SOURCE: "Jean Rhys: Life's Unfinished Form," in Chicago Review, Vol. 32, No. 4, Spring, 1981, pp. 68-74.

[In the following review, Pool offers negative analysis of Smile Please, citing flaws in the book's lack of structure and Rhys's unreflective content.]

"Smile please," the man said. "Not quite so serious."

He'd dodged out from behind the dark cloth. He had a yellow black face and pimples on his chin.

I looked down at my white dress, the one I had got for my birthday, and my legs and the white socks coming half way up my legs, and the black shiny shoes with the strap over the instep.

"Now," the man said.

I tried but my arm shot up of its own accord.

"Oh what a pity, she moved."

"You must keep still," my mother said, frowning.

                                      Smile Please

Those who are familiar with the work of Jean Rhys will recognize in this opening passage of her autobiography the defining characteristics and world view of the central character of her fiction. Repeatedly, Rhys's heroine—a vulnerable, intelligent, perceptive, helpless woman—is told what to do, tries to do it, fails, and is looked upon with a combination of pity and disapproval. It is certainly not inconsequential that what the child in this episode fails to do is to smile; one of Rhys's themes is that one ought to try to "make the best of things," and that she never really manages to do so. The impotence, the self-doubt, the self-consciousness, the failure, the disapproval, the pity, the acute and intelligent awareness of the entire scene, which takes place moreover in the realm of appearances—all describe what we find over and over again in the novels.

The opening passage is one of the best in Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, published in 1979, after Rhys's death, a book that only intermittently gathers energy and never manages to sustain it. That the book is not in itself successful is. I think, evident, and the reasons for its lack of success relate interestingly to the way that Rhys's fiction works. In part, the relationship contrasts the form of fiction with the formlessness of life, an issue which frustrated Rhys. In part, the problem hinges on Rhys's approach both to fiction and to life. That she was neither reflective nor analytical limits the statements she can make about her life. Interestingly, too, what we discover moving back from the autobiography to the fiction, which uses much of the same material, is how little we know about Jean Rhys personally.

It is well known that Rhys's fiction was largely autobiographical. As Diana Athill, Rhys's editor who wrote the foreword to her autobiography, remarks, the process of fictionalizing "never took her a great distance from the experience." However, Rhys did fictionalize, and the process was to create form: she changed episodes from their reality to meet the aesthetic requirements of the work at hand.

"I like shape very much," said Rhys. "A novel has to have a shape and life doesn't have any." Indeed, form is the quality that characterizes almost all of Rhys's fiction from the earliest, written in the 1920s, to the latest. It may be that Quartet, her first novel, is not strong, but its weakness is certainly not a lack of form. In Quartet and the three fine novels which follow it, Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, the overall structure of the fiction is tight as a fist—and that tightness is its strength and its power. It is almost as if Rhys saw and felt her work in shapes, and what she created and offered us was precisely those shapes; thus, her form was not merely integral to the work, but to some degree was the work itself.

But if the essence of fiction, to Rhys, was form, did autobiography have to be formless? Smile Please is a series of vignettes and sketches that serve to create impressions. What form the work has is its time frame, since it presents the chronological sequence of her life, and it is an artificial, imposed form—one that might have worked, but didn't, because it was not really consistent with the way Rhys viewed her life. What might have saved the structure was some sense of linkage or causality. But we do not have the sense that Rhys's early years were crucial, causally, to the later years, or even related to them. None of the sections are critically linked.

It is true that the autobiography was not finished when Rhys died, and it is difficult to evaluate critically an unfinished work, especially if the writer is a craftsman, in which case unfinished is as good as not done at all. The work was moving away from the vague sketches toward a narrative form, which might have proved more effective. But revision alone might not have solved the problems of the work. The autobiography is divided into two parts. "Smile Please," and "It Began to Grow Cold"; and it is the latter of the two that Athill identifies as truly unfinished. Yet it comes more fully to life than the former. It may be that "finishing" this particular work would not have improved it, that further refinement would have further deadened it.

Why the lifelessness? This is not a quality one finds in Rhys's fiction. Athill suggests that the autobiography was weak because the material had already been used up in the novels, written out, and had grown too stale to bear repetition. Yet I wonder if this is the case. If we turn from the autobiography to the fiction, we find that of the novels that take place in London and Paris, each, read singly, is a stunning rendition of a story that Rhys never seemed to tire of telling. The story in each of these novels is essentially the same, but each time it strikes with fresh and painful force. It does not seem likely that she would either write this material out or use it up.

The major part of Smile Please takes place in Dominica, where Rhys was born and where she remained until the age of sixteen, when she was sent to school in London. The West Indian material had always been to some degree intractable, and not because it had been "written out." Sleep It Off, Lady, a work which in a number of ways strongly resembles Smile Please, is a collection of stories which was published in 1976; drawn from Rhys's life and arranged in chronological order, the stories offer an overview of the life (though explicitly not an autobiography), beginning with stories set in the West Indies and concluding beyond death with the heroine's appearance as a ghost. The collection is of uneven quality, but the weakest of the stories are those which take place in the West Indies; they are diffuse, tedious, and disoriented.

One has the sense that Rhys did not have anything pressing she wanted to say about her West Indian childhood. Because the setting was dramatic, it must have appealed to her to try to work with it, but unlike Lowry's Mexico, which was not only the background of an obsession but a part of it. Rhys's Dominica in her stories and in her autobiography is simply there, a picturesque backdrop rather than a living part of the play.

Rhys used the tropical setting effectively in The Wide Sargasso Sea, the least autobiographical of her writings, which suggests that Rhys's problem was not the setting itself, but that she had no precise ideas about or attitudes toward its significance in her own life. In the novel, a brilliant interpretation of the life of Mrs. Rochester, the wife of the hero of Jane Eyre, the West Indies serves to create the character. But in Smile Please, we hear that Rhys feared insects, went to numerous carnivals and religious processions, that she was in a convent, that her nurse practiced witchcraft—details that do not possess intrinsic interest. That the events occur in an exotic setting does not suffice to make them exotic. We need a perspective that would make the details significant.

The listless quality of the West Indian material points us toward the kind of writing Rhys did not do, the ways in which she did not think, which are useful for defining who she was. For what there was to write about in Dominica, it seems, was the political and social, uneasiness, the relations between colonials and blacks, the position of Rhys's own parents on the island, the interplay between the religious elements (Catholic and pagan)—all of which appear but are not explored in depth in either Rhys's fiction or her autobiography. That they hover in the background, potential sources of a power never achieved, makes clear that Rhys was neither a political nor, directly, a social writer. She was aware of these forces, but they were not what mattered in her life, they were not what determined her life.

It is unfortunate that Rhys held such a strictly chronological concept of autobiography that compelled her, both in Sleep It Off, Lady and in Smile Please, to start at the beginning in Dominica and proceed through to the end, for her energy is diffused in the tropics long before she reaches the chapters of her life which seem to have interested her more. Only in London and Paris did Rhys find a subject that did not dry out and that engaged her interest, a subject which that world symbolized and provided material for: life on the edge.

Life on the edge, struggle, compromise, defeat—these are what Rhys depicts best in her fiction and what must have related most powerfully to her own life. Not in the West Indies but in this world of cheap hotels, pick-ups, and kept women Rhys found the arena in which she would play out her life struggles. It is easy to see Rhys as the heroine of her novels. What is unusual about the character who inhabits this world is her intelligence, her perception, her ability to size up her situation—clearly Rhys's own talents and skills. But if it is easy to attribute the character's intelligence to Rhys, one must be wary of ascribing attributes at random. There is always the form: Rhys changed what needed to be changed, and one does not really know how far to read.

One is dealing in part with events and in part with experience. Rhys was concerned in her autobiography to set straight the events of her life, but perhaps the experience was the more confusing element. Most perplexing, perhaps, is Rhys's attitude toward women and the position of women. Her central characters reveal an odd combination of intelligence and foolishness. For all their intelligence, their solutions to the problems in which they find themselves are inane. They seem truly to believe that if one only had a new coat, one would surely get a good job. A new hat, a new dress, a new pair of shoes are seen as bridges to a new life.

It is fair to say that intelligence will not in itself ward off disintegration: one may perceive acutely why one is falling apart and be unable to prevent it. In addition, Rhys understands the fear her heroines endure; for the most part, they are too frightened to make the moves they must make to get themselves out of the holes they are in. But it is clear that the intelligence of Rhys's heroines is neither reflective nor analytical. They analyze perceptions, not ideas; they move in an area of sensibility.

The emphasis on the world of superficial appearances throughout the fiction is striking. That the heroine has no decent hat, that she has put on weight, that her hair at any particular moment might be out of place are factors that take on disproportionate significance. One becomes aware that the heroine's world does not extend far beyond her own body, that to some degree it is circumscribed by her physicality. One could not imagine a male weighing his situation in such terms; this is a part of the female situation which Rhys depicts so terrifyingly.

But what about Rhys herself? Could she have saved her heroines? Could she have provided them with the solutions they could not find? Did she merely depict what was real, the reality of women's lives?

Rhys did not see fiction's role as offering judgments; they would have diminished the power of her work by delineating heroes and villains in a simplistic fashion. Thus, the refusal to judge was a part not only of her style but of the meaning of her work. But I had always believed that Rhys presented so clearly and painfully the rut into which her heroine's solutions led because she meant for us to conclude that the solutions were inane, that the position of women in the world was inane.

Smile Please offers a different view of Rhys. For here, in the realm of non-fiction, what Rhys relates about lives and her own experience is precisely that world of appearances: what one looked like, what one wanted to look like, what the effects of looking like that were, what the effects of looking like what one wanted to look like would have been. And suddenly, looking at the pictures of Rhys, a beautiful woman with enormous eyes, one realizes that she must have cared terribly about appearance, that she did feel it was of crucial significance, and that possibly she did not view her heroines' solutions as inane; that perhaps there was no judgment in the fiction because—there was no judgment.

That Rhys herself was caught in the situation she so accurately describes in no way diminishes the power of her description. However, her refusal to analyze does restrict her access to her life. Without analysis, she can only offer details; without reflection, she cannot shape the details for us. The techniques which are so effective in the fiction simply do not work in the autobiography. The vignettes, the snippets, the flip and witty asides seem to hide more than they reveal. While this is intriguing in fiction, it is irritating in autobiography. I do not read fiction to find out about a life; I do read autobiography because I want to know about a particular life, and I am resentful if I am not given entry, having paid the price of a ticket.

What drew Rhys to the project of writing an autobiography? She was 86 when she began to work on the book; she had a heart condition, her hands were too severely crippled to write, and she had a drinking problem. In a reminiscence published in Paris Review (number 76, 1979) that is excessive, tasteless, and finally pointless, David Plante (who worked with Rhys on this autobiography) reveals but this one useful fact: that Rhys was in no shape to write anything, let alone give form to the material that had been her life.

According to Athill, the idea of writing an autobiography did not really "attract" Rhys; it was not "the kind of writing that came to her naturally." This is most probably true. Autobiography requires reflection, the formulation of an overview Rhys was either unwilling or unable to make. She did not work this way in her fiction, and it seems to have been a mode of thinking she found alien.

If the idea of writing an autobiography did not attract Rhys, if the type of writing was not what she enjoyed, if her health was poor, and if she had already in Sleep It Off, Lady presented a good deal of the material, what on earth drew Rhys on to undertake this work? "Because she was sometimes angered and hurt by what other people wrote about her, she wanted to get the facts down," Athill says. If this was her main motivation, it is unfortunate; for although there are numerous facts in the work (including those she wanted to get down to set the record straight), they are for the most part lost for lack of a perspective that might have given them coherence. The events are clarified only to fall into oblivion.

Interestingly, as a result of reading Smile Please, I began to question the autobiographical aspects of her work. Much of the autobiography appears to be the writing out of a persona: it is not material that is untrue, but it represents a set of characteristics Jean Rhys had decided were Jean Rhys. Since much of this material appears in the fiction as well, I began to wonder where one might find reality. To be tough, as Rhys is about the London-Paris years, or to be nostalgic, as she is about her early years, is not necessarily to be open about the experience. Perhaps Rhys imposed more form than she was aware of upon life itself and gave it a shape after all.

There are things one might have wanted to know about Jean Rhys's life, about her attitudes toward women or toward writing, that probably never could have been known—because she herself didn't know them. The Rhys we see in Smile Please did not ask herself questions about her attitudes and philosophy; there seem to have been modes of analysis she had no patience for. She did not want to reflect in certain ways about her life—or if she did, she fully intended to keep those reflections to herself. Indeed, reading her autobiography one comes to the conclusion that for an author who wrote almost exclusively about herself, Jean Rhys revealed remarkably little about Jean Rhys.