Maatstaf. Jaargang 30

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Martien Kappers-den Hollander Jean Rhys and the Dutch Connection

(Lezing gehouden te New York op 28 december 1981 ter gelegenheid van een Jean Rhys Commemorative Colloquium van de ‘Modem Language Association of America’)

The story of Jean Rhys's ‘Dutch Connection’ begins in the year 1919 when at 29 years of age she, or, as her real name was, Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, came to the Netherlands to marry the Dutch writer and journalist Willem Johan Marie (called Jean) Lenglet, who was at the time 28. They stayed in The Hague for about six months, the longest period Jean Rhys was ever to spend in the Netherlands, and then left for Paris. Lenglet wrote, and sometimes travelled, under the name of Edouard de Nève, a combination of his elder brother's Christian name and the surname he had once seen linked up with his own (as Lenglet de Nève) in Northern France. When his wife in her turn needed a literary pseudonym, she concocted it out of her husband's nick-name and that of her Welsh-born father: Jean Rhys. The way in which Jean Rhys used Lenglet's life and character as material for her fiction has led to many speculations and wild guesses. It seems therefore advisable to start this paper about the ties she had with Holland by establishing some undisputed facts about his career. Jean Rhys herself has always been rather vague about her first husband, but there are in Holland still living witnesses, whose reliability can be checked against various Dutch sources - and vice versa. The most important of these is, of course, the daughter of Ella Williams and Jean Lenglet, Mrs. Maryvonne Moerman-Lenglet, who lives in Holland with her Dutch husband. Their daughter is reputed to have inherited her maternal grandmother's love of and feeling for language. Another is the 1973 autobiography Dierbare Wereld and several interviews given by the late Henriëtte van Eyk who was Lenglet's second wife. According to Mrs Moerman, Van Eyk's autobiography contains ‘some pertinent untruths’. Fortunately we can compare what she wrote with what Lenglet himself told a Dutch interviewer about his life, two years before his death in 1961.

Another important source is what must surely be the most reliable witness any investigator could hope for: the official Dutch historian, Prof. L. de Jong. His as yet unfinished lifework, begun in 1969, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog contains so far no fewer than ten different entries on Jean Lenglet.

Lenglet's mother was Dutch, but his father had French nationality; and although Jean Lenglet grew up partly in a Southern Dutch province, he received much of his schooling in France, and performed his military service there. At the age of seventeen he ran away from his Jesuit school, and for a while lived in Paris in the Latin Quarter as a student-painterchansonnier. He subsequently became a correspondent for the New York Herald, which took him from the Paris Apaches to the gold-diggers of Alaska, and afterwards he joined the French Foreign Legion, whose atrocious conditions he later described in his books.

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Early in the First World War Lenglet became one of its many gas victims; the permanent damage done to his lungs caused him to suffer from choking attacks for the rest of his life. For the remainder of the War Intelligence work took him all over Europe, including London, where he met Ella Williams in 1918. In 1920 his fabulous command of languages secured him a post as interpreter with the Interallied Disarmament Commission in Austria and Hungary. Jean Rhys joined him and they spent several happy months in Central Europe, after a difficult year in Paris which had witnessed the death of their newborn son, William (1920). In Vienna, Lenglet seems to have been involved in some sort of offence against currency regulations, and the couple had to leave prematurely. In 1922, on their way to Paris, a daughter, Maryvonne, was born in Ukkel near Brussels, Belgium. Because of financial and other difficulties her parents were forced to leave her in the care of others. They returned to Paris, where in 1923 Lenglet was arrested, because of his financial transactions in Vienna and his illegal entry into France. He was imprisoned and finally extradited to his native Holland. Jean Rhys, meanwhile, had become emotionally entangled with the British writer Ford Madox Ford and his commonlaw wife, the Australian painter Stella Bowen, which forms the basis of her first novel, Quartet. When the Lenglets separated in 1924, they agreed to share the responsibility of their daughter's upbringing; she was to stay with either parent from time to time. Mrs. Moerman recalls that around 1924 she spent about six months in the South of France with her mother, who at the time wrote ‘adult fairy-tales’ for Richard Hudnut's Cosmetica. And in 1959 Jean Lenglet told a Dutch reporter that in 1924-1925 he had led an exceptionally quiet life as a private tutor in Holland, because he was then looking after his little girl. After a while this quiet life became too much for him and he left her in the care of friends and relatives. He travelled to New York and Tokyo, then back to France, where he became a correspondent for Le Petit Parisien, until he suffered some kind of breakdown. After his return to Holland Lenglet met Henriëtte van Eyk and in 1932 he finally agreed to divorce his first wife.

In the same year Jean Rhys married Leslie Tilden Smith, whom she had met in England in 1927, and Jean Lenglet, who had become a London correspondent for Het Volk, married Henriëtte van Eyk. Their daughter, by mutual consent, stayed in Holland for her schooling, both parents providing for her. She would spend her holidays with her mother in England. When Henriëtte van Eyk went to London to marry Jean Lenglet, she travelled together with his daughter, who was on her way to one of these vacations. In fact, the contact between her parents and their respective spouses was so good that they would occasionally meet, in London as well as in Amsterdam.

It is unfortunate that Jean Rhys's first novel, Quartet, which is based on the unhappy Paris events of 1923, should have given rise to so many legends about Jean Lenglet. The fictional character Stephan Zeil, slightly louche, a swindler, a robber even, as Diana Athill puts it in her preface to Smile Please, has been superimposed upon the real man. Various Dutch people who knew him well have expressed their regrets at the damage Quartet has done to Lenglet's reputation, and as we know from the Preface to Smile Please, Jean Rhys herself had hoped to rehabilitate him to a certain extent in the autobiography she did not live to finish. But even without this evidence it is possible to put the charges made against the real man in an historical perspective. Illegal entry into France by a person who after his service in the Foreign Legion no longer possessed a passport, and evasion of currency regulations at a time of crippling inflation, when seen in the light of the bleak interbellum period in Europe, which witnessed the great tragedy of the stateless refugees, seem now almost meaningless offenses. Moreover, what-

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ever the truth of these charges may have been, they fade in comparison with the unanimous praise accorded to Lenglet for his anti-Fascist stand in the Thirties and the Forties. Untiringly, courageously and at great personal cost he travelled and worked, as a journalist, a secret agent, a resistance worker, in Civil War Spain, in pre-war Germany, and in the occupied Netherlands, until he was arrested in 1941 and spent four years in German concentration camps. Writing the truth about the dirty Italian war in Abessinia cost Lenglet his job. He knew Brecht and Malraux in London, met ‘La Pasionara’ and Hemingway in Spain, and at the outbreak of war he returned from neutral Scandinavia to the Netherlands. His daughter, who was spending a holiday with her mother, managed to join him there by taking the last boat from England to Holland.

Prof. de Jong tells us how from the very start of the war Lenglet was active in the Dutch resistance movement, under the cover of his post as air-raid warden in Amsterdam. His nephew remembers visiting him there in the early days of the war, and being shown a cellar full of explosives and machine-guns. Lenglet was a contact for the British Military Intelligence, who gave his address, at the Koninginneweg in Amsterdam, to raf pilots, in case they got stranded in the Netherlands. He guided pilots and escaped prisoners-of-war to a safe route back to England (on his arrest in the autumn of 1941 Lenglet had saved the lives of thirteen members of the raf). He saw the underground Vrij Nederland through a very critical phase after most of its early editors had been arrested, thus safeguarding its continued publication. He acted courageously in dangerous situations, to the point of recklessness, throwing Von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, out of his house, and removin unexploded bombs from populated areas. He also launched various successful and unsuccessful plans for sabotage, including flying German planes from Schiphol airport to London. After his arrest, Lenglet twice miraculously escaped the death sentence; first because he was declared clinically insane and sent to a German institution for psychopath criminals, the second time because his dossier mysteriously got lost after he had been sent on to a concentration camp. In spite of his own constant appeals to have his sentence revised, and be executed like the other members of his group, Lenglet survived the war, and, in the spring of 1945, even the notorious death march from Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen to Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which cost 9.000 lives. Two months after his return to Holland he published a brochure, introduced by Princess Juliana, about the role of the Dutch Red Cross after the liberation of the Southern Netherlands in 1944. In 1946 Glorieuzen appeared, an autobiographical work about his war experiences. He had originally sent the manuscript to Vrij Nederland, but it was sent back to him by return of post. Apparently the new editors were no longer interested in the man who had saved it in its infancy. However, in 1959, two years before his death, the paper sponsored an appeal by the well-known journalist Bibeb, to contribute to a special fund to send Lenglet to the French Rivièra, for reasons of health.

The end of the Second World War had also seen the end of Lenglet's marriage to Henriëtte van Eyk. She had to some extent been concerned with the welfare of his daughter, who after Lenglet's arrest and deportation to Germany was cut off from both parents. Van Eyk sketches her relationship with Maryvonne Lenglet as somewhat rosier than Mrs Moerman remembers it: but the admiration she expresses in her autobiography for Maryvonne's mother is no doubt genuine. In letters and interviews Henriëtte van Eyk has repeatedly praised Jean Rhys's literary qualities: and in a newspaper article that appeared the year before her death (1980) she ranged Rhys's works among those books that had meant most to her in her long life. And when Jean Rhys was interviewed by Dutch journalists in Devon in 1970, her

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parting words were: ‘Remember me to Jet van Eyk’. Theirs had been partly a writers' relationship: Jean Rhys had corrected and revised an unsatisfactory English translation of Henriëtte van Eyk's book Gabriël (1935), which, however, never found a publisher (the manuscript recently turned up in the late Henriëtte Van Eyk's estate). And Van Eyk in her turn made a Dutch translation of Voyage in the Dark, as Reis door het Duister, in 1969. At that time no-one seems to have bothered to point out that Henriëtte van Eyk's was not, as all reviewers assumed, the first Dutch translation of Voyage in the Dark. In 1935 an ‘authorized version’ of Voyage, as Melodie in Mineur, translated by Ed. de Nève (!) was published by Uitgeverij De Steenuil, Amsterdam. Neither Bruna, the publishers of Henriëtte van Eyk's 1969 translation, nor the translator herself so much as mention this first Dutch edition of Voyage in the Dark. This is all the more surprising because in 1935 Henriëtte van Eyk was the wife of Jean Lenglet, the translator, and a close friend of Victor van Vriesland, who wrote a preface to Melodie in Mineur. Whatever the reason for these omissions, the book had certainly disappeared from sight by 1969: I myself heard about its existence only last year, finally locating it with Mrs Moerman after a very long search. I then discovered that not only the Dutch title (Melody in Minor) differed from the original version, but that Jean Rhys's first-person narrative had been changed into a third-person account: ‘It seemed to Anna as though a curtain had fallen, hiding everything she had ever known’ (etcetera). It is amazing that Jean Rhys, reputedly a perfectionist who would not suffer so much as a comma to be changed, should have consented to such a drastic alteration. On the other hand, there is a statement by her in an interview with Bibeb, in 1976, that points to a less uncompromising attitude. She told the interviewer that she actually rewrote, at the publisher's request, the final pages of Voyage in the Dark, which should have ended with Anna Morgan's death. (This has since been confirmed by a manuscript dated ca. 1934, now in the Jean Rhys archives at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which contains the original ending.) Melodie in Mineur is, in any case, as its title page tells us, definitely an authorized version; and Mrs Moerman, in her letters to me, has stressed that ‘translations and rewritings (by her father, MK), definitely took place with her (mother's, MK) consent’.

In his preface to Melodie in Mineur the late Dr. Victor van Vriesland, an early admirer of Jean Rhys's work, defends the change to third-person narration. According to him it strengthens the effect of impartiality that the author so scrupulously observes in all her works. Van Vriesland's reviews of Jean Rhys's work in the Thirties did much to enhance her reputation in the Dutch literary world, but they are probably also the source of two persistent myths concerning herself and her first husband. One is that Jean Lenglet was a Frenchman, the other that he had written parts of Jean Rhys's works. In an article from 1932 on Jean Rhys's first two novels Van Vriesland writes that ‘De Nève has had such an important part in the realisation of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie that one may safely say that the novel has sprung from their mutual cooperation.’ His friend Henriëtte van Eyk fostered this rumour about her husband's share in Rhys's work by making various statements to that effect, and by producing some early proofs of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, corrected by De Nève and dedicated to herself. ‘Though I have not written this myself’, his inscription reads, ‘there is enough of myself in it for me to offer it to you as part of my thoughts.’ Mrs. Moerman's reaction was that it is highly unlikely that Edouard de Nève actually rewrote or improved Mackenzie:

Perhaps Henriëtte van Eyk meant correction of the first printers' proofs. Jean Rhys was very slow at this and Edouard de Nève may have put pressure on her to get the manuscript

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ready in time for the publisher's contract. But it was always Jean Rhys's habit to correct the final proofs herself.

Another legend about the Rhys-de Nève literary relationship, and one which appears to be equally tenacious, arose after a rather sensational article in De Haagse Post in 1977. The article made various claims. Not only had Edouard de Nève written parts of Jean Rhys's work, but also published, without her consent, many of her stories under his own name. It is indeed a fact that De Nève used material from Jean Rhys's books for a 1934 collection of stories by Henriëtte van Eyk and himself, called Aan den Loopenden Band. Thus, ‘In the Rue de l'Arrivée’, ‘The Blue Bird’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’, ‘At the Villa d'Or’ and ‘From a French Prison’, which had appeared in 1927 as stories from The Left Bank appeared, with an occasional minor alteration, as ‘Dolly’, ‘Carlo’, ‘Fifi’, ‘Villa d'Or’, and ‘Gevangenisbezoek’. Moreover, De Nève's first story in this collection, ‘Een Schrijver’, skilfully knits together ‘The Grey Day’, the first few pages of ‘Vienne’, and ‘Hunger’, again from The Left Bank. Various episodes from Quartet are combined into another story signed by Ed. de Nève and called ‘Mado’, while his ‘Suzanne’ begins with an episode from Good Morning, Midnight (which was published five years later). Two more stories, ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Houdia’ heavily draw upon the subject-matter of Quartet. All in all only two out of twelve stories De Nève published under his own name in Aan den Loopenden Band are unconnected with Jean Rhys's work.

The Haagse Post article states that both Lenglet's first and second wife, when confronted with this ‘piracy’, denied having had any previous knowledge of it, that they were ‘surprised, shocked and puzzled’ - and that Jean Rhys was indignant. Certainly the publisher's blurb, and the six or seven reviews of Aan den Loopenden Band that appeared in 1934, show that the critics were unaware that while they were praising De Nève, they should in fact have been praising Jean Rhys. But why did Victor van Vriesland, who was familiar with all her work, not speak up? And how is it that Henriëtte van Eyk, who mentions Jean Rhys's pre-war work in her autobiography, did not know the stories from The Left Bank, or did not recognize them when they appeared under her husband's name in a collection to which she herself contributed? What is the connection between Jean Rhys's denial, in 1977, of ever having given ‘Mr. De Nève’ permission to use her stories, and Mrs. Moerman's statement, in 1981, on Aan den Loopenden Band?

That fragments and episodes should be verbally almost identical is not astonishing. After the Ford episode their literary collaboration was considerable. (...) The financial situation of both was quite miserable. Jean Rhys was very generous and more than once wrote short pieces that Ed. de Nève would then publish under his own name. On the other hand, Ed. de Nève supplied her with themes during the ‘Hudnut’ period.

She emphasizes that her parents appreciated each other's work and that they mutually aided and encouraged each other in their literary efforts. We know that Jean Rhys's story ‘The Chevalier of the Place Blanche’ in Sleep It Off Lady is ‘a much-adapted translation of one written by Edouard de Nève’; and it is not difficult to imagine that he must have provided her with many themes, especially for her prewar work. Some of these themes return in his own books, as is, for instance, the case with the Left Bank story ‘The Sidi’, a prison tale, which returns as a similar episode in De Nève's counterpart to Quartet, his novel In de Strik. In de Strik came out in 1932, four years after Jean Rhys's novel, to which it forms a companion-piece. It is De Nève's fictional version (called ‘a true story’ in the author's preface) of the events of 1923 told from the point of view

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of the imprisoned husband. The book appeared in three languages: French, Dutch and English. The original French version, Sous les Verrous, dedicated to Victor van Vriesland and published in 1933 was in fact the last. The Dutch edition came out in 1932 as In De Strik.

It was dedicated to De Nève's daughter Maryvonne, and the English edition, dedicated to Jean Rhys, appeared as Barred in the same year. In his preface to the French edition De Nève states that ‘for certain reasons’ he has had to change the plots of the Dutch and the English versions. In the English edition he thanks Jean Rhys for taking a great deal of trouble over the manuscript. Diana Athill, in her preface to Smile Please, informs us that Jean Rhys translated and edited De Nève's book:

She told me she thought it ‘only fair’ that her husband's fictionalised version of events should be available as well as hers, and she took a good deal of trouble to find a publisher for her translation of it. She also said that she had given way to the temptation to cut a few - a very few - sentences about herself which struck her as ‘too unfair’.

As Jean Rhys could not read Dutch she must have worked from the French edition, and a close comparison of Barred and Sous Les Verrous would no doubt reveal which sentences these were. As far as In de Strik is concerned (which was written after the French and before the English version), only one sentence, cut in Barred, could possibly be considered ‘unfair’ from Jean Rhys's point of view. Where the Dutch says ‘Stania was not free from coquetry’, the English adaptation restricts itself to ‘Stania was not free.’ Mrs Moerman confirms that Jean Rhys had a considerable share in reshaping De Nève's novel:

It is true that Jean Rhys corrected and perhaps somewhat rewrote the English version. A textual comparison of Barred and the two other versions show Jean Rhys's influence to be very marked.

Interesting in this connection is Victor van Vriesland's remark in a review from 1933 of Ed. de Nève's novel Kerels, that of the three versions of In de Strik, the English version is stylistically by far the most superior.

For those who know Jean Rhys's work intimately, reading In de Strik or its English and French versions provides a veritable ‘shock of recognition’. Jan van Leeuwen's description of Stania, his wife, makes her so like a composite Jean Rhys heroine, that it creates a sensation of déjà vu:

She believes in an inevitable fate (...). But when she is planning something foolish she sees quite clearly what is going to happen. Not that that stops her from doing it ... No, she lets herself go. She disdains consequences. She sacrifices everybody who may suffer, starting with herself (...) That, and her indolence and passivity have sometimes made me hate her.

Jan van Leeuwen's (first-person-)account of Stania contains severe criticism of her. He is much harder on his spouse than Marya Zelli is on hers. In Quartet, narrated in the third-person, Marya is presented to us as judging Stephan rather more mildly than herself. Jan pictures his wife as weak and selfish, and without proper regard for him, and he minimizes his own share in the muddle she gets herself into. He blames her for more than indolence: where Marya Zelli only reluctantly accepts the Heidlers' offer to stay with them, partly to keep Stephan from worrying about her, Jan van Leeuwen presents Stania as disregarding his warning not to get mixed up with Hübner. Furthermore, he hints that she would have flouted any advice he might have given her: ‘After all, if it wasn't Hübner it would be someone else’. He even charges her with having been too lazy to fetch some papers from his hotel, which he could have used

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to plead extenuating circumstances. And he tells us how she presses him to rejoin the Foreign Legion after his release from prison, in order to have free play with her lover. When he refuses, she betrays him to the Foreign Police and he is expelled from France without a passport. Though Jan van Leeuwen is still obsessed by his wife, the moral of In de Strik is clear: Stania is a bad lot. She is not like other prisoners' wives:

How did they cope, then? Of course they managed somehow. They did not let themselves go, passively, without resistance. They looked after themselves, working, waiting for their husbands. But they are real women - mates. Stania's nothing but a doll.

The fictional accounts by Jean Rhys and Edouard de Nève of the year that saw the end of their marriage present two different visions, attacking and undermining, but also complementing one another. Together, they illustrate the unbridgeable differences and the lack of understanding that may exist between partners.

De Nève's book gives us more than a portrait of a troubled marriage. His novel is also an indictment of the French penal system and a realistic picture of the desperate lack of perspective that marked so many people's lives in the years preceding the Great Depression. Jan van Leeuwen, homeless, stateless, welcome in no country, is a representative of that large group of refugees, who in the years following the Great War were sent from one European border to another. Unlike Jean Rhys, De Nève is a socially engaged writer: where in Quartet the heroine's inner world barely touches the world of exterior, historical facts, Jan van Leeuwen's experiences are firmly anchored in the political, economic and social injustices, the oppression and lack of opportunity that characterize his time. This difference between the two novels is perhaps also the best proof that the allegations that De Nève collaborated with Jean Rhys in the writing of her novels must be fabrications. It is hard to imagine parts of In de Strik as interchangeable with similar episodes in Quartet. Jean Rhys's version is characterized by such a unity of style, of tone, of structure, it is so much more economical, suggestive and poetically evocative, that De Nève's greater explicitness, his verbosity, his sincerely shocked and outraged comments, and his rather journalistic approach would stand out at once.

Of the other novels and stories De Nève wrote before the Second World War, several are of interest to us, either because of their close resemblance to Jean Rhys's fiction (as is the case with Aan den Loopenden Band) or because they appear to form a sequel to the story presented to us in the various versions of In de Strik, and in Quartet. His book Kerels (1932) actually is a sequel: its hero, again Jan van Leeuwen, is now living in The Hague, and begs Stania, in Paris, to return to him. She comes, but as a cool and distant guest, who makes it clear that he must have no further expectations of her. In De Nève's next novel, Muziek Voorop (1935), a sergeant of the French Foreign Legion drives his wife, who has a ‘past’ she dare not confess to him, into the arms of a rich patron. Schuwe Vogels (1937), finally, pictures an incompatible couple. Leaving his wife with her lover in Paris, the husband goes to Holland where he leads a lonely life in poverty. Envious of her greater chances of happiness, he refuses to grant his wife a divorce until he himself finds another partner. By that time his ex-wife has slid into alcoholic self-destruction.

These novels by De Nève, and the books Jean Rhys wrote before 1940, received favourable, in her case highly favourable, reviews in Holland. Their literary patron was Victor van Vriesland, who between 1931 and 1938 wrote the influential literary chronicle of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. He rated Jean Rhys's work very highly, and in two outstanding essays gave a brilliant analysis of her style,

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pointing out the novelty of her subject and vision, and assigning her a place among her Modernist contemporaries. Van Vriesland contrasts Jean Rhys's work with that of the preceding Naturalist School, compares her interior monologues with those of James Joyce, her dialogues with Hemingway's, praises her sense of form, her economy, her perfectionism and creative intuition: in short, recognizes her for the important writer she is. Another equally favourable review in De Groene Amsterdammer, in 1939, calls Jean Rhys a representative of a pessimistic generation, living in an unusually bleak period of history, and points out her ‘specifically female sensibility’. Though only one of her novels had been translated into Dutch, Jean Rhys's pre-war reputation in Holland seems to have been much higher than it was in England (compare, for instance, Van Vriesland's thorough and penetrating discussion of her work in the nrc with the short summary dismissals of her books in the English tls, between 1927 and 1939). When Henriëtte van Eyk wrote in her autobiography that ‘Ella (...) was considered an important avant-garde author before the war, whose books got magnificent reviews’, she must have been thinking of the reception of Rhys's work in the Netherlands.

After the outbreak of the Second World War the picture in Holland is the same as everywhere else: Jean Rhys and her works disappear from the scene. By the time Van Vriesland's reviews of her novels had been reprinted as part of his collected essays (1958) she had become virtually unknown. After her comeback with Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, the interest in her work gradually increased. I have so far been able to trace some twenty-five Dutch reviews and articles since 1967, none of them, however, as serious and astute as Victor van Vriesland's in the Thirties. All Jean Rhys's books, with the exception of Smile Please, the stories from The Left Bank, Tigers Are Better-Looking and My Day were translated into Dutch. They have not, however, been a popular success in Holland.

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Perhaps this is because the rights were sold to Bruna, a firm that does not appear to have been greatly interested in keeping her in print. The Dutch translations are unobtainable these days. Perhaps the time is ripe for a take-over by another Dutch publisher, who is willing to put all her works back on the market. Now that Deutsch are preparing an edition of the Letters, and the American academic world is being struck by a veritable Rhys-rage, the interest in her books is bound to increase in the years to come. Jean Rhys herself is reported to have been somewhat dissatified with the present Dutch editions, especially with their cover-illustrations. The one on Wide Sargasso Sea features a black Surinam ‘Cotton Missie’ in her native headdress and attire, a clear case of miscasting. The mistake is understandable: in Holland, where a large segment of the population of former West-Indian colonies now resides, the word ‘Creole’, so often applied to Jean Rhys's heroines, has acquired the exclusive meaning of ‘black’ or ‘coloured’.

The majority of the Dutch post-war reviews I have seen give more or less the same information as is generally found in English and American periodicals. Occasionally the ties Jean Rhys had with Holland are mentioned: and sometimes certain links are made between the subject-matter and prevailing mood of her work, and specifically Dutch phenomena, like the anarchist and feminist movements (‘Provo’, ‘Dolle Mina’) that coincided with Jean Rhys's comeback in the late Sixties. In the Seventies, prominent Dutch journalists, some of them involved in women's emancipation groups, interviewed Jean Rhys in England: Harriet Freezer and Wim Hora Adema in Devon in 1970, Bibeb in London in 1976. Other Dutch writers and critics made the long journey to South-West England with the usual letter of introduction provided by Andre Deutsch, and with the usual gift: a book or a bottle. One of them was a colleague of mine at the English Department in Amsterdam, J.J. Peereboom, who reviewed all Rhys's books as they came out after 1966. Another was J. van Houts, the ‘Jan’ of the story ‘Who Knows What's Up in the Attic’, a Dutch teacher and writer who spent a holiday with Jean Rhys in Devon in 1970. This meeting led to two fictional accounts of it: one was Rhys's story in Sleep It Off Lady, the other Jan van Houts's companionpiece, called ‘Het Gaatje in het Gordijn’, which appeared in De Revisor, 2, 1982. (It was translated into English as ‘The Hole in the Curtain’ by John Rudge, under the sponsorship of the Dutch Ministry of Culture.)

Mr. van Houts's story gives his version of his contacts with Jean Rheys in May 1970, which led to a correspondence with her that continued until her death in 1979.

John Peereboom talked about his visit to Jean Rhys at a Rhys seminar I conducted in the spring of 1980. This seminar led to the 1980 Jean Rhys memorial issue of Literair Paspoort, to which we both contributed. One of the students who had participated at the seminar realised that he knew a grand-nephew of Jean Lenglet's, Mr. C. Lenglet, who had for many years lived in the same Amsterdam street with his great-uncle and third wife, Mrs J. Rozdejczer Kossakowska, whom Jean Lenglet had married in post-war Poland. Mr. Lenglet was able to provide me with many facts about his great-uncle's career, and put me on the track of that invaluable source of information, Professor de Jong's books on the Second World War. I was also able, through the intervention of another colleague, to consult various papers and books from the estate of the late Henriëtte van Eyk. And after one of my husband's colleagues brought me into contact with Mr. J. van Houts, he supplied me with many details about his prolonged visit to Devon in 1970, and finally finished the story he had been intending to write for ten years. When I told Francis Wyndham in London, who is working on the forthcoming Deutsch edition of Jean Rhys's letters, about her correspondence with Mr. van Houts, Wyndham contacted him and provided me with the address of Mrs Moerman

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in Rotterdam. Mrs Moerman has answered many of my questions and has been a great help, sending me rare material, or locating its whereabouts and pointing out likely sources of information. Though understandably anxious to guard her family's privacy, and determined to protect and preserve the memory of her parents, she is obviously an important source. From her early youth Mrs Moerman has many recollections of, and a unique insight into the writers' relationship that existed between Jean Rhys and Edouard de Nève, and into the creative processes that led to their publications. Apart from the stories and fairy-tales that both her parents would regularly send to her, when she was a little girl, Mrs Moerman remembers all sorts of (oral) versions of the stories located on the West-Indian islands, that form the basis of Jean Rhys's fiction.

In spite of the obstacles that I invariably encountered whenever I tried to obtain material from before 1945, due to the wartime bombing of Dutch cities which destroyed so many archives and manuscripts, the ‘Dutch Connection’ of Jean Rhys has yielded far more documentation than I had expected. (Even Selma Vaz Dias, the actress who rediscovered Jean Rhys in 1956, turns out to have been of Dutch descent!) No doubt, more material will turn up in the course of time. But even without any further information it is possible to see how significant ‘The Dutch Connection’ has been for the life and works of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams. Although Holland does not figure at all significantly in the Jean Rhys landscape made up of England, France, the Caribbean and some bits of Central Europe; although she did not know Dutch people well or appear one bit interested in them; and although she only rarely visited the Netherlands, and never after 1936, her family and literary ties with the country where she married her first husband, and where their daughter and granddaughter still live, make Jean Rhys's Dutch background important to us, and worthy of further investigation.

Source material

Works by Jean Rhys translated into Dutch:

Voyage in the Dark as Melodie in Mineur, authorized version translated by Edouard de Nève, with a preface by Victor E. van Vriesland, Amsterdam, De Steenuil, 1935.

Voyage in the Dark as Reis door het Duister, translated by Henriëtte van Eyk, Utrecht, Bruna, 1969, repr. 1975.

Good Morning, Midnight as Goede Morgen, Middernacht, translated by Max Schuchart, Utrecht, Utrecht, Bruna, 1977.

Wide Sargasso Sea as Sargasso Zee, translated by W.A. Dorsman-Vos, with an afterword by Francis Wyndham, Utrecht, Bruna, 1974.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie as Na Meneer Mackenzie, translated by W.A. Dorsman-Vos, Bruna, Utrecht 1977.

Quartet as Kwartet, translated by W.A. Dorsman-Vos, Utrecht, Bruna, 1975.

Sleep It Off Lady as Mens, Slaap Je Roes Uit, translated by W.A. Dorsman-Vos, Utrecht, Bruna, 1977.

‘I Spy a Stranger’ as ‘Vreemdeling in 't Vizier’, translated by Dorinde van Oort, Literair Paspoort, Special Jean Rhys Issue, July-August 1980, p. 680-689.

‘Temps Perdi’ (Part I), translated by Robert-Henk Zuidinga, De Tweede Ronde, II, 3, 1981, p. 121-125.

Relevant works by Ed. de Nève:

In de Strik, with authorial preface, portrait and dedication, Amsterdam, Andries Blitz, 1932. Also appeared in an English and a French version, as Barred, by Edward de Nève, with an authorial dedication, London, Desmond Harmsworth, 1932, and Sous les Verrous, par Edouard de Nève, with an authorial dedication, Paris, Librairie Stock, 1933.

Kerels, Amsterdam, Querido, 1932.

Aan den Loopenden Band (with Henriette van Eyk), Amsterdam, Querido, 1934.

Muziek Voorop, Amsterdam, Querido, 1935.

Schuwe Vogels, Amsterdam, Querido, 1937.

Other relevant works:

Henriette van Eyk, Dierbare Wereld, Amsterdam, De Bezige Bij, 1973.

Jean Rhys, Smile Please, an Unfinished Autobiography, London, Deutsch, 1979.

Prof. Dr. L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Part iv, first half (1972) and second half (1974), Part vi, first half (1975), Part viii, first half (1978), Den Haag, Staatsuitgeverij, 1969 - present.

Jan van Houts, ‘Het Gaatje in het Gordijn’ and Jean

[p. 40]

Rhys, ‘Wie Weet Wat Er nog Op Zolder Ligt?’ (‘Who Knows What's in the Attic?’) De Revisor, 9,2, 1982.

Interviews:

Harriët Freezer, Interview with Jean Rhys, Avenue, March 1970, p. 185-7.

Bibeb, Interview with Jean Lenglet, Vrij Nederland, 27 June 1959 (no. p.)

Bibeb, Interview with Jean Rhys, Vrij Nederland, 28 February 1976, p. 7, 8.

Reviews and Articles:

Victor van Vriesland, ‘Kroniek van Het Proza’, ii and xcii, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 24 September 1932 and 20 October 1934. Reprinted as ‘Niet Bang Voor Bijziendheid’ (slightly revised), in Onderzoek en Vertoog, Verzameld Critisch en Essayistisch Proza, Amsterdam, Querido, 1958, p. 294-301. Review-articles on Jean Rhys's early works.

Victor van Vriesland, ‘Kroniek van Het Proza’, vlv, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 25 November 1933.

Review of Kerels by Ed. de Nève, no. p.

Review of Good Morning, Midnight (anon.), De Groene Amsterdammer, 20 April 1939, n. p.

Reviews of Aan den Loopenden Band by Ed. de Nève and Henriëtte van Eyk:

De Groene Amsterdammer, 1 September 1934, n. p.

De Telegraaf, 30 September 1934, n. p.

Algemeen Handelsblad, 25 August, 1934, p. 12.

De Haagsche Post, 30 June 1934, p. 5-6.

Amersfoortsch Dagblad, 7 July 1934 n. p.

Henriëtte van Eyk, ‘De Hulpeloze Hopeloze Boeken van Jean Rhys’, De Volkskrant, 7 June 1980, n.p.

Robert-Henk Zuidinga, ‘Jean Rhys, een Literair Raadsel’, De Haagsche Post, 19 March, 1977, p. 6-8.

Unpublished Material:

Jan van Houts, ‘The Hole in the Curtain’, translation by John Rudge of ‘Het Gaatje in het Gordijn’, Zaandam, October 1981.

Martien Kappers, Interview with Mr. C.A.J. Lenglet, Amsterdam, October 1981.

Martien Kappers, Interview with Mr. J. van Houts, Zaandam, November 1981.

Martien Kappers, Interview with Mrs. Maryvonne Moerman-Lenglet, Rotterdam/Amsterdam, November 1981.

Special Issues:

Literair Paspoort, Jean Rhys memorial issue, July-August 1981, p. 661-693.

All translations from the Dutch: Martien Kappersden Hollander.