I read this right after reading The Abandoned Baobab, and I found the structure and even the mood strikingly similar. Although Rhys' protagonist is a white woman and does not share Ken's experience as a colonized subject, Rhys herself originated from Dominica which had been under British rule (Dominica is one of the most magical places I have ever been to. I went on a tour there on my 24th birthday, which fell by mad luck on the day off at the end of my training week when I worked at sea). Like Ken in Baobab, Sasha views her mental anguish as a function of her social position and context, including gender and class. Thus, while the novel is entirely steeped in Sasha's fraught consciousness, it moves the reader into the mode of sociopolitical critique.Thanks to Michele's contribution to this discussion of the book, I read this wonderful paper by Gina Maria Tomasulo Out of the Deep Dark River which compares Good Morning, Midnight to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:"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""Rhys' representation of the Underground as a fluid space of memory challenges Dostoevsky's view of the subject as split from his body, from his language and from the world of others"As Tomasulo points out, in contrast to Dostoevsky's underground man who withholds her servant's wages and strikes his driver, Sasha is enabled by her experience of poverty & victimisation to empathise with others worse or as badly off, such as the mixed-race woman she meets in the hallway of her building, the elderly woman shopping for a hat with her daughter, and the waitress she observes in a café. Sasha bears witness to the suffering of the generous and compassionate Frenchwoman Lise and the two become loving friends, while The Underground Man behaves sadistically towards a similar, kind woman, Liza, rearticulating the framing of sex workers as fallen women in need of moral rescue. Rhys' figure of Lise, with whom Sasha has a loving, non-hierarchical bond, is seen by Tomasulo as an 'ironic commentary' on Liza.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.Sasha also has a fairly positive association with two Russian men and with an artist friend of theirs, a Jewish man whom she and one of the friends visit. Since she identifies with the artist and feels some relief and return of feeling in the presence of his work, she is moved to buy one of his paintings, as seems to be expected (but certainly not demanded) of her. In discussion of the book, some readers said they did not understand why she bought the painting, but I strongly identified with this action - I have been well conditioned by late consumer capitalism to express myself, including emotional gratitude, by buying things.Tomasulo states that Sasha has come to Paris 'to drink herself to death' and she certainly drinks as much as she can, arranging her life methodically as though in single-minded pursuit of passing the time, yet more than anything else, she reminisces. Tomasulo argues that for her the underground is 'a fluid space of memory' where, by remembering through her body (pulling the past over her head like a blanket) she begins to undo her alienation from others. It's possible to imagine an end of this process of working through the past, a recovery of sorts, but Sasha doesn't worry herself with hope, she lives beyond hope, in the freedom of the depths.Tomasulo also points out that the underground man identifies with and even glories in his own 'repulsive' image, while Sasha is continually aware of and oppressed by a material and psychological need to present herself as psychologically well and socially acceptable, (for example she is devastated when a fellow patron refers to her as 'la vielle' (old woman) while depression constantly moves her to somehow 'violate social decorum', so that she gets thrown out of a place, loses a job or the respect or sympathy of someone she is with. This difference reflects gendered expectations of public conduct and social competence, and the relative intolerance of 'eccentric' or mad behaviour for women. She watches herself anxiously, fusses over her appearance, recovers her spirits after a visit to the hairdresser. Rhys roots such feminine consolation firmly in gendered oppression, but not in order to ridicule them, adding insult to injurySo actually, this is a novel of love honoured and relived in memory, warm compassion, and the reawakening of sensation amidst despair. It is a novel of redemptive reconnection that sutures the grave wounds inflicted by an atomising 'civilisation', that even follows Hito Steyerl's urging to 'embrace alienation' and the freedom that follows from it ('we are this pile of scrap') and shows how we can bear witness to and even heal each other's trauma.
There’s a great website called The Smoking Gun which features celebrity mugshots. The celebrities are divided into categories : Hollywood (A list and B list), Music, Killers, Business, Gangsters, Sports and Television, and… Nuisances. Since they haven’t got a Writers section, Jean Rhys’ mugshots would have been a perfect fit in the Nuisances section. But if there was a writer’s section, she’d surely have come top in number of arrests. The quality of the crimes, though, was rather poor.And alas, we don’t have the mugshots. But this will doFIRST ARRESTWardour Street, London, 13 June 1935. Jean and husband Leslie, both drunk, battering each other; both arrested at 4 in the morning. Spent the night in the cells; arraigned at Bow Street on a D&D. Both fined 30 shillings and sixpence, plus doctor’s fee. SECOND ARRESTFrom the Beckenham Recorder, 1 April 1948:“I lost my head and threw a brick through the window because her dog, a killer and a fighter, attacked my cat,” said Elle Gwendoline Hamer (56), a writer, of 35 Southend Road, Beckenham, accused at Bromley on Thursday, of breaking a pane of glass, value £5, belonging to Mrs Rose Hardiman, of 37 Southend Road. Hamer was bound over and ordered to pay £5 to Mrs Hardiman. THIRD ARREST12 April 1949 – Bromley Magistrates Court. The charge : assaulting a lodger, Mr Bezant, and the arresting officer, after a party the day before which Mrs Hamer objected to, on grounds of noise. Remanded to prison for 13 days. At the trial on 25 April she was found guilty, fined £4 (£1 for Mr Bezant and £3 for the policeman) and bound over to keep the peace for a year. When she got home on the 25th, her tenants, Mr & Mrs Besant, were lurking in the hallway (they rented the upstairs rooms). According to Jean he said“I see you didn’t like what happened in court today. I have got you where I want you now and I’ll get you lower still.” Jean said, according to Jean, “If you think I’m going to pay this fine, you have made a mistake. I would sooner go to prison for life.“So wouldn’t you know it, there was another fracas. FOURTH ARRESTBack to Bromley Magistrates Court, ten days later. Verdict : Guilty of assaulting the same person, plus his wife, plus another tenant. Case adjourned while psychiatric reports were made. Back in court on 27 June. Asked by the court if she had anything to say. Yes, she did. Remanded for another week to Holloway Prison – the big house. 4 July, back in court. They had discovered that she wasn’t insane. Sentence : two years’ probation. Now something crazy happened. On 5th November this appeared in the New Statesman :Jean Rhys (Mrs Tilden Smith) author of Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning Midnight, etc. Will anyone knowing the whereabouts kindly communicate with Dr H W Egli, 3 Chesterfield Gdns, NW3.An actress, Selma vaz Dias, a Rhys fan, had adapted GMM as a radio play, and needed Jean’s permission, but everyone was telling her Jean Rhys was dead. (Jean, drunk for years, totally out of touch with literary London, almost – but not quite – forgotten.) Jean saw the ad and replied. And then, on 16 November, ANOTHER drunken row with the neighbours.FIFTH ARRESTJean : my bitter enemy next door is now telling everybody very loud and clear that I’m an imposter “impersonating a dead writer called Jean Rhys” – it’s a weird feeling being told you are impersonating yourself… you think : Maybe I am!In a rage, proclaiming her innocence of the charge of impersonating Jean Rhys, she wandered back and forth in the road, stopping all the traffic. Back to Bromley Magistrates Court AGAIN…. But this time…. Charges dismissed!That was Jean’s last brush with the law, but not her last dance with the devils in the bottles. She missed the broadcast of Good morning Midnight. I wouldn’t like to say why.This is my attitude to life. Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missus 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…"Another Pernod," I say. (Good Morning Midnight, p 88)
Do You like book Good Morning, Midnight (2000)?
We fought sometimes, Jean and I. Midnight started well. We're introduced to narrator, Sasha Jensen, as she prepares to leave her claustrophobically secure room to find a place to have her nightly drink. This is a scene replicated many times throughout the novel. From the beginning we're aware that things in Sasha's world are shit. Just shit. In first person narration Sasha brings her world to life, gives us the skinny on why things are in fact as bad as they seem. But information does not come quickly. Sasha is a damaged person and though she has a bad habit of trusting the wrong people, despite her own wariness, she does not yet trust us her readers. If you want to know what's going on you have to gain her confidence. It's a bit of work sometimes, but it's worth undertaking. 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! The instances where an important truth was revealed were often slow in coming, or slower than I expected, and there were several, several pages of self-loathing to wade through before they were revealed. But all in good time. We were just getting to know each other, she and I. With each revelation, my head began to pound. The space between my eyes became a spreading bruise: first a little yellow, then dark lime, then bright blue, and finally deepest black. With each revelation I dropped more and more of my feeble attempt to make her understand that things weren't so bad as all that. If she was so fed up with people, I reasoned previously, why not tell those people to fuck off and be done with it? But it's not that easy, is it, Jean? 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. It's best not to speak of endings. Sometimes they're so final. Sometimes so open-ended. But I like to think that wherever Sasha is, she has found some kind of peace in her life. Or is happily, finally taking the big sleep she so desperately wanted but could not give to herself.
—Mark
A disaffected, thirty-something guy abandons his wife, moves to Paris and sleeps with some prostitutes. His name is Henry Miller and the book is called Tropic of Cancer.A disaffected, thirty-something woman, after being abandoned by her husband, goes to Paris and almost sleeps with a gigolo. Her name is Jean Rhys and the book is called Good Morning, Midnight.As near as I can figure, Miller and Rhys were in Paris at the same time. Maybe they even hung out in the same cafés and bought each other rounds of Pernod. Beyond that, you’d be hard-pressed to find two people more different. Miller looks at the world, sees himself everywhere and shouts, “Fuck, yeah.” Rhys peeks out her window, sees herself everywhere and mutters, “Meh.” Then she crawls back into bed with a bottle of gin and stares at the bugs on the wall.I’m not convinced Henry Miller is a good role model for the thousands of middle-class boys who read him in late adolescence and are given this incredibly seductive picture of life as an endless bachelor party, with wall-to-wall pussy and intermissions of boozy philosophical chatter. It’s like learning all about girls from that disreputable uncle who used to keep back issues of Penthouse lying out in plain view and who spoke vaguely yet appealingly about Zen Buddhism. You know, the same uncle who was always hitting your parents up for “short-term loans.”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.Okay, so maybe Rhys isn’t such a great role model either. I could see how her world-view might have the same warping effect on a certain type of girl as Miller’s does on a certain type of boy. But I still say Good Morning, Midnight is a more grown-up book than Tropic of Cancer, just as Rhys’s Paris—glum, bitchy, lower middle-class—is less romanticized than Miller’s Brassai-esque version.Wisdom would probably consist in finding some middle path between these two poles of egotism, but if I had to choose, I guess I’d take Rhys’s route. I mean, I have no desire to end up a depressive alcoholic in a rented room—though that’s a definite possibility at this point—but that does seem a marginally better fate than becoming a priapic fifty-year-old pontificating about Nietzsche to his cronies. Or I could get married, move to the suburbs and avoid the whole sordid dilemma. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
—Buck
This book rightfully deserves five stars. For if awards are given to books, like they are people, and prizes are given to the most this and the most that, this book, I think, will handily win the award of being The Loneliest Book Ever, and its main protagonist, Sasha Jansen, The Loneliest Character Ever to Come Out in a Work of Fiction.The prose is interspersed with French. But those who do not know the language [like me:] can just go on ignoring the French. The English alone, sparse as it is, had seemingly magically condensed all the possible sadness there is in this world and, like a weapon, stabs your heart with it.And to think that there is no conventional horror or tragedy in its plot. No war, no children being slaughtered. It is just one hotel room to another, memories retrieved and relived, clocks ticking, hours of long sleep, a drink, then another. Perfect recipes for a boring book. Yet I read it nonstop this one, hot afternoon of the 9th of February 2110, more than 60 years after this book was written.I was cynical when I saw a blurb at the back cover of the book which says: "No one who reads [the book:] will ever forget it." Nice sales talk, I thought to myself. Now, I completely agree.
—Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly
