Diffident Jest: A Look2 Essay on Stevie Smith
In November 1962, Stevie Smith received a letter from “an addict…a desperate Smith-addict.” The importunate admirer inquired as to how she might get hold of Smith’s elusive first novel (having just completed her own) and hoped to arrange a meeting “over tea or coffee” in London, where she was planning to move in the new year. Smith’s reply is gracious though distant; after acknowledging the difficulty of obtaining the now out-of-print novel, she gently pours cold water on the prospect of a rendezvous:
I do hope your novel goes well & I do hope the move in the New Year goes well too—if only as you suggest, so that we can meet some time.
I feel awfully lazy most of the time, even the idea of writing a novel makes me feel rather faint! And as for poetry, I am a real humbug, just write it (?) sometimes but practically never read a word. That makes me feel pretty mean spirited when poets like you write such nice letters.
The poet in this case was Sylvia Plath—the newly separated Plath who had, over the course of the previous month, composed the Ariel poems; the Plath who would, little over a month into the new year, kill herself in her freezing London flat.
A meeting with Smith, Plath thought, would “cheer [her] on a bit.”
Smith was not exactly a cheering poet. Among the many things that she shared with Plath (including: a love of horse-riding, early exposure to the world of publishing, a deft hand at prose) was an abiding awareness of the destructiveness of intimacy, as well as the ability to conjure a sense of despair all the more companionable for its tenacity. Both poets toyed with death in life and art. In the summer of 1953, Smith’s severe depression culminated in an attempted suicide. It was in this same period that she produced the single poem on which her posthumous reputation almost entirely stands:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
“Not Waving But Drowning” shows Smith at her most tragi-comically adept. It is a poem in which the difficulty of distinguishing between depths and shallows is posed by characteristically underpunctuated lines that prove so equivocal to both eye and ear. How are we to read the “no no no” at the beginning of the third stanza? Does the absence of commas make us linger on each “no” longer or does it allow us to skip over them more spryly? Are these the lugubriously self-pitying “no”s of an admonishing spirit (keeping in mind that the collection to which this poem gives its name also includes a poem about “King Hamlet’s Ghost”)? Or is this the courteous stutter of someone trying to smooth over the simplest of misunderstandings? These delicate ambiguities point to the fallibility of our senses of sight and sound when it comes to detecting the undertow of sorrow.
It takes a peculiar kind of imagination to appreciate the superficial resemblance between waving and drowning—an imagination capable of abstracting itself sufficiently from the drama of a struggle for life to take up an aesthetic interest in gesture and performance. This is not, of course, the same kind of abstraction evinced by the second stanza’s anonymous spectators, whose measured diagnosis (“It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way”) breaks the measure of the poem, adding an extra beat before the rhythm completely flatlines in the unaccented attribution “They said.” The lopsidedness of the lineation and the patness of the “dead” / “said” rhyme create the air of a complacent finality—the dead weight of consensus opinion—that stands for correction in the poem’s final verses. Not only is the purported cause of death wrong, but the reports of the man’s death may have been greatly exaggerated: he still lies there moaning.
Like Classical tragedy, “Not Waving But Drowning” turns on the relationship between spectacle and suffering, on the presumption that we have at our disposal the adequate means (through speaking and acting) to make our suffering visible to others. But Smith seems to ask if there isn’t a kind of hubris attached to this notion—if our investment in spectacle (or “larking”) isn’t more an invitation to continue looking at the mask rather than through it? The poem’s “dead man” is too good-natured to deem his onlookers culpable for his fate; however plangent, his “moaning” never sharpens into an accusation. But there lingers a sense that the reader, too, might be complicit in this misrecognition: for couldn’t the poem’s own blitheness of manner be another instance of “not waving but drowning”? How easily does the heart that gives way give itself away?
Anguish in Smith’s work often comes apparelled in the light drapery of fable, nursery rhyme, or ballad. It is this apparent lightness that led early readers and reviewers to compare Smith’s work to Edward Lear and Ogden Nash, whose quip “Who or what is Stevie Smith? / Is she woman? Is she myth?” was used to advertise the American edition of her Selected Poems. Emily Dickinson and William Blake afford better comparisons. There is more than a touch of Dickinson in “Tender Only to One,” an early poem that twists the swoon of petal-plucking sentimentalism into morbidity:
Tender only to one,
Last petal’s latest breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.
If light verse is an instrument of sentiment, it is equally a weapon of satire and Smith shares with Blake a temperament of moral severity and wit. Their tactics are also similar. Take the use of the Blakean bestiary in “Reversionary”:
The Lion dishonored bids death come,
The worm in like hap lingers on.
The Lion dead, his pride no less,
The world inherits wormliness.
Or the echo of Blake’s “The Human Abstract” in the song of “Childe Rolandine,” an adaptation of Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”:
It is the privilege of the rich
To waste the time of the poor
To water with tears in secret
A tree that grows in secret
That bears fruit in secret
That ripened falls to the ground in secret
And manures the parent tree
Her poems, like Blake’s, are more often than not accompanied by images: wiry line drawings of heads, androgynous figures in outlandish costume, animals of the wild and domestic variety, angels and muses both vindictive and salutary, woodlands and suburban scenes. They give her work a children’s picture-book quality and occasionally provide a master-clue to the current of feeling in a poem.
In the case of “Brickenden, Hertfordshire,” I was, initially, at a loss to explain the pathos and strange power of a poem about a day-tripper’s failed quest to find a stream in the wood surrounding a village. The speaker’s revulsion is ratcheted up as the quest takes on a nightmarish futility:
I see the pashy ground,
And round and round
My tired feet the rushes twine,
And frogs croak and the sweating slime
Is moved about by an ambiguous brood
Of low and legless life.
It turns out that there isn’t a stream after all. Piqued by this failure, the speaker turns on the wood, abhorring its “profligate viridity” as “but a suppuration of earth’s humours”: “thy sap’s virtue comes from dank earth’s sweat”.
There is something sublime yet childish about the thwarted desire summoned up in this poem and in the recent Collected Poems & Drawings of Stevie Smith, “Brickenden” is accompanied by an illustration of a sour-faced child on a hillock of grass. The child has frown lines and a mop of hair resembling a badly poached egg. The relation between text and image isn’t immediately clear: Is this intended to deflate the high-flown rhetoric of the poem (“I wept / For the tragedy of unwatered country”), a suggestion on the sly that the speaker’s rage is merely a toddler tantrum? Or is there something else at play? The poem’s baroque diction seems to rule a child speaker out of the question, but after a while, it dawns on you that the poem is very much about what it means to be a child, about the comfort of origin stories and of knowing one’s source. It seems embarrassing to have overlooked what the illustration helps make startlingly clear: that at the emotional core of “Brickenden, Hertfordshire” is a drama of lost and irrecoverable parentage.
The figure of the orphan appears in many guises throughout Smith’s oeuvre and one could say (with only a hint of hyperbole) that Smith has been orphaned by the periodizations and groupings by which readers have come to see and understand twentieth-century Anglophone poetry. Born in Hull in 1902, Smith was too young to be a high modernist. Her work first started appearing in the mid-thirties—her first novel, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936; her first book of poems, A Good Time Was Had By All, the next year—and it was largely as a “writer of the thirties” that she continued to be thought of (long after “a writer of the thirties” had ceased being a fashionable thing). But she remains an uneasy fit even for that decade with its poetry of political commitment and ideological swagger. Temperamentally, Smith was not a joiner of causes; she was skeptical of “flag-wavers of both sexes,” and would chide her friends for the “hubris” of their “world-worrying.” In 1942, she could still say: “it is to the poet’s merit / To be silent about the war” (compare this to Auden’s “maps can really point to places / Where life is evil now: / Nanking. Dachau.”). She continued writing poems and novels well into the fifties and sixties, but had little to do with either the macho-nativism of The Movement writers in England (Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes chief among them) or the countercultural energy fueling American confessionalist poetry.
Lack of membership in a clear clique or milieu meant that, throughout her career, Smith had difficulty finding a consistent publisher for her poetry, though she was often in high demand as a reviewer of novels (sometimes at the very monthlies that were turning down her poems). Part of this had to do with the sheer volume of verse she produced and a lack of decisiveness with her own selections; part of it had to do with her insistence that the poems be accompanied by her idiosyncratic drawings. When she did become something of a literary celebrity in the 1960s, it was largely as a result of poetry readings undertaken both in person and on radio. As her biographer, Francis Spalding, observes, Smith’s popularity in the sixties is best seen against “a demand for a fresh, imaginative and popular use of language”—a demand that was met in the musical world by the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Working through text, image, and voice, she was one of the first truly multimedia artists.
Smith might best be described as a “problem” poet in the same way that adults will speak of a “problem” child (or literary critics of a “problem” play): problematic because recalcitrant and mercurial. And there was something perennially childlike about her demeanor both on the page and off it. About her everyday life, there was a strange mixture of a fierce independence of spirit and an enfeebling dependency. With an absent father and an incapacitated mother, she lived most of her life under the guardianship of her aunt, Madge Spear (the “Lion of Hull” as she is called in Smith’s novels), who coddled her to such an extent that well into middle age Smith had little idea how to boil an egg or open a tin can. At the conclusion of the many literary parties and gatherings she attended in London, she would demand lifts from her friends back to her suburban home at 1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green (about a forty-minute drive out of the city central). Throughout her life, Smith cultivated a “little girl” persona, her signature look consisting of “old-fashioned strap shoes and knitted stockings” and a pinafore over which sprouted the wings of a white shirt collar.
She’s in this costume in the widely reproduced photograph of her taken by Jorge Lewinski in 1965. There, Smith is seated at a table, staring off into the top right corner with her mouth slightly ajar as if in mid-thought. What one notices most of all is the tensile strength of her fingers, three of which prop up her head; in the remaining two, a cigarette is wedged. When looking at Smith’s illustrations too, I find myself continually drawn to her depiction of fingers. As if belonging to characters out of a Tim Burton fantasy, they are never rounded, but long and sharp, delicate yet deadly.
Returning readers of Smith will be well served by Will May’s edition of the Collected Poems & Drawings—a scholarly, yet extremely readable volume. But for first-time readers, the best place to start remains Smith’s prose. It was, after all, the success of the disarmingly titled Novel on Yellow Paper (so-called because Smith’s typescript made its way through the offices of Jonathan Cape on yellow copying paper; the New Directions “Revived Modern Classic” edition is printed on paper of the same hue) that launched Smith’s career as a poet. Like her two subsequent novels, Novel on Yellow Paper is transparently autobiographical, recounting the life and reflections of one Pompey Casmilus, secretary to publishing magnate Sir Phoebus Ullwater (as Smith herself, until her suicide attempt, was secretary-typist to Sir Neville Newnes of the Newnes publishing company). The reader is warned that “this is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by left hand…if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation.” While there is, broadly speaking, a temporal arc as Pompey narrates her life story from birth onward, the novel is more or less a series of digressions on everything from Christian mysticism and the differences between French Neoclassical and Classical Greek tragedy to sex education and the way foreign visitors will use diminutives like “doggie” to impress their English hosts. Equal parts diary, commonplace book, and Beckettian monologue, the book seems narrated by the garrulous love child of Molly Bloom and Tristram Shandy.
Between high and low, bright and somber, Pompey treads a nervy line:
I am a forward-looking girl and don’t stay where I am. ‘Left right, Be bright,’ as I said in my poem. That’s on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable.
In a review that continues to shape Smith’s reception, Philip Larkin called her manner “that of the fausse-naïve, the ‘feminine’ doodler or jotter who puts down everything as it strikes her, no matter how silly or tragic.” For Larkin, Smith’s deeply gendered eccentricity aligned her with modernisms both high and low, with Gertrude Stein on the one hand and Lorelei Lee (the protagonist of Anita Loos’ comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) on the other. There is something right about these points of reference (Smith was a great admirer of Loos). But the charge of whimsical indiscriminateness relegates Smith’s work to the purgatory of literary spinsterdom in which women writers such as Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner have unfairly found themselves.
I prefer to think of Smith less as an ingénue (fausse or not) and more as a jester—if we take jest not in its narrow modern sense of trifle or joke, but rather in its broader etymological sense, as the critic David Bromwich has put it, of a “truth, accommodated to an audience with whom the poet’s relation is tactical, but ready for another audience with whom [her] relation may be moral.” On this reading, the jester is a sage in disguise, concealing her wisdom behind legerdemain while waiting for the readers and hearers to come along who will see through the act to the plea for recognition. It’s no accident that some of Smith’s most memorable poems center on the consequences of misrecognition between performer and audience. It’s the theme not only of “Not Waving But Drowning,” but also of “The Orphan Reformed”:
At last the orphan is reformed. Now quite
Alone she goes; now she is right.
Now when she cries, Father, Mother, it is only to please.
Now the people do not mind, now they say she is a mild tease.
The orphan, one might say, is the consummate jester, driven, above all else, by a desire to find and forge a right relation.