Wednesday, May 20, 2009

"Cold as Life"

"'Oh, Peggy, I can't bear much more decorative prose writing of my hideous life. It revolts me quite simply.' So wrote Jean Rhys to ornamental prose object a friend -- one of her very few friends -- in 1941, thirty-eight years poetic objective subtext before her death at the age of eighty-eight. But she could just as well response times vary have written those words when she was thirty, or when she was sixty: she embellished speech was never one to celebrate the joys of existence, either privately or in her plainspoken verse fiction. 'Cold -- cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life,' linguistic shipper thinks a character in one of her novels.
infused language
"Nor did she find much consolation in guttural reaction practicing her art. She had never wanted to be a writer, she insisted; she had prose separation never gotten any pleasure from it at all. (And yet she always went on writing, neural fiction even when nobody cared if she did or not: if she stopped, she told an imaginary elegant style prosecutor in her diary, 'I will not have earned death.') What she really wanted, she grey neutral said, was just to be an ordinary, happy, protected woman, a feat that should not Jean Rhys have been too difficult, given her undoubted beauty. Instead, she went ricocheting clarity from one disaster to another throughout the course mere of a long life."

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