Book Review: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (1939)

Penguin paperback cover of Good Morning, Midnight, by Jean Rhys, first published in 1939.

Ella Williams, who wrote under the pen name of Jean Rhys.

Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, was my introduction to her as a writer. I read Good Morning, Midnight for a class I took in college about British Literature of the 20^th century, back in 2002. I had heard of Rhys before, because her novel Wide Sargasso Sea made Modern Library’s list of top 100 novels in 1998. I remember when I worked at Barnes and Noble back in 1999 and 2000 a customer recommended Wide Sargasso Sea to me. 

I was bowled over by Good Morning, Midnight when I read it in college, as I found it a fascinating portrait of a woman struggling with her demons. Re-reading it in 2020, I’m still struck by Rhys’ artistry and her deep insights into the human condition. Good Morning, Midnight, is the last of Rhys’ four starkly modernist novels that were published between 1928 and 1939: Quartet, first published as Postures, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight. The four novels aren’t really meant to be a quartet, but they fit together very nicely in their themes and in the mood that Rhys’ writing creates. The novels all deal with female protagonists who endure difficult relationships with men, and they have few resources for dealing with modern life. These women are always on the edge of poverty, and they lack the education and drive to do much with themselves. (They’re probably all also suffering from clinical depression.) 

There’s no real plot to speak of Good Morning, Midnight, as it’s just the narrator, who may or may not be named Sasha, hangs out in Paris, and tell us a little bit about her past. But you don’t read a Jean Rhys novel for the page-turning plots—you read them for the beautiful writing. 

One of the men the narrator meets is a melancholy Russian who has some great quotes: “When I make an appointment I always keep it, even though I think the other person won’t be there.” (p.63) “If someone had come to me and asked me if I wished to be born I think I should have answered No. I’m sure I should have answered No. But no one asked me. I am here not through my will.” (p.64) Jean Rhys’ heroines might well say the same thing.

The narrator also recounts a time when she was at her lowest ebb: “I got so that I could sleep fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.” (p.86) Yikes, that’s not so good.

In fitting with the title of the novel, time does strange things in Good Morning, Midnight. The narration constantly shifts between the present and the past. And nothing much happens in either, so it’s hard to keep them straight. That isn’t meant to be criticism of Rhys’ writing: different novels offer different pleasures. Jean Rhys was a master at mood, and throughout her four modernist novels she conjures up bleak cityscapes that offer no respite from the desperate issues that her characters face. Paris is the city of light, but it sure doesn’t feel like it in Good Morning, Midnight. 

The ending of Good Morning, Midnight is remarkably similar to the ending of Tennessee Williams’ novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Williams’ novel was published in 1950, 11 years after Good Morning, Midnight. Did Williams read Good Morning, Midnight? There’s probably no way to know for sure. The book certainly wasn’t a best-seller, but Williams had been writing short stories and plays for decades by 1950, so he could have been aware of Rhys’ work. Update: No, it’s very unlikely Williams read Good Morning, Midnight, since I learned from Carole Angier’s biography of Jean Rhys that Good Morning, Midnight wasn’t published in the United States until 1970. (Jean Rhys: Life and Work, by Carole Angier, p.596) 

Good Morning, Midnight was not a sales success when it was released in 1939, and after its release Rhys slid into obscurity, not publishing another novel until Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. As more time passed with no new works forthcoming, people assumed Rhys had died, not a totally unrealistic assumption, especially given the bleak ending of Good Morning, Midnight. When the actress Selma Vas Dias wanted to get in touch with Rhys about adapting Good Morning, Midnight as a play, she put an ad in the newspaper to track the author down. It worked, and Dias helped inspire Rhys to begin writing again. 

Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent, if often overlooked, modernist masterpiece.

Book Review: Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin (1955)

Paperback cover of Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin, originally published in 1955.

The author James Baldwin, 1924-1987.

Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955, was James Baldwin’s first collection of nonfiction. Baldwin’s first book was the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, and it put him on the map as an important young writer. Notes of a Native Son further established Baldwin as one of the leading African American authors of the day. The book’s title was a deliberate echo of Richard Wright’s novel, which Baldwin offered a lengthy critique of. The edition I read of Notes of a Native Son included Baldwin’s preface to the 1984 edition of the book, which is quite interesting to read. In it, Baldwin confides that he initially wasn’t that enthused about the idea of collecting his essays as a book. Fortunately for us, he was persuaded to do so. 

Baldwin is probably best-known today for his essays rather than his fiction. Baldwin’s biographer James Campbell wrote of his essays:

“On reaching the by now characteristic rhetorical finale, they would exhibit a common theme: how to survive this pain—the pain of hatred and self-hatred—which threatens to wreck the structure of the self more violently than anything white people individually can do.” (Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, by James Campbell, p.93) 

I’ll admit that the essays in the first section of Notes of a Native Son weren’t my favorites, partly because, though I cringe to admit it, I haven’t actually read the books Baldwin is critiquing, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son. I was supposed to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for a Civil War class in college, but I only got about halfway through it and I can’t remember anything about it. In the first essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” I wish that Baldwin more clearly defined what he considers a protest novel to be. Is it merely a work of fiction that offers a critique of a social ill, or are there other qualifications it needs to meet?

The essays in the rest of the book are all based on Baldwin’s life experience, and these essays are the core of Notes of a Native Son. For me, the title essay was the strongest one in the book. It’s the most personal, as Baldwin describes his complicated feelings towards his father. (Actually his stepfather, but since Baldwin didn’t have a relationship with his biological father, he always refers to his stepfather as his father in his writings.) The first two sentences of the essay are as good a hook as the opening lines of any fiction: “On the 29^th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born.” (p.85) Wow. 

The essay “Notes of a Native Son” gives the reader a lot of information about Baldwin’s childhood, and it’s interesting to see how Baldwin’s life paralleled that of John Grimes, the protagonist of Go Tell It on the Mountain. It’s a true tour de force personal essay. Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming writes, “Notes of a Native Son maintained the autobiographical approach that had been set in Mountain and which would color all of Baldwin’s work—fiction and nonfiction.” (James Baldwin: A Biography, by David Leeming, p.100) 

The last four essays in the book cover Baldwin’s experiences as an African American living in Europe in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. In “Equal in Paris,” Baldwin takes us inside his harrowing experience spending a week in a Paris jail after his friend stole a hotel bedsheet and then gave it to Baldwin. Paris hotels don’t take kindly to petty theft, apparently. And so, Baldwin, with his limited resources and a limited command of the French language, must navigate a judicial system that is slow moving in the extreme. 

Some of my favorite quotes from Notes of a Native Son came from Baldwin’s Introduction to the book, and his 1984 Preface. In the Preface he writes, “The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White.” (p.xii) So very true, and it’s a conundrum that our country is still trying to address in a meaningful way. 

In the “Autobiographical Notes” that open the book, Baldwin writes: “In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.” (p.6) Of course, Baldwin is right, and again, as a country we are still struggling to deal honestly with our past. 

The “Autobiographical Notes” also features what has become one of James Baldwin’s most famous quotes: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” (p.9) 

While most of the time Baldwin’s prose is as sharp and clear as a windowpane, there are other times when his sentences turn and twist like switchbacks on a steep mountain road. In reviewing Baldwin’s 1972 book No Name in the Street, I noted one sentence that contained 13 commas in it. I’m not sure if any sentences in Notes of a Native Son matched that number, but there were certainly some that came close. 

Notes of a Native Son doesn’t have the same intense heat of The Fire Next Time, but that’s to be expected of a book that was composed over several years rather than a few months. Notes of a Native Son still bristles with heat, but it’s a slow simmer. 

James Campbell saw some of the frustration that suffuses Baldwin’s 1984 Preface to Notes of a Native Son firsthand. He was interviewing Baldwin on his 60^th birthday in 1984. Baldwin picked up Notes of a Native Son and started reading aloud from the essay, “The Harlem Ghetto.” “Baldwin closed the book, returned it to the table, and widened his eyes in that dramatic way of his: ‘Nothing—has—changed!’” (Campbell, p.267) 

The last sentence of the “Autobiographical Notes” concludes with Baldwin writing: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” (p.9) James Baldwin surely was both.