LINDA BAMBER
93
Rhys's sense of being an outsider must certainly have its roots
in her personal history. Born in Dominica of a Welsh father and a
Creole mother, she ran away to England at sixteen, married a
French-Dutch poet and moved to France. In England she studied
briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts; then she went on the
road as a chorus girl. With Jean Lenglet, the first of her three
husbands, she led an irregular life, borrowing money and sleeping
on other people's couches, often in some sort of trouble with the
authorities. A contemporary describes the world Lenglet shared with
Rhys as "an underworld of darkness and disorder, where
officialdom, the bourgeoisie and the police were the .. . enemies and
the fugitive the . . . hero." In one of her fitful efforts to make some
money Rhys at one point translated a few of Lenglet's feature
articles into English and peddled them to Paris-based represent–
atives of British newspapers.
It
was while she was acting as Lenglet's
agent that she was herself "discovered" as a writer. The sympathetic
wife of a
London Times
correspondent read Rhys's journals, typed
them up for her, and sen t them on to Ford Madox Ford, at that time ,
the editor of the
Transatlantic Review.
Ford became Rhys's literary
mentor, her lover, and the subject of her future work.
The Left Bank
(1927) is a collection of stories that Ford helped into print;
Quartet
(1928) is about the period of time during which Rhys lived in a
menage
a
trois
with Ford and his wife, Stella Bowen; and
After Leaving
Mr. Mackenzie
(1930) looks back on the affair after its unpleasant
ending. Her last prewar novel,
Good Morning Midnight
(1939), was
written more than a decade after her relations with both Ford and
Lenglet were over. At this point, Rhys was remarried to Leslie
Tilden Smith, reader for a British publishing company. Yet in the
novel Rhys returns to the events of her early married life, replaying
them in the memory of her aging heroine.
Rhys's novels, all of them autobiographical, have one subject:
the victimization and self-victimization of a woman drifting along
the edges of artsy-bourgeois society. The Rhys heroine has no
money, no family to speak of, no particular talents. Out of sexual
desperation (for she is always spurned by the man she loves) she
picks up men who turn out to be cads or gigolos. These encounters
usually take place in Bloomsbury or the Left Bank; the atmosphere
is of cafe life, of cosmopolitan sterility. The heroine lives
ent~rely
in
the present, and her ambition for the future is to get through the
afternoon without crying. When she fails she says to herself, "Now,
I'm a gone coon. I've begun crying and I'll never stop." The world
shrinks to the size of the heroine's rented room - from which she
