For once, he wasn’t wearing the green jumper, but a red and blue checked shirt that smelled of smoke. Rochester-not just thoughts, but a novel in which to voice them. And here was Rhys, in exquisite, deadly prose, constructing for Antoinette-or Mrs. In the world for which we were being trained, our usefulness lay not in any thoughts we might construct ourselves, but in the speed and accuracy with which we recorded the thoughts of others.
Speed was imperative, measured in words per minute, and the movement from sound to symbol was not to be slowed by any pondering of meaning.
The shorthand I practiced by day was a sort of code, comprehensible only to those initiated in its strange and lovely marks. The novel didn’t just take inspiration from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it illuminated and confronted it, challenged the narrative. “Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19 th century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20 th century,” Michele Roberts has said of Wide Sargasso Sea. Here were words engaged in a different sort of taking apart. We took words apart and mined them for sound, converted that sound into something close to art.īy night, I attended classes at University College Cork where, as part of an English-literature module, I first read Jean Rhys’s beautiful and subversive Wide Sargasso Sea. Words like get or racket with their piglet-style tails, or yell and yam and Yale with their resemblance to mutant tadpoles. Still, I remember fondly the sweeps and curves and wriggles of Gregg shorthand as we practiced giving shape to language.
My secretarial prospects, unfortunately, were not much better, something that didn’t go unnoticed by the tiny, fierce woman tasked with teaching us. The talk was of little interest to me, perhaps because my modeling prospects were precisely zero. I have a hazy recollection of being instructed in how to walk properly, and of someone who ran a modeling agency coming to talk to us.
It was a course of a kind that I suspect no longer exists, with bookkeeping exercises involving sheets of carbon paper, classes in shorthand, typing learned on manual typewriters. In the summer of 1986, I finished secondary school, and that autumn I enrolled in a secretarial course in Cork City.
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