Ezra Pound's cruel "Portrait d'une Femme" uncannily foretells the life of Jean Rhys: "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, / London has swept about you these score years, / And bright ships left you this or that in fee." Like Pound's femme, Rhys was a passive and exotic temptress, who hoarded fragments of the literary and artistic demi-monde she inhabited. But unlike Pound's siren, who has finally "nothing that is quite your own", Rhys was an artist who managed to survive poverty, alcoholism, loneliness, mental depression and physical dilapidation, and produce one great novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to Jane Eyre which tells the story from the viewpoint of the first Mrs Rochester, as well as four other fine novels, short stories and an unfinished memoir.
Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour echoes Pound in its subtitle; a "portrait", after all, is more subjective and intimate than a biography. Carole Angier's monumental biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work gathered all the details and interviewed the witnesses. Angier concluded that Rhys, despite her gifts, was a "borderline personality" and a genius of self-pity. Pizzichini wants to present Rhys's life more sympathetically, to show her as "an angry woman who had good reason to be angry, and whose vision was bleak". She takes her title from Rhys's favourite perfume, L'Heure Bleue, a fragrance suggesting the Parisian twilight, melancholy and romance that Rhys chose for her frail heroines. By using Rhys's fiction to get at her feelings, and by writing in a declarative, pared-down style very close to the one Rhys developed, Pizzichini attempts "to recapture" her subject's life, and to leave the reader "with an impression of what it was like to have lived such a life". But the impression she leaves is of Rhys's excessive anger and perennial selfishness.
Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, the daughter of a Welsh father and Creole mother on a decaying Caribbean sugar plantation, she immersed herself in English literature. When she failed her entrance exam to Oxford, she was delighted; she wanted to become an actror. But her Caribbean accent held her back, and she left drama school to become first a chorus girl, then a manicurist, a prostitute and an artist's model. Over the next decades and through two wars, she moved around Europe with a series of lovers and patrons, as well as three husbands with a strong tendency to end up in prison. She had at least one abortion, lost a baby son, gave birth to a daughter, and upped her drinking from two bottles of wine a day in 1934 to a bottle of whiskey a day by 1966. As her drinking increased, so did her rage and despair. She threw one husband's typewriter out of the window, beat up another, got into violent street brawls with her neighbours, spent a week in Holloway prison, attempted suicide, yelled "Heil Hitler" in a pub during the blitz, and in her final days, had to be rescued from a drunken collapse in a lavatory.
The major mysteries about Rhys are how she became so self-destructive, and how someone so dysfunctional then became a compelling writer. Pizzichini's theory is that Rhys was traumatised as a child by her mother's lack of affection. Moreover, Rhys saw herself as perpetually frustrated and blocked by other people: "It is so hard to get what you want in this life. Everything and everyone conspires to stop you. This was how it seemed to Jean."
But Pizzichini did not persuade me of either motive. Rhys never became close to other women, and rather than being blocked, she received astonishing generosity, affection and support from almost everyone she met. Pearl Adam, a British journalist, passed her on to Ford Madox Ford, who launched her literary career. He taught her how to write fiction, made her read Anatole France and translate Colette, cut her melodramatic endings. Rhys's second husband, the literary agent Leslie Tilden Smith, devoted himself to her career. When he died, his cousin Max Hamer married her; they were living in penury when out of nowhere an actress and producer, Selma vaz Dias, appeared to turn Good Morning Midnight into a radio play, and to alert Francis Wyndham and Diana Athill at Hamish Hamilton of her whereabouts. Their patient devotion, during the decade when she worked on Wide Sargasso Sea; the largesse of Sonia Orwell and Diana Melly, who bought her fancy lunches, paid for her clothes, make-up, and wigs, and sent her chocolates and booze; the attention of David Plante, who helped her write her memoir; and the general goodness of her neighbours in Cornwall and her surviving relatives kept Rhys afloat.
Pizzichini shows that it took a village to make a productive writer out of Jean Rhys, and that the effort was worthwhile. But her loving portrait is also oddly blemished by typos and awkward idioms. Overall, while Pizzichini shows how painful she found her life, Rhys was no wistful heliotrope. She was a carnivorous orchid, a Caribbean Blanche DuBois, who felt as entitled to the kindness of strangers as to the service of lovers, family and friends. A blue hour for her, alas, was always a black-and-blue hour for someone else.
• Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers is published by Virago.
