Book Review: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, by Jean Rhys (1979)

 

Paperback cover of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, by Jean Rhys (1979)

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was published just a few months after author Jean Rhys’ death in 1979. Like most of Rhys’ books, it’s a slim volume, and editor Diana Athill warns us in the Foreword that the second half of the book was not finished to Rhys’ satisfaction. That being said, I preferred the “unfinished” second section, which feels more finished to me—I suppose because the sections are longer and more detailed.

Jean Rhys was the pen name of Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, who was born on the island of Dominica to a Welsh doctor father and a mother of Scottish ancestry whose family had lived on Dominica for three generations. When Ella was 16 years old, she was sent to school in England. Ella’s whiteness meant that she would always be an outsider in Dominica, but in England she seemed too exotic, too foreign, to be fully accepted as English, and so she was an outsider in both societies. Ella worked a variety of jobs, including as a chorus girl, which provided some of the inspiration for her novel Voyage in the Dark.

Williams wrote four novels under the name Jean Rhys that were published between 1928 and 1939: Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and the sublime Good Morning, Midnight. All four books are closely unified in style and subject matter, and they could easily be read together as a quartet. The novels all deal with female protagonists who endure difficult relationships with men, and they have few resources for dealing with modern life. These women are always on the edge of poverty, and they lack the education and drive to do much with themselves. (They’re probably all also suffering from clinical depression.) It’s not too much of a stretch to discern from Smile Please that these women were all quite similar to Jean Rhys herself.

Readers of Rhys’ novels will notice passages in Smile Please that crop up in her fiction as well. In Smile Please, Rhys writes: “It was astonishing how much I could sleep. I’m sure I slept fifteen hours out of the twenty-four, and I never dreamed. I slept as if dead.” (p.120) In Good Morning, Midnight, the narrator reports: “I got so that I could sleep fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.” (p.86) If you’re sleeping that much, it may be a sign that something else is wrong.

All four of Rhys’ novels sold poorly at the time but are now acknowledged as bleak modernist masterpieces. After the release of Good Morning, Midnight in 1939, Rhys didn’t publish another book until Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, which finally brought her popular and critical acclaim and helped shed light on her earlier work. I read Wide Sargasso Sea not long before I read Smile Please, so I found the parts of Smile Please about Rhys’ childhood in Dominica to be very interesting, especially as they relate to the setting of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Smile Please is at times a heartbreaking portrait of the pain and alienation that Ella Williams seems to have constantly felt during her life. One of the quotes that really struck me was the following: “I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong.” (p.124) At times it seems as though everyone mistreats her, and she has a knack for remembering slights from so many years in the past.

The life of Jean Rhys/Ella Williams seems a prime example of how someone can take a life full of pain and, through the power of art, transform it into moments of beauty.