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A review by michaelontheplanet
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour
4.0
A Caribbean ghost story: dull minds sometimes come out with things like “truth is stranger than fiction” and “art imitates life”, platitudes up with which Jean Rhys would indubitably not have put. For as Miranda Seymour’s controlled, meticulous biography shows, life and art intertwine in a way that if one is not careful can become difficult to untangle.
Rhys was a glorious monster. The favoured daughter of a likeable island GP from Dominica, whose fractured relationship with her philistine mother drove so much of her action, comes to London determined to learn to be an actress, and lodges with family: “‘I’ve already noticed,’ her aunt remarked tartly, ‘that you are quite incapable of thinking of anyone but yourself.’” This, and a part-submerged longing to go back to her Caribbean home, are motifs that stay with the former Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams throughout her life.
I Used To Live Here Once carries us through a rich carnival of event and feeling that would inform her writing - from chorus girl, via rich man’s kept woman, marriage to a Dutch-Belgian convict, affair with Ford Madox Ford, second marriage to her publisher’s reader, third marriage to his cousin, to life in a remote Devon village where she achieves Mad Old Lady status, is tormented by the yokels, slapped by a vicar’s wife, and has a bucket of water poured over her while drunk by a neighbour. She ends her days on a pink chaise longue in George Melly’s Camden Town attic, still knocking back a quarter bottle of whisky a day, railing at all and sundry, and longing for a return to the half-imagined tropics of her girlhood. This is how old age, if it must, should be.
Despite her difficulties - and how difficult she could be - Rhys remains one of the most important writers in English of the 20th century. “Keeps one all the time at the central point of feeling,” said one critic not always sympathetic to her, and to achieve this, one feels and Seymour drives towards it, requires a degree of solipsism, self-centredness and focus on one’s own feelings. An author who would muse for years on the correct deployment of a phrase she’d devised is the flip side of a woman who could bear long grudges, scream drunkenly at friends who went to considerable lengths on her behalf, and hurl stones through the windows of neighbours who’d pissed her off.
I Used To Live Here Once is sympathetic without making excuses, deftly written, and enlightening both of a charismatic, challenging human and what informed her extraordinary writing
Rhys was a glorious monster. The favoured daughter of a likeable island GP from Dominica, whose fractured relationship with her philistine mother drove so much of her action, comes to London determined to learn to be an actress, and lodges with family: “‘I’ve already noticed,’ her aunt remarked tartly, ‘that you are quite incapable of thinking of anyone but yourself.’” This, and a part-submerged longing to go back to her Caribbean home, are motifs that stay with the former Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams throughout her life.
I Used To Live Here Once carries us through a rich carnival of event and feeling that would inform her writing - from chorus girl, via rich man’s kept woman, marriage to a Dutch-Belgian convict, affair with Ford Madox Ford, second marriage to her publisher’s reader, third marriage to his cousin, to life in a remote Devon village where she achieves Mad Old Lady status, is tormented by the yokels, slapped by a vicar’s wife, and has a bucket of water poured over her while drunk by a neighbour. She ends her days on a pink chaise longue in George Melly’s Camden Town attic, still knocking back a quarter bottle of whisky a day, railing at all and sundry, and longing for a return to the half-imagined tropics of her girlhood. This is how old age, if it must, should be.
Despite her difficulties - and how difficult she could be - Rhys remains one of the most important writers in English of the 20th century. “Keeps one all the time at the central point of feeling,” said one critic not always sympathetic to her, and to achieve this, one feels and Seymour drives towards it, requires a degree of solipsism, self-centredness and focus on one’s own feelings. An author who would muse for years on the correct deployment of a phrase she’d devised is the flip side of a woman who could bear long grudges, scream drunkenly at friends who went to considerable lengths on her behalf, and hurl stones through the windows of neighbours who’d pissed her off.
I Used To Live Here Once is sympathetic without making excuses, deftly written, and enlightening both of a charismatic, challenging human and what informed her extraordinary writing