My review of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Jean Rhys died aged 87 in 1979 before completing her autobiography, which she had started dictating only months before. Later that year the incomplete text appeared posthumously under this title. 

After years of reading and rereading Jean's fiction I, like many, was doubtless it was all pieces of her own life. That was irrelevant to me, yet so relevant too. That presumption - that she needed to borrow from herself rather than create - felt disloyal, insulting to her writing ability. Yet I also feared that by reading this I may be disappointed discovering that her fiction was not, after all, dressed up (or down) fragments her own life. 

Such was the dilemma underlying my prevarication in reading this, a slow self-torture not unlike Jean's own which I knew so intimately from her stories. When I mustered the courage to read this it was the milestone I hoped it would be. 

Yes, Jean's fictional books were distinguishable here in her real life. But thankfully, as the saying goes, 'truth is always stranger than fiction'. So I was saved, my dilemma redundant. 

I had a reticence that this felt intrusive, like rummaging through her drawers when she had gone. However, I consoled myself, she would not have disclosed here what she chose not to, nobody was forcing her to say anything. My mother once said, 'I taught you everything you know ... but not everything I know!' Here was my favourite writer inferring likewise with those deliciously pregnant narrative gaps. 

As devotees and biographers have noted, Jean bared her soul in her writing but kept some to herself. I was relieved she did likewise here, retained some small, precious dignity after the literary world had bellowed at her, in her dotage, for forever baring her most intimate truths veiled in gossamer thin fiction. 

Many have concurred it was not just what Jean wrote that was so brilliant: it was what she did not write, those gaps left for the reader's mind to fill. Indeed, one biographer who researched her old drafts revealed that Jean always underwent a severe, almost self-lacerating editing process, originally taught her by ex-lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford. Here she does it one final time as she grinningly waves us farewell, leaving us longing to know what else happened in between these episodes she so tantalisingly punctuates. 

In this Jean includes her first poem, penned the first time her adolescent heart broke. It comprises three simple words written three consecutive times: 'I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.' 

I will not desist revisiting her works whenever I get those Jean Rhys blues. That would be unthinkable. I need to know her words await me. 

This, her last word, was not for this fan the end of Jean Rhys, not something that left me with any disloyal finality or closure on her. Rather, it confirmed that I should start over and read her books from scratch. Again. And again. And again.