BIOGRAPHY: T he Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys By Lilian PizzichiniBloomsbury, 322 pp. £18.99
‘I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could not be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.” Jean Rhys, 1954
Best known for her extraordinary novel Wide Sargasso Sea,Jean Rhys was also the author of Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning Midnight, as well as two collections of short stories and a short autobiography, Smile Please. In each of her novels, the life of the drifting heroine is pitifully sad and painful, as sad and painful as we can imagine life was for Rhys. Her powerful and unfaltering prose repeatedly hits the reader with small blows; the cumulative effect is staggeringly bleak. In Stet, Diana Athill wrote: "No one who has read Jean Rhys's first four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was".
For many, Jean Rhys’s life has been a kind of curiosity. Born in Dominica in 1890 to a Welsh doctor father and a Creole mother, she left her beloved island home for England when just 16. After boarding school, and a stint at RADA, she joined the stage and toured as a chorus girl throughout the provinces, occasionally appearing in the West End. The collapse of her relationship with Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith affected her deeply.
Her first marriage ended in divorce after a destructive love affair with Ford Maddox Ford, the literary giant who encouraged her to write. There were two more marriages, periods of poverty, a short spell in jail, and much depression.
With such a complicated personal life, it is a wonder Rhys found time to write. But thankfully she did; as if a part of her knew it was ultimately the writing that would save her.
Her struggle has been well documented in Carole Angier’s weighty and meticulous biography. Throughout, Angier explores the correlation between Jean’s work and her life, charting the development of Rhys’s heroines as they progress through her novels. She presents Rhys as a writer with growing self-awareness. Angier’s account is so detailed and thorough it is hard to imagine what more could be added.
In The Blue Hour, Lillian Pizzichini has taken on the risky task of writing about Rhys's life in a way that leaves the reader "with an impression of what it was like to have lived such a life". She draws a helpless, difficult, depressive woman lurching from one crisis to another. The slim book is written almost like a work of fiction. Pizzichini writes often in summaries, in sweeping and colourful prose. There is nothing here to stumble over; no footnotes, no references to Rhys's letters; there is nothing of Rhys's own immaculate, understated prose.
Pizzichini seems to use Rhys's fiction as biographical evidence, as if what happened to her heroines had actually happened to Jean Rhys. She confidently tells us what Rhys was feeling. But, and herein lies the main problem with The Blue Hour,how can anyone truly know what Jean Rhys felt? And how can we trust Pizzichini when there is no evidence here of any thorough research. The Blue Houris riddled with assumptions.
When describing her early years, Pizzichini writes, “Jean spent much of her childhood screaming, crying or collapsing with terror and taking weeks to recover in bed”.
It is most likely true that Rhys was a sensitive child who reacted strongly to her environment, but there is something irritatingly melodramatic here.
When Rhys first starts to write, Pizzichini tells us, “She returned her gaze to her pens and notebooks and then It started. Her palms and fingertips were tingling . . . ”. It is hard to imagine that the moment was quite so portentous. But, Pizzichini says, “the feeling was one of torture: knowing the feeling but not the words to describe it”.
Torture? Jean Rhys was a woman who cared very much about truth; she used a pen like a drill to bore down deeply into herself. She wrote out of herself, out of her pain and sadness. The wonder of her early novels is the lack of sentimentality. She once said, "I am the only truth I know". Diana Athill describes the author as a stickler for accuracy and precision. In The Blue Hour, there seems to be little of this.
In fact, there is little of Jean Rhys the artist and her astonishingly sharp eye. There is little of the charming and witty woman who captured the hearts of her many patrons. Where is Francis Wyndham’s “slant-eyed siren with whom one could enjoy the full intensity of a treat as no one else – those sacred moments of frivolity (an old tune, a new scent, a perfect cocktail, a wonderful joke) which for her nearly made life worth living”?
Pizzichini herself says "Carole Angier leaves no stone unturned in uncovering the events of her life". For those who have not yet read Carole Angier's account, The Blue Hourwill be an introduction to understanding some aspects of the novelist's journey. Perhaps if The Blue Hourhad been presented as a work of fiction based on truth, or as a kind of meditation on the life of Jean Rhys, it would have served Pizzichini better. But, as a biography, I fear it paints an inaccurate and distorted picture of a displaced and complex woman, a West Indian waif, who, despite much hardship, became one of the greatest writers of the last century.
Amanda Smyth’s debut novel, Black Rock, was published by Serpent’s Tail earlier this year