Foremother poet: Stevie Smith (1902-71)

Stevie Smith’s drawing underneath her poem, “My Soul”

Dear friends and readers,

Stevie Smith is one of my favorite 20th century poets. I’ve been wanting to write a foremother poet blog for her, and waiting until I could re-see the movie, Stevie (1978), based on her life, and starring Glenda Jackson (director Robert Enders, writer Hugh Whittemore), but as I’ve discovered now that I can’t obtain a DVD, and tonight read a splendid literary evaluation of her poetry, have decided to go ahead without benefit of the fictional-biographical portrayal.

A second problem for me is since I like her poetry so much, and have 3 books of it (plus selections and prose writing), I just didn’t know which ones to select. But select I must, so I have chosen a mix of longer monologues, lyrical and epigrammatic verses.

To start with the latter, a poem which states simply what makes love worthwhile and lasting:

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.’

move onto the former (long monologue) where we see her overturn conventional identifications and judgemental views:

Phèdre

I wonder why Proust should have thought
The lines from Racine’s Phèdre
Depuis que sur ces bords les deux ont envoyé
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé to be
Entirely devoid of meaning,
To me they seem
As lucid as they are alarming.
I wonder why
The actresses I’ve seen
Playing Phèdre
Always indulge
In such mature agonising.
Phèdre was young,
(This is as clear in Racine as Euripides)
She was young,
A girl caught in a trap, a girl
Under the enforcement
Of a goddess.
I dare say Phèdre
In fact I’m sure of it
Was by nature
As prim as Hipolytus,
Poor girl, poor girl, what could she do
But be ashamed and hang herself,
Poor girl.

How awful the French actess
Marie Bell
Made her appear.
Poor Phèdre,
Not only to be shamed by her own behaviour
Enforced by that disgusting goddess,
Ancient enemy
Of her family,
But nowadays to have played
By actresses like Marie Bell
In awful ancient agonising, something painful

Now if I
Had been writing this story
I should have arranged for Theseus
To die,
(Well he was old)
And then I should have let
Phèdre and Hippolytus
Find Aricie out
In some small meanness,
Say
Eating up somebody else’s chocolates,
Half a pound of them, soft-centred,
Secretly in bed at night, alone
One after another
Positively wolfing them down.
This would have put Hip off,
and Phaedra would be there too
and he would turn and see
That she was pretty disgusted , too
so then they would have got married
and everything would have been respectable
and the wretched Venus could have lumped it,
Lumped I mean Phèdre
Being the only respectable member
Of her awful family
And being happy.

I should have liked one member
of that awful family
To be happy.
What with Ariadne auf Naxos,
and Pasiphaé and that awful animal
and Minos sitting judging the Dead
In those awful dark halls.
Yes, I should like poor honorable simple sweet prim Phèdre
to be happy. One would have to be pretty simple
to be happy with a prig like Hippolytus
But she was simple
I think it might have been a go
If I were writing the story
I should have made it a go.

Even if altogether too often quoted, Not Waving But Drowning is one of her supreme and characteristic achievements, and for it I have (from a friend on WWTTA) a taped commentary and reading aloud. (I am not sure it will work; I had it on the blog but it was removed for copyright infringement after third parties apparently told someone with the power to block the UTube.) If you can find this UTube recording, you hear her unsettling way of reading aloud, a off-key frank talk that is more haunted and memorable than you at first realize. You also learn that the poem is based on a real incident of someone who really drowned while others thought he was just waving.

She lived her life with women, at one point in a house of aunts, and a sister (when she was young her father went to sea and thereafter never saw his family); this poem testifies to the beauty of the female household:

A House of Mercy

It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For although Fear knocked loud
Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.

There were also two feeble babes, two girls,
That Mrs S. had by her husband had,
He soon left them and went away to sea,
Nor sent them money, nor came home again
Except to borrow back
Her Naval Officer’s Wife’s Allowance from Mrs S.
Who gave it him at once, she thought she should.

There was also the ladies’ aunt
And babes’ great aunt, a Mrs Martha Hearn Clode,
And she was elderly.
These ladies put their money all together
And so we lived.

I was the younger of the feeble babes
And when I was a child my mother died
And later Great Aunt Martha Hearn Clode died
And later still my sister went away.

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.

It is a house of female habitation
A house expecting strength as it is strong
A house of aristocratic mould that looks apart
When tears fall; counts despair
Derisory. Yet it has kept us well. For all its faults,
If they are faults, of sternness and reserve,
It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart
A house of mercy.

This the anguish of loss of such a friendship in a softly melting lyric:

Pad pad

I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more

What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

Drawing by Stevie Smith

I like this brilliant art criticism (how imitations tarnish and bring out what’s bad in the better version of something too). I think of Kenneth Clark’s The Nude is after all endless pictures of naked women for men to look at and judge; he is perfectly unconcerned (the phrase is Austen’s about Lydia Bennet) with their circumstances, context, the models themselves.

Salon d’Automne

One thousand and one naked ladies
With a naivete
At once pedantic and unsympathetic
Deck the walls
Of the Salon d’Automne.
This is the Slap school of art,
It would be nice
To smack them
Slap, slap, slap,
That would be nice.
It is possible
One might tire of smacking them In time
But not so soon
As one tires of seeing them.
We too
Have our pedantic and unsympathetic
School,
It used to show
A feeling for animals.
The English are splendid with animals,
There was The Stag at Bay
And Faithful unto Death,
And Man’s Best Friend the horse this time
Usually under gunfire,
The English are splendid with animals.
That older school
Was perhaps
On an intellectual level
With the Salon d’Automne.
Nowadays, of course,
We are more advanced:
The bad modern painter
Has lost the naivete
Of that earlier school
And in its place
Has developed a talent
For making the work of his betters
Seem stale
By uninspired Imitation.
Really
This is more tiring
Than the thousand and one
Naked ladies.

This poem of a dance performance at a school, dated June 1939. The poet is there watching them, and the imagery of a “cold summer sky” and dark hard currents in the air, with something “equivocal” underneath the “veneer” of a “vision of innocence” soon to come to an end connects to the coming war:

The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses

HAYES COURT, JUNE 1939

The schoolgirls dance on the cold grass
The ballet of the twelve dancing princesses
And the shadows pass

Over their cold feet

Above in the cold summer sky the clouds mass
The icy wind blows across the laurel bushes
The sky is hard blue and gray where a cloud rushes
The sky is icy blue it is like the night blue where a star pushes.

But it is not night
It is daytime on an English lawn.
The scholars dance. The weather is as fresh as dawn.
Dawn and night are the webs of this summer’s day
Dawn and night the tempo of the children’s play.

Who taught the scholars? Who informed the dance?
Who taught them so innocent to advance
So far in a peculiar study? They seem to be in a trance.
It is a trance in which the cold innocent feet pass
To and fro in a hinted meaning over the grass
The meaning is not more ominous and frivolous than the clouds
that mass.

There is nothing to my thought more beautiful at this moment
Than a vision of innocence that is bound to do something
equivocal
I sense something equivocal beneath the veneer of an innocent
spent
Tale and in the trumpet sound of the icy storm overhead there is
evocable
The advance of innocence against a mutation that is irrevocable
Only in the imagination of that issue joined for a split second is
the idea beautiful.

**********************************

Stevie Smith, photograph on the Net

There are a large number of sites for Florence Margaret Smith (1902-71), which retell her life and offer criticism of her poetry and prose and art as well as cite books and articles: see, e.g., wikipedia tells us also that she suffered from depression all her life, a popular biography and bibliography by Anne Bryan

What follows is a summary of Jane Dowson’s critical essay (a rare good one), her introduction to her selection in Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology, with a few interjections of my own (put in parentheses).

Dowson begins by telling us that Smith was self-educated: she found the environment of the “prestigious North Collegiate School for Girls repressive,” and did not go on to college for she foresaw for herself only a career as a teacher, which she did not want to do. She read on her own and took classes in literature, theology, the arts, classics, history. In 1922 she became a secretary to the publishers George Newnes and Nevil Pearson and remained so for 30 years. She wrote prolifically despite repeated rejections from publishers.

She is “framed as an idiosyncratic spinster” though she was later known also for her theatrical readings of her poems (see above). She makes people uncomfortable with her announced preference for death, and readers have found her poetry “unclassifiable.” Philip Larkin called her work “facetious bosch” (in the UTube she obviously has an over-the-top plummy accent, while mocking all pretension.) , but, as Dowson says, “disregard for convention is … a contrived and political gesture.” She renders class and status distinctions irrelevant by “integrating folk culture, ballds, nusery rhymes, hymn tunes, and proverbial sayings.”

Perhaps most striking is her “irreverence” and “literary referentiality” whereby she produces a kind of “metacommunication” (the poems are self-conscious). Dowson’s themes is the social conscience of her chosen women and Smith has strong “socialist sympathies” with outsiders, “children, women, and the socially disadvantaged.” She “challenges” “groupismus.” She opposes “institutionalized uniformity,” and there is a “dialectic of mass culture versus elitism” (see her “Salone d’Automne” and “Sterilization”).

This is “not light-hearted verse;” there is much “unease” and a use of “psychological realism” (which makes for deep melancholy). Her feminism is in her use of off-beat figures, unusual identifications, and “portraits of powerlessness.” “Betrayal” is a central theme, and we see women “the casualties of men’s freedom to choose (“Marriage I think” has an abandoned wife). She rejects “the discourses of power” (academic or hierarchical, traditional viatic poetry). There’s a “persistent transgression” of “conventional assumptions” of all sorts from many areas of life.

By dismissing the poems as “odd or strange” or “eccentric” readers are trying to undo her desire to upset the security of decorums (a kind of disguise). Dowson ends her introduction by quoting Smith’s answer to some of these critics:

You will say: But your poems are all story poems, you keep yourself hidden. Yes. But all the same, my whole life is in these poems … everything I have lived through, and done, and seen, and read and imagined and thought and argued. Then why do I turn them all upon other people, imaginary people, the people I create? It is because … it gives proportion and eases the pressure.”

I close with these three from Jane Dowson’s anthology:

From Jane Dowson’s anthology:

Sterilization

Carve delinquency away,
Said the great Professor Clay.

A surgical operation is just the thing
To make everybody as happy as a king.

But the great Dostoievsky the Epileptic
Turned on his side and looked rather sceptic.

And the homosexual Mr. Wilde
Sat in the sunshine and smiled and smiled.

And a similarly inclined older ghost in a ruff
Stopped reading his sonnets aloud and said ‘Stuff’

And the certainly eccentric Swift, Crashawe and Donne,
Silently shook hands and thanked God they had gone.

But the egregious Professor Clay
Called on Theopompous and won the day.

And soon all our minds will be flat as a pancake,
With no room for genius exaltation or heartache.

And our children and theirs will preen, smirk and chatter,
With not even the sense to ask what is the matter.
21.19.1937

Drawing placed to the side of “Marriage I think”

Marriage I think
For women
Is the best of opiates
It kills the thoughts
That think about the thoughts,
It is the best of opiates.
So said Maria.
But too long in solitude she’d dwelt,
And too long her thoughts had felt
Their strength. So when the man drew near,
Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear.
Poor Maria!
Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain,
For now she’s alone again and all in pain;
She sighs for the man that went and thoughts that stay
To trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.

A last rejecting any heterosexual relationship as a necessary solution to life’s lack of meaning, a child speaking to her mother:

Landrecie

What shall I say to the gentlemen, mother,
They stand in the doorway to hear what is said,
Waiting and watching and listening and laughing,
Is there no word that will send them away?

What shall I say to the gentlemen, mother,
What shall I say to them, must I say nothing?
If I say nothing, then will they not harm us,
Will they not harm us and shall we not suffer?

What shall I say to the gentlemen, mother?
See, they are waiting, and will not depart.
Closed are your eyelids, your lips closed in silence
Cannot instruct me, oh what shall I answer?

Dowson cites Seamus Heaney, “A Memorable Voice,” Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London, Faber, 1980, pp. 199-201); Martin Pumphrey, “Play, Fantasy and strange laughter: Stevie Smith’s uncomfortable poetry,” Critical Quarterly, 28:3 (1986):85-96; Francis Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (Faber, 1988) and Jack Barbera and Wm McBrien, Stevie: A Biography (Heineman, 1985)

Glenda Jackson as Stevie Smith

I add a further selection: Edward Hirsh, “Stevie: the Movie, a Column,” American Poetry Review, 29:4 (2000):32-27, an evaluation of the film (low-budget, low-tech art movie, surprisingly profound and deeply felt”) and poetry, which strongly praises both (“a heartbreaking brightness we needed all along”): he quotes her: “I’m probably a couple of sherries below par most of the time.”

Romana Huk, “Misplacing Stevie Smith,” a review of Catherine Civello’s Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and poetry of Stevie Smith, and Laura Severin’s Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics, in Contemporary Literature 40:3 (1999):507-23.

Sheryl Stevenson, Stevie Smith’s Voices, Contemporary Literature, 33:1 (1992):24-45.

Jack Barbera, “The Relevance of Stevie Smith’s Drawings,” Journal of Modern Literature 12:2 (1985):221-36. The drawings done separately prompted more poems, and they provide specific instances, grim, jokey, of the general assertions or themes of the poems.

The House of OverDew (drawing placed above poem, by Stevie Smith

My books at home are Stevie Smith: A Selection, edited by Hermione Lee (with an excellent introduction, Faber 1983); Stevie Smith, Selected Poems (New Directions, 1962); and Me Again: Stevie Smith: Uncollected Writings, Illustrated by Herself, edited by Jack Barbera and Wm McBrien (Vintage,1983)

See further foremother blogs in Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two

Ellen