Jean Rhys: feeling different and not belonging

Carole Angier's biography of the novelist Jean Rhys contains some very insightful remarks about her and her life. Some of these remarks are very similar to what I would have come up with myself if I had looked at the same source material. 

The miraculous deliverances and spiralling down elements of Jean Rhys's life have been introduced. This article covers some more key features: she felt different from most people and she felt that she didn't belong anywhere. 

Feeling different 

There is nothing unusual about Jean Rhys's feeling of being fundamentally different from the people around her; after reading biographies of other writers, I would think it very unusual if she didn't feel like that! It's what they all say; it goes with the territory. 

What does seem strange to me is how various people of interest quite independently describe their feelings and experiences in much the same words. 

Something that Carole Angier says about Jean Rhys could equally apply to many others, including Stella Benson and Antonia White:

“One of the strongest feelings Jean had always...was that she didn't fit in the world, that life was a game she had never learned how to play...She did not understand the rules.”

This is exactly how some people feel: everyone knows the rules of the game but them; everyone else knows how to behave, what to say, where to go and what to do, but they are baffled and clueless.

Such people may see the world as a club to which they will never belong no matter how much they want to and how hard they try. The article about Jean Rhys and Antonia White contains uncannily similar quotations about how something always goes wrong when they try to be like other people.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part V

This article in the series inspired by John Christopher’s Guardians is mainly about some minor connections and a major influence that I detected.

Feeling different and Eoin Colfer's imp No.1

Both Rob Randall and the little imp Number One from Eoin Colfer's Lost Colony feel - and are - different from their colleagues. They take opposite approaches when it comes to saying this out loud.

Number One tells his teacher that even thinking about the slime associated with 'warping' makes him sick; he also tells him why:

“Rawley shook his head in disgust. 'Slime makes you sick? What kind of imp are you? The others live for slime.'

No.l took a deep breath and said something aloud that he had known for a long time. 'I'm not like the others.' “

Mike asks Rob Randall why Conurbans are not permitted to enter the County; Rob doesn't like to tell Mike why he found the courage to overcome his programming and enter the forbidden area:

"“Conurbans are not allowed to come into the County. Why is that?”

“They don't want to come.”

“You did.”

Rob could hardly say he was different from the rest. Immodesty, by the standards of the County, was one of the deadlier sins."

Incidentally, immodesty is not the only thing that does not go down well in the County: 

“To be described as clever was not, as Rob had discovered, a complimentary thing in the County. Most people who were clever did their best to disguise it.”

“One did not enthuse about things that impressed one: it was not customary.”

Custom rules all in the County; it is definitely not the right place for someone like Rob Randall!

Jean Rhys and Antonia White: some similarities

I have been working my way through Carole Angier’s definitive and very detailed biography of the writer Jean Rhys. 

Jean Rhys: Life and Work is over 700 pages long; it includes a literary study of her novels and short stories. I suppose that people who want information about Jean Rhys  and her life will find this book a goldmine and people who like her writings will enjoy reading it, but I found it very depressing.

Jean Rhys got a brief mention in one of the articles about Diana Wynne Jones’s Aunt Maria; the time has now come to say something more about her. Anyone who wants very detailed information about her life and works is best off reading the biography; here I just want to highlight a few elements of particular interest, especially ones that she has in common with other featured writers. 

I found some very familiar features in Carole Angier’s biography; I had already encountered much similar material while investigating other writers. Jean Rhys is in many ways a classic, text-book case. Although she has features in common with several other writers, in my opinion it is Antonia White whom Jean Rhys on the whole most resembles. 

Some of the similarities
Both Jean Rhys and Antonia White were very interested in expensive clothes and beauty treatments - to the detriment of their finances! 

They both spent some time at convent schools.

They both attended the Academy of Dramatic Art in London’s Gower Street and later went on the stage in minor roles for a short time. It was not very successful; they found the touring tiring and the life disillusioning. Acting was a false start for both of them.

They were both self-obsessed. They could never bear to be alone. Both made screaming scenes. Both suffered from poor impulse control. Both led tortured lives. 

Context and the total picture: Part II

Part I introduces the idea that putting painful experiences into the context of the lives of well-known people can have both positive and negative effects. 

Some people are the worse for learning that they are not alone, some take comfort in the idea and try to make the best of things and a few of them take another big step forward: they start noticing patterns, joining dots and making connections. 

It seems strange to me that some of the writers featured on here appear never to have reached even the first stage. Their writings are full of insights about themselves and their lives but they looked at it all in isolation. 

No context for their lives
I first mentioned this important point in an article about the poet Kathleen Raine: I said that while she made a good, honest evaluation of herself and her life, she did not compare it with the personalities and lives of other creative writers. She actually had many ideas, insights, feelings and experiences in common with some of them, but she never, at least publicly, did much to put her life into the context of the lives of other, similar, people. 

For example, she admitted that her thoughts about and feelings for Gavin Maxwell placed a heavy and intrusive psychic burden on him and that he eventually turned against her because of this. He may not have been the only person she had a bad effect on: he called her a destroyer.

Would it have made things better or worse if she had known about the terrible effect that J. M. Barrie had on the Llewelyn Davies boys and their parents or Benjamin Disraeli had on various people?

Antonia White and a few more familiar elements

This article contains a few more examples of elements that Antonia White had in common with other people featured on here. 

Telepathic connections
Antonia White is said to have established a telepathic connection or psychic rapport with a few people during her lifetime.

This is from her daughter Lyndall Hopkinson’s book Nothing to Forgive:

”...a strange telepathy...had again and again compelled me to leave for England just when Antonia most needed someone, although she had never appealed for help.”

Another link was with a young solder called Robert Legg. As Jane Dunn tells us in her biography Antonia White: A Life, they played a game in which they would not communicate verbally. Antonia White describes this phenomenon in her autobiographical novel Beyond the Glass:

“She had become so expert at ‘the game’ that he had only to will her and she went instinctively to the right place at the right time.”

This reminds me of what Joyce Collin-Smith said about the Maharishi Yogi:

“He seemed to have definite hypnotic power. Most of us could be summoned at a distance and would come at the inner command...”

Antonia White too had a telepathic link with an Indian guru, a mystic called Meher Baba. She too believed that he was sending her hypnotic commands.

Feeling different and copying others
Feeling that they are not real people, feeling different on the inside from everyone around them and imitating others for various reasons are common elements in the lives of Antonia White and Stella Benson - and many other creative people.

Antonia White, a gold coin and impressionable children

This article was inspired by an incident that I read about in the novelist Antonia White’s account of her early childhood in As Once in May.

It concerns what she called one of the great disappointments of her life. It happened when she was only four years old.

In addition to being a schoolmaster, her father gave private tuition to young men. Antonia got talking to one of these pupils while he was waiting for his lesson. He was so impressed by her knowledge that he gave her a gold coin, a half-sovereign!

When her father arrived and noticed the coin, he forced her to return it. He could not possibly allow her to accept it; it was far too much money for a child of her age. Despite his pupil’s efforts on Antonia’s behalf, her father was adamant. The coin went back into the young man’s pocket.

As she left the room, holding back her tears, she heard her father say:

“It was exceedingly generous of you, but I’m sure that you’ll see my point of view. No, no, she won’t be disappointed. I’m sure she knew all along she couldn’t possibly be allowed to keep it. Don’t worry. By tomorrow she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

This is what Antonia White said decades later:

“He was wrong. After seventy-two years I have not forgotten that breathless moment of possession and the bitter sense of injustice when the treasure was snatched away...”

This is a very good illustration of something that that really stands out in the biographies and autobiographies of many writers: how hard they take some things and how they often never forget and never forgive a childhood injury.

Diana Wynne Jones had this to say, in connection with being permanently affected by not being permitted to read fantasy books as a child:

“And it does bring you hard up against the responsibility adults have, if only because it shows you what a truly lasting impression can be made on a child.”

This is from her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, which is full of such insights.

Antonia White's travel nightmare

The novelist Antonia White describes a nightmare journey in her unfinished autobiographical novel Clara IV.

Clara goes on holiday to Austria without her husband; being alone has a bad effect on her. She becomes demoralised and mismanages everything including her money, which helps to make the return journey one long endurance test.

Clara’s travel nightmare 
The long journey home involves taking a train to Linz, a train from Linz to Ostend, a steamboat from Ostend to Dover followed by a train to London and finally a taxi to her house.

On the long train ride to Ostend, it seems to Clara as though her journey will never end and she will never find herself safely back home.

By the time she gets to Ostend she is in a trance of weariness. She has had a sleepless night in a horrible third-class compartment, which was all that she could afford. She has not slept for thirty-six hours and as she has very little money left has eaten almost nothing during the journey. She would happily exchange the beautiful and expensive new handbag that she had unwisely bought in Vienna for just a cup of tea and a couple of aspirins. Half blinded by a bad headache, she has to carry her heavy luggage onto the ferry herself as she cannot afford to pay a porter. 

White magic on the ferry
Clara is horrified to see how awful she looks and how dirty and creased her clothes are when she catches sight of herself in the washroom mirror, but she is too ill and exhausted to do anything about it until after she has rested for a while.

Antonia White, Terry Pratchett, snakes and a big coincidence

The novelists Antonia White and Stella Benson have more in common than biographical material that has a very depressing and exasperating effect on impressionable readers.

Stella Benson’s love of snakes  has already been covered; I have recently learned that, at least as a child, Antonia  White was a snake lover too. Not only that, but just like Stella Benson she was taken behind the scenes at London Zoo to meet some snakes.

Antonia White was a small girl and Stella Benson an adult when they visited the snakes, which was around 1904/05 for Antonia and in 1917 for Stella. The big coincidence here is that the same person was involved in both invitations to see the snakes up close.

How the visits came about
As previously mentioned, Stella Benson’s privileged visits came about because at the time she was staying with a friend whose husband, Edouard (sometimes anglicised to Edward) Boulenger, was Director of Reptiles at London Zoo.

Some years earlier, Antonia’s father had been great friends with both the eminent Belgian zoologist George Boulenger and his son the above-mentioned Edouard, who at the time was Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo.

Edouard conducted Antonia on tours of the snake cages. She loved holding some of them, which neither of her parents had the courage to do.

Stella Benson felt that she had the soul of a snake. Antonia White sometimes felt less than human. Perhaps they both felt drawn to snakes because they had reptilian-like personalities.

Antonia White, cults and independent thinking

This article was inspired by something very disturbing that I read in As Once in May, a collection of Antonia White’s autobiographical writings.

While taking time out to work on a different article, I had occasion to return to Sheri S. Tepper’s fantasy novel Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore. A previously overlooked speech there is a very good counterweight to the offending passage. It puts what Antonia White tells us about her Catholic boarding school into context; it suggests that she was treated like a cult member.

Antonia White’s alarming school story
Antonia White said that while the nuns at the convent school she attended did not crush the spirits of the pupils - high spirits and general childish naughtiness were not discouraged - they cracked down hard on any attempts to show independence of mind and tried to stamp it out:

“Through years of training, the nuns had learned to recognise the faintest signs of such an attitude, and it was severely repressed. They could detect it the slightest thing...an inclination to answer back, and, most of all, in the faintest speculation in matters of faith. The world was waiting for us outside, with its Satan-set traps of heresy, free thought and easy morals, and the whole object of our education was to arm us against its snares...Mental pride... the most dangerous of all our temptations.”

Many people will be outraged by this, and for several reasons.

Balancing the books: a problem and a solution

I started an article about Terry Pratchett’s witch Tiffany Aching by saying what a great relief it was for me to turn to his books after reading a lot of depressing biographical material.

This introduced one of the problems that reading certain books can cause together with a good solution.

While other articles cover the sometimes devastating effects of putting ideas and experiences into the context of other people’s lives and looking at the total picture, this one is about being badly affected emotionally or even psychically rather than mentally. 

Reading about the lives of writers such as August Strindberg, Stella Benson, Mary Webb, Ouida, Jean Rhys and Antonia White, who have all been featured or at least mentioned on here, can have a very bad effect on impressionable people.

Some people are very good at getting inside books, sharing the writers’ viewpoints and living the lives and stories.  This can be a two-edged sword: when reading certain books, such people are in danger of getting sucked in, overwhelmed, trapped and poisoned by psychic contagion.

Some of the harmful effects come from picking up the writers’ inner states from the material: general negativity and feelings of misery, agony, abandonment, depression, desolation, disconnection, doom and despair can be infectious. 

Counterweights and antidotes
By far the best solution is to read very different books, ones that have on the whole a very positive effect. They can be inspiring, educational and informational or just entertaining. 

Children’s and young adults’ books are often ideal; old friends, comfort reading and new books by a favourite author are all good too.  

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: wanting and getting

A further article or two about Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has been outstanding for a long time now.

Angel has inspired three previous articles. I have described her imagination, her life and personality and her resemblance to various witches. So what more can there be to say about this strange and impossible woman?

There are some more familiar features and scenarios in her story to be described, and more details to come about the way she wants and gets things.

Wants and obsessions

Angel is an all-or-nothing person; she wants what she wants, how and when she wants it, on her own terms.

People like Angel are so single-minded in the pursuit of what they want that they may behave like addicts desperate for their next fix. They want nothing and no one except whatever they are currently obsessed with; if they are offered anything else they behave as if they have been given a stone when they wanted bread.

I have already mentioned Angel’s visit to her publisher in which she ignores his wife. Angel mostly ignores her aunt, except when she hears her say something interesting about life in the big house, something that she can use in her fantasies.

As a schoolgirl, Angel spends as much time as possible in her imagination, dreaming about living a life of luxury as a member of the family that owns the local big house. She surprises her aunt by actually asking her some questions after hearing her say something that catches her interest and provides food for her imagination. I have seen this behaviour in real life; it is not a good sign. The perpetrator blocks someone completely, then suddenly pounces on them if there is a chance of getting something they want from them.

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch Aunt Maria: part I

Aunt Maria appears in Diana Wynne Jones’s Black Maria aka Aunt Maria. She operates and does a lot of damage on more than one level: she is both a dreadful, detestable, manipulative old woman and an evil witch. 

Aunt Maria gets under my skin in a way that none of the other witches I have discussed so far does. I can read about her turning people into animals without any problems, but I can hardly bear to read the descriptions of her ‘this world’ behaviour towards the family that she asks to come and stay with her: it comes too close to home; it triggers very painful memories and feelings. 

Her intrusive behaviour over the phone in the first few pages of the book is more than enough to make me want to stop reading, but I persevere because there are lessons to be learned and points and connections to be made.

Aunt Maria’s personality and behaviour
Aunt Maria is hateful; she is insufferable; she is intrusive, annoying, selfish, demanding and controlling. She is a complete expert at using suggestion, disapproval, martyrdom, disappointment, guilt trips, intimidation, emotional blackmail and mind control to manipulate people into doing what she wants. She is cruel and unscrupulous. She is a tyrant in disguise: she subtly forces everyone to dance to her tune. 

Alcotts and Brontës and psychic crime

When I first read some biographies of the Brontë and the Alcott families, I immediately noticed some connections and common patterns. Some of these features are also present in and relevant to my own family. There are large numbers of scholarly, well researched and comprehensive books and articles about these families of interest and many analyses of their literary works, but they do not cover the aspects that I am most interested in. 

I always look out for possible examples of psychic crime or psychological black magic when researching the lives and works of people whose experiences and outlook on life have much in common with my own. I also look out for coincidences; for example, both Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson and Charlotte Brontë's father Patrick as young men slightly changed their last names to make them more 'up-market'. 

Louisa May Alcott was born on the same day as her father; she died a few days after he did, which could indicate some kind of psychic stranglehold. 

There was a lot of elevated and progressive ideology in the family, and Louisa bought the idea that the Alcotts were a breed apart. Her father frequently opted out of supporting the family, and Louisa was the sacrificial victim who was made to feel responsible for earning enough to support the lot of them. 

She disapproved when her older sister Anna married a very ordinary man called John Pratt, who died ten years later - shortly before the joint birthday.  

If marrying into the elite Alcott family was not acceptable, neither was escaping. Her youngest sister May travelled around Europe, then wrote to say that she had married and would not be coming back to the US. Her letters described the luxuries that she now had. She died some months later in Paris. 

The deaths of May and Anna's husband seem suspicious to me.