Books: “Good Morning, Midnight” by Jean Rhys

Novelist Jean Rhys was a study in loneliness and melancholy. Born in 1890 on the Caribbean island of Dominica to one of the island’s few white families, she was taunted with the nickname “the white cockroach” as a child. Scorned by her mother and ostracized by both Blacks and whites, Rhys was sent by her father to a girls school in England in 1906, and was subsequently mocked for her Caribbean accent.

After she attended two terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, her instructors despaired of her ever learning to speak "proper English" and advised her father to take her away. Unable to train as an actress and refusing to return to the Caribbean, Rhys worked with varied success as a chorus girl, adopting the names Vivienne, Emma, or Ella Gray.

In 1924, Rhys seems to have found her way, coming under the influence of English writer Ford Madox Ford in Paris. In her first short stories, Ford recognized that her experience as an exile gave Rhys a unique viewpoint, and praised her "singular instinct for form.”

Rhys began writing novels, and the plot of  “Good Morning, Midnight” is typical of her subject matter. Sasha, an aging Englishwoman, drinks, takes sleeping pills, and obsesses over her looks. Adrift in Paris, she is alternately flush and impoverished, moving between grim hotel rooms and the men who pay for their interest in her. Throughout the novel which jumps around from past to present, Sasha reminisces about a bad marriage to a Dutchman, a child that died soon after birth, and a lodging in London where only one bedsheet is changed at a time, “so that the bed was never quite clean and never quite dirty.”

“Good Morning, Midnight” is hardly the laugh riot of this or any year. Frankly, the subject matter is wistful and depressing, and the story of how she is nearly taken in by a gigolo is heartbreaking. But her prose is lovely, capturing the loneliness and desperation of a woman whose options even in the mid 20th century were few and far between. Fortunately for us, fate led Rhys to become a novelist, and in 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing. Not bad for a “white cockroach.”