Smile, Please
Phillips, Robert
Pearls on a string SMILE PLEASE AN UNFINISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Jean Rhys Harper & Row, $10.95, 151 pp. Robert Phillips "THE GREATEST living English A novelist," A. Alvarez called Jean Rhys when...
...Rhys's five novels are too narrow in range for greatness...
...She had heard many horror stories about the nuns...
...In an editor's foreword, Diane Athill discusses Rhys's difficulties in writing this book (and understates them considerably, when compared with David Plante's own harrowing account of Rhys's last years, published in the Fall 1979 issue of The Paris Review...
...Anyone interested ki Rhys's fiction will want to read it...
...Robert Phillips "THE GREATEST living English A novelist," A. Alvarez called Jean Rhys when her books were republished in the 1960s, after a three-decade lapse into obscurity...
...Athill might also have included the little memoir, "Invitation to the Dance," published in a 1975 chapbook...
...In this entire first section the writing is of the highest distinction...
...It was a method suited to her dramatic sense...
...29 August 1980:475...
...Originally published in Vogue, it gives us a vivid look at Rhys as an old woman...
...The pearls she threads concern parents, cooks, songs, games, dolls, dresses, and terrors of an impressionable young girl sent to a convent day school...
...But they will wish there were more...
...Aside from alcoholism, which Ms...
...A note on the editing: It is to Ms...
...The first section, roughly half the volume, concerns her childhood in Dominica where she felt "alone except for books...
...Athill's credit she decided to include the piece, "My Day," which Jean Rhys did not originally conceive as part of the book...
...Her novels and three story collections should not date...
...11 & 12)—would have added some substance and polish to what presumably is the last book by this gifted prose stylist...
...Rhys only lived to complete that section—76j)ages in all...
...And an appendix comprised of the last uncollected short stories—"Close Season for the Old...
...Her plots championing the underdog were subtle yet somehow inevitable...
...Athill does not mention, and heart attacks and arthritis, which Athill does, Rhys also was battling her own feelings of inadequacy—believing that so much of her life already had been mined for fiction, her material was used-up...
...As a whole the book is an incomplete portrait of the subject behind some of the most subjective fiction of tour time...
...At her advanced age (she began the book at eighty-six), she distrusted her memory...
...Yet she wanted to get the facts down before she was, as the Irish say, "gathered...
...They remain foils for her desperate woman, whose sensitive and artistic nature renders her unable to contend in the aggressive male world...
...And the men in her novels are rarely developed...
...those written in the late '20s and early '30s are still as disturbing today, and their language is in no way quaint...
...Some material seems finished...
...Only 148 pages long, even if completed it would not have been conventional...
...The Lotus" and "Temps Perdu" from Art and Literature (No...
...Smile Please is, then, a series of vignettes—pearls on a string of her life...
...She also 'felt that autobiography, unlike fiction, must be literally true in every detail, including conversations...
...Alvarez is too generous...
...Though her name changes from book to book, the female protagonist in each is the same, Jean Rhys at different stages of development (or disintegration...
...But if Jean Rhys was not the greatest living English novelist (she died in 1979), she was a fine one...
...much else—the diary entries especially—are sketchy in the extreme...
...from The Times (London...
...Above all, her language was careful, a delight to read...
...She possessed an instinctive feeling for form, and—like Colette—her insight into the feminine sensibility seems total...
...The solution was to construct an autobiography around a series of vital occasions which had involved her and present Commonweal: 474 them chronologically...
...Now we have Rhys's unfinished autobiography...
...Nothing is written about Rhys's second and third marriages, or her living daughter...
...This section reinforces impressions of Rhys's own youth and West Indian roots as presented fictionally in Anna Morgan's memories in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and...
...most of the girls at the convent were colored...
...The rest is first drafts and notes toward first drafts concerning her removal to London, her schooling and jobs there, her first love affair, first marriage, the death of a son, and the impulse to become a writer...
...in Antoinette Cosway's in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
