Sleep It Off, Lady
Jean Rhys
New York: Harper and Row 176 pp. $7.95
The career of Jean Rhys has had more than its share of ups and downs during the fifty years since it began, she has been recognized, forgotten, and rediscovered, but the work itself has had a: remarkably steady existence. Rhys’s early mastery of form and tone has been consistently maintained in all her novels and stories, as has her use of an unusual and unsettling world view; on the other side, the limitations in her early work have remained much the same. Her most recent book, Sleep It Off Lady, offers no surprises in this regard. The collection of short stories, though less powerful than the best of Rhys’s work, is fairly representative of the writer. And since it brings to conclusion some of the themes on which Rhys has worked for a lifetime, it offers a chance to reflect upon what she has achieved as well as upon some of the problems in her work.
Rhys’s career began in the 1920s with the publication of her first short stories, and before the Second World War, she had written four novels: Quartet, Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight. Rhys disappeared after that, and her books went out of print until the 1960s, when the novel The Wide Sargasso Sea and more stories, among them one of her best, “Let Them Call It Jazz,” were published.
The early novels are similar in style and theme. The first, Quartet, introduces the heroine who reappears in the other novels, and in many of the stories: an intelligent, sensitive, attractive, vulnerable woman who is dependent upon men. This dependence is her great weakness, and prevents her from ever gaining or taking control of her own life. She alternates between an open innocence that leads to her being hurt and a shell of numbness which is her only protection. Powerless before her unhappiness, she is constantly moving up against her own limitations.
Quartet is not a very good novel compared to the three which follow, but even this early work exhibits that quality for which Ford Madox Ford praised Rhys so highly in 1927 and which is the essence of her artistry: her sense of form. Rhys builds so skillfully, the nuts and bolts are never visible. Her use of surfaces is so deft that it easily escapes our notice that she uses them to penetrate an entire world view. And she is a master of understatement. The writing is so clean that the messiest subjects, and Rhys takes on only the messiest subjects—the ways in which people hurt each other—are handled bloodlessly and quickly: you scarcely realize what is happening and it is done. It is this quality that makes reading the best of her work such a stunning experience.
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