I Used to Live Here Once – the biography takes its brilliantly apt title from one of Rhys’s ghost stories – is shot through with madness...Half its cast are half crazy, and most of the rest are as creepy as hell...Liars and fraudsters, bigamists and bolters, grifters and gropers: they’re all here, though Seymour has a special line (because her subject attracted them) in the kind of literary stalker whose pulse races furtively at the sight of an old woman with a bad wig, a whisky habit and (just perhaps) a half-finished manuscript in a drawer...Some readers will relish it when Rhys is to be found in Paris, hanging out with notable bohemians...But it’s the second half of the book, in which she is old and 'potty' and half-cut, that is Seymour’s triumph...The narrative has the tension of a thriller as Rhys struggles to finish Wide Sargasso Sea, and once she has been rediscovered, there are the shabby hotels she haunts; the jaunts with Sonia Orwell and Diana Melly; the literary hangers-on who call for tea...Here is the poet Al Alvarez flirting with her, and here is the memoirist David Plante preparing to stitch her up (the portrait of a sodden Rhys in his book Difficult Women is among the most chilling things I’ve ever read).
Seymour’s approach to the celebrated author of novels such as Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea is rooted in similar clarity, yet underpinned by an acute empathy that drives her into less obvious corners...The result is an exhaustive, definitive ride around both the idea and the reality of Jean Rhys, and what emerges is a portrait of a contrarian woman, with 'the haunted life' that Seymour writes of brought on by tragic and transformative experiences, and Rhys’s own sense of being a ghost haunting her own life...This is also a love letter to the different ways that writers work, and how they are not always disciples of discipline, how sometimes great work comes piecemeal and from the messy brutality of living...While Rhys herself wrote that she 'would never really belong anywhere,' somehow, Seymour has brought her home.
The best biographies marry the talents of a perceptive biographer and a complicated subject. In Miranda Seymour's new biography of British writer Jean Rhys, readers will find a perfect match ... a compassionate and unflinching portrait of a renegade of tenacity and talent, for whom writing was the best and only thing. Everything else was a complication.
