Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux, and the Imperial Road

Abstract

Toward end of her life Jean Rhys offered many of private papers and manuscripts still in her possession for sale through booksellers Bertram Rota, Ltd. Their catalogue listed unpublished story, Imperial Road, with notation: Rhys has stated that her publishers declined to include this in Sleep It Off, Lady, considering it to be too anti-negro in tone (7). The was never published and its major components never appeared in any of Rhys's other work.(1) Though I was familiar with manuscript, two stories in Paul Theroux's collection World's End spurred my interest in a closer reading of Rhys's unpublished one. World's End contains two consecutive and connected pieces: first, Zombies, is clearly a portrait of elderly Jean Rhys and refers to reasons why Imperial Road was not published. Theroux's second story, Imperial Ice House, renders a variant of Rhys's Imperial Road, thereby tendering a further subtextual comment on its rejection by her publishers. In Zombies Miss Bristow, aged writer originally from island of Isabella, lives in exile in England. She is courted by literati who have recently rediscovered her and her work after a long disappearance. (She knew talk that people believed she had been dead for years. . . . She could not remember when people had listened to her so keenly. She began to write again |27~.) Zombies is related from point of view of Miss Bristow, a fragile and fearful alcoholic. From her profession and history to her posture and presence, Miss Bristow immediately calls to mind Jean Rhys. At a party Miss Bristow meets Philippa, a young editor from Howlett's, her publishing house. Philippa, who is bright and dull and who never fully understands Miss Bristow's sarcasm and irony, is anxious to please now famous writer and to do well at publishing house. Toward end of story, it is Philippa's job to report to Miss Bristow that Howlett's will not publish the icehouse story in Miss Bristow's forthcoming collection. As Philippa haltingly tells her this, Miss Bristow reflects on volume as an old woman's book, rather a monochrome, all memory, without adornment or invention (36)--a suitable description of Sleep It Off, Lady, Rhys's last book of fiction. Though Philippa tells Miss Bristow that is easily one of best-written things she's done, she finally agrees with her superiors, who will not publish it because It's anti-Negro. I had no doubt that Miss Bristow and her were based on Jean Rhys and her experience with publication history of Imperial Road. It also seemed likely that there might be a connection, in either style or content, between second Theroux story, Imperial Ice House, and Rhys's unpublished one. Certainly their titles were similar. A comparison of Rhys manuscript and Theroux's suggest no strong stylistic relationship but there certainly are thematic connections. Imperial Ice House is about a white newcomer to a Caribbean Island who, unaccustomed to realities of life there, decides one day to haul a cart containing a large block of ice back to his plantation using labor of three of his black workers. The ice melts; cart, under its great burden, begins to break; horse resists; and black workers, first cajoled and then threatened by planter finally, under hot sun, on lonely difficult road to plantation, murder planter with icepick. I was curious to know whether Theroux had ever seen Rhys's or whether Rhys had seen Theroux's. And, even if Rhys was not aware of Theroux's reference to her and her work, I was interested in underlying significance of this literary alliance, particularly because Jean Rhys, as a person and as a writer, seems to have attracted other writers who use elements of her personality and history as bases for characters in their own fiction. …