I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE EB

Miranda Seymour

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008353285
• eBook ISBN: 9780008355609
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

'An absolute belter of a biography' MARINA HYDE

A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022

An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022

An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic 'Rhys woman' whose personality – vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry – was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait.

Many details of Rhys's life emerge from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout her long and challenging career. But it's a shock to discover that no biographer – until now – has researched the crucial seventeen years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of Dominica; the island which haunted Rhys's mind and her work for the rest of her life.

Luminous and penetrating, Seymour's biography reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil – and yet was never a victim. I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a fascinatingly elusive woman. The figure who emerges for Seymour is powerful, cultured, self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable and often darkly funny. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.

PART ONE

A WORLD APART

Gwen

Tout mama ki ti ni jen fi – All mothers with young daughters!

Pa lésé yo allé en plési yo, – Don’t let them go follow their own pleasures,

Pa lésé yo allé en jewté yo. – Don’t let them go follow their joy.

Si diab la vini yi kai anni mé yo. – If the devil comes, he will just take them away.

Elizé malewé – Poor Elizé

Elizé malewé – Poor Elizé

Elizé malewé. – Poor Elizé.

On pon innocen la ou van ba de demon la. – You took an innocent child and sold her to the two devils.

(Translation by Sonia Magloire-Akba, with thanks.*)

Elizé Malewé

* The largest single holding of Jean Rhys’s personal papers is at the handsomely Gothic-styled McFarlin Library, which forms part of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The library contains a digitalised recording of Jean Rhys singing this old island song in July 1963, when she was almost seventy-three years old. I’m grateful to Sonia Magloire-Akba, an authority on the Kwéyòl (Creole) language still in use today on Dominica, for her informal translation.

1

Wellspring (1890–1907)

‘You turn to the left and the sea is at your back, and the road goes zigzag upwards … Everything is green, everywhere things are growing … That’s how the road to Constance is – green, and the smell of green, and then the smell of water and dark earth and rotting leaves and damp.’

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, Part Three (1934)

Near to the end of her long life – she was almost ninety when she died in May 1979 – Jean Rhys wrote what her Devonshire neighbour William Trevor praised as one of the finest short ghost stories he’d ever read. She called it ‘I Used to Live Here Once’. The dreaming narrator – evidently Rhys herself – follows the trail of stepping stones that guide her across a shallow, familiar river and onto a rough forest path that leads to her own childhood home. She feels ‘extraordinarily happy’. But when she walks across the parched grass to where a boy and girl seem to await her, they register her presence and timid greeting only as a sudden chill in the afternoon air. The children turn away. The story ends abruptly: ‘It was then that I knew.’

Rhys lived in a secluded village in the south-west of England for the last nineteen years of an extraordinary and often reckless life, one that took her from poverty, imprisonment and obscurity to eventual recognition as perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century. The island which haunted her mind and almost everything that she wrote lay on the far side of the world. There – not in Devon, or London, nor even in Paris – lay the wellspring of Rhys’s art.

*

Jean Rhys was born on 24 August 1890 in Dominica, a small and sternly beautiful Caribbean island of green mountains (mornes), tangled forests, rushing rivers, forest pools and impenetrable ravines. Dominica’s larger neighbours – Martinique and the archipelago that forms Guadeloupe – were French, as Dominica itself had been until the island was ceded to the British in 1763, at the end of the Seven Years’ War. By the close of the nineteenth century, when Dominica had almost 29,000 inhabitants, the island’s white population had shrunk to fewer than a hundred. Living in an impoverished outpost of the British Empire, white Dominicans clung to a romanticised vision of England as the centre of their own diminished world, marooned on an island that still spoke in the French-based creole language known today as Kwéyòl.

The Lockhart twins. Rhys’s proud mother Minna (left) and (right) her unmarried, more cultured twin sister, Brenda (‘Auntie B’) grew up at Geneva, formerly a slave-owning sugar estate, on the Caribbean island of Dominica. (McFarlin)

Jean Rhys’s father, William Rees Williams, was a Welshman with an Irish mother. A ship’s doctor, he came to Dominica in 1881 in search of better pay as a twenty-seven-year-old British-funded medical officer. He went ashore at the tiny coastal village of Stowe in the area known as Grand Bay, lying below the once prosperous plantation of Geneva in the south-east of the island. In January 1882, the Welshman married Minna Lockhart, a white Creole, a term which, despite its pejorative sound, meant only that Minna, whose family still inhabited Mitcham, the old Geneva estate house, had been born on Dominica. The newlywed couple spent their honeymoon year at Stowe. Dr Rees Williams brightened the sitting-room walls of their little shoreside home with the four prints of Betws-y-Coed in Snowdonia that had adorned his shipboard cabin. In 1885, Williams was promoted from a relatively humble job in the island’s Southern Medical District to a more lucrative position in the capital town of Roseau, where private patient care usefully augmented his income. Here, after renting a house near to the Roseau river on Hillsborough Street (where Jean Rhys was born), the doctor purchased a more substantial property closer to the centre of town.

It was burly, hazel-eyed Willie Rees Williams who named the couple’s fourth child Ella Gwendoline. Gwen, as she was always known to her relatives, followed two older brothers, Edward and Owen, and a sister named Minna, like their mother. A fifth child, a girl, died as an infant, three years before the birth in 1895 of Brenda Clarice, named both for Minna Lockhart’s adored twin (Brenda) and the doctor’s devoted sister (Clarice Rees Williams).*

Pale-skinned, sapphire-eyed and exceptionally sensitive in spirit, Gwen resembled neither of her parents, nor her more heavily built and dark-haired siblings. Almost from birth, as Rhys remembered it in Smile Please (a memoir which still remained unfinished when she died), she had felt like an outsider; a changeling; a ghostly revenant in the hard light of day. True or not, that was the role which would come to fit both the writer and her work as closely as a handstitched glove.

*

No family papers survive against which to test the accuracy of Smile Please, Jean Rhys’s published account of the seventeen years she spent in the West Indies. An unpublished novel by her brother Owen related the story of a white Creole girl who breaks her family’s unspoken social code by falling in love with an island boy. But it was Owen – not his sister – who was sent away from Dominica for forming intimate relationships with local girls (one was an employee in his parents’ home), an infringement that embarrassed his strait-laced mother. Nothing in Rhys’s own recollections suggests that any such romance took place in her early life, although Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea recalls having exchanged a final ‘life and death kiss’ with her handsome illegitimate cousin Alexander (‘Sandi’) before she travels to England as Rochester’s wife.1 Hearsay in the family of Rhys’s father’s medical colleague Sir Henry Nicholls suggested that Gwen had been labelled ‘fast’ as a young girl. Nicholls and his wife were probably recalling Gwen’s childish crush on their son Willie, a youth whose wild ways would eventually lead to his discreet banishment to Scotland, to study medicine.2

Travel writers and historians (among them the lushly romantic Lafcadio Hearn and earnest James Froude) have provided magnificent descriptions of Dominica’s invincible appearance: a small island rearing up from a range of submerged volcanic peaks like an emerald cathedral of soaring rock. A voracious reader throughout her life, Rhys became familiar with the books written by Froude and Hearn. (Froude toured the island with one of Gwen’s Lockhart uncles in the 1880s, as an unofficial representative of Britain’s Colonial Office; Hearn, visiting the West Indies for two years just before Rhys was born, first wrote about Dominica with a lyricism that artfully concealed the fact that he was describing its forested heights from aboard a passenger ship.)

But Jean would remember Dominica best from her own early experiences. She had seen the gigantic wheel and iron mangles at Geneva’s disused sugar mill (one of sixty mills on the island from which a cluster of white planters had once prospered); she had listened to the family stories told about her own mother’s Lockhart forebears, once the wealthiest of a small plantocracy. The island held a more powerful grasp on her imagination through the enduring presence in her mind of an unforgettable landscape: the green and densely mantled mountains that Rhys knew from childhood as Morne Micotrin, Morne Anglais, Morne Trois Pitons and – towering above them all – Morne Diablotin. They offered a majestic presence, along with a rich stew of gossip, island stories and family scandals that would nourish Jean Rhys’s fiction.

Questions abound. How much of the material on which Rhys seems to draw for her novels was based on historical fact? Should a reader believe in the actual existence of Maillotte Boyd, simply because Anna Morgan, the dream-laden protagonist of Rhys’s third novel (Voyage in the Dark), remembers having seen Maillotte’s name on an old list of house-slaves? Does a real Maillotte gain credibility because Rhys also made use of her unusual name in Wide Sargasso Sea? (There, in Rhys’s extraordinary prequel to Jane Eyre, Maillotte’s daughter appears both as the twin spirit and the nemesis of unhappy Antoinette Cosway, Mr Rochester’s young Creole wife.) More likely, Rhys was playing with a name that chimes with the word ‘mulatto’, a term still in use on Dominica today. Mixed race was not uncommon in families like hers. James Potter Lockhart, Minna’s grandfather, had taken two of his slaves as mistresses. Gwen, from an early age, was discouraged from making friends with any of the darker-skinned Lockhart cousins on the island, cousins whose fortunes began slowly ascending as those of her poorer white relatives fell.

*

Rhys’s first memories were of the freehold house in Dominica’s capital, Roseau, that her father, a proud Welshman, named Bod Gwilym (‘William’s Home’). A large timber-framed corner house, standing between Cork Street and Grandby Street, Bod Gwilym was painted white, with green-shuttered windows. Gwen’s bedroom gave onto a high platform, hidden from public view. From here, as a secret observer, she watched the village women striding down to the marketplace near the bay, dark heads crowned by their bright baskets of mangoes, yellow passionfruit and small, green oranges. Dominica was a Catholic island: there was uproar when an outspoken newspaper editor – described in Rhys’s early story ‘Against the Antilles’ as ‘a stout little man of a beautiful shade of coffee colour’ who lived close to the Rees Williams’s house – criticised the money being spent on a new palace for the town’s Catholic bishop. When a band of angry women marched into town (‘Against the Antilles’ described the crowd as ‘throwing stones and howling for the editor’s blood’), the shutters of Bod Gwilym were closed and barred. Peeping over the edge of her hidden observation platform, Gwen saw the exhilaration in the women’s faces and understood it. As with the mob on the street, so it was indoors between Minna Lockhart and her timid, fiery daughter. Rage might hurt others; never oneself. Rage brought relief.

Standing with her family at an open window and dressed in her best clothes, little Gwen watched the town’s annual carnival with longing, waiting for the moment when she was allowed outside, just long enough to present a sixpence to the tall stilt-walker who always stopped to perform a stiff-legged dance beside Dr Rees Williams’s house. Passionately, Gwen had wanted to join the whirling dancers, but she distrusted the brightly daubed wire masks that screened their watchful eyes from view. Once, not perhaps intending to frighten a nervous child, a kitchen visitor spoke in a strange falsetto voice and thrust a thick pink tongue through the white wire mesh that concealed darker skin. Gwen ran away crying. She was inconsolable. Later, Rhys would place that scene among Anna Morgan’s Caribbean recollections in Voyage in the Dark.

Grandest of all Roseau’s public spectacles were the religious processions led by the Catholic bishop and a retinue of stately priests in splendid robes. Watching from the broad wooden gallery that separated the doctor’s house from the street, young Gwen gazed out at a dazzle of colourful headdresses, banners and effigies. Listen hard enough, and she could hear the froufrou crackle of paper-hemmed petticoats worn under the ladies’ sweeping trains.

Catholicism played no active part in Gwen’s home life, but her father, the product of an Anglican upbringing in South Wales, often lunched with a friendly priest and he offered free medical advice at the Catholic Presbytery and the town’s convent school. Dr Rees Williams was not considered a prejudiced man. He saw his white patients privately in the afternoons, but his mornings at the surgery which formed an extension wing to his house were reserved for the black islanders. All patients, black or white, were treated with equal courtesy and only Minna Lockhart raised objections when the doctor despatched his socially sensitive daughter to walk along the surgery queue with small offerings of bread or money.

The doctor’s wife cared more than her husband for how she, a proud Lockhart (one sister had married John Spencer Churchill, a former Governor of the Virgin Islands), would be perceived by those whom she regarded as her peers. Gwen’s father seems to have quietly favoured Catholicism although he was never a churchgoer, but on Sunday mornings, Minna Rees Williams and her children processed slowly up the hill from Bod Gwilym to St George’s, the town’s Anglican church, built for the benefit of the island’s leading white families. A pause was always made beside the tiny grave of Gwen’s dead baby sister before the doctor’s wife swept on to take her position in a pew near the head of the nave, the preserve of the town’s white worshippers. Sometimes, bored of watching her mother fan her broad, expressionless face with a fronded palm leaf, Gwen tried to translate an impressive Latin wall tablet that honoured her great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart. She learned a few of the punning words by heart, well enough to make later use of them, over and again, in her work: Locked Hearts I open. I have the heavy key.3

Rhys could always summon up Bod Gwilym in vivid detail. A framed dark print of Mary Queen o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Map
• Foreword
• PART ONE: A WORLD APART – Gwen
• 1: Wellspring (1890–1907)
• 2: Floggings, School and Sex (1896–1906)
• PART TWO: ENGLAND: A COLD COUNTRY – Ella
• 3: Stage-struck (1907–13)
• 4: Fact and Fiction: A London Life (1911–13)
• 5: London in Wartime (1913–19)
• PART THREE: A EUROPEAN LIFE – Madame Jean Lenglet
• 6: A Paris Marriage (1919–25)
• 7: ‘L’affaire Ford’* (1924–26)
• 8: Hunger, and Hope (1926–28)
• PART FOUR: THE RHYS WOMAN – Jean Rhys
• 9: Two Tunes: Past and Present (1929–36)
• 10: A la recherche, or Temps Perdi (1936)
• 11: Good Morning, Midnight (1936–39)
• PART FIVE: DARKNESS AT NOON – Mrs Max Hamer
• 12: At War with the World (1940–45)
• 13: Beckenham Blues (1946–50)
• 14: The Lady Vanishes* (1950–56)
• PART SIX: THE PHOENIX RISES ∏– Jean Rhys
• 15: A House by the Sea (1957–60)
• 16: Cheriton Fitzpaine
• 17: The Madness of Perfection (1960–63)
• 18: An End and a Beginning (1964–66)
• PART SEVEN: UNWELCOME FAME
• 19: No Orchids for Miss Rhys* (1966–69)
• 20: Rhys in Retreat (1967–74)
• 21: ‘Mrs Methuselah’ (1973–76)
• PART EIGHT: AND YET I FEAR*
• 22: ‘The Old Punk Upstairs’* (1977–79)
• Afterlife
• Sources and Bibliography
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• By the Same Author
• About the Author
• About the Publisher