks. One playmate became a close friend, but then she disappeared: she had become mistress to one of the white landowners.

Ella/Gwen migrated to London at age 16, then after some time as a chorus girl, she moved to Paris. As she’d done in Dominican pools, her beauty and free spirit made it natural and easy for her to plunge into the depths of Parisian bohemian life. She adopted the name ‘Jean Rhys’ and wrote novels about it. After her time in Paris, she returned to London and wrote about the same life, but from an older woman’s perspective. All five novels won critical acclaim. Her literary admirers formed a small but intense avant garde. Lucien Freud was one, another, Francis Wyndham saved her life, but that’s for later.

The books did not sell. She told the truth, about disappointment in love, about impoverished women that necessity forced to barter their time and attention for survival. Lovers were numerous, in the novels and her life. Of her three husbands, two served time in prison.

Her fifth novel, “Good Morning, Midnight”, published in 1939. It almost became her last. Her publisher dropped her. Then for twenty years, she published nothing. Her books went out of print. She seemed to disappear.

Then in 1951, an actress tried to locate her to get consent to adapt “Good Morning, Midnight” for BBC radio. No one knew where to find Rhys; some thought she was dead. The actress took out a personal inquiry in the New Statesman pleading to make contact. A friend of Rhys saw it, and contacted Rhys. She and her final husband were penniless in Cornwall. I’ve learned since living in Cornwall that being penniless down here is not all that uncommon.

Of course, Cornwall; that’s where outsiders and outcasts go, people who suffer from going their own way. Her husband was frail after his two years in prison. They found comfortless accommodation in Bude, Cornwall - Rhys called it “Bude the Obscure”. Later, she drifted to Devon, a place called Chariton Fitzpayne, in a corrugated aluminum shed that leaked rain and let in winter cold.

The BBC radio adaptation of “Good Morning, Midnight” was a success. Francis Wyndham, now a literary consultant at André Deutsch, contacted her and offered her an option for a new work. Diane Athill, the editor, gambled and sent a £25 option check in 1957 to an elated Rhys. So began Rhys’ arduous work on ‘Mrs. Rochester’ which after many drafts, and a heart attack, became “Wide Sargasso Sea.”

This, my first encounter with her prose, blew apart the opaque shell I had formed around my mind to protect it from bad writing and dreary ideologues. Light, wind, and sea poured in. And people: a young woman bewitched by love and the music of her thoughts led me across a tropical island to an attic in a posh English manor. “Wide Sargasso Sea” uses seduction but punches hard. Jean Rhys didn’t tell me what to think or feel. Like human nature, nothing was bad or good; it just was, wonderful and terrible.

Wide Sargasso Sea” reads like it was written by a writer whose life depends on it. The prose throbs with the lifelong sadness of a perpetual outsider. This impression deepened when I learned it was her last novel and that she wrote it after twenty years of silence and despair. There’s no waste in it, probably because Rhys had no time to waste. She finds only the necessary words to sum up her life. On the evidence of this novel, she succeeded.

Miranda Seymour in her biography “I Used to Live Here Once” quotes Rhys “From a Diary: at the Ropemaker’s Arms” which Diane Athill included posthumously in the autobiographical fragment Rhys wrote in her last decade, “Smile Please: an Unfinished Autobiography”:

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.

“Wide Sargasso Sea” features writing at that pitch, with death as its muse. My initial impressions focused on the vividness of the descriptions, the colour, the smells, the violent ocean waves and the placidity of perfect moments on the island. Her descriptions of nature delineate the psychology of the characters with vivid colours and sharp strokes of darkness. Lush landscape and voodoo spells drive behaviour as well as their madness or desire. There’s love everywhere, and peril. The language sets traps: the wine is poisoned, love offers oblivion narcotised by the threat of domination then death. It’s the world as Antoinette Cosway sees it. That rhymes with ‘causeway’ a raised path over damp, wet ground.

Rhys tells Antoinette’s side of the story: the fear and embarrassment of a young woman, the exhilaration of her quickening body, and the torments of imprisonment on this island with a mad mother, a riot of rebellious former slaves who burn her house down, and later a fiance who means to marry her, imprison her in his tedious sexual fantasies, then lock her in his attic, when he’s done with her.

But always everywhere there’s Jean Rhys’ clear eye. Its an objectivity that builds understanding. The three sections represent three points of view. One of the pleasures of the novel comes from the lush prose set against the obdurate knowledge that Rhys brings to the story, knowledge that her experience decants. Underlying the seduction there’s this knowledge: the story will cost our protagonist everything. In the last section Antoinette Cosway’s story is told from the attic where Rochester locked her away, after giving her another name, ‘Bertha Mason’. It’s possible to read “Wide Sargasso Sea” as an extraordinary rendition.

Francis Wyndham analyses this characteristic voice that runs through Rhys’ fiction:

Although she is aggressively unhappy, she is always good company; her self-knowledge is exact, her observation of others comical and freezing…

…it is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world.

James Wood says it square and true in his last sentence of his New Yorker (£$) review of the Seymour biography:

She lacked hope, but never courage.

James Wood, New Yorker reviews of Miranda Seymour’s biography of Jean Rhys

My discovery of Rhys ranks with my discovery of James Joyce at fifteen, reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” then right after, “Dubliners”. It was if the sky opened and my understanding grew by several epochs and dimensions. When you’re very young, you learn to walk, to speak, you sprout teeth, then there’s bikes, and but there’s always reading. There’s so much to know; it’s all an adventure. When I read Joyce I knew I had found the codebook that enabled me to read my heart, other people, history, and the glorious fallen nature of our kind.

Reading Rhys and reading about her, I experienced a kinship. I’m an outsider and expatriate, like her. I live in Cornwall, as she did, money running out, writing ‘to earn death’. Seymour finds a diary in Rhys’ Collection in the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. (In another uncanny connection, Tulsa is my hometown, my backwater point of origin. I used to study in that Library. I often experienced despair in Tulsa, but never in that tranquil Library. It was a haven, for Seymour, too, I see.)The diary records more evidence of Rhys’ resiliance; she writes when quite young that “despair is a sin”.

Rhys kept writing. With encouragement from Wyndham and Athill, she finds the thread in “Jane Eyre” that leads to the origins of her despair and infuses “Wide Sargasso Sea” with wild emotion. Francis Wyndham discusses:

…the Brontë book provided the initial inspiration for an imaginative feat almost uncanny in its vivid intensity. From her personal knowledge of the West Indies, and her reading of their history, Miss Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden to them: products of an inbred, decadent, expatriate society, resented by the recently freed slaves whose superstitions they shared, they languished uneasily in the oppressive beauty of their tropical surroundings, ripe for exploitation

Jean Rhys vowed never to return to Dominica, site of so much cruelty. Trauma drove her escape. She ran as far as she could; but eventually she lost her voice when the words ran out.

It’s speculative to say but it’s possible that the outline of an idea - tell the story of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in “Jane Eyre” - whispered to her a solution to her writer’s block. Her previous novels followed women - not her exactly but refractions.

It’s possible her impasse resulted from having nothing more to say. The publisher was persuaded that people, on the evidence, had no interest in further accounts of deepening disappointment, not with a war on. Rhys caught up with herself. What more was there to say?

After the war, she stood by her third husband during service of two years sentence in prison in Kent. She nursed him after his release, she who could barely look after herself. It seems she could not write and also tend to her husband, and beg for money and lodging all at the same time.

Good fortune with the BBC radio adaptation and the attention from Francis Wyndham and Diane Athill renewed her courage. More than that, Wyndham and Athill at André Deutsch had taken a chance by optioning, albeit for a meagre sum, one more novel.

Her whisper of an idea developed into a proposal. A trauma survivor must at some point tell the story of their trauma. In patches, she had revisited in bits memories of Dominica in her last two novels. She was courageous. She returned to Dominica and her trauma for her first novel in twenty years. Perhaps she needed the refraction of “Jane Eyre” to see her own story with such precise focus.

Wyndham describes her accomplishment toward the end of an essay that reappears as the Introduction to my Oxfam Penguin edition:

In “Wide Sargasso Sea”, which is set in Jamaica and Dominica during the 1830’s, she returns to that spiritual country as to a distant dream: and discovers it, for all its beauty (and she conures up this beauty with haunting perfection) to have been a nightmare.

Awakening from a nightmare makes its own sort of haunting image. From my experience reading the novel, it’s an accurate one. The story deploys slavery, violence, sexual abuse, rancid colonial politics, disquieting emotional cruelty, voodoo, intimate manipulation, bride theft, and imprisonment, all of it legal, all sanctioned by the ‘best people’. There’s no sentimentality here; there is terror.

The novel becomes a nightmare with the logic of a fairy tale: real human monsters, doors without locks, spells, the sane going mad, a woman transforming when given another name, which is the concluding and most lethal spell cast in this novel The houses are haunted by real ghosts, more terrifying because they are not make-believe ones.

They must have lived undead in Rhys all these years. There’s evidence to support a claim that these apparitions troubled her over the course of her entire life. So it’s possible to imagine what an ordeal it was for Rhys to summon these traumatic memories: The cruel mother transforms into the mad mother who calls to mind all the women victimised on Domenica for generations, most vividly, Ella or Gwen Williams.

A thin thread of literary allusion to the Brontë novel was all that Rhys had to find her way into her haunted house. There she faced her demons and made the story entirely her own. She may also have discovered the rare craft to mend the riven parts of one’s self into a unified person. Such is the aim of art.

James Wood says Rhys had courage. Here we see it in action. In “Wide Sargasso Sea”, we see, as many readers did, utter mastery of the art of storytelling.

“Wide Sargasso Sea” sold many copies. It won awards. Asked what she thought about this success, Jean Rhys said roughly, ‘it’s too late.’ But I believe that writing this novel released her from dark energies that had silenced her and made her a fugitive from herself.

It was her last novel. It may have contributed to her heart attack. But she was older now, and it had been a hard life - she had not taken care of herself. Death, when it came, may have been a relief.

Jean Rhys may have felt that by writing the whole truth and finding that authority we hear in the novel’s voice she had earned her death, at last.

I will continue reading Jean Rhys because she acquaints me with my own shadows. As she wrote in a fragment intended for her daughter, our shadows keep us honest.

If you take Rhys seriously, death is our muse. There’s a silence waiting for you to put down what you must say in words, if only to leave a record.

“The shadow is yourself that follows you, watching.”

Jean Rhys to her daughter, Maryvonne, 14 January 1958, quoting from her own unpublished fragment of a children’s story for Maryvonne.

(Seymour, Miranda. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (p. 235).