Sheer Bliss

A Creole Journey

Michela A. Calderaro

• Verlag: The University of the West Indies Press
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789766408152

"We all know Jean Rhys. But now, out from under the shadow of her more famous contemporary, comes Eliot Bliss. Bliss: an early twentieth century, white creole, Jamaican, lesbian writer. Bliss: whose out-of-print 1931 novel Saraband Calderaro first stumbles across in a bookshop in New York in 1998. Bliss: the absent figure Calderaro pursues throughout this book. The scholar Michela Calderaro reads into the past to recover Bliss, a writer she reveals as ahead of her time and not fit for her time or place in the world. Calderaro delivers Bliss back to the present, through interviews conducted across many years with Bliss's lifelong partner Patricia Allan-Burns, through the recollections of editors and friends painstakingly tracked down, through letters and diaries discovered and meticulously pored over and pieced together. Calderaro's book is, like Bliss's own novels as we come to learn, genre-defying. One part biography, one part criticism, one part memoir, one part detective story, Sheer Bliss carries us on the 'treasure hunt' Calderaro enacted over twenty years of research and personal devotion to solving a literary puzzle: Who exactly was Eliot Bliss and why were she and her work forgotten? Calderaro answers in luminous prose and what amounts to the most suspenseful excavation of a writer's life and lost-then-recovered legacies I've yet encountered."

—Shara McCallum, Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State University

CHAPTER 1

The Meeting

Bishop’s Stortford

15 April 2004

She was standing right in front of me, at the end of the street. She seemed to have appeared suddenly out of nowhere – out of an opening in the tall brick wall that was covered with rosemary. She was leaning, but just slightly, on a stick, and staring at me.

“Here you are. Come on in.”

I had been walking up and down the street that morning looking for 152 Plaw Hatch Close, all the time dismissing the half-hidden opening in the crumbling wall.

A cold sweat was running down my back. The light drizzle had covered my glasses with a watery film. I felt uncomfortable. Uttering some sort of excuse for being late, I moved towards her and entered. She was already crossing a garden, then turned her head and looked at me.

“I told you, the house was next to the school.”

She led the way, waving her stick and naming all the flowers and plants that she herself had planted over the years and was still taking care of. The sheen on my glasses made every petal and leaf shine. I felt as if I had entered Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden.

I followed her past the garden into a small entrance to a narrow, short corridor. The door on my left was to Eliot’s room, I would be told later. And two other doors on my right led to the bathroom and to Sylvia’s room. Past the corridor was the living room, and to its right, a small kitchen.

“You sit there.” She pointed at a chair next to a bed in the living room, her bed for the last forty-five years. Piled on a little table were letters, pictures and a folder. She sat in front of me, in an armchair; next to her was another small table, crammed with an ashtray, a spray for asthma, a pile of new books. She followed my eyes while I took in the room.

“I like reading, keeping informed. So, what would you like to know?” Her voice was like a rumble, a distant rumble, and she was looking at me with piercing, unflinching, light blue eyes.

“I’m a researcher, as I mentioned. I’ve read Ms Bliss’s novels and would like to know more about her, her life, her work. I would actually like just to know her, since nothing has been written so far, and I like her books,” I explained.

A smile finally illuminated her face. She must have been striking at nineteen, in 1933, when she first met Eliot Bliss.

“I would like to know Eliot through your eyes,” I said.

“I’ll make some coffee, or would you like something else?”

“Coffee . . . perfect.”

She stood up and disappeared into the kitchen; I didn’t dare stir. She came back and handed me a cup of coffee – sugar, I realized, was on the table in front of me. I sipped, burning my throat in reverent silence, already spellbound.

She sat back in her armchair, very quietly.

“I was an art student . . . very young. My father insisted that if I take up this scholarship, at London Central School of Arts. . . . To be quite honest with you, dear, I was sort of . . . in a world I had rarely ever known. I was brought up very strictly, you’d say. I mean, we weren’t allowed out unchaperoned, and, you see, I was with Patience and Eliot at the time when they were parting, and I didn’t know a thing, I didn’t understand, it was only later that one realized . . .”

I was breathless; she was letting me enter her life.

It had taken me six years to find her.

BEFORE

New York

13 July 1998

It was a hot Monday, we were having lunch, as we had done in the past, at one of my favourite restaurants, the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill.

“You look good!” I said. It was true, though he was dying. “I need your help, I don’t know whom to ask, and in a few days I’ll be going back to Italy. So, Jim, you must help me.”

Jim Tuttleton would die a few months later of pancreatic cancer. He had been my mentor and friend at New York University, one of the brightest minds around. I had flown to New York especially to see him but pretended I was on a scholarship for some sort of research. I could only stay for a week.

Actually, as often happens, while pretending to carry on an imaginary research project, I had stumbled on a real literary puzzle.

“Have you ever heard of a writer called Eliot Bliss? I searched everywhere: Library, MLA, Internet, Britannica – there’s no mention of her. I searched the catalogue at Bobst,¹ but even there I couldn’t discover anything! I found this book in one of my favourite known-only-to-the-initiated second-hand bookstores. It’s a second edition.” I handed him the book, Saraband, a tattered soft-cover I’d likely have ignored and left on its dusty shelf were it not for the word “Jamaica” on its back cover, noting the author’s place of birth, and followed by the detail that she had been friends with Anna Wickham, Jean Rhys and Dorothy Richardson.

“Have you asked George Thompson² at Bobst to help you? He remembers exactly where each book is!” he suggested with a hearty laugh.

“I haven’t had much time to contact him.”

“Is the book any good?”

“Oh, yes! Sounds a bit like James, or even Ford, the description of a society that is crumbling. But it also gives you a strange feeling, as if there’s more to it than a mere autobiographical novel, the way they describe it on the book cover.”

“I have no idea. . . . Well, you’ve got your little mystery to solve.” And he smiled. “Shall we have lunch Wednesday, and discuss a line of investigation? Same place?”

I would never see him again after that lunch at Knickerbocker Bar and Grill. He was hospitalized the next day.

Venice

1999

Saraband sat on my shelves for quite a while, among other books by Caribbean authors. I couldn’t find Bliss’s second novel, Luminous Isle, mentioned on the book cover, though I searched for it in many bookstores and libraries.

Since seeking anything connected to Bliss bore few, if any, fruits besides frustration, I was soon distracted by other, already planned, projects, and by my workload at the University of Trieste. I was working on a paper on Ford Madox Ford at the time, for a conference to be held in Münster in June 1999, and was thrilled at the prospect. Ford had been my ongoing “love affair”, and I was looking forward to the pleasure of mixing with old friends: the group of lively, enthusiastic and knowledgeable scholars of the Ford Madox Ford Society.

Thinking about what to write (Punctuation in modernist fiction, perhaps?), I was looking for something physical to do that would not interfere with my Fordian frame of mind. I decided to put my desk and my shelves in order: “my” part of the studio I share with my husband.

On the floor lay a pile of books I had collected during my tours at Argosy, the Strand, Gotham Bookmart, Octagon Books, and other favourite old-book dealers. Next to it another pile: articles I had gathered the year before in New York and hadn’t had the time to catalogue properly. Because of Jean Rhys’s liaison with Ford Madox Ford, I had begun reading her novels and come to appreciate her style, and actually fell in love with the Caribbean landscape. I wanted to write about her work, and all those piled articles and books were to constitute the critical background to my own analysis of her novels.

Among them was a book by Evelyn O’Callaghan,³ a scholar whose works I had always admired. I was flipping distractedly through its pages, when my eye fell on something that made me stop, startled. One of the chapters dealt with white creole women writers, and three names stood out: Jean Rhys, Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Eliot Bliss.

The piles would remain unattended and my plans to impose some order postponed indefinitely.

I had, a few years before, written a brief article about Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and then devoted myself completely to what I thought would have been my book on Rhys – which never took off. But here was Bliss’s name. The chapter did not say much on Bliss’s life and briefly analysed only one book, Luminous Isle, the one I had not read.

Again, she was mentioned in connection with Jean Rhys, with whom, I was to discover, she was very close. I decided to start with the name indexes in all books about Rhys in my possession; later I would search connections to poet Anna Wickham and to Dorothy Richardson. First, I picked up The Letters of Jean Rhys, edited by Francis Wyndham. A note on a letter from Jean Rhys to Peggy Kirkaldy,⁴ who was also a friend of Dorothy Richardson, read: “Eliot (real name Eileen) Bliss was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at a Highgate convent and University College, London. She published two novels: Saraband (1931) and Luminous Isle (1934). She got to know Jean in 1937, through an introduction from Horace Gregory, and used to visit the Tilden-Smiths at Paulton’s Square where Jean would cook her ‘delicious West Indian meals’.”⁵

Now I knew her real name. The information contained in the letter and in the note, though scarce, added to what I had learned so far. Then I looked at Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys, where I found a reference to Eliot Bliss, and to the fact that the two were friends. Her relationship with Jean Rhys seemed to me, at the time, the most promising. From what I read, the intellectual connection between the two women was stronger than what one could infer from the vague references to Bliss in Rhys’s collection of letters. Eliot was a good friend indeed, I would discover. Their friendship, which began in 1936, was important to both throughout their lives. Eliot travelled to America, and then to Hertfordshire, but the correspondence went on even after the war. She was always sympathetic and understanding, especially during what Carole Angier defines as Rhys’s “very drunken moments”: “She would rail at Eliot for being an ‘unfeeling aristocrat’, accuse her of belonging to the snobs and prigs and respectable people. [. . .] But here was the key to their friendship, and to why it ended only because Eliot left for America: Eliot didn’t mind. ‘Jean didn’t mean it’ [. . .]. ‘She wasn’t attacking me, she was attacking the world.’ I’d seen it before, in other artists. This was the sort of understanding Jean needed.”⁶

Carole Angier stresses the importance of “Eliot’s glimpse of Jean in 1937 [. . .]. Without it our picture [of Jean] would be different, and darker”.⁷ But I could not find any description of Eliot: her figure, like her writings, had been overshadowed by her more famous contemporaries. I wondered why, and was saddened to think of such a talented writer completely forgotten, of her books being out of print; it felt as if she had never existed.

I had to know more about her; I had to read Luminous Isle.

I could not find the book in any library within my reach, so I got in touch with Alessandra Zorzi, librarian at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, and asked for advice. She could get the book for me, she said, but I had to read it at the library; I could take notes, but photocopying large parts was forbidden.

Waiting for Luminous Isle to arrive, I began reading Dorothy Richardson’s biography and works, as I had never read anything by her before. She had been influential and admired in her time, and used to surround herself with a court of young promising writers. A few surprises were in store for me in her Collected Letters.

In the collection, Eliot Bliss’s name is briefly mentioned, with a condescending tone, in two letters to Peggy Kirkaldy. The first is dated 30 October 1940:

Dear Peggy,

A hurried line. my first thought was to evade by saying that my East A. friends [. . .] had gone to Jamaica. E.B. [Eliot Bliss] who is a great friend of Anna Wickham, has been so to speak, running after me for years. This, for me, is a mystery, for I cannot like her. I fail, however I may try. Lately, for some years, she has been in one difficulty after another [. . .]. Her little friend[,] a scholarship artist, now in commercial art, I do like. I leave it to you. If you so instruct me, (just a card) I’ll do as proposed above. She has quality, & a sheer fundamental integrity I can’t quite name or fathom. Too good for me perhaps. But there is something that always “puts me off”. She appears to make friends (where?) she goes & to escape, at the eleventh hour from her difficulties.⁸

A footnote by the editor explained that the scholarship artist “would be Patricia Allan-Burns, Eliot Bliss’s companion for fifty years”. She had a female companion then; “her ...