How appropriate would it be to present Jean Rhys as the female counterpart to Patrick Hamilton. It may only be superficial but that's never stopped me before.
Their stories, and their lives if that is relevant, are both set in low rent, insecure worlds of exploitation, emotional and monetary hardship with the theatre sometimes as a vainglamorous environment place for manipulation, false expectations and seedy dishonesty.
The cruelty in Patrick Hamilton eventually went further as Unknown Assailant saw his prose diminished to little more than a gin-soaked set of shorthand notes whereas Jean Rhys' stories maintain a spare style that, if anything, improves with maturity and in Hamilton it is more often the men that suffer for their infatuation.
Hamilton's leftist sympathies are less obvious than Rhys' more explicit and prescient themes of racism and sexism but she is in a better position to know, coming from a Carribean childhood that makes England time and again seem like 'the land of the dead' in any number of ways. Both, though, concern themselves with outsiders, misfits and characters in isolation.
Alienation, in A Solid House, is felt by Teresa in Miss Spearman,
Usually the sweetness and softness, if any, were displayed for all to see; but, hidden away, what continents of distrust, what icy seas of silence.
In Fishy Waters, Maggie says to Matt,
'you find envy, malice, hatred everywhere'
and very soon realizes,
She was trying to fight the overwhelming certainty that the man she was looking at was a complete stranger.
By the time we read Overture and Beginners Please, it is clear that comfort is going to be cold comfort and the first person narrator is the only one who thinks, that having been offered a place at the Academy of Dramatic Art, she had reason to be,
happier than I'd ever been in my life. Nothing could touch me, not praise, nor blame.
On a tour of northern theatres, she meets one of the boys who,
showed me a sketch he'd done of a street in a Northern town. He'd called it 'Why we drink'. But none of this prevented me from being excited and happy.
The later stories do more by not making everything explicit but Rhys' ironies are obvious if gently put.
The artificial behaviour of 'beauties' in the theatrical profession are sharply observed in Before the Deluge. The Chevalier of the Place Blanche sees a predatory seducer foiled as his promises are too transparent but the girl that escapes him has only to look forward to 'the midnight train to Brussels and a very thin time indeed'. And something like that thin time comes to Miss Verney in Sleep it off Lady.
But, troubled though they are and rarely bringing with them anything less than a bleak view of human nature, Jean Rhys proves to be a wonderful story teller and a hugely gifted writer. These pieces are more subtle than I make them sound by only quoting thematic, resonant lines. If and when the opportunity arises in the ongoing crusade to be equal to the number of books I buy, I will look out furtherr titles of hers. Whether the next option is a novel or her memoirs remains to be seen.
