by Kay Ryan
Dignity, in any Thatcherly sense, was never her long suit. In fact, she eschewed long suits in general, having plumped early for some sort of short-skirted, schoolgirlish device that commentators shuddered at decade after decade. There was also that “fringe” she insisted upon, straight across the forehead. And the need for cosseting, waiting up well past her bedtime for her weekend hostess to fix her hot milk “as Aunt always did.”
Going along with life is a great drain on one’s resources. Because Stevie Smith got her tastes and behavior firmly fixed at an early age, she was left in possession of a great deal of energy that other people use up in adaptation. Smith always felt that it had particularly contributed to her independence of mind to have grown up in an all-female household. Most lower-middle-class women, she says in her third novel, The Holiday, are “conditioned early to having ‘father’ in the centre of home-life, with father’s chair, and father’s dinner, and father’s Times and father says, so they are not brought up like me to be this wicked selfish creature.” With a Lion Aunt always behind her she can safely be the “unicorn of fancy,” unimpressed by all the father’s chairs of social and literary opinion. Her poetry revels in this freedom from domination, creating wonderfully fanciful and fatherless rooms.
As first and last things, childhood and death, were always most interesting to Stevie Smith, so are they most interesting in her biography. She always recalls her Edwardian childhood as a “golden age.” She loves her early schooling, getting the stirring rhymes that she never stopped loving (and abusing) by heart, building jungles in dress-boxes. And there is the delicious ritual of Anglican services. It is merely typical of Stevie Smith that she would decide in advance what hymn to sing of a Sunday, and sing it directly over the chorus of humble voices applied to the assigned text. Childhood provided her the purest pleasure in this kind of “doing otherwise.” Even her early childhood stays in a TB sanitarium she found salutary for the preservation of the individual. She enjoyed the special treatment she received for being numbered among the sickest children, and she was able to begin refining her sense of alienation. By age eight she had acquired her own “flood subject.” For Emily Dickinson it had been the thought of immortality; for Stevie Smith it was the cheering thought of suicide. Each poet finds such solace in her subject that she applies it like a hem to perhaps too many ragged sleeves. Nevertheless, these are indisputable sources of original power.
While always bucked up by Death, “the god who must come when you call,” Stevie Smith managed to keep their relationship epistolary except on the one occasion in her fifty-first year. And then, though not released from life, she is released from her lifetime office job, which seems to be Death enough to keep her going until He comes on His own eighteen years later.
The middle chapters of the biography, devoted to Stevie Smith’s “maturity,” are the farrago of anecdote and commentary that seems difficult to avoid in documenting such a fixed character. These chapters can be enjoyed at random and, for an American reader especially, for their exquisite Britishness. It is sometimes difficult to sort out what in Stevie Smith is simply standard village-murder-mystery British and what is uniquely cockeyed, but either way, who will not relish Miss Smith laying on a guest lunch of junket, or another of boiled potatoes and a tin of peas? Or Miss Smith insisting upon rice pudding at the Piazza San Marco in Venice? (Our biographers conclude mildly that she was “certainly not Mediterranean-minded.”) We can enjoy as well the lengthy consideration of whether or not Miss Smith ever “did the last fence,” perhaps with George Orwell in a London park.
Love. This odd stickleback fish who bloats up and pokes would-be predators from the inside, what could she know about love? She was doubtful herself. She told a friend, shortly before her death, “When I am dead you must put people right. I loved my Aunt.” And, because she kept herself “well on the edge” of it, she said, she loved life also. But of that middle human area between the pleasures of being cosseted and the pleasures of rain on a slate roof, she could know little. In “Dirge,” one of her best-known poems, she says it for herself:
From a friend’s friend I taste friendship,
From a friend’s friend, love,
My spirit in confusion,
Long years I strove,
But now I know that never
Nearer I shall move,
Than a friend’s friend to friendship,
To love than a friend’s love.
There is great strength here. And perhaps great strength requires, or produces, a great distortion in its host. Still, the host is never sufficiently distorted to be free of the knowledge of her strangeness. She suffers not only the feelings appropriate to her nature, but also ghost feelings in the limbs she is born without. Stevie Smith is not one to obscure the hard truths about others (she was repeatedly threatened with libel) or about herself. She is deadly summary. She says what one might say if one were not dragged down by the very act of saying. She gives us poems in shapes that might result in a chamber free of the heart’s gravity.
Stevie Smith knows she is locked in on the nursery side of the baby-viewing window, over there where life is new, cold, novel, alien, filled with competing cries, every baby an enemy. She is not strengthened by the instincts to nourish, protect, make room, compromise, couple, or step aside. She expresses the child’s helplessness in a world it has not attached to but receives full-force. The child has the keenest sense of unequal powers, which would account for the fierceness and directness of her counterattacks.
But this is making it all sound much too dire. Stevie played with first and last things as one who grew up with wolves might play with wolves. She is lonely and hungry, and neither she nor the reader really wishes it otherwise. She always reminds us that she is doing it all from behind the privet hedge of Palmers Green: “Only those who have the luxury of a beautiful kindly bustling suburb that is theirs for the taking and of that ‘customary domestic kindness’ De Quincey speaks of, can indulge themselves in these antagonistic forest-thoughts,” she confesses in a 1947 essay.
Stevie Smith never asks for your complicity in her feelings. In fact, she goes further: her whole poetic technique fairly drives you back. Hers are seldom the large generous sentiments to which each bosom returns an answer. Her poems offer different rewards. For one, the liberation from ourselves. A poem of Stevie Smith’s does not become another thing which it is our responsibility to profit from. It is not “good” in that burdensome way whose secret subtext is that there is room for improvement in you. You are not required to improve each shining hour and you are not permitted to be empathetic.
A Stevie Smith poem has particular ways of defending itself from sympathetic ingestion. It keeps a tight rein over meaning, brooking no looseness of interpretation. It is about what it’s about. It enforces rhyme patterns which are never allowed to appear subtle, natural, accidental, or musical beyond what an enthusiastic but amateur brass band might get up. The rhythms love to march off the parade route. It takes private delight in funny walks. It refuses to be round; it loves to go flat. It goes exactly where most interested vision draws it. The reader is nobody’s hypocrite brother. Your soul isn’t compromised; it is simply threatened. Things are said briskly, uniformly briskly. It is a good technique to have if one is going to tell mortal truths. The comic sting of it in general takes away the sting of its burden—you are lonely, you are hungry, you are not understood. You are best so. You will die so. And through some paradox, this voice can achieve a rare tenderness, as it does in “Autumn”:
He told his life story to Mrs. Courtly
Who was a widow. “Let us get married shortly,”
He said. “I am no longer passionate,
But we can have some conversation before it is too late.”
Stevie Smith is always going to spell trouble for anyone who feels it necessary to separate the joke from the deeper exercises of the heart. Even the Stevie-smitten Philip Larkin must end a prickly 1962 review of her poetry with the redemptive ju
dgment that “Miss Smith’s poems speak with the authority of sadness.”
No doubt Miss Smith would counter that to speak at all is to confess sadness. She would hope that the authority comes from its brisk dispatch—the authority of lightness. Milan Kundera writes wistfully of the eponymous substance in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, describing how Beethoven once converted a perfectly inconsequential joke into a “serious quartet.” He contemplates how much more remarkable it would have been if Beethoven had achieved the reverse, making “heavy go to light.” He says with real pain that we don’t know how to think this way. But if, for a moment, we could give up the prejudices of gravity, which most values that which is most obedient to its force, if we could read her in space, we would find in Stevie Smith a most unencumbering soul. We tend to think either that poetry is superior entertainment or that poetry approaches higher truths. But what if higher truths are really entertaining: what if the ultimate forms are ravishing cartoons?
Here is Stevie Smith on the subject of poetry in “My Muse,” from the excellent Me Again, uncollected writings of Stevie Smith edited by our biographers back in 1982 and attesting to their enduring interest in their subject. After saying that poetry is fierce, absolute, dangerous, not neat, without kindness at all, “the strong way out,” she says: “All the poems Poetry writes may be called, ‘Heaven, a Detail,’ or ‘Hell, a Detail.’” She likens Poetry to “the goddess Thetis who turned herself into a crab with silver feet, that Peleus sought for and held. Then in his hands she became first a fire, then a serpent, then a suffocating stench. But Peleus put sand on his hands and wrapped his body in sodden sacking and so held her through all her changes, till she became Thetis again, and so he married her, and an unhappy marriage it was.”
Note the characteristic Stevie Smith tag. She concocts this great polymorphic struggle only to reduce it in her British saucepot to a Palmers Green domestic mismatch. She will simply not be rattled by grandeur. Exalted and terrible moments will occur. “Riding home one night late on a bus,” she writes in another essay, “I was lost forever in the swirling streets of that reflected world, with its panic corners and the distances that end too soon; lost and never to come home again.” But what one emphasizes above them, below them, through them, is order.
At age sixty-two, she writes in a characteristically short essay, “Simply Living”: “I enjoy myself now living simply. I look after somebody who used to look after me.” She likes to spend time in the kitchen: “I like food, I like stripping vegetables of their skins, I like to have a slim young parsnip under my knife.” (A pity she didn’t serve them to guests.) Then there is the morning glass of sherry with Aunt: “I can only say that this is glorious.” What puts the edge on the routine are those “moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply—and the thought of Death as a friend.”
Whatever strong conclusion one of her poems may draw, the next is likely to run the other way. On one page there is the admonition to carry on; on the opposite there is the yearning for escape through death or war work. She is never out of the crisscross storms no matter how safely she tucks herself in with Aunt. Still Stevie Smith is no existential hero, bravely bearing the irreconcilable ambiguities. They are not to be borne. They are to be fried in the frying pan, caught in mousetraps, dipped in paint-cans, and marched off planks with the gusto of Tom and Jerry’s battles. It is as though poetry really were, as Eliot claimed, superior amusement.
Stevie Smith’s Miss Snooks, Mrs. Osmosis (“all right in small doses”), Lord Mopes, jungle husbands, swinging apes, singing cats, voices of God and other primary movers, dogs, knights, and frogs go beyond Emily Dickinson’s directive to tell it slant. They tell it in Sunday-school felt-board figures. Yet she insists that her poetry is the best and most of her: “Everything I have lived through, and done, and seen, and read and imagined and thought and argued.” She gives her life to her cut-outs and caricatures because it “gives proportion and eases the pressure, puts the feelings at one remove, cools the fever.”
Stevie Smith does everything possible to cartoonify herself and her work. She is perfectly capable of saying onstage that much of her poetry “may be understood as a soft sighing after shadowy death.” But this does nothing to prevent the cartoon from being grand. Stevie Smith’s poems, so doggerelish, so faux faux, so clearly enjoying themselves in their headstrong way, so thoroughly “unnatural,” can’t in the long run be separated from the True, the Beautiful, the Timeless, the deeply moving. It is terrible in a way that there is not one language for the Truth and another for the Joke but there is not. Artifice will groan like a common trestle under our grief. Anything can do anything. A clumsily rhymed retelling of the fairy tale “The Frog Prince,” illustrated with a drawing of a heavy-lidded toad apparently suffering with a stomachache, can weigh up the mortal cost of enchantment and remain weightless itself.
But let us return to Palmers Green. The Lion Aunt survives upstairs in her dignity until the age of ninety-six, leaving Stevie Smith only three years to live out alone in the house on Avondale Road. Her sister has a stroke and Smith’s own health deteriorates in these final years, but the Stevie spirit is if anything refined by tribulation. After her aunt’s death she writes a poem about how we must not refuse suffering, “So to fatness come.” It has the always-obvious Stevie Smith rhymes hiccoughing down the ragged right side, and it twists syntax to get them; it has the archaic “thy’s” and “spakes”; it is no less than the voice of Grief addressed to the whole of the “Poor human race.” It features not just the “dish” of pain but the “cup” of it as well. (One suspects that this additional vessel appears because she wanted to do something later with the words “sup” and “up.”) The last stanza abandons all attempt at rhyme. The authorial I comes in and says that the preceding address by Grief occurred to her in a dream, and concludes with Johnsonian dignity: “I thought / He spoke no more than grace allowed / And no less than truth.” And what is the effect of this mix? It is grand, restrained, glowing with probity, inevitable, ancient, biblical, immediate, fresh, and unencumbering.
The Stevie Method of Life and Poetry turns out to work very well, despite her lifetime caveats. Call her childlike, or childish; say that it is unattractive for a grown woman to steal the good stuff out of the tea sandwiches; but add that her method of getting along was sustainable, that her solitary stand, her combination of fierceness and indecision, her tweaking of demons’ beaks, continued to nourish as well as any of the more familiar modes. It was, the evidence suggests, neither too brittle nor too heavy to go on serving. She may craze and crack, but she never comes down of her own weight like the Roman Empire. And here is the cheerful news for the outsider, the one among us who is never caught behind the knees by the chairlift of Life: the outsider can get along in a way that isn’t tragic, that continues brave and enlivening.
Even the brain tumor that kills her seems a final Stevie joke. She had always praised tiredness for its tendency to shift words “a bit offbeam,” turning a word like lodestar into lobster, for instance, and engendering the wonderfully silly poem “Duty Was His Lodestar,” beginning “Duty was my Lobster, my Lobster was she, / And when I walked with my Lobster / I was happy.” And now the tumor pressing on her brain accelerates the gift. The images in her last letters, published in Stevie and also in Me Again, are like ammunition going off in a burning house. It’s an end which Stevie Smith would have enjoyed, given greater distance.
Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith, by Jack Barbera and William McBrien (Oxford University Press, 1987)
Inedible Melons
Marianne Moore’s poems are as contemporary as a Google search and as antique as wonder cabinets. Her method for going forward in a poem is so barnacled and elaborate that one might question whether she goes forward or not. She really has very little interest in forward drive—perhaps progress smac
ked to her of base qualities such as striving or pugnacity. Nevertheless, she arranges to at least simulate the sensation of forward motion through linking object to object in her wonder cabinets. The poems are glass-cased and filled with small sliding drawers which we open. Our fascination with any part both blinds us to the rest (and to the fact that the connections may be casual) and convinces us that the whole would, by extrapolation, be more than the sum of its priceless parts if we could ever apprehend it, which we cannot. This is not a criticism but an observation. The reader can go from part to part, relishing detail and secure in the powerful sense that Marianne Moore is somehow taking care of the big picture. She has taken as her subject matter that which she has found in museums, books, and zoos, but the power of her voice and her moral presence assure us that her understanding is not intermittent but constant, and that we may—we should—abandon ourselves to the study of wonders, confident that Miss Moore could—and probably will—handle the dragon attacks.
What a desirable presence. Marianne Moore was this curio—who was so much more, who really did seem to hold steady and brave. She strikes me as at once ridiculous and immensely cheering. She is monumental, like a stern aunt, and all bits and pieces, like a pixilated one.