The castrating atmosphere of Broadcasting House is to my mind due to the air-conditioning — Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)
I spent much of January making notes on the life and work of Stevie Smith. I was preparing for this episode of In Our Time, which went out on BBC radio last week:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001j45h
The fun of this kind of discussion is that you never know quite what you are going to say. For example: I found myself looking Melvyn Bragg in the eye and singing in the surprising way that Smith did during her public readings in the Sixties. If the academic career doesn’t work out, I might start a tribute act. For now, though, here are some notes I didn’t use.
HATS: As a teenager, Smith showed poems to her English teacher, who praised the line “She threw at him her gorgeous hat” (“your forte ought to be quaint, well-made, clear-cut verse”). Later poems would revisit the association of hats and romance e.g. “Mother said if I wore this hat / I should be certain to get off with the right sort of chap” (“My Hat”); “I love my beautiful hat more than anything / And through my beautiful hat I see a wedding ring” (“The Hat”).
CLERIHEWS: Smith owned a copy of Biography for Beginners (1905) by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who, as a schoolboy, invented the form known as the “clerihew”: two couplets, in irregular metre, which humorously summarise a well-known person. Here is Bentley on Christopher Wren (as drawn by G.K. Chesterton):
Smith’s early poem, “Alfred the Great”, from her first collection A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), might be called a social-realist clerihew:
WARLOCKS: Philip Larkin came across Smith’s 1957 collection Not Waving But Drowning in a bookshop one Christmas and was “sufficiently impressed by it to buy a number of copies for random distribution among friends”.
One of Larkin’s later tributes to Smith, I suspect, comes in the poem “Vers de Société” (1971), which begins with an invitation from someone called “Warlock-Williams” (“My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps / To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps / You’d care to join us?”). The only other poem I know to feature “Warlock” as a surname is Smith’s “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock” (1962). The Person from Porlock was the man who notoriously interrupted Coleridge during the composition of “Kubla Khan”. Like Warlock-Williams, he represents the outside world distracting the poet from their visionary task; a precious idea that Smith mocks. She is interested instead in the possibility that the Person from Porlock had his own story:
He wasn’t much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock.
LE CRIME: Smith chose Agatha Christie’s Endless Night as a Book of the Year in 1967. She told readers of the Observer newspaper that she liked to re-read Christie’s murder mysteries, but “in order to make it a bit different, I often read her in French”. This way, she could enjoy the effect of “franglais”: “‘J’ai stoppé mon car’; it is very exotic.”
MOULD: Smith was a sparing but brilliant inventor of puns. Sometimes they arrive like a custard pie in the face, as when the drunk “Jungle Husband” writes to his wife “Yesterday I hittapotamus” — or when the Person from Porlock’s name is revealed to be “Porson”. But sometimes they creep up more subtly. Smith’s poem about the house where she lived for almost all of her life with her aunt, for example, characterises it as both dignified and dilapidated: “a house of aristocratic mould” (“A House of Mercy”).
WORMS: Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to Smith on 19 November 1962 to say that she had been listening to recordings of Smith reading her work and was “a desperate Smith-addict”. Three days earlier, Plath wrote “The Fearful”, which begins: “This man makes a pseudonym / And crawls behind it like a worm.” The sing-song grotesquery of this image echoes Smith poems such as “The White Thought” (1942), where a repressed daughter tells her mother that, “when I am older”, her thoughts
Will shine as a white worm under a green boulder.
“BASIL”: The character called Basil in Stevie Smith’s last novel, The Holiday (1949), who goes off on a rant about
an article in an American woman’s magazine about scanty panties, he said women who thought about scanty panties never had a comfortable fire burning in the fire-place
appears to have been based on George Orwell.
FINE CATS: Smith published a sketchbook of the doodles that often decorated her poems, Some Are More Human Than Others (1958). One was, simply, of a sexy old cat:
Smith once wrote: “I like cats. I could crush a fine cat.”
FAIRY TALES: Much of my enthusiasm for Smith is indebted to the poet Moniza Alvi, whose PhD research on Smith’s life and work I supervised. Her latest book, Fairoz (Bloodaxe, 2022) — written as part of the PhD — tells the story of a young Muslim girl who is radicalised. One of its Smithian strategies is to use the poetics of the fairy tale to tell new stories (“Fairoz wanders the dark pathways of the internet. / The trees form tunnels over her head.”) Smith, for example, responded to the Moors Murders with a long poem, “Angel Boley” (1972), about a young woman who kills her mother and husband for their unspeakable crimes.
A HAPPY POEM: Smith’s poem “I Remember” (1957) — for me, one of her finest — describes the “bridal night” of a man “of seventy-three” and “a girl with t.b.”, which takes place during the Blitz. It is, in so very many ways, a doomed love. But somehow, as Smith said, it is a happy poem — perhaps because it is partly a versification of a passage from Still the Joy of It (1956), the autobiography of Littleton C. Powys, a man whose motto was “rejoice, rejoice, in all things, rejoice”. Powys writes:
Our wedding night coincided with the most spirited German air raid that had been experience in London for a very long time; and the confusion was increased by a very large fleet of our own bombers passing over London on their way to Germany at the same time.
Smith seizes on the gentle, unconscious English comedy of this sentence (“the confusion was increased”) and heightens it with rhyme:
It was wartime and overhead
The Germans were conducting a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely,
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
When Smith was recorded reading the poem at the Freemason’s Hall in Edinburgh, the next line — spoken by the young woman in the poem — got a huge laugh:
Harry, do they ever collide?
But it is the last lines that go right to the heart; reciting them by way of a warm-up before heading into Broadcasting House, I welled up instead:
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.
Why is this happy poem so moving? The audience in Edinburgh laughed at the voice of innocence, asking a naive question about the mechanics of air war. Buried beneath this , of course, are all the old jokes about the innocent bride on her wedding night.
But Smith’s suggestion of bawdy is really a decoy for the more inarticulate drama of innocence in the poem, which turns on that word “bride”. “It was my bridal night, I remember”, begins the poem — not “my wedding night”, even though it is the groom speaking. And if he really was “seventy-three” during the Blitz, he must by now be a very old man indeed. Or is he — as in the more famous “Not Waving But Drowning” — a speaking ghost (“Still the dead one lay moaning”)? Did he die shortly after tempting fate with the words “I do not think it has ever happened”?
My point is that Smith doesn’t really expect us to believe in the reality this speaker. He is, from the start, a slipping mask for a moment of feeling. And that moment of feeling is also what the word “bride” names: “a woman who is about to be married or a newly-wed”. When the speaker of the poem says “my bridal night”, his wording wishfully suggests the temporary loss of his identity as “an old man” in the wartime darkness. For a moment, opposites are equal: there is no conflict between these non-combatant civilians, no collision course with the young woman he has married.
And that is why the repetition of last line, with its echo of the first — “Oh my bride, my bride” — is so moving: it should be an expression of the highest happiness a bridegroom can feel, but it is shadowed by a lament for the passing of bride and bride.