98
PARTISAN REVIEW
worse .... In the glass just now my eyes were like that kitten's eyes."
The heroine is called romantic names like Antoinette, Petronella,
Julia, Sasha, Roseau. She is as vulnerable as the kittens, sad
children, and gentle prostitutes who so often cross her path; there is
no question but that the feminine should be protected. The men who
don't pay up, the lovers who fail to provide a haven for the heroine,
practically perceive
themselves
as cads and slink ignominiously from
the novels. The one time a Rhys heroine is satisfied with the
behavior of "people" in general is when they do homage to her
femininity during a pregnancy:
My face is pretty, my stomach is huge .... People are very kind
to me. They get up and give me their seats in buses.
Passe, femme
sacree.
"Passe, femme sacree,
"of course, is offered ironically; and yet to Rhys it is
a kind of tragedy when, as so often, the feminine is
not
held sacred.
Rhys's last book,
Smile, Please,
is a curious phenomenon. It was
apparently undertaken to correct false impressions about the
author's life. There were rumors that one of her two children was
Ford's; not so, Rhys wanted us to know, both were Lenglet's. Her
first lover was, as we have seen, a kind man, not a villain; Lenglet
was arrested for currency violations, not robbery. But what
developed from this impulse to set the record straight is a collection
of fragments which are pointless, at best, and at their worst, quite
ugly. Rhys finished only the first half of the book, the part on her
childhood in Dominica; but even if we confine ourselves to that we
must be surprised at what we are offered. Our attention is claimed
for what cannot possibly interest us. We learn that Rhys had
petits
pains
for breakfast while she was in convent school, not
croissants;
that
she cannot remember how her father defined Nirvana; that when she
first got a clothing allowance she bought herself a red tam-o'-shanter;
that she loved the word "wisteria" and hated the word "cold." It is
when she comes to the matter of race relations in Dominica that her
book seems worse than shapeless. Rhys records her discovery that
she was disliked by a black fellow student in tones of undisguised
self-pity; and she includes this lethargically mean-spirited comment
on the contemporary Caribbean situation:
When years later I paid a short visit to Dominica I went to the
library of course. Instead of being empty it was crowded, a long
queue before the librarian's desk. At first I thought it was a very
touching sight, all the black hands, eagerly stretched out, holding
