I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour

Author:Miranda Seymour [Seymour, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

DISGRACED AND PERMANENTLY disbarred from his profession, Max Hamer was an unemployable man of seventy when he walked out of Maidstone prison in May 1952. His wife, aged almost sixty-two, had not published a word for thirteen years. Their mysterious benefactor’s assistance had ceased. Rhys was living on the modest allowance provided by her surviving siblings,§ to which members of the Hamer family added a small annual payment in compensation for the modest naval allowance that was cancelled when Max was convicted. (Typically, for an always improvident man, Max Hamer had no pension.)

Life in the centre of London was beyond the Hamers’ economic reach; instead, they squeezed themselves into a couple of small rooms in a shared house on Milestone Road in Upper Norwood, just north of the enormous, landscaped park that surrounded the burned-out remains of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace.¶ Writing to Maryvonne in June, and again in August, Jean was valiantly cheerful. A Polish co-tenant was doing a splendid job on the minute garden. The pond was filled with goldfish and the roses were glorious. Just one heartfelt statement offered a glimpse of what Rhys had endured during her husband’s prison sentence: “I like so much not being alone.”11

Rhys’s response to a change of home was always the same. Beginning in euphoria, she rapidly plunged into gloom. Six months after their move to Norwood, Max—he was almost certainly prompted by Jean—sought advice from the former husband of Norah Hoult, one of his wife’s earliest literary admirers. Oliver Stonor had remarried and moved to Devon, where the cost of living was low when compared to London. Did “Mr Bishop” (Stonor’s literary pseudonym) remember having praised Miss Rhys’s work? Max wondered. Now, his wife had a new novel “all planned out” and needed only a quiet country home in which to write. Might Mr. Stonor know of such a place in Devon?12

Sadly, Oliver Stonor was unable to help, and Jean’s prudent older brother ruled out hare-brained plans for the couple to live in a caravan. Nevertheless, Rhys struck up a literary correspondence with Stonor who, as she was quick to appreciate, was an unusually well-read man. (He had recently published a short and erudite study of William Blake.) Max was not greatly interested in books; Rhys’s letters to Stonor glow with all her old passion for the one world—other than her Dominican girlhood—in which she could always take refuge. Here was a man who shared her admiration for the technique of Maupassant’s short stories and understood why, in January 1953, she rated Hemingway’s 1927 short story “Hills Like White Elephants” above his highly praised and recently published novella, The Old Man and the Sea.13

Hemingway had become one of the world’s best-known writers. Rhys’s novels were known only to a discerning few. On 5 March 1953, while confined to her bed by flu, she comforted a despairing Stonor about the future of his own work: “You have fifteen long years probably to be still at your best,” she reassured him. “As a writer longer.

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