Thinking about my forthcoming trip to Paris, I’ve been looking for literature that will evoke a real sense of the place. To this end, I have revisited Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning Midnight. It's been a while since I first read it and I had forgotten how dark this book is, but there is no doubt that it embeds the reader in the less glamorous side of expatriate living in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Rhys is probably most famous now for her prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) which imagines the early life of Bertha Mason, the first wife of Mr Rochester. But several decades earlier she wrote a sequence of novels that draw on her own lived experience of Paris in the inter-war years: Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and this one. The central female characters of each novel are all component parts of the same whole. They are one woman without her own income, dependent on, exploited by and occasionally exploiting men for a living. And generally, it does not go well.
Sasha Jensen, the central protagonist of Good Morning Midnight, is a middle-aged woman who, having come into a small inheritance, returns to Paris for a holiday. Gradually through flashbacks we learn that disillusioned with her old life in London, she eloped to Europe shortly after the end of the First World War and lived in Paris for fifteen years. From her seedy hotel in Montparnasse, she spends a lot of time haunting the boulevards, cafes and bars of her youth, constantly afraid of being recognised, afraid of breaking down. As her history is gradually revealed it is easy to see why.
While all this may sound depressing, Rhys’ poetic experimental prose lifts it to a classic. Sasha’s modified stream of consciousness narrative invites us into the intimate moments of her life, often those she is trying to forget. We share her embarrassment during her visit to the milliners, we feel the sun on our faces in the Luxembourg gardens, we can smell the cheap hotel rooms and taste the brandy and soda. We share her discomfort, her longing and her loneliness as she meets a collection of unsuitable men. We fear their predatory nature just as she tries to deny it.
These Paris novels are all semi-autobiographical. Rhys did marry a French-Dutch journalist in 1919. She was part of the Bohemian expat community in Paris in the 1920s, for some time the mistress of Ford Madox Ford. The book was not successful when it was published and shortly afterwards Rhys completely disappeared for nearly twenty years. She and the novel were rediscovered in 1957 when it was adapted for the radio.
For me though, Paris lives in this novel. I can imagine following in Sasha’s footsteps around Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, although I will be happy to avoid much of the rest of her experience. Absinthe anyone?