“Nobody else knows me, but the street knows me.“ – Good Morning, Midnight

Jean Rhys’s heroines lead disturbingly empty lives.  London, Paris, it hardly matters.  They are unlucky and poor, and barely balance on the edge of the abyss. They cannot work, or if they can, they do not excel in the workplace.  

In Good Morning, Midnight, published in 1938, the narrator, Sasha Jenson, is one of Rhys’s smart, incapable women.  She has left London to rent a room in a hotel in Paris, and fills her days according to a time-table:  she picks a place to eat at midday, a place to eat at night, and goes out for a drink or two at night.

Drinking is an integral part of Sasha’s life:  she feels better if she drinks a little too much.  Sasha is a highly intelligent alcoholic who understands her needs and her limits.  She has hit bottom and has now clawed her way back up to a large room on the shabby top floor of a hotel, supported by a tiny inheritance.  “Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set.  Nobody would know I had ever been in it.”

But on her fourth night in Paris, she begins to cry after a friendly woman’s boyfriend kindly buys Sasha a drink.  The friendly woman is not very sympathetic: “I understand.  All the same…. Sometimes I’m just as unhappy as you are. But that’s not to say that I let everybody see it.” 

Sasha promptly goes to the lavabo to finish her cry.

There is a lot of crying in Jean Rhys’s first four novels, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Goodbye, Midnight.  In a way these novels make up a series.  The heroines have different problems but all live on the edge. Sasha used to be married: her husband left her after their baby died.  Now she is completely on her own.

Bizarrely, I identified with these women when I first read these books in my thirties. I did not identify with Sasha’s life-style, of course – we women of the 20th century all had to work – but I understood the crying. 

But reading is a funny thing:  you can get so lost in a book that you forget yourself.  You become the character, or the omniscient narrator, or whatever you’re reading for.  And so over the years I’ve been a lot of unlikely characters:  Dido (The Aeneid), Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina), Meg Eliot (The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot), Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch), and Lucy Snowe (Villette). 

Rhys’s writing is exquisite, canny, and lucid.  Despite Sasha’s intelligence, she drifts.  She recklessly makes friends with a Russian artist and a gigolo, but has no interest in sex, and repeatedly says “No” to the gigolo. She is a bit uncertain about these men, but hangs out with anyone who shows up.  If you’re like me you keep saying: “No, no, no, no, Sasha.”  Eventually, unexpectedly, she pays a terrible price. And then I cried.

I think that we love these books (a) because the style is gorgeous, (b) because Rhys is a genius, and (c) because we have a sense of “But for the grace of God, there go I.”

Nowadays my favorite of Rhys’ books is Wide Sargasso Sea, a kind of  prequel to Jane Eyre. She reimagines the story of Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha, who, in this verison, is not mad but Rochester’s victim. 

I  also recommend her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please.  Fascinating, brilliant, and always disturbing, Rhys is one of my favorite writers of the twentieth century.