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Bookish Quotes
"One of the first things I associate with the reading of books is the struggle I waged to obtain them. Not to own them, mind you, but to lay hands on them."
After leaving Mr. Mackenzie
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After leaving Mr. Mackenzie
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5 journalers for this copy...
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Released 6 yrs ago (6/27/2005 UTC) at RABCK in Bellingham, Washington USA WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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Thanks very much, lilysmom - it was very nice of you to send this along. I'll be back to let you know what I think once I've read it!(Left: author Jean Rhys.) |
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Written in the 1920s and published in 1930, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie tells the story of thirty-six year old Julia Martin, who as the book begins has just been dumped by her forty-eight year old lover, Mr. Mackenzie. Paid a weekly allowance of 300 francs by Mackenzie (it arrives every Tuesday wrapped in a tersely worded note from his French lawyer), Julia has just enough money to to rent a room in a modest Paris hotel and take her lunches over a newspaper in a restaurant. (She has been living in France, we learn, since "after the armistice", and it's now the late 1920s.) To pass the time, she takes long, meandering walks through the city.One day Julia's allowance is unceremoniously cut off (there's a final payment of 1500 francs, but she refuses it in an ugly scene with Mr. Mackenzie in a restaurant on Montparnasse). Increasingly alcoholic and disreputable ("[t]he landlady ... disapproved of Julia's habit of coming home at night accompanied by a bottle. A man, yes: a bottle no. That was the landlady's point of view."), Julia struggles to make ends meet. She meets George Horsfield (who actually engineers their meeting, having witnessed the incident between Julia and Mackenzie in the Montparnasse restaurant), a WWI veteran just back from six months "kicking his heels" in Spain. The two commence a mutually reluctant liaison, based -- it seems -- on the fact that like Julia, Horsfield "know[s] something about cracking up". His sympathy for Julia's plight (poverty, loneliness, addiction, desperation) transforms occasionally into a kinder form of empathy, but it's not enough. (As Julia herself observes much earlier in the novel, "Once you started letting the instinct of pity degenerate from the general to the particular, life became completely impossible.") Ultimately, Julia repulses him. Julia spends a lot of her time thinking about "when [she] was a kid", but they're not particularly sunny memories: "The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?". You get the feeling every moment of her life lead inevitably to the Moment described in the last pages of the book, though it's hard to silence the admittedly 21st century voice that whispers "psst ... Julia ... get a job!". Free will, says one of Julia's acquaintances, "is a whole lot of dosh", but even so Julia's complete abdication of responsibility is distressing. Jean Rhys was herself born in 1890 -- four years before the character of Julia. Like Julia, she had a succession of ill-fated relationships (including one with English novelist Ford Madox Ford), and battled with alcoholism and her own "hectic times". She wrote five novels, said to be distinctly autobiographical (Mr. Mackenzie may be based on Rhys' relationship with Dutch journalist and adventurer Jean Lenglet, which ended in the late 1920s when he went to jail for dealing in black market currency), along with several volumes of short stories and an unfinished autobiography. The novels are: Postures (aka Quartet) (1928); After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930); Voyage in the Dark (1934); Good Morning, Midnight (1939) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Although Mr. Mackenzie was published in 1930, you can read a May 2005 review of the novel from the Guardian's "Rereading" column here, and another in the blog Head Butler here. There's also a very informative article about Rhys in Caribbean Beat here, and a brief biography of Jean Rhys here. (Top left: Jean Rhys and husband Jean Lenglet.) |
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Released 6 yrs ago (4/4/2006 UTC) at -- wild released somewhere in Vancouver in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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Journal Entry 7 by
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