Shades of Darkness
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Waiters &Writing SHADES OF DARKNESS by daphne merkin l .f there are few genuinely sunny literary temperaments??I can think offhand only of Fielding's and, further back, of Rabelais'??those...
...Her characters are all feverishly abject...
...on a note of total withdrawal into the interior...
...During the '40s and '50s she published novels and short stories in England...
...There was always winter framed in the frozen windows...
...The images retained by Anna Ka-van in the fiction of hers I have read are exclusively those of frustration and death...
...Meta tries to discourage her from reading so much by telling her that her eyes will fall out...
...What her books gain in intensity they lose in breadth of reference: They remain documents of suffering, pure and simple...
...Eventually she married and moved to Paris, a city she found more congenial than London...
...It is good that she did, for Rhys is, even in this unideal form, a nearly flawless stylist...
...I can't bear to see them, because the stars remind me of loving and of being loved...
...one novel, Ice, was published in America...
...Kavan's writing relentlessly details the pain of being lost in the brambles of one's own mind...
...Everything is posed on the verge ol disappearing...
...I am alone forever in this room," says the narrator of "Asylum Piece II," "where the light burns all night long and the professional faces of strangers, without warmth or pity, glance at me through the half-open door...
...Sleep Has His House is a self-styled recounting of childhood, opening with a description of "the brutal violence of the birth shock" and closing, after a few disappointing skirmishes with representatives from the outside (parents, classmates, etc...
...The little girl is noticed by the elements: "No one talked to me much: but the rain often used to whisper...
...I'm sure I slept fifteen hours out of the twenty-four, and I never dreamed...
...They make me remember the time when I used to look at them and think, I'm alive, I'm in love and I'm loved...
...Ten pages later, after describing the racing-car drivers who comprise her "world of heroes," the narrator returns to the bottom of the well, where she lives: "I don't look up now," she concludes...
...Kavan's world of darkness-seeking women and harsh, persecutory men is presented without any mitigating circumstances, and as such is insightful only about extremity...
...and take walks to distant places for tea...
...I filled three exercise books and half another," she tells us in Smile Please, An Unfinished Autobiography (Harper & Row, 151 pp., $10.95), "then I wrote: 'Oh God, I'm only twenty and I'll have to go on living and living and living.'" Smile Please, a rather synthetic memoir put together by Rhys' editor, Diana Athill, from incomplete material, deals mainly with the first 17 years of her life in Dominica, West Indies...
...asks the narrator, who is called "B" (her mother having been designated "A '), midway in her accounting of deceptive alliances and rescinded pleasures...
...Jean attends a convent school, where she has a short religious "fit" and looks unsuccessfully for good works to perform...
...I can't bear to see them...
...She dances three waltzes with a Mr...
...Rhys' style is buttery, practically invisible: One wakes from her books as though from under a spell...
...Of course, I always had been alone, but this was different...
...Although she is remarkably akin to Kavan, the terror in Rhys' novels is almost always circumvented...
...The novel is composed of montage-like scenes, clippings from an album whose photographs have been shot in an unnatural light...
...She worked as a governess and seems to have fallen into writing by the bye...
...I was alone now in a bad way, alone in a crowded ugliness without respite...
...It is tempting to ascribe a ready-made significance to certain kinds of subject-matter??most notably mental illness and its attendant perceptions??yet the truth is that eschewing normalcy is not intrinsically more valid or interesting from the standpoint of art (as opposed to the psychoanalytic standpoint) than sanity, especially since sanity is an approximate state at best...
...In 1975 a volume of previously unpublished stories, Julia and the Bazooka, edited by Rhys Davies, was issued by Alfred A. Knopf...
...We have more to learn, too, from the approximate than from the absolute...
...For several years she appears to have done little else but sleep...
...The young Jean reads avidly: "Before I could read, almost a baby, 1 imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book...
...I always try not to look at the stars...
...I slept as if dead...
...In our own century the situation is almost completely that of the writer as victim, a hapless reporter on Kafkaesque beats...
...the busy, distant father who can only be conversed with by appointmenl...
...She very much wanted out of this life, and to the extent that she retreated into drugs and mental illness she got out...
...the exact feel of her isolation is observed again and again with a forlorn loyalty to the peculiar quality of self-intimacy it brings: "The rooms were noisy and cold and crowded," she writes of the boarding-school she was sent to, "and I was alone in them...
...the making of sentences temporarily eases the anguish, but one senses it waiting to reclaim the author beyond the page, just as officious betrayors??called, variously, "Patron," "advisors" or "chief doctors"??lurk in every corner of her fiction, ready to close off the exits...
...then tiptoes away...
...For me this raises another pertinent question: Is Kavan's work art or exorcism...
...by the time she has grown up, she has rejected it in favor of the house of sleep??the alternate reality she has been constructing throughout the long, lonely days of her childhood: "Hidden by curtains, sheltered in cupboards, ambushed in foxholes between tables and chairs, I transmuted flat daylight into my night-time magic and privately made for myself a world out of spells and whispers...
...The winter light marched along barren hilltops...
...Waiters &Writing SHADES OF DARKNESS by daphne merkin l .f there are few genuinely sunny literary temperaments??I can think offhand only of Fielding's and, further back, of Rabelais'??those writers whose natural affinity is with unhappiness, or at the least with a state of sustained anxiety readily come to mind: the uneasily-jesting Lawrence Sterne in the 18th century, the burdened Dickens in the 19th...
...Her work seems to have been accorded the limited yet rapt attention that haunted visions, particularly female ones, usually receive...
...There is, finally, something consecrated about Kavan's hopelessness, and in this sense it is irritating as often as it is moving...
...It is interesting to read in Athill's Foreword that Rhys was not attracted to the idea of writing an autobiography, having felt "that much of her life had already been 'used up' in the novels...
...The part called "Smile Please" (which the author considered to be finished) details an exotic upbringing that featured a fear-instilling black nurse named Meta and various female relatives who seem to have been irrevocably sidetracked somewhere in their past...
...The story entitled "World of Heroes" begins and ends with a typical statement of implacable despair...
...The metal trees could never have sprouted leaves...
...contrast, Jean Rhys became well-known, albeit late in her writing career, as the creator of bewildered and beautiful heroines who inhabit novels that progress from sleazy bars to down-at-the-heel rooming-houses with an uncanny grace that belies the actual darkness of the voyage...
...Smile Please is a sad and unsettling peek at the bumps and bruises that were assuaged by that style...
...The second, unfinished section of the book, "It Began to Grow Cold," is a sketchy account of Jean Rhys' arrival in England with an aunt, her brief training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, two years as a chorus girl, and her successive dreary lodgings and lovers...
...The almost smug passivity that her characters exhibit in the face of "the enemy" ties Kavan's prose to its clinical origins??to the hothouse atmosphere of asylum and phantasy-producing nighttimes...
...Anna Kavan is an example...
...To the extent that she wrote??and Peter Owen, in his Preface to Asylum Piece, says Kavan told him "that she was a compulsive writer and was only happy when writing"??she wanted to stay in this life, to grapple with her sense of its insufficiency...
...they speak out of a delirium of suffering, conscious only of having been abandoned...
...It is a pertinent question that is repeated in a different form by the first-person narrator of "There Is No End," at the close of Asylum Piece: "On a planet where there is so much natural conflict, may there not very well exist in certain individuals an overwhelming affinity with frustration and death...
...Two early books of Anna Kavan, a novel, Sleep Has His House (Michael Kesend, 182 pp., $11.95), and a collection of sketches, Asylum Piece (Michael Kesend, 206 pp., $11.95), have just been brought out here...
...the large suburban house crammed with dusty objects??except for the soundlessly wounded presence of the narrator: "A little girl with fair hair . . . peeps in through the open door, unnoticed by the grownups...
...The narrator, it emerges, has always been on uneasy terms with the waking world...
...She died in 1968 from an overdose of heroine, having been an addict for the last 30 years of her life...
...Most of all, though, she is noticed by herself...
...Her father was a district doctor, kindly but not particularly communicative...
...Does the brain choose the images to be retained...
...And may this not result in an actual materialization, a sort of eidolon moving about the world...
...I try not to look at the stars," the narrator starts off...
...It rained a lot and the rain kept whispering to me...
...in its place there is submission, a deadly waiting for something other than what is...
...the pale, despondent mother who dies young...
...It was astonishing how much I could sleep...
...Rhys' mother was a taciturn figure, given to reading Marie Corelli novels and gazing out of windows...
...How skillfully Rhys "used up" that life, how much her heroines are versions of herself, revised for the purposes of literature, becomes startlingly clear in this little book...
...Hesketh and experiences the shy glow of romantic interest...
Vol. 63 • June 1980 • No. 11
