LINDA BAMBER
books . Then I noticed how ill the librarian, whom of course I
knew, looked. As people filed past her she'd take the book, stamp
it and give it back. No one looked at her and no one thanked her.
They seemed to think that she was a machine and indeed there
was something robotlike about the way she was working. Book
after book and with each one she seemed to get more tired , look
more ill. I wasn't at all surprised when I heard a few days later
that she was dead.
I seem to be brought up willy-nilly against the two sides of the
question. Sometimes I ask myself if I am the only one who is; for
after all, who knows or cares if there are two sides.
99
Ludicrously, Rhys seems to imply that the spread of culture to the
third world will result in the death of the Culture-keepers, over–
worked librarians. She doesn't mean it, of course; but what does she
mean?
Smile, Please
includes an admiring foreward by Rhys's editor at
Harper and Row, Diana Athill, and is followed by a chronology of
Rhys's life and a bibliography of her books. In the middle are
pictures of Rhys's grandfather's church in Wales, Rhys's first and
second husbands, and Rhys's return to Dominica in the thirties. In
other words, the book treats Rhys as a classic author. There is some–
thing incongruous in the contrast between the featherweight text and
the solemn superstructure that surrounds it. As Phyllis Rose points
out in the
Yale Review,
"her autobiography will win her no new
readers." And yet it has been, for the most part, reviewed as
respectfully as it has been packaged. Rose is one of the few reviewers
to admit that this book "demonstrates how
not
to write an auto–
biography" and that Rhys's talents as a writer have clearly been
undermined by the fact that she was "frequently soused" while
writing the book . Rhys, who was awarded the CBE (Commander of
the Order of the British Empire) in 1978, is an institution. We have
apparently learned from her the trick of silent withdrawal from her
failures.
Jean Rhys had a hard life. She grew up imagining that life was
elsewhere - in England; when she got to England it was dingy, cold,
and hostile to her ambition to become an actress. The most
appealing picture of Rhys in
Smile, Please
shows her posed in a
tableau vivant with other young and pretty members of her troupe.
But the energy and good humor of this moment faded during a
grueling and humiliating tour of the north of England, and Rhys
came to think of herself mostly in terms of her unsatisfactory rela-
