Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
Displaced Person
By V.S. Pritchett
Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
by Jean Rhys
Harper and Row, 151 pp., $10.95
So Jean Rhys reflected when she was put to the torture of attempting an autobiography in her mid-eighties. It was not finished when she died. She was frail in health, alone, drinking a lot, but famous to a younger generation, after being forgotten for twenty years by her contemporaries. Autobiography was a special torture. Not because she thought her private life was her own business but because she had already written it out in her very autobiographical novels and stories. She was being asked to winnow away her remarkable art and reveal, if she could remember them, the 'real' facts in a continuous narrative. There was one inducement: she had been angered and hurt by what had been written about her character and drifting life in London and Paris. The judgments were 'unfair,' too much had been read into her books, there had been too much gloating on her 'vagabondage,' which, in any case, was too romantic a word. Yet 'to put the record straight' was a cliché next to impossible for an artist who had been instinctive. She said she could not remember what people had really said. Memory rationalizes and is therefore the enemy of art.
Review, 2007 words
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