Belated Homage to Jean Rhys

I just started reading Jean Rhys and can't believe how good she is. I tried to read her once, long ago, but she seemed too close to a kind of terror and bitterness I wanted to avoid. Well, I know better now. You don't avoid that stuff, any more than Hazel Motes could run from Grace.
These days I respect only invention, as in PKD and Jack Vance, and blunt intellectual honesty. And that's what Rhys delivers. The book I've just read, Tigers Are Better Looking, consists of two lots of stories, about a young woman dragging through chronic poverty and the general swinishness of other people in London and Paris. No use pretending the protagonist here is anybody but Rhys, who once said, "I never wrote about anything except myself." Damn right. Same thing holds true for Celine and Limonov: it's all what hicks call "self-pity," and how wonderful it is, after wading through the hotel paintings that we call Fiction, or Writing.
Rhys is too smart to settle for that Writing crap. She's going to tell you to your face. She reminds me of a strange set of people who'd hate each other, Schopenhauer and Celine (the only two writers I know who use those damn three dots effectively, they also share a healthy loathing for human life) and Naipaul. But she's much more honest about London and the English than Naipaul, who will never say a thing about what he suffered there. Rhys spits in London's face and thanks Fate for the opportunity. She's not shy about her sheer hatred of the place and people. A sample: "That was the English for you: heads I win, tails you lose." Every story in the London half of this book is framed, very loudly, as a hate-letter to Britain.
Yet no critic can see, or will admit seeing this. They talk about her hatred for any safe substitute: colonialism, men, "life"--and indeed Rhys has some spittle left over for all of the above. But in this part of the book, the clear target is the English.
Is the critics' 'failure to mention this the result of an impenetrable smugness--"She can't mean us, we're too wonderful!"--or a grim determination to ignore provocation shouted by a "horrid colonial"? It's an interesting question, reminding me of similar reactions to Swift's "Modest Proposal." You can't imagine how many critical essays on that text begin, "Clearly, Swift does not mean simply to condemn England." Oh yes he did. And so does Rhys. Can they not see this, or are they just lying about what they see? Yeah, that's the question these days, about a lot of things.
The second part of the book is set in France. It lacks the fierce hate of the London stories, displaying instead a wonderful contempt for all the fussy Writing decorations favored by amateurs: moral lessons, endings, pathos. Her motto here is "Take it or leave it, idiots." She's tired of talking to the world Celine describes in Journey, full of brave idiots. She'll tell you quickly and drily what it's like to be smart, female and scared in a world of male chimps and trannies. If you don't like it, go read Barbara Kingsolver.
Like Celine, Rhys is above all a writer forged by the 1930s, the most insanely misogynistic decade of the last century. Celine thought he had it bad in that world of vicious apes; Rhys had to deal with being a woman there, writing for idiots about idiots. She must have thought Celine was a sissy.
Her take on the French in these stories is very different from her fierce bombardment of the English. She looks at the French with a squint and a shrug; they're rational animals, no more and no less. They must be dealt with, but there's no need to hate them, any more than you'd hate the trees as you struggle through a forest.
Strange how the feminists of my youth claimed Rhys as one of their own. It's oddly reminiscent of the way Leftists claimed Celine after the publication of Journey. A classic case of a handy misreading by idiots. But Celine's came while he was young enough to enjoy it. By the time the idiocracy had misread Rhys as one of its own, she was past caring. When she got a big award in her old age, she said simply, "It has come too late."
A taste for truth. That's what you end up respecting, after you puke up all that Writing.