Backlisted - Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Episode Date: December 14, 2015

John Mitchinson and Andy Miller are joined by author Linda Grant and Unbound's Mathew Clayton to discuss 'Good Morning, Midnight' by 'Wide Sargasso Sea' author Jean Rhys. Plus perfume, the previously unheard of genre of Scandinavian magic realism, and a mistake in the best selling science book of all time. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)1'49 - A Winter Book by Tove Jansson 9'46 - A Brief History of Time by Prof Stephen Hawking 17'30 - Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm* If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I absolutely... I have a photograph of him. Really? Yeah, do you want to see a picture of him? I'd love that. You should make him your avatar on Twitter. That would really... Look, there he is. That would really fucks me.

Look, there he is. Look at him just relaxing. What was it, 6-1 against Southampton? Yeah, when he pointed, they said to him, is it true you've had a hair transplant? He said, yeah, I think it looks really stylish. What do you think? He's just shameless.

Yeah, I love that. And then he said somebody else, some other manager, had said, I play football as poetry, and he said, I play football as any metal. It's absolutely brilliant. He's fantastic. I love him. And all the Liverpool fans completely adore him. And look at the results.

Yes, I know. I know. Love him. Love him. Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the new podcast where old books get a new life. I'm John Mitchinson and we're coming to you live from the kitchen table of Unbound, the website where readers and writers come together to produce great books.

And I'm Andy Miller, I'm the author of the year of Reading Dangerously. We are the levis and butthead of reading as week, it's up to you to decide which is which. And we're also going to be joined in the Baldrick role today by Mr Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew. Good evening, everyone. Good evening, Matthew. And later on, we're going to be joined by Linda Grant to talk about Jean Rees, and specifically Jean Rees' novel Good Morning, Midnight. But first, as is traditional on Backlisted John what have you been reading? I've had a lovely week Andy I've had a week of

deliciousness um it gets to this time of year and uh for those of you who are listening uh in in September 2019 I'm actually talking to you in December 2015 and at a certain point of the year you just want a book that is full of cold I wanted a book that was full of coldness and bleached wood and the sound of the sea on pebbles and just something that made me feel wintry

and a couple of weeks ago I picked up Tove Janssen. I say Tove because I don't know how. Tove. Let me stop you there. Let me stop you there. I was informed by the great Will Grozier a couple of days ago that it is Tove as in Duve. Tove Janssen.

Tove Janssen. Well, I was reading Tove Jansson's The Winter Book, which is just a beautiful, almost a perfect collection of stories selected by Ali Smith, the great Ali Smith. And I felt like I've – it's an amazing thing. It's a collection of stories which almost functions like an autobiography. I mean, it's fictional, but the stories themselves are kind of cumulative. And they go through a, I mean, it starts with a very small child

and ends with an old woman railing against the kind of the world. There's a fantastic story towards the end of the book about a squirrel, which she befriends and um it's it's it's one of those again it's that thing about when you sometimes just need comfort reading yes but strangely um and if i had the copy in front of me but i've left it on the tube i would be able to read magnificent passages of uh loveliness they are drawn the stories in the winter Book are chronological, aren't they? And they're drawn from different points in her career. So she wrote several volumes of short stories,

not all of which have been translated into English yet. Is it a book for adults or children? It's a book for adults, yeah. I mean, the thing about Tuve, because I was getting used to it. You have to say Tuve Jansson. Is that I loved the, of course, she's most famous for writing the Moomin Troll books and the Moomin books, and I loved the Moomin books as a child, particularly the later ones, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November.

And I took the liberty of writing down, this is the opening of Moominpappa at Sea, this is their book supposedly for children. It starts, one afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden, feeling at a loss. He had no idea what to do with himself because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done or was being done by somebody else.

And I only, as an adult, when I read it, it's a book about a midlife crisis. So one of the weird things is that, as we'll see when we get to talk about Jean Rees later, I hadn't planned it this way, but there's a weird resonance in that strange kind of slightly dislocated narrative voice that Tove Janssen has, which kind of does sort of fit with the Jean Rees, certainly the Jean Rees that we're going to talk about later. The thing that I loved about her books as a child, which I still like about her work as an adult, either her writing for children or for adults, is that unsentimental mixture of humour and melancholy and emotional realism, all of which you would find actually in Jean Rees, without talking about Jean Rees too quickly. Also, but they're amazing, mad explosions of total invention. So one of the first stories in the book is about a child rolling a stone, which is made from silver, rolling and rolling. And it's very, very intense. And in the end, she drops the stone and the stone explodes

and covers the whole of the neighbourhood in silver. That silver plagues the neighbourhood. The story is amazing. I agree. It's just kind of Nordic magic realism. I mean, hitherto undiscovered, unthought of, unremarked upon kind of genre. And I thought, how do you get, I mean, in my own case, how do I get to 52 and only discover Trurvy, Janssens?

I mean, the Moomin Trolls, we grew up with them. I was reading about her this week. Apparently Moomin Troll, Moominpuppet C and Moominvalley in November were published in Finnish as adult books. It's only in this country that they were published as children's books because she wanted to approach adult themes using characters that she had invented for children. But don't you think that was to do with the illustrations,

which kind of put them firmly in there, which is an interesting thing. I mean, I guess, like, you know, it's a bit like Roald Dahl. I mean, you could publish Matilda almost as an adult book. Yes, yes, very much. If you didn't have Quentin Blake's drawings. I've been reading some of her adult books this year. The Summer Book, which is a classic, really.

The True Deceiver. And one called Sun City. The second novel that she wrote in English called Sun City. It's set in Florida. I had to buy a copy from a Florida library. It was incredibly rare. And I'd like to issue a public appeal to Sort Of Books, who have done a brilliant job republishing her in the last 10 years,

but have thus far ignored this book, because presumably it's insufficiently Scandinavian. But it's absolutely wonderful. I mean, to see early 70s America and the life of old people in early 70s America through the eyes of somebody from a totally different world is really uh remarkable it's terrific book actually I thought it was going to be a chorus skating kind of a attack on South African casinos during the apartment it's just coincidental it's just a coincidence can I give it I mean it's really this is a cheesy

marketing line because as Andy knows, I can't resist a cheesy marketing line. But if Lyra Malacqua ever wrote short stories, they would read a lot like, I think, the stories in Turvey Janssen's winter book and indeed the summer book. She's just... It's fantastically... They they're just odd aren't

they in the same way and we'll come on to gene reese is that that sort of that thing about writers who are odd how do you do that i mean you try to be odd but there's that if you're really it's that thing you read a sentence in a sense i mean as i say the book is now somewhere on the circle line i think but the lucky person is going to pick that up. I'd like to also take the opportunity to recommend to all adult readers Moominvalley in November, which I reread quite recently. That's like a Bergman film. It's like a children's book about absence.

There are no Moomins in it. All the animals arrive and all the Moomins have gone. You're right to bring that up because when I think about reading these stories I'm reminded of early Bergman, Summer with Monica. That kind of amazing strange, weird thing

that basically it's shit, the winter is shit and then the summer is incredibly intense and then there's a shit winter and you do get that sort of feeling that there's a lot of the stories in the winter book are about darkness and snow and ice and coldness and

but there's also wonderful things about it's a brilliant story about her dad having a party and the mum not involving herself in the party but the dad is basically just, her dad brings a bunch of drunk mates around and they have a play on the balalaika

and they have a hooli and the mum's job is to not interfere but to make sure there's plenty of pickled herring in the fridge so they can refresh themselves at various times. It's about as joyful as it gets. What are you reading this week, Andy? I have been reading, successfully

from cover to cover, A Brief History of Time by Professor Stephen Hawking. Yes, I think that's utterly deserved. Thank you. Which is right up there, if I'm not wrong, along with 1984 as the most talked about, least read book of all time.

1984? Apparently that's the book that most people lie about having read. Is it really? Can I tell you a terrible terrible dark secret? I have never read 1984. I've talked about it. I've just never read it. It didn't come up. I've read it for you.

I've read it so many times. Linda Grant is looking at me with such disdain. I'm just being in disappointment. I've read pretty much everything else that Orwell ever wrote. I've read all of the other shit novels. The Nodderhip. Keep the Asperdus flying.

You're too good. I don't know why I didn't read it. I'd always felt it was sort of... John liked his early B-sides and then after he saw that... Not much, actually. What I love, what everybody loves as Orwell is the essays, which are beyond compare, but

Coming Up For Air... I like Coming Up For Air. Yeah, it's alright. Anyway... That's another podcast, by the way. Anyway, I'm just saying... Much as I'd like to talk about Orwell. You're talking about Stephen Hawking. So, A Brief History Of Time. I was challenged to read A Brief History Of Time by a friend of mine who I've known for 30 years, who said to me,

looked down a list of books that I was planning to read, and he said, but these are all fiction, Andy. These are all fiction. Why don't you read any nonfiction? I, my friend, he's a maths prodigy. He loves maths. And he said, you've got A Brief History of Time on here. And until he challenged me to read it, to be honest with you,

although it was on my to-read list, I had no real plans to read it. But I thought, well, I'll give it a go. No real plans. No real plans to read it, yeah. But I did read it, and I found it quite tough going. Famously, Chewie, famously it's a book more started than finished, isn't it? And I had to read several chapters three times, particularly the bits about quantum mechanics and imaginary numbers but i did find it very enlightening and it was really good to see how all those terms that you've heard of like black hole and event horizon and string theory and

uncertainty principle etc fit together though pleased don't ask me now on the spot to explain to you how they do fit together obviously i Obviously, I can't do that. Because I, obviously, knowing you were reading it, I had to dig it up again. I've not read it, I'll be honest. I've read. I've skimmed it this week. Has it got thinner as well? I'm sure the version I had was about double the thickness. No, it's actually got slightly longer.

But this is a slightly personal thing. But do you remember that John Gray, do you remember the guy who used to run the Waterstones in Aberdeen he was single-handedly responsible for making this book a bestseller he read it and he was I think a bit of a math geek and kind of went mental for it in Aberdeen I mean bought like 200 copies and they all sold and then I mean it seems like the least likely word of mouth book you could possibly imagine.

But that's sort of what it became. And, of course, the problem with it is, I have to say, I found it weirdly less forbidding than I'd expected it to. Yeah. But I still, if you say to me, string theory, I'm going to struggle to say it succinctly and interestingly. Yes, yes. Although there are lots of little, wonderful little moments in it, I think. The whole black hole thing is so gorgeous.

I realised I'd like... Of a universe that's sort of consuming itself. I love that. And where does it go? Where does all the stuff go? Where is the universe? Where's the outside? Where are all this stuff?

Where does it go when it's not in the universe that's i mean which he kind of glosses over let's be honest i realized i'd like 40 years of prep before reading this book because of most of the concepts were familiar to me via 40 years of reading douglas adams and watching dr who and star trek and films called the black hole and event horizon and what i don't know about the general theory of relativity i do make up for with watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, and films called The Black Hole and Event Horizon. And what I don't know about the general theory of relativity, I do make up for with a solid foundation in crappy 70s and 80s sci-fi, right? And on that basis, the real revelation for me, when reading A Brief History of Time,

was that I found a mistake. No, God. I found a mistake in A Brief History of Time, a book which has been in print for 25 years and has sold in excess of 10 million copies. 10 million copies. I am going to read you the erroneous passage, and I'm going to ask you to tell me what's wrong with it.

Okay? Erroneous passage. Here we go. Coming up. The other possible way to resolve the paradoxes of time travel might be called the alternative histories hypothesis. The idea here is that when time travellers go back to the past, they enter alternative histories which differ from recorded history.

Thus, they can act freely without the constraint of consistency with their previous history. Steven Spielberg had fun with this notion in the Back to the Future films. Marty McFly was able to go back and change his parents' courtship to a more satisfactory history. What is the schoolboy era there? It was directed by a person other than Steven Spielberg. Absolutely.

Back to the Future was written and directed by robert zemeckis and bob game yeah and so saying it's and steven spielberg was involved he was the executive producer but it would be a bit like attributing the success of a brief history of time to the finance director of its publisher bantam books rather than its author professor steven hawking and one of the other things i learned about A Brief History of Time while reading it is that Professor Hawking is not the kind of chap who would let an error like that go easily. Now, the first question that struck me is why has nobody spotted that mistake in A Brief History of Time over the last 25 years, which sold 10 million copies? Well, clearly, one, it's not what the book's about. so uh some might argue it doesn't matter i wouldn't

argue that but some might say that but secondly also it's on page 183 isn't it quite near the end of the book suggesting the end of the book has indeed not been read that frequently and there's also in that paragraph a grammatical error in there which suggests that even the proofreader didn't make it as far as page 183 of a brief history of time it's all circumstantial evidence i can't prove it finally the last thing i want to say about a brief history of time is i really loved professor hawking's author biography presumably self-penned at the back of the book which starts with the line, Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford in 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo.

Just pluck that fact out of the air. That's a bit like me saying Andy Miller was born in Croydon in 1968, six years after Marvel Comics published the first issue of The Incredible Hulk, as though it were just a naturally flowing fact. Is that true? It is true. I researched it. At the point being, Professor Hawking threw out the book to his great credit. He's a very, very clever man,

but he's very, very keen to place himself in the lineage of Galileo, Newton, Einstein and... Andy Miller. Professor Hawking. You know what? I'm really pleased to have read it. It is very much a horrible phrase outside my comfort zone, but it is very much outside my comfort zone. And yet I did find...

He does write really well. Yeah, he writes really well. And also it's good for your brain to be pushed a bit and struggle to get your head around things you wouldn't normally get your head around. So I'm very pleased to have read it. Okay, it's time now for an advert. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone. So you can't normally get your head around so i'm very pleased to have read it okay it's time now for an advert when you're working out at planet fitness it's a judgment

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I think it's obvious to anyone listening that I and everyone gathered here would choose Jean Rees, including our guest today, Linda Grant. Hello, Linda. Hello. Thank you for coming in. I would not choose Jean Rees to be alone with on it, as well. Unless you brought something to drink, actually. Linda, author of novels such as The Clothes on Their Back

and most recently Upstairs at the Party, as well as a short book, which I would just like to talk a little bit about first, called I Murdered My Library, which is an account of... A Kindle single. How you disposed of a lifetime's worth of books didn't you i did i moved to a flat which was half the size of the previous one and i didn't have room for all my

books and i had to have a massive painful traumatic clear out And one of the things which was, you imagine that, you know, you're building this library and that in your old age, you will reread these books. And in fact, you know, I do reread. But when I got down off the shelf, my 1970s paperbacks of I have the complete works of Dickens, Penguin editions, you open them, the pages sort of smelt you know of cheap paper and bad ink and they fell out because the glue had perished and i couldn't read them because yeah and couldn't read them because the writing was too small the typeface was too small so um so i was sort of throwing them throwing them them, throwing them. And people asked me, you know, did you get, you know, do you send them to a book dealer? Nobody is interested. Nobody is interested in 1970s paperbacks. You know, the next generation doesn't read, they're not interested. The book dealers are not interested. There were no first editions. There was nothing like that because I didn't buy first editions. I bought paperbacks.

So it was very, very traumatic. But I have to say my entire collection of Jean Rees did survive the cut. And the one which I have in front of me is dated, as we used to do rather pretentiously in those days, August 1980. So that was when I was reading Jean Rees in the 70s, late 70s. You were saying to me a little bit earlier on that you read all of her novels in quick succession back then. Yeah. White Sargasso Sea was published in the 60s, I think. And I remember they had that in the school library,

and that was the first time I'd heard of her, and I read that. And then they republished, Penguin republished all the Paris novels. And I must have been in my late 20s when I and everybody else I know read all of Jean Rees. And I've been trying to figure out why it was that in this kind of great feminist phase of our lives we thought for reasons which are now completely opaque to me that she was some kind of great feminist discovery because she is not i mean she is she's not a sister i mean she is the writer which I cherish. Of 20th century writers, she is the writer I cherish the most. Having said that, I haven't actually reread her because, as the writer Susan Hill said,

you can't read two in succession because you'd commit suicide but i remember reading them at the time and finding them indescribably painful because what they were actually telling you was we were in our 20s it was the 70s we were absolutely arrogantly self-confident in our ability to change the world, have as much sex as we wanted, to smoke as much dope as we wanted, to do anything we wanted, to be anything we wanted. And then you have this series of very, very short novels about women who are 15, 20 years older than you who are sitting in a room drinking themselves to death.

And it was, I think, the first intimation to us that we were not immortal, that we were not young and going to stay young forever. So she was a kind of terrifying and corrosive and eye-opening read back then. And rereading her now, what struck me about her is that the, you know, I remember when I was reading her at the time thinking, why don't you get a job? You know, get a job. the time thinking, why don't you get a job?

You know, get a job! The Jean Rees heroine does not get a job if she can help it. So what she does is... The most annoying girl I've ever met. She sits in... That's the thing, reading Good Night, Midnight, which I've never read before, which is brilliant.

Good morning, Midnight. It's that thing of, oh my god just just you're so smart and you're so beautiful and you're so difficult just be less difficult can i just can i just give do a quick recap of gene reese's life because it's germane to what we're talking about clearly gene reese born 1890 in dominica in the west indies died 1979 in devon england aged 88 published a book of short stories in 1927 called the left bank with a big introduction from her editor and lover ford maddox ford and then then in the late 20s into the late 30s, she published four novels, Postures, which became Quartet subsequently. In 1931, After Leaving Mr. McKenzie, 1934, Voyage in the Dark, 1939, Good Morning, Midnight. Each of those novels in commercial terms

was progressively less successful than the previous one. And after the publication of Good Morning Midnight, which kind of disappeared, so did Jean Rees. And for many years, it was believed that many people thought that she was dead. She moved to Devon and vanished, and her books all fell out of print. Devon and vanished and her books all fell out of print and in 1955

from 1955 to 1960 she lived in Bude in Cornwall which she referred to in letters as Bude the Obscure and then she moved to a village in Devon called Sheraton Fitzpain which she described

as quote a dull spot which even drink can't enliven much. And while she was living there, she was accused of being a witch and was shunned by most of the village. I found this quote from the chairman of the Sheraton Fitzpain Parish Council, who in 2010 was asked how he felt about Jean referring to Sheraton Fitzpain as a dull spot,

which even drink can't enliven much. And he responded by saying, There's always something going on. It's exceptionally friendly. There's football, cricket, darts and skittles. There's a drama club, a WI and a church. He added, We barely knew Jean because she kept herself to herself quite a lot.

Um, so, so she basically, she's languishing in obscurity for many, many years. And then thanks to, uh, Francis Wyndham and Diana Aptill.

Yeah. They coax the novel wide Sargasso sea out of her, which she spends years writing 17, maybe even 20 years. And we have a little clip here of Jean Rhys being interviewed at the end of her life after she had finally achieved great success with Wide Sog Associe, which won prizes and is widely agreed to be a classic. And here she is talking, I think, in her interview with the Paris Review, talking a little bit about how it felt to write and live the life of a writer.

When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written about being happy, never. I didn't want to. Besides, I don't think you can describe being happy. I've never had a long period of being happy. Do you think anybody has? I think you can be peaceful for quite a long time, but to be happy is different, isn't it? And that's

a bit rare. I can't have feelings. But then altogether, I think, well, I think if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than right. If I had my life all over again and could choose. right if i had my life all over again and could choose i'm just going to read now the synopsis on the back cover of linda's coffee of good morning midnight can anyone imagine this getting through a marketing meeting today here we go here we go this isn't so you you're in the station bookstore you're looking for something to read here we we go. Back in Paris for a quiet, sane fortnight, Sasha Jensen has just been rescued by a friend from drinking herself to death in a Bloomsbury bedsitter.

Despite a transformation act, new clothes and a blonde, sondre hair dye, Sasha still feels, quote, not quite as good as new, unquote. Streets, shops and bars vividly evoke her Paris path. Feckless husband, Eno, her dead baby. Sundry humiliations in abject jobs. One night, a gigolo mistakes Sasha for a rich woman. She still has her fur coat.

And their subsequent liaison somehow distills the essence of all that has gone before. I mean, the thing is, that makes this book sound relentlessly miserable. I don't think it is relentlessly miserable, is it, Linda? It's quite funny. Yeah, it is. In a dark way. Yes, it is. I mean, the thing about the Jean Rhys heroine of those Paris novels

is they're all kind of pretty much the same. They get progressively older. And I remember thinking when I was reading them, they were a bit like what would happen if Jane Austen characters were sort of suddenly moved forwards into the 20th century and were trying to survive economically. That's so brilliant and what happens to these to the gene reese character and there's something i mean the gene reese characters in all these novels we might think of them as being autobiographical none of them are artists there is no sense whatsoever that any of these people are writers. They are not writers. They are women who have fallen off the edge of what is the life that women are supposed to lead. for an ex lover to send them a check so they can go and buy a dress to be presentable enough to go and sit in a cafe to be picked up by a man who will support them financially so they live in

this kind of world of incredible economic precariousness and because you know there's no sense of these women having any form of career just i think why we found it so strange in the 70s as young feminists but what they do is because of the dependence on men the jobs the only jobs they could get kind of you know jobs in a cafe jobs in a shop and she hasn't got she can't pull it. She hasn't got the kind of work ethic. So, of course, what happens every single time is prostitution. And so the great insight about these novels is how women can fall into prostitution because of this, you know, this world of dependence of men. And they're terrifying, absolutely terrifying. But also, sorry, you've wound me up and I'm going here.

No, you guys are absolutely brilliant. Well, what every Jean Rhys heroine is, absolute heroine character, is absolutely obsessed with is clothes, right? Clothes are utterly important so she spends this money on having this blonde saundra ash blonde hair she's got a mink she's always talking about her necessity for clothes but there is this sense of of these women being absolutely flayed. She lives for this world of, you know, the feminine, the kind of, you know, the female stereotype. And beneath it, there is this always a strong sense of not fitting in. And there's a little passage here, in which he says, this is my attitude to life. Please,

please, Monsieur, Madame, Mr. Mrs. and Miss, I'm trying so hard to be like you. I know I don't succeed, but look how hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat. Every morning, an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everybody else. Every word I say has chains around its ankles. Every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. It's absolutely extraordinary stuff I know I don't succeed but look how hard I try I mean that's one of the things that I think is incredible about her writing, incredible about this book

is how quotable it is I wrote down some of the quotes here I'll just read a couple of them here a room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is and one day the fierce wolf that walks A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside, and that's all any room is. And one day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out.

And I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only, to be left alone. It's so beautiful and kind of self-dramatising. I would like to, the only thing, and I'm going to respond to what Linda was saying slightly, is that although the characters, the Jean Rees character, as we call her, although they aren't writers, their occupations are things that Jean Rees did.

Yes. Mannequin, showgirl, a prostitute. Jean Rhys did all those things. That wonderful scene early in the book where she gets sacked for, you know, basically just being herself, you know. For being herself. And this is the thing that Jean said. She specifically said in an interview,

I write about myself because that's all I really know. So the writing is extracted i agree but the the interiority horrible word again i apologize but the the interiority of those characters they're all gene aren't they yes they i think they are all the interiority of them is all gene um but you know i think so many you, I think there's so many writers would have done this as I am a frustrated artist, you know, and she doesn't do that at all. I mean, I think that

one of the important aspects of her is the fact that she came from this very, very strange background, which is as an Anglo in the Caribbean. So when you read White Sock read white sock association she's actually racist but she comes to um europe and she experiences the coldness the coldness of the climate but also

the coldness of the people but she doesn't really belong in the caribbean and she she feels that she doesn't belong in the caribbean but she doesn't belong here either and so this powerful sense of alienation is running through absolutely everything and in a way she's alienated from the human race she's and what she wants is love she wants to be loved she just that is all she wants that's the thing for me that made, I mean, not having read it before, it's a total revelation. And it's just every, you know, I'm going to read them all now because I just want that voice. And there's just little things.

I've never read anyone who captures that sense of the desire for self-improvement and at the same time the undermining of that. You know, it's like she's... So I love this. The thing is, to have a programme, not to leave anything to chance, no gaps, no trailing around aimlessly

with cheap gramophone records starting up in your head, no, here this happened, here that happened. Above all, no crying in public, no crying at all, if you can help it and of course the book is basically just punctuated with her crying at various i mean there's something wonderful about that sense of being inside somebody's head and you know that she doesn't want to do i've never really quite read anyone who's done that interior monologue as believably it's like somebody talking to themselves you know That's one of the wonderful things about the book.

And also that she has a kind of, you know, why do such terrible things happen? Answer, because I expect, create and deserve them. She can't be free of her own sense of anger, self-persecution, but kind of despair, but humour at the despair. It kind of goes round and round you know instinct for self-preservation she has no instinct for self-preservation whatsoever you know there is no common sense there there's never any common sense she's reckless i mean she

buys a painting when she hasn't got any money she gives gives Gigolo, you know, her money. She's crazy. You know, she's crazy, and you want to give her a shake. Isn't it an amazing thing is that somehow you care about the journey? I mean, it's like, you know, you think, who is this? It ought to be depressing, but it isn't. Because the language is so precise. Yes, the language is incredibly spare.

We should say that. Yes, I want to talk about the language. Here we go. I have no pride, no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don't belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad. It doesn't matter. There I am, like one of those straws which floats around the edge of a whirlpool

and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre, where everything is stagnant and everything is calm. Isn't that beautiful? It's just so great. Punch the air brilliant, isn't it? It's just for that sense of somebody whose life is, she doesn't, there's no volition there. Linda, you were going to say about the style in which she writes,

it's incredibly pared back and restrained. It's very pared back. volition there linda you were going to say about the style in which she writes is incredibly um pared back and restrained it's very pared back it's very simple there are no linguistic fireworks going on there at all there's not a great deal of there is some descriptive writing but she does something she does something which i find i'm you can't I can't understand what it is she's doing because you read page page page and then she says there's one sentence and your stomach flips and you think she has prepared the ground here absolutely pages and pages have prepared you for one sentence which is not doing anything showy or flashy but it's like a punch to the stomach i i i take it around the wrist of the dead baby oh yeah i would like to say that i i my experience

reading these books is obviously very different to linda's because i jean reese is my favorite writer that i've discovered in the last 10 years i Amazing. I read Wide Sog S.O.C. about 10 years ago, and I thought it was fantastic. It's fantastic. It's a classic, as I said earlier. But several years after that, then I think I read After Leaving Mr. McKenzie. And shortly after reading After Leaving Mr. McKenzie,

I read a book of short stories, Tigers Are Better Looking. Tigers Are Better Looking, currently out of print. Penguin books, if you're listening, bring it back. And I felt a very strong sense, Tigers of Bedlam, currently out of print. Penguin Books, if you're listening, bring it back. And I felt a very strong sense, oh, this is like all those Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton books that I've read and loved. But wait a minute, and Malcolm Lowry, but wait a minute, it's written in the 1930s,

they're written by a woman. And the literary quality of them, with all due respect to three of my favourite authors, Green, lots of Lowry, and most of Hamilton, the sheer literary quality in the way that Linda was just talking about is way above that. I struggle to see – and I say that reading them here in the 21st century they seem incredibly modern to me and the sensibility seems very modern they must have been perplexing in the extreme insane in the 1930s if you're reading this in 1939 yeah i have to say again pleasure the pleasure thing about reading is to find a voice that is that absolutely clear i mean it's so rare i mean you know you're not i i think now i could pick up a book randomly by anybody uh and and spot a jean reese i mean it's that she's that good and that quick at getting that sensibility linda you

were saying um on twitter uh you said a brilliant thing about what it's like to read Jean Rees now. Yes. Well, if what you demand from fiction, which is now heavily

demanded from Amazon reviews and Goodreads reviews, and particularly book groups groups is likeable characters. You are not going to find any likeable characters in Jean Rees. And, you know, as such, there is no one more bracingly, literally serious. Not relatable, isn't it? You want that sort of like, but with serious misgivings. I mean, sort of like.

Yeah, not relatable. Not relatable at all. You know, this demand to soften the novel by requiring that it be likeable characters, and this is an even worse expression, that I can root for. You know, which is apparently a phrase which originates with Kurt Vonnegut, which I can never forgive him for.

I only found this out quite recently. I don't think he probably meant it quite as... Well, apparently he had some rules for writing, and one of them was character. There must be at least one character that you can root for. I mean, are we rooting for Sasha? I mean, not really. You're not really rooting.

You're just looking with your hands slightly over your eyes going, oh, my God, I'm watching a car crash. But the truthfulness of it, that's the thing, right? It's truthful. It's absolutely truthful. Matthew and I had a water cooler conversation earlier in the week and he said, pretty fucking depressing. Hey, Linda, you said you hadn't re-read this book since the 70s.

Yeah. Was it as good as you remembered it? Was it better than you remembered it? I think that it didn't have the effect on me that it had when I was in my 20s, which was entirely a personal, subjective one, which was terror, right? Because I think that when i was in my 20s there were these you know you probably they probably exist less now but sort of middle-aged women living in a bedsit on limited means you know who would be you know hitting the ceiling

with a you know the broom handle to tell you to keep quiet. You know, these sort of spinsterish women that you're all completely terrified of being bed, sit, land. And, you know, this is cockroaches, you know, poverty, all of that kind of thing. And I think we saw this kind of abyss, you know, this kind of gulf of horror that, you know, possibly. And, you know, you get to the age where you're like, oh, that's all right, I'm okayyss you know this kind of gulf of horror that you know possibly and you you know you get to the age you're like oh that's all right i'm okay fine that didn't happen um we're out the other side yeah we're out the other side of that um but i i think that rereading it, rereading her style is so extraordinary. I remember having a conversation with a publisher who was very taken aback when I said that I thought that Jean Rees was one of the great writers of the 20th century. And he said, slightly sneeringly, he said, well, I put her on the par with Evelyn Waugh.

Oh. Yeah. I mean, I love Evelyn Waugh. You know, but this woman is doing something so far beyond, you know, what Waugh was doing, even though I like him very much. I can see some of the similarities, you know, particularly in those early novels. But these are not social novels. I think that, you know, the pain of reading her has subsided. And I now think to myself,

how is she being read by people who are coming at her for the first time? And now I find out. I would like to make just just a very quick uh mention for a book that was recommended to me by eric anderson at lonesome reader called difficult women by david plant which is a memoir of working with in reverse order jermaine greer sonia orwell and gene Jesus Christ. And the description of ministering to Jean's requirements in her 80s while attempting to coax her autobiography out of her is one of the most hair-raising reads imaginable. And that sense of what it must have been like to be gene reese at that stage is very brilliantly

communicated there which brings us the the being gene reese brings us to to at last mr matthew clayton with a tenuous link tenuous link well i was uh i was thinking about that i was thinking about our connection to her and um how we kind of bring her back to life. And when I was reading the book, I was interested to discover, Linda, you talked earlier about the hats and the clothes, and there's also perfumes mentioned. Le Heubleu. Yeah, Le Heubleu, which was the perfume that the main character wears and is also the perfume that was Jean's favorite perfume.

And I was amazed to discover that it's still being manufactured so i went to debenhams at lunchtime and i've got in this bag i went in there and kind of embarrassed myself by um going to the kind of tester thing and getting some going and asking if they had a blur and they did so i've got some here so i thought we could all brilliant brilliant i i've got some for us all to smell and i thought andy maybe you could start by smelling the glove smell the glove um thank you very much it's on my it's on here it's on the glove yeah it's on the glove actually produce a bottle it costs 80 quid linda yeah i know so you sprayed the gloves i sprayed the gloves what do you think it

smells like can you smell it well to me it smells of mr sheen yeah if that's what's mr g i'm not really i'm not good how would you describe it i can give you the manufacturer's description go on so it's described as it opens with a spicy, sweet aniseed note that leads into rose, carnation, violet. The soft and powery floral notes rest on a bed of vanilla. Do they? Yeah, I think so. And it's supposed to evoke the...

Is this the perfume that... That Jean wore. And that Sasha wore in the book. Yes. Yes, it is, yeah. How exciting. Just mix that smell with some Pernod. Yeah, and then you've got...

You have the smell. I mean, can we just say that very few people have ever written better about drink, ever. Yeah. I mean, she's just... She's really... I love this great passage. It's amazing, actually.

I have an irresistible longing for a long, strong drink to make me forget that once again I have given damnable human beings the right to pity me and laugh at me. Isn't that brilliant? That's every time I've ever been in a bar ever. Damnable human beings.

And the book is, obviously you can buy the book and the perfume on Amazon. Which do you think has the highest customer rating? The book or the perfume? The book. So, Linda, you're going for the book.

Andy, you're going for perfume. Well, I have to go for the perfume, obviously. Well, it's actually the book. The book's 4.4. The perfume, only 4.1. Well, that's because... Statistically accurate. And that's because it's a perfume which is dated,

if you see what I mean. It's very old lady. It smells very old lady. The thing about perfume, if you're a woman, is you have to be... Men don't like what they perceive to be old lady perfume and i remember i had just come from um a perfumier who and i had two two cents one in each hand and i was at the hairdressers and i said to the hairdresser male which one do you like and he

said don't like that one it's old lady yeah um he said, don't like that one, it's old lady. Yeah. So contemporary men don't like strong scents. Interesting. Matthew, are those your gloves or did you just find them in the Debenhams? I do love the gloves. I'm afraid they're my gloves. Now you're going to be smelling of Jean Rees on my cycle home.

Yeah. Can I tell you one thing that my QI research threw up many years ago, which is extraordinary, is that they tested a lot of chemicals on sperm, and the main chemical that's in Lily of the Valley, they discovered, made sperm swim three times as fast as any other. So you know your kind of grandma's knicker drawers? They used to have those. I don't think they have them now,

but you'd have Lily of the Valley sachets in your drawers. Possibly all worked out for the best. I mean, the final thing about the perfume, I think, is maybe one of the reasons why she loved it so much is the stopper of the perfume is a hollow heart. Oh, there it is. Very good. Tenuous, but so, so, so, so... stopper of the perfume is a hollow heart. There it is. Tenuous, but so, so,

so, so, so nice. Well, thanks for listening. Thank you, Linda. Thank you for coming in to talk about Jean Rees. Thank you, Matthew, for your tireless research and your ability to go into Debenhams and smell the glove. Thank you, John. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

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