Parsing L'Heure Bleue

The delights of parsing blue are many: Not only do I muzzle what fellow depressive Winston Churchill called the “Black Dog” of depression, I also travel to exotic intellectual locations, places I scarcely knew existed before undertaking this singular journey. For instance, for my birthday, which came and went a month ago without much fanfare, my dear friend, C., who has been a generous midwife to this blog, gave me a bottle of L’Heure Bleue.

Entre nous, I have never been much of a girlie girl. For most of my adult life, I have rued the feminine niceties of perfume, lipstick, make-up, rouge, eye-shadow, eye-brow pencil, and mascara. I rarely even bother to accessorize my faded jeans and sea-blue shirts. I have a drawer full of colorful silk scarves, but I can’t be bothered to put them on, much less layer or wrap them fashionably around my throat or shoulders.

My mother, who loved to trick my sister and me out in frilly dresses with velvet collars from Best & Company, occasionally tried to cast the tomboy out of me, like some Old Testament prophet getting rid of Satan. From the time I was about 12 until my late thirties before my second marriage, with time out for the years when her own depression made it hard for her to care whether I looked like a shaggy pony that’s been rolling in manure, she filled my ears with fashion advice: how you should never wear black near your face, as it made you look washed out, how monochromatic colors, worn with artistry, could be flattering. She sometimes gave me presents of miniature bottles of perfume, with instructions to dab a little on my arms and around my neck. Like this, she would say, sitting upright as Aphrodite at her dressing table and misting the undersides of her wrists, the hollows of her elbow and dips along her collarbone with her favorite Chanel No. 5 before hurrying off to cast her perfumed glow like some mating firefly at a country club tea dance.

While I loved to look at her looking at herself in the glass, I thought it was gross to stink up my own sunburned flesh with any Frenchified potion, however aromatic. The only smells I craved were those of fresh-mown grass and the sweet stink of fresh manure piling up in the fields and drawing its lace curtain of tiny flies.

But in the twilight of post-menopausal pulchritude, with Mom’s fashion dictives as faded as 1940s pin-ups of Hollywood It Girls, I relish the prospect of misting my secret hollows with L’Heure Bleue. Of course, were it any other perfume, I wouldn’t be the least bit jazzed, but L’Heure Bleue, a mix of roses, iris and jasmine created by celebrated perfumier Jacques Guerlain in the summer of 1912, and meant to evoke the pleasures of Paris at dusk when the roses in the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne are said to be at their most aromatic, well, L’Heure Bleue is hardly a perfume at all, but un pays, a Zeitgeist.

“What scent are you wearing,” demands the hapless heroine of another stronger, prouder young woman in Jean Rhys’ first novel, Quartet.

“L’Heure Bleue of Guerlain,” answers the self-possessed young woman.

“Guerlain! Listen to that!” mocks her sometime male companion, as if the idea of linking such a fine perfume with this denizen of the Moulin Rouge is a joke.

“You get on my nerves,” retorts the young woman calmly.

Jean Rhys loved L’Heure Bleue and wore it all her life, according to Lillian Pizzichini, who has just published The Blue Hour, a harrowing account of Rhys’ rootless, alcohol-and-perfume soaked existence, which mirrored the fate of one of her melancholy heroines. Growing up in the British colony of Dominica and sent off to England at the age of 16 to attend the Perce School for Girls, Rhys once acknowledged that she didn’t know a thing about mathematics or machines. But like many young girls who came of age before women received the right to vote, Rhys knew how to captivate men.

There was an early first marriage to Jean Lenglet, a Polish journalist who dabbled in stolen antiques and who served time in a French prison. There was Rhys’ celebrated affair with the older, richer Ford Madox Ford, who gave Rhys money and published Rhys’ first short story in the transatlantic review. (When Ford dumped her, Rhys got her revenge by putting him in Quartet, as the self-centered English picture dealer H.G. Heidler.) There was second husband Leslie Tilden Smith, an English literary agent who met Rhys after her first two novels were published and who was fervently devoted to the pretty novelist, correcting her proofs and looking after Maryvonne, Rhys’ only child. After Smith died suddenly of a heart attack, Rhys took up with his cousin, Max Hamer, who became husband number three.

And yet, despite the manic changes of addresses and lovers and husbands, despite the gin, white wine, and sweet vermouth downed without restraint in cafes all over Paris and in bed-sits all over London, despite a vicious temper that landed her in court facing charges of abuse and disorderly conduct from neighbors, Rhys still managed to write five critically acclaimed novels, still published--at 76, after all her books had gone out of print and she was virtually unknown throughout Great Britain--her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea.

“I must write,” she once confided to the American novelist, David Plante, whose essay about her in Difficult Women is a little masterpiece, “If I stop writing, my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned my death.”