Difficult Women Read online

  DAVID PLANTE is the author of nine novels, including his Francoeur Trilogy—The Family, The Country, and The Woods. He has also written several works of nonfiction in addition to Difficult Women, most recently The Pure Lover, and published two volumes of selections from his diary, Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart. He lives in Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece.

  SCOTT SPENCER is the author of eleven novels, including Endless Love, A Ship Made of Paper, Man in the Woods, and River Under the Road. He has taught at Columbia University, Williams College, University of Iowa, University of Virginia, and the Bard Prison Initiative.

  DIFFICULT WOMEN

  A Memoir of Three

  DAVID PLANTE

  Introduction by

  SCOTT SPENCER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1979, 1983 by David Plante

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Scott Spencer

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art: Grace Hartigan, Grazie Rosetti, 1995; © the Estate of Grace Hartigan; collection of Don and Rosie Shepard, The Woodlands, Texas;

  image courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Plante, David author. | Spencer, Scott author of introduction. Title:

  Difficult women / by David Plante ; introduction by Scott Spencer.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059708| ISBN 9781681371498 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681371504 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Plante, David—Friends and associates. | Women—Great Britain—Biography. | Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. | Rhys, Jean. | Orwell, Sonia. | Greer, Germaine, 1939–

  Classification: LCC PS3566.L257 Z463 2017 | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059708

  ISBN 978-1-68137-150-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  JEAN

  SONIA

  GERMAINE

  THE THREE

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  David plante’s Difficult Women, his account of his life as a young writer in London in the late 1970s, was first published in 1983; decades later, it continues to divide readers between those who are captivated by its grace and wit, and those who perceive it as disloyal, improper, unkind, and pitiless. A writer of my acquaintance known for her transgressive fiction bridles at the mere mention of Plante’s name. Because of this book, she has said, she will never read another word by the man.

  There is certainly something startling about the almost childlike frankness with which Plante depicts his three subjects—Jean Rhys in her final years, the feminist activist and theorist Germaine Greer, and Sonia Orwell, who, though married to George Orwell for only fourteen weeks before being widowed, carried his (pen) name to the end of her life. Doubtless, my initial pleasure in reading this book was in part voyeuristic. Plante has said that everything in Difficult Women comes word for word from his diaries, and his observations do have the unmediated intimacy of a secret journal—any thought he has troubled himself to record, he is willing to share. Its revelations, particularly (and somewhat notoriously) those about Jean Rhys, may approach poor taste—or more importantly risk being accused of poor taste. But the risk of offending others can stir up something vital in a writer, and Plante’s gamble with his own reputation has paid off: Difficult Women remains an illuminating work—the writer never seems to bring himself up short, never tells himself I better not say that.

  In Difficult Women a preternaturally alert novelist describes how he was bullied and disrespected by three formidable women. Plante’s three subjects seem to have no idea or concern that as soon as he returns to his room he will be writing down the slights, slips of the tongue, and the bad behavior he has witnessed. Here, for example, is Plante enduring Sonia Orwell’s spiky hospitality:

  At table, I tried to take my place in the talk, but most of it—as I discovered often happened in London—had to do with people I didn’t know. Whenever I did speak up, Sonia glared at me and said, “That’s silly.” I kept sweating. . . . The conversation turned to a writer whose work I didn’t like, and I said something about it, and Sonia said to me harshly, almost shouting, “What do you know about writing?”

  In incidents like this, one can feel both the affront and the social claustrophobia of the moment, and an understanding is reached between memoirist and reader: how not to cheer on the Extra Man who is treated harshly? The diary becomes a refuge where wounded pride is offered succor—for certain kinds of poison, writing it down word for word is the best antidote. Yet questions about tact and taste continue to orbit the book, presenting moral challenges not just for the writer but for the reader as well. Difficult Women was Plante’s first sustained work of nonfiction and reading it now I am reminded of what Janet Malcolm said about writers who insinuate themselves into the lives of others: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Malcolm famously argued that when a writer speaks to a subject there is at the core of the transaction a kind of seduction and betrayal, putting an indelible moral stain on the fabric of the relationship.

  He [the writer] is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

  One cannot help but wonder if Difficult Women was something of an ambush. And, if so, what was the moral justification for reporting moments in the life of Sonia Orwell and Jean Rhys, both deceased before the book’s publication, which they might plausibly denounce as an invasion of privacy? Plante is gentler with the living, and Germaine Greer makes it through largely unblemished. Who and what is not fair game in a writer’s work? Whatever rules of decorum govern the writing of memoir, Plante flagrantly disregards them, reminding me of the great blues lyric by Sonny Boy Williamson: Don’t start me talkin’ / I’ll tell everything I know. Of course, someone willing to do that has a real hold on our attention. In Plante’s book the past, rendered without the faintest elegiac quiver, and seemingly without fear of consequence, remains shocking, as if it were still present.

  Plante’s memoir has some of the same power as his novels. From the outset of his career he was attuned to the indignities of aging, and to how our bodies wordlessly confess to our helpless animal nature. In The Family, The Woods, and The Country, his trilogy about a Catholic French-Canadian working-class family in Rhode Island, Plante’s fascination with what many writers would choose to omit is apparent from the opening pages. “When his father leaned forward the bathrobe came away from his chest, and Daniel saw underneath to an armpit.” Later in that same novel: “Daniel left his mother and brother and walked towards the exit
to go to the toilet. He passed the old women sitting in a long row along the side of the hall, under the pipes. . . . Their mouths were turned down at the corners; they had chin hair; their arms were fat and loose-fleshed, and they kept them folded. Daniel walked at a distance from them, imagining they would emit a smell.”

  Plante’s preoccupation with what is most unguarded and vulnerable in his characters, and his willingness to describe the body’s sorrows and failures give his novels toughness. But though his descriptions and perceptions are blunt, his style is elegant, sternly lyrical. In a work of nonfiction, however, this same mandarin funkiness raised readers’ hackles. His portrait of Jean Rhys drew particular censure. We see her incapacitated by drink. We see her helpless in her hotel bathroom. It has to be said that taking down Sonia Orwell’s own repellent posh remarks and telling us about Germaine Greer lamenting the state of her ass didn’t win Plante many friends, either.

  In fact, Difficult Women—and, by extension, Plante himself—made enemies. Mary-Kay Wilmers of the London Review of Books warned him that “telling funny stories about your friends is a tricky business if you intend to go on having friends. . . . No one who records everything he sees his friends do and hears them say does so without malice, yet something besides malice must have prompted Mr. Plante to write up his diary for publication, especially as he can’t make his friends look silly without looking pretty silly himself.”

  Plante is too expert a writer not to know what kind of attention these pages were going to draw, and too perceptive about human motivations and vulnerabilities not to know that in exposing others he is simultaneously exposing himself. He doubtlessly knew that by publishing his diaries he was courting stern criticism. He may have been courting social ostracism as well—and this could account for some of the project’s dark appeal both for writer and reader. Something similar has been theorized about Truman Capote’s last book, Answered Prayers, that it was Capote’s way to get his phone to stop ringing, and to spring free of the La Côte Basque crowd once and for all.

  Part of the allure of Difficult Women is trying to puzzle out what motivated Plante’s exposure of his friends and himself. The literary artist from hardscrabble New England beginnings was living now in old England, perhaps not as a well-known writer, but connected well enough—Stephen Spender was a friend—to receive some fairly choice invitations. Perhaps his willingness to report on the vulnerabilities of his companions, all of them more prominent than he was, and most with more money at their disposal, was a way of reminding himself that they were all as flawed and human as the people with whom he was raised. It could also have been an attempt to exorcise their influence. Like a man trapped within the push and pull of a relationship with his impossible mother, Plante here is grappling with his attraction to women who are all outwardly more powerful than he is, and none of whom take him terribly seriously as a writer—though the sense of affront is too palpable to be mere literary vanity. On display here is a man getting his own back on more levels than one.

  The portraits may be stark, but in seeking to reveal the irreducible core of his subject, to display each self as it exists in spite of itself, compulsively, he succeeds in making these portraits live—and endure. These difficult women are recognizably real people. And by virtue of not explaining himself, and making no excuses, Plante succeeds too in adding to the portraits of his three subjects a self-portrait that is no less compelling and puzzling.

  In its way, Difficult Women is a deeply generous work. Plante invites us into his world; we see what he sees, and even in those places where we cringe a bit, we remain rapt. Plante’s willingness to make his relationship to us more important than his relationship to his friends forges a powerful bond between writer and reader. He entrusts us with this record of his life, without filters, flattery, or fear, and we make of it what we will. When I first read this book thirty years ago, I mistakenly thought that this bond between Plante and the reader came wholly at the expense of his subjects. Now it reads differently for me. The trapped marginal Extra Man writer is a comic figure here, while the three tempestuous women Plante portrays loom large. Young Daniel in The Family may have been afraid to walk past the women sitting near the bathroom. In Difficult Women David Plante is prepared to follow the story wherever it takes him, blithely burning his bridges as he proceeds, and the result has the gruesome beauty of the portraits of Lucian Freud.

  —SCOTT SPENCER

  DIFFICULT WOMEN

  JEAN

  1

  I asked at reception for Mrs. Hamer. It always gave me pleasure to use her married name, not the name she was known by. She once told me some of the names she had used in her life to keep her life secret, and I forgot them. To refer to her as Mrs. Hamer, which was a private name, and not as Jean Rhys, meant, I suppose, that I was a part of her private world, the world she wanted to remain forever her world. I wondered why I should want to be a part of it.

  The receptionist, an old woman with lank hair, looked at the register. Behind her was a mirror and on either side of the mirror were white glass shells with lights inside. She said, “I don’t think we have a Mrs. Hamer.” I said, “Jean Rhys.” “Yes,” she said, “she’s waiting in the pink lounge.”

  I was carrying a bottle of wine. The carpet of the pink lounge was patterned with large soft pink roses on a grey background. The wallpaper was pink. The floor lamps, lit, had great dark pink shades. Jean was sitting at the corner of a red sofa, under a lamp; she wore a wide-brimmed pink hat. Her head was lowered, her fist up to her chin, and she was staring at the floor, her blue eyes bulging a little. She did not look up as I approached.

  I said, “Jean.”

  With a sudden jolt of her small, hunched body, as if I had frightened her, she dropped her hand and raised her head to look at me. “Oh David,” she said, “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you.”

  I put the bottle of wine on the little table before the sofa and kissed her. “You’re looking marvellous,” I said.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “I’m dying.”

  I sat on the couch by her.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said. “Will you go and buy me a bottle of sweet vermouth? They don’t have any in this hotel.” She laughed, a small ha, that lifted her shoulders. “It’s that kind of hotel.” She looked about, as with sudden suspicion, and gave another small shrugging laugh. “A big dreary hotel in South Kensington filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth.”

  On another red sofa across the room, and in big red armchairs, were old people, men and women, their canes held alongside them or between their legs; none were talking, and some were asleep.

  When I went out quickly to an off-licence it occurred to me the day was bright, and I was very aware, when I came back to the hotel, of the grey interior, and all the lights lit with dim bulbs. I ordered glasses and ice from a waiter with satin lapels and a crooked black bow tie.

  As I poured out the drinks on a table before us, Jean sat back and crossed her legs. Her body seemed bent in many ways; she had to grab one leg and heft it across the other, and, once crossed, you thought she could never uncross them. I gave her a drink and she smiled. As she drank she pulled at the brim of her hat.

  This was December 1975. I hadn’t seen her in a year, since the last time she had come up to London for a few weeks.

  “Now,” she said, “give me your news. I hope it’s cheerful.”

  I tried to make my news entertaining; she listened, drinking and pulling at her hat, her large clear blue eyes staring attentively at me. Sometimes she laughed.

  “Now,” she said, “I’ll tell you my news.”

  She prepared herself by taking a drink.

  “Well,” she said, “I got a letter from the tax people. They said I hadn’t paid my taxes. I got very upset. I thought I had. I’d sent everything off to my accountant, as he’d told me to. But a tax man came to the house and said I had to pay my taxes. I said I’d written to my accountant, bu
t he said that didn’t matter, I had to pay. I said I couldn’t. He said, ‘I’m only here on orders.’ I said, ‘That’s what the fascists used to say.’ He left angry. The next day I got a letter saying if I didn’t pay my taxes they’d take my house away from me. I rang up my accountant. He said, ‘Oh, they’re always threatening to do things like that.’ But I was worried. I was so worried, I fell. I’ve been dying ever since.”

  “I hate tax people,” I said.

  She bared her teeth. “Hate them,” she said. “I know what they do. I know.” She snorted. “Fascists!” Her drink splashed over her glass. “They take what I have and put it in their pockets.” I wondered if she were joking, and I laughed; but her face twisted a little, and she bared her teeth again and said, “They’ve taken over the world.” Then she looked at her drink. “Well, I’ll be dead soon. They won’t be able to get anything more from me.” She drank.

  I said, “The fact is I don’t understand much about taxes, and—”

  “Neither do I. I never did. I never understood anything that had to do with mathematics and machines, so I never understood more than half of what goes on in the world.”

  A thin young woman with black hair and dressed in black came into the pink lounge. She went to a window and drew closed the grey draperies over the net curtains, making the lounge dimmer. At her appearance, a number of old people, clutching their canes for support, began to rise.

  Jean said, “That’s the manageress. When she appears, everyone rises.”

  “Why?”

  “She doesn’t exactly announce it, but they know that when she comes in lunch is being served.”

  I sat with Jean as the old people followed the manageress out of the lounge into the dining room.

  She said, “All those old people, all alone.”