Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The next day, Sasha goes with Delmar to meet Serge, who dances wildly in his apartment full of art. She has a great time but unexpectedly starts crying. She’s embarrassed, but Serge assures her that it’s very human to cry. Despite their pleasant and reassuring conversation, though, it soon becomes clear that Serge is mainly interested in getting Sasha to buy one of his paintings—and yet, when she says she doesn’t have the money on her at the moment, he says she can have a painting for free. But she insists upon paying him, so they plan to meet later that day so she can give him the cash.

Told with a spare prose style, this reads as a work of psychological fiction, but redeems Jean Rhys' own consciousness throughout. In her life she found the simplest practicalities beyond her, and once said 'I have only ever written about myself'. It's difficult not to see Sasha as a mere self-portrait, but would be unfair to see Good Morning Midnight just as a disguised memoir, because it isn't. It's a small novel in its own brief and perfect right, depicting the emotional and sensitive nature of trying to find stability again. It could have been more depressing but the overall tone is just about right, giving a good balance of hopefulness and despair. I got to know Sasha in four acts. By the third act I began to listen seriously to what she was telling me. It was at this point that the fighting stopped. By the final act, I found myself reaching out desperately for her. Your hand, Sasha, give me your hand!! But when you have taken this much shrapnel in life, you tend to me mistrustful of even the hand that wishes to save you. Save you from life, from yourself. I bought this novel not knowing what to expect from it, I saw it in a used bookshop and remembered I liked "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys a lot, so why not try. Was it fate? Rhys, then, is the anti-Miller. She’s a gigantic but necessary buzzkill. Where Miller is all about acquisition—of books, women, experiences—Rhys is all about loss. Her fictional alter ego is slowly losing everything: her looks, her faith in humanity, her will to live. There’s no self-pity; just the bitter resignation of someone who, out of pure disgust, has decided to drink herself to death.

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These are words spoken with truth and clarity. They’re simple and honest. And not for a single moment in the novel did I doubt them, not for a single moment did I conceive that there could be an alternative ending. I’m not going to sugar coat it for you: this isn’t a nice novel. There is very little in the way of redemptive themes, and the motif of freedom is only fully achieved through the ultimate rejection of human happiness and interpersonal relationships. I know who did the rejecting of the day. But night is supposed to fall and it doesn't. Good bye, Midnight. The room curtains are drawn and the view stinks. I have a bad feeling that Rhys was just throwing a nowhere fit this time... If you cry to feel dead... I had some thoughts before hand this would turn out to have a strong feminist viewpoint, and it does to some extent, only her women are more helpless and sad rather than angry or militant, and there is no poisoned chalice towards men, with her rants feeling aimed more internally. Sasha does have a saving grace though, that being humour, her willingness to see the comedy, even absurdity, in the most bitter memories and humiliating encounters, and there would be many of them. The sex worker Sasha meets, Rene, is another mirror to Liza. Sasha's relationship with him is particularly ambivalent, since while she empathises with him as a victim, she also fears his sexuality and machismo. When he mistreats her, her revenge is to withdraw her sympathy from him (her witnessing, in Tomasulo's framing) since she can no longer identify with him.

God, it’s funny, being a woman! And the other one – the one behind the bar – is she going to giggle or to say something about me in a voice loud enough for me to hear? That’s the way she’s feeling. V. S. Naipaul wrote in 1973 that it is "the most subtle and complete of [Rhys'] novels, and the most humane." [4] What is ironic about the Paris trip, which is meant to help her, is that it is probably the worst place in the world for her to be. Because hiding is not possible there. A return, as I found myself, is not an escape. She is oppressed by her memories, is forced to relive these memories as she stumbles around Paris, from one familiar place to the next. Here, she did this, my God; and there, well, there is where such and such happened. Yet Sasha’s anxiety is more complex than embarrassment or shame at having shown herself up or been shown up in certain restaurants or cafes; it goes beyond having her nose rubbed in her past experiences. Sasha’s anxiety extends to pretty much every sphere of her existence. If she goes somewhere she is convinced that people are looking at her, and talking about her, and judging her. She thinks herself old, and not attractive. Conversation, all interaction, is excruciating, for her and for the reader. I have come across very few characters that are as relentlessly terrified and lonely and unhappy as this one. She’s not a hot mess. She’s just a mess, period. The only reason she is still alive, she says, is because she doesn’t have the guts to end it all. Yes, she cries. But Jean tries too, at least intermittently, once in a while, getting ready to go to that so-hard to hold job, that appointment for something she can’t remember what or why …But this is my attitude to life. Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don’t succeed, but look how hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everybody else. Every word I say has chains around its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn’t every word I’ve said, every thought I’ve thought, everything I’ve done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And, mind you, I know that with all this I don’t succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well … But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think – and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt. She meets another man, at a decisive moment knows that she has fallen in love and will love him forever, and for a few weeks perhaps things go well ... he has a job she teaches English makes a few sous but then things change the money stops coming in and as usual it turns out that forever lasts only so long, then it’s over. Money. Every care in the world centers on money, swirls around money like a whirlpool. She borrows money from friends, some give her money out of exasperation or kindness or … whatever. What to say about the protagonist? She has a name, seldom mentioned, since the narrative is in the first person - but I won't bother looking it up - let's just call her "Jean" - will that do?

it feels like there’s no bottom. She is lonely, isolated, hopeless, self destructive and has zero will to live. She understands everything about herself and she’s pitiless. Everything hurts her, and when you read it, it hurts you too. In Paris, Sasha passes the time going to cafés, drinking, taking sleep medication, and lounging in her room. She often encounters her neighbor in the hall or on the stairs. He’s always in a nightgown and is very eager to talk to her, but she finds him unnerving. Her social interactions are limited; she just wanders through the city and wonders what other people think of her. Sitting in bars with a glass of absinthe, she often breaks into tears at unexpected moments. Because of this tendency to cry, she’s well acquainted with the many bar bathrooms of Paris, where she escapes to weep while staring at herself in the mirror. This is my 3rd book within a couple of months - by Jean Rhys - so one can assume correct that I think Rhys was a phenomenal writer.

Sometimes Sasha would feel extra sorry for herself. This was when she and I fought. She would tell me how things were so bad because of the way people treated her and I would look at it, removed from emotion at this early stage in our acquaintance, and say to her, "But you did such-and-such to yourself. Don't you see that? So why are you feeling sorry for yourself when you did it? You were mistrustful of people from the beginning, but you went along with it," and Sasha would go on a little longer, dancing around the topic and then she would throw a punch that landed right between my eyes and I would concede, "Oh, oh. Oh. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Carry on," and she would. But she still kept me at arm's length. Me, her reader. Imagine! Having now soldiered through the fourth of Jean Rhys’s autobiographical, alcohol-and-female-dependency-themed novels, I cannot concur with the opinion that the author is “one of the foremost writers of the twentieth-century.” Tales of passive, suggestible, self-pitying, depressive protagonists drifting through life, attempting to sponge off, cling to, and be saved by a succession of invariably unworthy men—sordid dramas which unfold in seedy, sometimes bedbug-infested hotels and squalid boarding houses—don’t do much for me. Stylistically, Rhys may have been a competent enough writer, but style can only take bleak content so far. I don’t see good evidence here that it can turn dark material into literature worth reading. While pushing through these novels over the last couple of weeks, I frequently thought how unfortunate it was for Rhys that she didn’t have access to Alcoholics Anonymous or quality psychotherapy. Hers was no way to go through life. Given the abuse her body suffered, it’s a marvel she was able to write at all and very surprising that she lived into her late eighties. Like Dostoevsky, Rhys uses the topos of the underground to represent her protagonist's retreat from hostile society into a private, subjective realm. However, while Dostoevsky ontologises his subject's alienation, likening it to a 'disease' of 'hyperconsciousness', Rhys locates her protagonist's alienation in the social and material circumstances of her life" Serge never shows up to their appointment. Instead, Delmar comes and apologizes on behalf of his friend. He takes the money and promises to relay it to Serge, but he also makes it clear that he’s jealous because Sasha liked Serge so much. Put off by Delmar’s interest in her, Sasha declares that she’s leaving Paris sooner than expected.