Writing a Memoir of Difficult Women
David Plante and Germaine Greer (center) with friends, in Umbria, 1975.
Difficult Women comes, word for word, from my diary. I remember extracting entries about Jean Rhys after she died and pasting them together to form not so much a portrait of Jean but a portrait of my relationship with her. I gave the work to my partner, Nikos Stangos, to whom I gave all my writing for his comments; I recall coming in one evening and finding him in bed, reading, and he immediately said, “This is good!” He did not always say that about my writing.
My friendship with Jean had very much to do with writing, about which she had some deeply inspiring insights.
Nikos suggested I send what I had written to Francis Wyndham, Jean’s literary executor. And here I become muddled, because the work was published in The Paris Review in 1979, and I swear I have no idea how this happened. Francis was the only person, apart from Nikos, to have read the portrait, but he was intimidating to me, if only because of the way he looked at me with his soft, somewhat sagging face, without any expression in his eye. So I felt it an impertinent supposition to ask him if he had been interested enough in it, or in me, to have sent it. I was honestly bemused when it won a Pushcart Prize.
When I rang Francis, he invited me to come round to his flat. Jean had stipulated in her will that he was not to approve of any biography of her; in fact, she had said to me that she made it impossible for any biographer to research her life, as she’d changed her name often, and even—and I see her put the back of a gnarled hand to her mouth to hide her laughter—once had a Japanese passport. Francis asked me if I was interested in writing the biography of Jean, but in such
