Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (58 page)

It was the BBC which found her, when they were preparing to broadcast an adaptation of
Good Morning, Midnight
made and performed by the actress Selma vaz Dias. They advertised for information about ‘the late Jean Rhys’, and she answered. Learning of this, Francis wrote to her, and she replied, saying that she was working on a new book. Responding to Francis’s and my enthusiasm, André Deutsch agreed that we should buy the option to see it – for
£
25.

When people exclaim at how mean this was I no longer blush simply because I have blushed so often. I tell myself that the pound bought much more in the fifties than it does now, which is true; that this was not, after all, an advance, only an advance on an advance, which is true; and that no one else in those days would have paid much more for an option, and that, too, is true. But it is inconceivable that anyone would have paid less – so mean it was. If we had known anything about Jean’s circumstances I am sure that Francis and I would have fought for more, but it would be a long time before we gained any idea of them.

The trouble was, she kept up a gallant front. In the letters we exchanged between 1957, when she said that her book would be finished in ‘six or nine months’, and March 1966, when she announced that it
was
finished, she would refer to being held up by domestic disasters such as leaking pipes, or mice in the kitchen, and she would make the disasters sound funny. Not until I met her did I understand that for Jean such incidents were appalling: they knocked her right out because her inability to cope with life’s practicalities went beyond anything I ever saw in anyone generally taken to be sane. Max’s health had given out, but her loyalty to him extended beyond keeping silent about his prison sentence to disguising his subsequent helplessness. It was years before I learnt how dreadful her seventies had been as she alternated between the struggle to nurse him and bleak loneliness when he was in hospital. She ate too little, drank too much, was frightened, exhausted and ill – and paranoid into the bargain, seeing the village of Cheriton FitzPaine (to which they moved during these years) as a cruel place. So any little horror on top of all this would incapacitate her for weeks. And when it passed a certain point she would crack.

For example: she told me that neighbours were saying that she was a witch, and she told it lightly, so that I thought she was making a funny story out of some small incident. But Mr Woodward, the rector, was to say that indeed she had been so accused, and that anyone who thought such beliefs were extinct didn’t know Devon. Jean, driven frantic, had run out into the road and attacked the woman who originated the charge with a pair of scissors, which led to her being bundled for a week or so into a mental hospital. ‘And if you ask me,’ said Mr Greenslade, one of her few friends in the village, as he drove me from Exeter in his taxi, ‘it was the other one who ought to have been shut up, not poor Mrs Hamer.’ And not a word of all that appeared in her letters.

Luckily she gradually became less inhibited with Francis – partly, no doubt, because he was a man, and partly because he wrote to her as a friend from his own home, not as her publisher from an office (he worked with us only part-time). To him she owed the fact that a publisher was waiting for her book, and in him (this was probably more important to her) she had found someone who understood and loved her writing, who was sympathetic, amusing, kind, anxious to help. He made her dig out stories and found magazines to publish them, and when at last she let him know that she was on the verge of collapse, he sent her
£
100 so that she could go to a hotel or into a nursing-home for a rest. Her letters to me during those years are those of a writer glad to have a sympathetic editor; her letters to Francis are those of someone luxuriating in the unexpected discovery of a friend. Had it not been for his support she would not have been able to finish the book through which, in spite of such heavy odds against it, she was slowly, slowly, slowly inching her way.

People are not, thank God, wholly explicable. Carole Angier’s biography of Jean does as much as anything ever will to explain the connections between the life and the work, but how this hopelessly inept, seemingly incomplete woman could write with such clarity, power and grace remains a mystery. I have long since settled for this fact; but I think I have reached a better understanding of the bad-at-life side of Jean since coming to know Dominica
*
, the island in the eastern Caribbean where she was born.

I have been given an unusually close view of the island by a piece of great good fortune: becoming friends (through having been Jean’s publisher) with a Dominican family which includes the man who knows more than anyone else about every aspect of it. In Lennox Honychurch one of the Caribbean’s smallest islands has produced the region’s best historian, and it is through mental spectacles borrowed from him that I suddenly saw how
foreign
Jean was when she came to England in 1906, at the age of sixteen.

The British, thinking ‘West Indies’, mostly envisage a mixture of Jamaica and Barbados with a touch of Mustique. My own image, which I considered well-founded because I had been there, was Trinidad & Tobago plus Jamaica. So Dominica surprised me.

In the first place, no one had seriously wanted to make a colony of it. Columbus hit on it in 1493, and once described it by scrunching up a sheet of paper and tossing it onto a table: an inadequate image, but one can see what he meant. It consists of thirty by sixteen miles of densely packed volcanic mountains separated by deep valleys into which waterfalls roar and down which little rivers, often turbulent, run. The whole of it is clad in exuberant forest and some of it is given to steaming and shuddering. The dramatic nature of its conformation, and the  tropical richness of its forest (much of it rain forest) make it wonderfully beautiful, but it is hardly
useful-looking
.

Human beings have two ways of relating to such terrain. If, like the Caribs, who were there when Columbus turned up, you are the kind of human who lives with nature rather than on or against it, you find it hospitable: you can’t freeze in it, you can’t starve in it, there is plenty of material for building shelters and a vast number of mighty trees out of which to make canoes; and if hostile humans invade they find it extremely difficult to move about in, while you can very easily hide, and then ambush them. (There are still more Caribs living in Dominica than anywhere else, and it enabled escaped slaves to put up a more impressive resistance to vengeful slave-owners than they could do on any other island.) But if you are the kind of human who likes to control nature, and hopes to make a profit from it, then you must either leave such an island alone, as the Spanish sensibly did, or else steel yourself to work very hard for sadly little return. Dominica’s settlers have tried planting a variety of crops – coffee, cocoa, a very little sugar (not enough flat ground), lots of bananas and citrus fruit, vanilla, bay rum … all of them reasonably profitable for a time, then wiped out or greatly reduced by hurricanes, blights, or shifts in the market. In many parts of the Caribbean planters made fortunes; in Dominica with luck you got by, but rich you did not get.

It was the French who first, early in the eighteenth century, edged themselves in to start plantation life: the Dominicans of today, almost all of them of African descent, still speak the French-based patois introduced by the slaves of the French planters, and Catholicism remains the island’s predominant religion. The English took the place over in 1763 as part of the peace settlement at the end of the Seven Years War between France and England, and were not excited by it. ‘These islands’, said a booklet for investors in 1764, ‘are not the promised land, flowing with milk and honey … Of those who adventure, many fall untimely. Of those who survive, many fall before enjoyment …’
*
Most  plantation owners from then on were absentees who left managers in charge – men who had a bad reputation. A coffee planter in the eighteenth century wrote: ‘When we look around and see the many drunken, ignorant, illiterate, dissolute, unprincipled Characters to whom the charge of property is confided … it is no wonder that the Estate goes to ruin and destruction.’ But the managers deserve some sympathy: it was a lonely life. The small and rustic estate houses were separated from each other not by great distances, but by impassable terrain.

To this day the abruptness with which mountains plunge into sea at each end of the island has defeated road-builders, so that no road runs right round it; and only since 1956 has it been possible to drive obliquely across it from the Caribbean to the Atlantic on a road forced by mountains to be much longer than the distance straight across. This trans-insular road, grandly named the Imperial Road, was officially ‘opened’ in about 1900, but in fact petered out halfway across, with only the first five or six miles surfaced. In Jean’s day you either sailed round the island, or rode a very difficult track often interrupted by flood or landslip. Even the flat coast road linking Roseau and Portsmouth, the two main towns on the Caribbean side, was non-existent until 1972. Nowadays a few narrow metalled roads run up into the mountains from the coast, so that farmers can truck their produce down to be shipped; but when Jean went to visit her grandmother at Geneva, the family’s estate, she rode nine miles of stony track.

Except for the one between Roseau and Portsmouth, Dominica’s narrow bumpy roads still inspire awe just by existing: so much forest to be cleared, so many ups and so many downs to be negotiated hairpin after hairpin after hairpin, so many tropical downpours to wash away what has just been achieved … and so little money and no earth-moving equipment! They are valiant little roads, and keeping them in repair is a heavy task.

So it is not surprising that few white people settled in Dominica. In Jean’s girlhood an energetic Administrator tempted in a new generation of English planters, and briefly the white population soared … from forty-four in 1891 to three hundred and ninety-nine in 1911
*
. But the new planters soon gave up, and now it is under a dozen. Jean’s parents lent her elder sister to rich relations to be brought up, and I can see why. White middle-class girls didn’t work, they got married, and who was there in Dominica for a girl to marry? No one. In those days British neglect of the island had been so scandalous regarding schools that hardly any black Dominicans had any schooling at all. Racial prejudice would, anyway, have made a black husband for a white girl seem impossible, but there would also have been real incompatibility. White education was nothing to boast of, but even the least polished white daughter could read.

In a colonial society people only had to be white to feel themselves upper-class, in addition to which they hung on with determination to awareness of gentlemanly forebears if they had them, as the Lockharts (Jean’s mother’s family) did. So normal life to the child Jean was life at the top of the pile. Against which, the pile was no more than a molehill. Such a very small and isolated white society was less than provincial – less, even, than parochial, since there was considerably less enduring structure to it than to an average English village. It was threatened from below, which Jean sensed while still very young; but that pushed her in the direction of her family’s attitudes, rather than away from them (not until she had worked her way through to the writer in herself – the seeing eye – would she, almost in spite of herself, reflect back an image of white Dominican society as it really was). As she approached the age of sixteen, when she would leave for England, her life was that of a tiny group of people whose experience was considerably narrower than they liked to think, combined with life in the head: dream life.

Part of the dream was of Dominica itself, because its combination of beauty and untameability exerts a strong pull on the imagination. Jean wrote
**

Outsiders, too, respond to it romantically. I know others beside myself who try to play down the intensity of their infatuation with it for fear of seeming absurd. I was charmed by Tobago, but it did not haunt my imagination as Dominica does. Perhaps it has to do with its volcanic nature. In addition to the Boiling Lake, steaming and gulping in its impressive crater, it has several lesser fumaroles, sulphur springs, earth tremors … vulcanologists say that at least four of its centres of volcanic activity might blow at any time. The inconceivable violence barely contained within our planet can’t be forgotten on Dominica. It is a place so far from ordinary in the mind’s eye that belonging to it, as Jean so passionately felt she did, must set one apart.

Her other dream was of England, bred partly from the way that colonial families of British origin idealized it, more from the books which were sent her by her grandmother on her father’s side. From this material she created a promised land even more seductive than her beloved Dominica. Her father had an inkling of what would happen when she got there: he warned her that it would be ‘very different’, and told her to write directly to him if she was unhappy – ‘But don’t write at the first shock or I’ll be disappointed in you.’ But when they said goodbye, and he hugged her tightly enough to break the coral brooch she was wearing, she was unmoved by his emotion and felt very cheerful, ‘for already I was on my way to England’. At which she arrived knowing so little about it that she might have been landing from Mars.