Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (59 page)

It was not just a matter of the obvious ignorances, such as not knowing what a train looked like (put into a little brown room at her first railway station she didn’t realize what it was), or supposing that the hot water gushing from bathroom taps was inexhaustible (she was scolded for using it all up when she took her first bath, and how could she have known?). And of course she had never dreamt of endless streets of joined-together brick houses, all grey … All that was bad enough, but worse was having none of the instinctive sense of give and take that is gained from living in a complex society surrounded by plenty of people like oneself. The older women she had known had been given no more opportunity than she had to acquire this … She could hardly have known what it was that she lacked, but she did know how badly she was at a loss.

In England
everyone she met
knew things she didn’t know – not just the things taught in schools, but baffling ordinary, everyday things. Many young women are nimble face-savers, able to learn ways out of difficult situations, but Jean was not. Already, for whatever reason, she was in some ways trammelled in childishness; already paranoia threatened. It did not occur to her to learn, all she could do was hate. She hated this country which was so far from resembling her dream, and even more fiercely its inhabitants, for despising (as she was sure they did) her ignorance and her home. This feeling persisted into her old age: I saw it flare up when a woman spoke of Castries, in St Lucia, as ‘a shanty town’. Instantly Jean assumed that this sneering woman – these sneering English – would see Roseau in the same way, and Roseau was not a shanty town – it was
not
– they were not seeing it right. She sprang to defend it against strangers – hateful strangers. She had always hated them with their damned cold competence and common sense: never would she dream of trying to be like them. Probably she could not have been, anyway; but her abhorrence of what she saw as Englishness did make her
embrace
her own incompetence.

The book she was trying against such heavy odds to finish was inspired by this hate. At first it was called ‘The First Mrs Rochester’. Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
had always filled her with indignation on behalf of the mad West Indian wife shut up in the attic of Thornfield Hall. She knew that Englishmen had sometimes married West Indian heiresses for their money, and suspected that Brontë had based her story on local gossip about such a marriage; and to Jean such gossip could only have been spiteful and unfair. For years she had wanted to write a novel showing the wife’s point of view, and for almost as many years again that was what – with long and painful interruptions – she had been doing.

We had not been corresponding for long before she admitted that her worry about Part Two of
Wide Sargasso Sea
(as it had become) was exhausting her. In this Part Mr Rochester turns up and marries Antoinette (disliking the name Bertha, which Brontë gave the wife, Jean chooses to call her heroine by her second name). Their relationship has to be established and the reason why this marriage of convenience goes so terribly wrong has to be explained. For Antoinette’s childhood and schooling, Jean said in letters, she could draw on her own, and ‘the end was also possible because I
am
in England and can all too easily imagine being mad’. But for the wedding and what followed she had nothing to go on, and she went through agonies of uncertainty: ‘Not one real fact. Not one. No dialogue. Nothing.’

She sent an early version of Parts One and Two to Francis, who showed them to me, and in that version Part Two was indeed thin: the marriage became a disaster almost immediately, before it had been given time to exist. About this I wrote to her – nervously, because Part One was so marvellous that the book I was meddling with could obviously become a work of genius. I was relieved when she accepted what I had said; but not until much later, when I read one of her letters to Francis
*
, did I see that my suggestion had been of real use.

She told him of certain ‘clues’ that had led her forward. The first was obeah, and how it must have played its ambiguous part in the story. ‘The second clue was when Miss Athill suggested a few weeks’ happiness for the unfortunate couple – before he gets disturbing letters.’ Starting to follow this suggestion, she saw at once that ‘He must have fallen for her, and violently too’, and at once the marriage came alive and was launched on its complex and agonizing course.

That was to remain my only editorial intervention, strictly speaking, in Jean Rhys’s work: on points of detail she was such a perfectionist that she never needed ‘tidying up’.

Jean and I met for the first time in November 1964, when, after the support she had received from Francis, and also from another Deutsch editor, Esther Whitby, who had volunteered to spend a weekend at Cheriton FitzPaine to help her sort out and arrange what she had written, she felt able to bring the finished book to London. Or rather, the almost finished book: there were still a few lines which she would have to dictate to the typist to whom we had given the material brought back by Esther. We would meet, Jean and I, for a celebratory lunch the day after she arrived … Instead, I was called to her hotel by an agitated manageress, who reported that she had suffered a heart attack during the night. So there was no triumph over a bottle of champagne. I had to pack her into an ambulance and take her to hospital. This, followed by three or four weeks of hospital visiting, with all the usual intimacies of nightdress washing, toothpaste buying and so on, plunged us into the deep end of friendship – though I soon learnt that it would be a mistake to suppose that meant trust. Jean never entirely trusted anybody. But she was never thereafter to show me an unfriendly face.

At the end of her first day in hospital she presented me with what might have become a painful moral problem: she asked me for a solemn promise that the book would never be published in its unfinished state – without, that is, the few lines she had been intending to dictate. Naturally I gave it. And then I went home to think ‘What if she dies?’ It seemed quite likely that she would. The book was publishable as it stood – perhaps a footnote or two would be necessary at the places where the lines were to go, but that was all. If she died would I be able to – would it even be right to – keep my promise? Now I know there would have been no question about it: of course we would have published. But at the time, in all the disturbance and anxiety caused by her illness, my sense of the terrifyingly treacherous world in which Jean’s paranoia could trap her (I’d picked that up at once) was so strong that I felt any promise given her
must
be real.

A possible solution occurred to me. Esther had described how Jean kept her manuscript in shopping-bags under her bed, a huggermugger of loose sheets and little notebooks which Jean had said only she herself could make sense of. I knew that her brother, Colonel Rees-Williams, was coming up from Budleigh Salterton to visit her in hospital. Why not ask him to collect every bag of writing he could find in her cottage and bring it to me, without telling her (she was too ill to deal with it herself)? I would then go through it, returning everything meticulously to the order in which I found it, hoping to find clues to what she intended to insert; so that, if the worst happened, I could follow, at least approximately, her intentions.

Colonel Rees-Williams did his part, but in vain. Jean had been right: she
was
the only person who could make sense of the amazing muddle seething in those bags. So I gave up, her brother put the bags back exactly where he found them, and Jean never knew what we had done.

It took her nearly two years to regain enough strength to look at the book again, and to add the scraps of material she felt to be necessary. She could do it, she said, because of a new pill prescribed, I think, by a new doctor – though it may have been her old doctor trying something new. Perhaps he was the most important contributor to the conclusion of that novel, so I am sorry I cannot name him.

It was on March 9th 1966 that she wrote to tell me that the book was finished – and that Max was dead.

It’s so
cold
.

I asked if I could come to Cheriton to collect the book, which seemed to please her; that first visit was when Mr Greenslade, sent by Jean to pick me up at Exeter, told me about her attack on her disagreeable neighbour.

She had booked me a room at the Ring of Bells, the village pub, because although she had a tiny extra room it would be another two years before it was inhabitable. Her letters always bewailed the weather, and sure enough, when I walked the length of the village to Landboat Bungalows, where she lived in number 6, it was raining and windy; and the village, too, behaved as she always said it did. On a walk of about half a mile I saw not a single person, the houses all stood with their backsides to the road, and the two dogs I met – mongrels of a sheepdog type – peered at me with hostile yellow eyes through their sodden shagginess and sidled away as though they expected me to stone them. Later I would see Cheriton looking quite normal (though the houses turning their backs to the road on that stretch of it remained odd); but that day I thought ‘What a depressing place – she hasn’t been exaggerating at all’.

I had always thought of a bungalow as a detached dwelling sitting on its own little plot, but Jean’s was the last in a joined-together row of one-storey shacks, crouching grey, makeshift and neglected behind a hedge which almost hid them. They looked as though corrugated iron, asbestos and tarred felt were their main ingredients, and if I had been told that I must live in one of them I would have been appalled.

Jean could not afford to heat, and so didn’t use, the only decent room which, like her bedroom, looked out over what would have been the garden had it been cultivated, towards some fields. On the road side there was a strip of rough grass shaded by the hedge, and the door opened into a narrow unlit passage, bathroom on the left, kitchen – into which I was immediately steered – on the right. It was about ten feet by ten, and it was just as well that it was no bigger; the only heating, apart from the two-burner gas cooker, was an electric heater of the kind which has little bars in front of a concave metal reflector, which scorches the shins of the person just in front while failing to warm the space as a whole. The small table at which Jean worked and ate, two upright chairs, a cupboard for food and another for utensils were all the furniture, and this was the room in which Jean spent all day, every day.

I doubt whether she could have survived another year in Landboat Bungalows if she had not managed to finish
Wide
Sargasso Sea
.

Its publication, followed by the reissue of all her earlier work except for two or three stories which she didn’t consider good enough to keep, brought her money: not a great deal of it, but enough to keep her warm and comfortable for the rest of her life. It also brought her fame, to which she was almost completely indifferent but which must have been better than being forgotten, and friends. Among the friends was Sonia Orwell, who made more difference to her life than anyone else.

Sonia struck me as tiresome. She often drank too much, was easily bored, which made her tetchy and sometimes rude, and was an intellectual snob without having, as far as I could see, a good enough mind to justify it. But although I suspect it was Jean’s sudden fame, rather than her writing in itself, which made Sonia take her up, once she had been moved to do so she was amazingly generous about it.

She financed long winter holidays in London for Jean every year from the publication of
Wide Sargasso Sea
in 1966 to the end of her life, and she gave her many expensive presents. When I remarked on the amount she was spending she told me that she had always felt embarrassed at having inherited George Orwell’s literary income, and had decided that she must use it to help writers who were hard up. This she said shyly and apologetically, to stop me thinking she was more generous than she was, not to take credit for it. And more impressive than the money she spent was the sensitivity she showed in her determination to give Jean a good time. She didn’t just pay hotel bills: she did all the tipping in advance, she explained to the management the special kinds of attention this old lady would need, she booked hairdressers and manicurists, she bought pretty dressing-gowns, she saw to it that the fridge was full of white wine and of milk for Jean’s nightcap, she supplied books, she organized visitors … From time to time she even did the thing she most hated (as I did too): took Jean shopping for clothes. This was so exhausting and so boring that eventually we both went on strike – and it was Sonia who then saw to it that younger and stronger spirits took our place. It was also she who was the most active member of what we called ‘the Jean Committee’ – the meetings at which she, Francis and I discussed ‘Jean problems’, such as getting her finances in order, or trying to find her somewhere to live nearer London, and less mingy, than Landboat Bungalows. (In this we did not succeed: whenever we came up with a real possibility Jean would jib: ‘Better the devil I know’, she would say.)