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PARTISAN REVIEW
tionships with men . Her first marriage ended in divorce; her second
husband died seven years after her marriage to him. She lost a child,
she herself was in poor health for the last fifteen years of her life. For
the biographical woman who suffered all this we can have only
sympathy. We are indeed "mean beasts" if we refuse to recognize in
her an example of common human misfortune. But towards the
heroine of her novels, towards the woman as she imagines herself,
we may surely be permitted to feel some irritation and disapproval.
Her unhappiness does not seem awful and inevitable, as Rhys's own
unhappiness was.
It
is worn as a badge of honor, claimed as a
position of power. The Rhys heroine considers her unhappiness a
brilliant distinction . Sasha, the heroine of
Good Morning Midnight,
tells us:
I'm not talking about the struggle when you are strong and a
good swimmer and there are willing and eager friends on the
bank waiting to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean
the
real thing.
You jump in with no willing and eager friends and
when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter.
[my italics
1
To sink is more interesting than to swim, to be friendless is to
experience
the real thing.
If only Sasha would value her pathos a little
less than she does, perhaps she would become less pathetic. The
great modern poets of our futility and choicelessness persuade us,
against our wills, that there is no alternative to our difficulties. The
Rhys heroine, however, proudly
rifuses
alternatives. Her situation,
therefore, is not necessarily ours. Within the shelter in
Endgame
is the
whole of the modern world; we cannot escape it. But we need only
visit the rented rooms of Rhys's novels when we are feeling low or
broke or pissy. Who would do time there if she could help it? Not
Rhys, certainly, who remarked in an interview:
When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at
all . ...
You see, there is very little invention in my books. What came
first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful
sadness that weighed me down.
The desolation in Rhys's work, then, is not to be mistaken for
the whole story . It is only how things look when we feel bad. The
novels powerfully evoke a mood, but it is a mood we would ordi–
narily do much to avoid: depression. There is very little here to
distance us from the bad mood of her work. This is the thing itself,
much as we might hear it from a friend in trouble or, if we were in
the business, from the couch.
