One Thing

John Bayley

• Jean Rhys by Carole Angier
  Deutsch, 780 pp, £15.99, November 1990, ISBN 0 233 98597 2
• A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym by Hazel Holt
  Macmillan, 308 pp, £14.99, November 1990, ISBN 0 333 40614 1

In the introduction he wrote to the Magnus memoir of the Foreign Legion, D.H. Lawrence remarked that he hated ‘terrible’ things, ‘and the people to whom they happen.’ A reason for keeping away from Jean Rhys, but in any case they would hardly have appealed to each other. When she was young she liked adventurers, and married one, but later in her long life she preferred gentle and gentlemanly types who wanted to cherish her, though they seldom or never succeeded. As Carole Angier acutely observes, she gravitated towards men with ‘social confidence and inner uncertainty’. Adultery and promiscuity were, oddly enough, not her problems: she craved, or thought she did, ‘the twins freedom and safety’ (dissimilar twins, one might have thought) and the respectability of a married name. Her later spouses clung to her with suicidal fidelity at the cost of their finances, their health and sanity. They died worn out, but she kept going, on gin, whisky and Algerian wine, to die at a great age, famous at last, completing an early book called Smile Please.