by Stevie Smith
Father Damien Doshing (1938)
Bed (1938)
My Earliest Love (c.1938)
The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses (c.1939)
Song in Time of War (c.1947)
Mrs Midnight (1952)
They Killed (c.1953)
Professor Snooks Does His Worst with a Grecian Fragment (1957)
The Lesson (1957)
On the Dressing gown lent me by my Hostess the Brazilian Consul in Milan, 1958 (1958)
A Fiend (1962)
Le Paquebot (1962)
Voice from the Tomb (1966)
To the Brownes’ Cat (1966)
To the Brownes’ Hamster (1966)
Mort’s Cry (1967)
Friend and Neighbour (1968)
The Publisher (1968)
Lord Henry de Bohon (1969)
The Stream with Two Faces (1969)
I thank thee, Lord (1969)
Soupir d’Angleterre (1969)
He preferred … (c.1970)
Like This (1) (c.1970)
Like This (2) (c.1970)
Telly-me-Do (c.1970)
Accented
Cars
César
Childhood and Interruption
Death
Mabel
‘Mother Love’
None of the Other Birds
Oh Thou Pale Intellectual Brow
Roaming
Ruory and Edith
She got up and went away
The Easter Rose
The Little Birdies
The Old Soul
The Pearl
There is an Old Man
Tom Snooks the Pundit
Wife’s Lament at Hereford
III TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR SELECTED POEMS, THE FROG PRINCE AND OTHER POEMS, AND PENGUIN MODERN POETS 8
IV LIST OF ALTERNATIVE TITLES
Notes
Index by Title
Index by First Line
Copyright
Acknowledgements
The editor wishes to thank Jack Barbera and William McBrien, whose magisterial Smith bibliography made a challenging task possible; Hermione Lee, whose critical selection of Smith’s work set an exceptional standard; and Frances Spalding, whose rich biography offered connections the archive could not reveal alone. James MacGibbon and Linda Stearns produced a fine edition in their original Collected Poems, and it proved a wise guide throughout the editing process. Smith’s executor Hamish MacGibbon has been a supportive and judicious presence throughout.
Monika Class and George May both provided expert translations, and Kristen Marangoni kindly assisted me on a number of archival queries. The editor also wishes to thank the University of Southampton, which provided a grant to support archival work for the project, and staff at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, for their unfailing generosity and good humour.
This project would not have been possible without the knowledge, guidance, and commitment of Matthew Hollis and Martha Sprackland at Faber, to whom I owe an immense debt. I am also grateful for the proofreading expertise of Laura Ashby, George May and Silvia Crompton. Any errors or inaccuracies are acknowledged here as the editor’s.
Introduction
Rather a fishy thing to do –
And yet this is not wholly true.
‘Flounder (Part of an Acrostic)’
Like all great poets, Stevie Smith invites contradictions. Several poems play with the word ‘easy’, but are neither straightforward nor comfortable: ‘easy in feeling’ is ‘easily excessive’, we are reminded in ‘To Carry the Child’. Smith is refreshingly no-nonsense, but her poetry sometimes flirts with it, as in the miniature above, which is designed to leave readers not wondering but floundering. She takes poetry seriously enough to risk not being taken seriously: it’s no accident her poems are interested in those with more courage than is good for them, from the superfluous acrobatics of the cat in ‘Can it Be?’ to the stoic war veterans in ‘A Soldier Dear to Us’ who are too brave to ask ‘if there was any hope’. She is often dogmatic, even indignant, and few modern poets make such use of imperatives and exhortations: we’re asked to admire newspaper editors in ‘Magnificent Words’, honour penny-pinched fathers in ‘Alfred the Great’, or disparage the recent work of a French actress in ‘Phèdre’, sometimes with little room for disagreement. Yet Smith is compelled by the protean nature of truth, which is often made up of two opposing views, ‘the one meanly begot, the other nobly’ (p. 635), or couched in French euphemism, as in ‘Loin de l’Être’ and ‘Si peu séduisante’. Philip Larkin borrowed the French term ‘fausse-naïve’1 to equivocate about Smith’s poetry in a 1962 review, but helped himself to her equivocations for The Whitsun Weddings (1964): the words ‘not true’ and ‘unkind’ in ‘I Was so Full …’ become Larkin’s ‘words not untrue and not unkind’.2 In Smith’s autobiographical allegory poem ‘A House of Mercy’, the speaker conflates ‘True’ with some surprising adjectives:
Now I am old I tend my mother’s sister
The noble aunt who so long tended us,
Faithful and True her name is. Tranquil.
Also Sardonic. And I tend the house.
If true tends towards the sardonic, we might begin to wonder if what we know about Smith is ‘wholly true’ or a good deal more ‘fishy’.
Stevie Smith was born in Hull in 1902, moved to Palmers Green aged three, and lived there for the rest of her life. After school, she spent thirty years working at Newnes Publishing as a secretary to Sir Neville Pearson, and produced three semi-autobiographical novels and eight collections of poetry. The apparently narrow canvas of her life is, for many, part of her appeal: singer-songwriter Morrissey rhapsodises on a writer who ‘appeared to live like a never-opened window’,3 while poet Amy Clampitt imagines ‘a routine so settled that the tiniest subverting of the expected comes as a betrayal’.4 While most dramatic representations of writers give us the misleading impression their life is more interesting than their work, Hugh Whitemore’s play Stevie (1978) goes out of its way to suggest the opposite. We hear, through interrupted anecdotes, tales of an absconding father, a childhood battle with TB, and a failed suicide, yet much of this happens off-stage or before the play begins. Tales from school-days are recounted with Beckettian compulsion, as if memory might take the place of event. Potential lovers are undone by their suburban ‘meelyoo’, and death is the only welcome visitor. Yet Smith understood that a modern poet needed a persona, even if it was one that advertised its own marginality at every opportunity. While critics were both delighted and exasperated at her apparent idiosyncrasies, she countered them with shoulder-shrugging ordinariness: ‘the poet is not an important fellow’, she reminds us in the essay ‘My Muse’ (1960): ‘there will always be another poet’.5
Another version of her life could equally cast her as a prolific book reviewer, a trenchant social critic, or a shrewd literary professional. At the height of her success in the 1960s, she was feted on both sides of the Atlantic, yet in interviews played the unconnected and isolated figure, ferried in from an unliterary suburb, trespassing on the modern day.6 The editor who told her to ‘go away and write a novel’7 when faced with her unpublished poetry in 1935 offered better advice than he knew: Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938), and The Holiday (1949) gave her the opportunity to create the nearest the period could ever come to Wordsworth’s Prelude. Her gift for self-fashioning turned Florence to Stevie in the 1920s, and then Stevie into Pompey Casmilus, the arch, brittle and conspiratorial protagonist of her first two novels. Hiding amongst the glittering conversational set-pieces of the first book (women’s magazines, anti-Semitism, the ironies of staging Euripides at a girls’ school) there is a poet eager for us to ‘get the first look in’8 at her work; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) would follow this example. In Over the Frontier, the spectre of war is accompanied by the anxieties of authorship and literary production. By the time we come to the plaintive Celia in The Holiday, the protagonist brings her poems to life
by recitation and performance. The question is no longer one of publication, but of posterity: a cancelled line in the manuscript confesses ‘how these tunes bother me, how can I get them written down, and if I do not do that, when I am dead who will know how they should be sung?’9 While Smith distanced herself from her novels later in her career, they alert us to the careful moves her poetry makes in situating her story. ‘Reader, before you condemn, pause’, she cautions in ‘Infant’, with a line that pauses, knowingly, after it has as good as condemned us. While lyrics like ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ can be flattened by biography, the cryptic allegory of ‘The Crown of Gold’ cannot be deciphered without it.
Smith is often remembered for her hymns to the suburbs, but once warned against ‘letting [children] think it matters much where a writer lives’,10 and made her first novel’s tutelary deity Hermes, the messenger god who speeds back and forth from the Underworld. ‘To and fro’11 is the most common co-ordinate in her work. Yet she is an inveterate chronicler of English places and their traditions. Her England is full of water, from the pashy ground of Lincolnshire and the Fenland drains to the rivers Yarrow, Deben, and Humber. While Britain is sometimes invoked in patriotic terms, her feelings are nationalist: she thought twice about publishing the anti-Welsh poem ‘Soupir d’Angleterre’, but not ‘The Celts’. Her landscapes are sometimes fantastical, but those permitted to venture there are often her most pragmatic characters, like Joan in ‘Deeply Morbid’. When the imagination becomes an unhealthy delusion, Smith is the first to disapprove: both ‘Night Thoughts’ and ‘How do you see?’ cast judgement on their troubled fantasists with the resigned understatement ‘it is not good’.
Contradictions abound, too, in the timbre of her poems. Early critics heard the visionary power of William Blake and Emily Dickinson alongside the epigrammatic comedy of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash.12 Her work is distinctive, but it jangles with a range of voices and registers. She is pitch-perfect in her ventriloquism, whether voicing the distracted evasions of the English upper class, the self-satisfied entitlement of the literary critic, or even the harmless vanity of a preening bull. Not since Keats has English poetry had a voice that can make archaism so energetic (her closing rhyme of ‘death/saith’ at the end of ‘The Bereaved Swan’ is her affectionate gesture to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’). Within a single poem, the same speaker might declaim ‘Sepulchral ailment!’ or complain about all the ‘push and fuss’ (p. 394). Yet these shifts are not just there for comic bathos: like Wallace Stevens, with whom Smith has more than a ‘ho ho, thump thump’ (p. 537) in common, her switches allow the possibility of seriousness. Her nomadic diction permits the solemn more often than the whimsical.
The range of Smith’s poetic voice is matched by its polyphony. There are stoic dialogues, choruses, and chanting twins. Smith captivated 1960s poetry audiences by singing her poems to missionary hymns, self-penned drones, and folk ballads, but her musical range goes further: ‘Death in the Rose Garden’ is scored to Bizet, while ‘The Dedicated Dancing Bull and the Water Maid’ was inspired by Beethoven’s horn and piano sonata. Like Smith’s singing voice, the exchanges between Smith’s speakers are uneven and off-kilter. Her poems are full of committed conversations, but often ones that turn on difference or mishearing:
Struck by the shout
That he may not know what it’s about
The deaf friend again
Up-ends his hearing instrument to relieve the strain.
What? Oh shock, ‘“Pray for the Mute”?
I thought you said the newt.’
(‘In the Park’)
Smith is most famous for the drowned man who goes unheard, but even the religious fanatics in ‘Our Bog is Dood’ find they ‘never could agree’.
Her first collection includes a poem called ‘Progression’, and some of her greatest admirers have questioned whether her work really had any.13 Although 1960s works such as ‘The Last Turn of the Screw’ and ‘Watchful’ marked a renewed interest in the long poem, a corpus that begins with an eerie trip to the pet shop and ends with a number of commissions to write children’s animal poems does not tell the usual story. Her poems are haunted by the dangers of development deferred:
To carry the child into adult life
Is to be handicapped
(‘To Carry the Child’)
We might read this psychological warning as authorial self-diagnosis. Yet the origins of individual poems challenge our understanding of chronology in more complicated ways. Some are Escher-like puzzles that seem to have been written before the idea for them came about: ‘What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good’ is Smith’s only poem about a writer not worried about their reception, and yet it is one of her most self-conscious. ‘Was it not curious?’ constructs its central rhyme around Saint Aúgustin, only to conveniently remember in the final verse it has mistaken him for someone else:
Was it not curious of Gregory
Rather more than of Aúgustin?
It was not curious so much
As it was wicked of them.
Other poems disorientate us not with their synchronicity, but their gestation. ‘Come on, Come back’ begins its life in the 1920s as a draft called ‘Incident in the Great War, 1991–7’, but this futuristic vision of apocalypse is not completed for another thirty-five years, by which time a war as long as the one she imagined has come and gone. This is one of the many wormholes that war drills though Smith’s work: the Trojan women quarrel to a soundtrack of ‘we’re here because, we’re here because we’re here’ in ‘I had a dream …’; a young Smith learns about trench warfare by reading Browning’s ‘Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ in ‘A Soldier Dear to Us’; while ‘At School’, a poem which introduces itself as a ‘Paolo and Francesca’ situation, is prompted by the Cold War. Smith’s most topical poem, ‘Angel Boley’, explored the Moors Murders, but was also her most sustained attempt at a legend.
As these examples suggest, allusion is a tricky customer in Smith’s poetry. The three roots most visible above ground are classical tragedy and epic (especially Dante, Euripides, and Racine), French symbolist poetry (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud), and the ‘rag-bag’ of quotations and biblical verse that came from school and home. Smith was brought up in the Palgrave’s Golden Treasury tradition: Browning, Blake, Clare, Cowper, Shelley, Tennyson, and Wordsworth in particular. Yet her use of allusion flits between misremembered quotation and deliberate reversal; it’s telling that ‘Old Ghosts’, a poem apparently about the burden of literary antecedents, makes very free and easy with its epigraph from De Quincey. In Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (1821), De Quincey praises a child for his ability to call up ghosts; Smith’s misremembered quotation worries about whether they can be sent back. She removes the epigraph altogether for Mother, What is Man?, but reinstates a revised version in Selected Poems, now even more approximate. The poem is about being besieged by the past, but the allusion only asserts Smith’s control. We find similarly sharp-witted children throughout her work: ‘The Orphan Reformed’ suggests a poet more astute about placing themselves in a lineage than we have been:
She looks at this pair and that
Cries, Father, Mother,
Likes these, does not like those,
Stays for a time; goes.
The resemblance to Wordsworth’s orphan-in-distress ‘Alice Fell’ (1807) beguiles us, and is meant to: her poetry claims then disavows kinships far and wide.
Sometimes Smith’s poetic reversals are more deliberate, and more knowing. Tennyson rhapsodises ‘The Dying Swan’ (1830) in full-throated apostrophe, and Smith replies with the stubby monosyllables of ‘The Bereaved Swan’:
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.
(Tennyson, ‘The Dying Swan’)
Wan
Swan
On a lake
(Smith, ‘The Bereaved Swan’)
Romantic swansongs have their place, but more interesting to Smi
th are those left behind who have to ‘go on’.14 While the swansong risks self-indulgence and sentimentality, Smith’s bereaved swan gives up the right to compassion. The voice of the abandoned is less grief-stricken than caustic.
Smith had little truck with poetic schools or movements, but chose her source material to place her in a wider tradition of wily writers and writing: Coleridge’s interruption by the Person from Porlock is revealed as an expedient excuse; an invented quotation about atheism by French novelist Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly prompts a poem about something-and-nothing in ‘Ceci est digne de gens sans Dieu’; while ‘Great Unaffected Vampires and the Moon’ is written in response to a competition in The Spectator to introduce the title line, the line itself coming from a made-up poem in a spoof review by Hilaire Belloc.15 Writers, like reformed orphans, are not averse to pulling the wool over our eyes when they have to. Sometimes, Smith is less allusive than she appears. One of her most celebrated poems, ‘I Remember’, seems to invoke Keats, Hardy, Larkin, and Edward Thomas, and was tellingly noted by an interviewer as being ‘typical’ of her style.16 Yet she breezily dismissed it as a near transcription from Llewellyn Powys, and therefore could not claim to have written it (p. 761). Smith’s poems are translations, reworkings, afterthoughts, disquisitions, interrogations, feelings recollected in anxiety. When we listen to them carefully, we hear not only the cadences of canonical Victorian verse, but also the fudged rhymes of Scottish child-poet Marjorie Fleming (p. 777), the quips of Billy Bunter (p. 766), or the ghost of a seventeenth-century French witch hunter (p. 751).
The furniture of Smith’s poetry specialises in uncanny objects – plaster busts of dead mothers sitting on pianos, hats of surreal proportions, gas fires worthy of friendship, and toxic mushrooms. Her drawings are similarly disorientating. Sketches of enigmatic women look out from the page, like readers who have got there first but are unwilling to give up their secrets to us. Like her poetry, her drawings have eclectic starting points. Some are inspired by the epigrammatic underlines of Goya or the sketches of Georg Grosz, while others skirt closer to Edward Lear. While a few appear to be illustrations to the poems they accompany, many were added to her poems at proof stage or substituted for an apparently unrelated doodle, deliberately unsettling how we might understand a poem’s speaker, tone, or addressee. As with her poems, they are as likely to put us on our guard as provide relief.