Stevie Smith, steel soul of the suburbs
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Version 0 of 1. Stevie Smith was the first poet I read. I can’t remember how I discovered her; all I know is that I asked for her Collected Poems one Christmas. If the elaborately careful signature on the inside jacket is anything to judge by, I must have been about 15 at the time. I liked the fact that she was a swift read, her poems so wondrously succinct I sometimes wondered if they really counted as Literature. Far too many writers were, in my youthful opinion, far too prolix. But it was her tone that really delighted me. Her irony, her wit, that slight edge of malice: these things spoke to a moody teenager. Her voice was irresistible. Related: Rachel Cooke on the Virago Modern Classic Wanting more, I bought her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, and one grey Sunday – exactly the kind of dreary, slow-ticking afternoon she must often have endured in her Victorian villa, marooned in the outer reaches of suburban London – I sat down to read it. The shock was considerable. What’s this? I thought, a question that’s tricky to answer even now, for Smith’s novels (she wrote three, after which she abandoned fiction for ever) are nothing if not singular. Her debts – to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to the Dorothys Parker and Richardson, and, above all, to Virginia Woolf – might well be obvious, especially to those well schooled in modernism. Nevertheless, she remains her own writer, sui generis. A poem, she once told a friend, was a relatively light thing; it could be carried around “while you’re doing the housework”. A novel, though, was an altogether darker beast. She likened her fiction to the sea: on the surface bright and sunny, but seven miles down “black and cold”. Yet far from feeling chilled on finishing the book, the reader closes Novel on Yellow Paper feeling that everyday speech, in all its repetitive clumsiness, has been brought magically close to poetry. Something has been crystallised. The 30s, certainly, for it’s all here: antisemitism, political self-delusion, “the nervous irritability that has in it the pulse of our time”. But also the moods of a young woman, alone in the world at a moment when to be such a thing felt daring, insecure, perilous, freakish. Stevie Smith was born Florence Margaret Smith in 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire, the second daughter of Charles Smith, a failed shipping agent, and his wife, Ethel. Her parents were, in her words, “ill-assorted”, and when she was only three, her father ran away to sea – an abandonment Stevie would feel for the rest of her life. His absence had a powerful effect on her character. While other girls of her class were brought up to bring Father his paper, and then to disappear into silence, Smith was a “wicked, selfish creature” who mostly got to please herself, her eccentricity and determination (useful qualities in a poet) growing exponentially as a result. It was thanks to his sudden departure, too, that she grew up in a “house of female habitation” in Palmers Green, north London. Stevie’s maternal aunt Madge Spear, aka “the Lion of Hull”, came to live with the family, and soon afterwards Ethel, Madge, Stevie and her sister, Molly, moved south, probably – as her biographer Frances Spalding has speculated – to escape gossip. Stevie and Aunt would live in the redbrick house in Avondale Road until 1968, when Aunt died at the age of 96, and this was the single most important relationship of Stevie’s life. If her father’s sporadic postcards left her with a “powerful sense of transiency”, Aunt was an emotional standing stone, solid and immovable. She never loved anyone more. Ethel died in 1919 and in 1920 Stevie and her sister left their school, North London Collegiate; Molly to take up a place at the University of Birmingham, Stevie to sign on at Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial Academy in Hyde Park (money being thin on the ground by now, she hoped for a career that would provide a regular income). Her first post on completing her training was at an engineering firm; her second was at the magazine publisher C Arthur Pearson, where she was appointed secretary to Sir Neville Pearson, the son of the firm’s founder. She would hold down this unremarkable job for the next 30 years, her employer a “lodestar in a disordered existence”. Life settled down. Her work was dull, but it did not capture her mind – “I did not want a job where I had to use up my whole energy” – leaving her free to read, something she did omnivorously. She liked returning to Palmers Green in the evening, to its quietness and stillness. The house was old-fashioned, its garden made gloomy by a huge privet hedge. But its rhythms comforted her, and she was able to begin the process of becoming Stevie Smith (her nickname was acquired when, horseriding on a London common, some boys yelled at her: “Come on, Steve!”, a reference to a popular jockey, Steve Donoghue). Those who knew her in this period were already struck by her zest, originality, quick-wittedness and disparate crowd of friends (she vastly preferred the idea of friendship to that of marriage and turned away from the latter for ever in the mid-30s, having broken off her brief engagement to an insurance broker called Eric Armitage). A colleague described her as “a busy little person”. Behind the lively, darting facade, behind the nervousness, caprice and periodic depressions, there was steel Little. This isn’t the right word, however affectionately used. It’s true that Stevie was birdlike, her mannerisms dainty and her looks gamine, but in every other respect, she was far from little. Behind the lively, darting facade, behind the nervousness, caprice and periodic depressions, there was steel. In 1934, she submitted a collection of poems to the literary agent Curtis Brown. They did not go down well, the company’s bewildered reader finding them neurotic. Stevie, however, was not discouraged, and a further bundle was soon dispatched to an editor at Chatto & Windus, who told her: “Go away and write a novel and we will then think about the poems.” This she did, and in just 10 weeks – one evening, she claimed, she wrote 6,000 words at a stroke – only for Chatto to turn it down, too. Undaunted, Stevie now turned to Hamish Miles, a reader at Jonathan Cape whose eye had been caught by the poems she’d recently had published in the New Statesman. Bingo! Novel on Yellow Paper had found its publisher. Acclaimed by some critics and abhorred by others, it turned her overnight into the kind of writer who received fan letters. Its publication was followed swiftly by that of her first collection of poetry, A Good Time Was Had By All. Starting as she meant to go on, she illustrated it with her own drawings, angular and spindly, just like her. The career that followed had highs and lows. A Good Time Was Had By All, and her second novel, Over the Frontier, were well-received. But in the 40s and 50s she was unfashionable. Some of this must have been connected to her gender. The postwar literary world was irredeemably masculine. But it was also easy to underestimate Stevie’s work. Her outward simplicities could be taken at face value, the pain beneath ignored. Though bolstered by her friendships – her circle now included Olivia Manning, Rosamond Lehmann and George Orwell – she grew increasingly fragile: spiky on the outside, easily bruised within. The title poem of Harold’s Leap, her fourth collection of poetry, describes a suicide (“Harold, I remember your leap, / It may have killed you / But it was a brave thing to do.”) and thus foreshadows the events of 1953, when she cut one of her wrists in the office. It was decided after this that she would not return to her job. It wasn’t until 1957, and the publication of her most famous collection of poetry, Not Waving But Drowning, that she re-emerged as a writer. The 60s came to her rescue. Stevie unselfconsciously took her place alongside the Liverpool poets, her neat dresses and sensible shoes in polite contrast to their leather and denim. She had a gift for performance, her stylised recitations, half spoken and half sung, half cheerful and half desperate, unnerving her audiences with their sense of something – madness? rage? – kept only just at bay. Stevie died in 1971 of a brain tumour. Frances Spalding has described how, in hospital awaiting a biopsy, she performed her last poem Come Death (“Come Death. / Do not be Slow.”) from her bed, astonishing visitors and patients alike. Perhaps she was content, knowing there were books to live on after her – and sure enough, in the years that followed, her critical reputation bloomed. In 1977, Hugh Whitemore’s play Stevie was first staged, starring Glenda Jackson, and greatly added to her legend. Zoë Wanamaker is currently adding to it further, playing the title role in a revival at the Hampstead theatre, London. Stevie will always stand alone, at an angle to everyone else. She belongs to no group; she cannot easily be appropriated by any cause. Her verses are unlikely to appear in those carefully marketed volumes that hope to console us in certain states of mind (love, grief, melancholy). Her poems are too sly for that; their sophistication, extreme once you notice it, is elusive at first. The same is true of the novels, so keenly observant, so cold-eyed, so full of pity for all that is most melancholy. “We carry our own wilderness with us,” says Pompey in Over the Frontier – and isn’t this precisely it? As Stevie knew all too well, even the suburbs come with desolate expanses. Their avenues, parks and crescents have their fair share of exiles, restless and forever in search of home. Extracted from Rachel Cooke’s introduction to Novel on Yellow Paper, reissued by Virago on 28 April for £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com |