Stevie Smith and Authorship (Oxford English Monographs)

STEVIE SMITH AND AUTHORSHIP

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS General Editors helen barr david bradshaw paulina kewes hermione lee sally mapstone david norbrook fiona stafford

STEVIE SMITH AND AUTHORSHIP WILLIAM MAY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # William May 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2010930308 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–958337–9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

for Martha

Preface Few twentieth-century British writers are both as inviting and as hostile to their audience as Stevie Smith. If she has maintained a qualified popularity in poetry anthologies, for some, her sui generis idiosyncrasy makes her uniquely immune to academic treatment. Others point to her authorial shoulder-shrugs to ask whether she need be taken seriously at all. Her caricatures of professional literary readers in her poems and novels find them, without exception, to be pompous, self-regarding, and belittling to their subjects. If sustained study of her work is rewarding, its gifts are often given with sly looks and mistrust. This book argues not only that a reassessment of her work is timely, but that Smith’s defensive attitude towards it can offer a point of entry, rather than a barrier, to its rich and humane insights. Recent attempts to posthumously categorize her works as feminist treatises, protopostmodernist experiments, or imperial critiques offer revealing commentaries on individual works but suffer from silencing large portions of her oeuvre, whether her nine collections of poetry or her three whimsically intransigent novels. This monograph does not aim for definitive statements or final answers to her riddling complexity, but focuses on Smith’s reception to return to her work itself with a new receptivity. Combining close readings of her poems along with a new focus on her illustrations, the book opens up new points of contact between Smith and figures as seemingly unlikely as Aubrey Beardsley, Alexander Pope, or Henry Wallis. More importantly, it reclaims Smith’s own agency in her career, recasting her as impresario, rather than victim, of her own literary reputation.

Acknowledgements The book has benefited immensely from the encouragement and support of my doctoral supervisor, Sally Bayley, as well as Jon Stallworthy and Hermione Lee, who both oversaw earlier research projects on Smith. I also thank Frances Spalding who was the external examiner of my thesis on Smith. Jacqueline Baker and Ariane Petit at Oxford University Press have been extremely helpful throughout the commissioning and publication process, as were the two anonymous readers for OUP, whose constructive comments have been particularly useful. I thank Monika Class, George May, and Melody Enjoubault for their translation work, and Alexandra Harris and Andrew Blades for reading early drafts. Charles Lauder’s copyediting and Katie Ryde’s proofreading have also been much appreciated. The monograph has involved extensive archival research at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I thank all the staff at the Special Collections department, and for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature for their generous financial support for the project. I also particularly thank Jan and Bob Butler for their warm hospitality during my stay in Tulsa. Many thanks to staff at King’s College Library, Cambridge, the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, the Brymor Jones Library at the University of Hull, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I also thank Hamish MacGibbon for permission to include Smith’s unpublished drawings. I thank the following for copyright permission. All poems by Stevie Smith, from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, copyright #1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and courtesy of the Estate of James MacGibbon. All unpublished material published courtesy of the Estate of James MacGibbon and the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Portions of Chapter 3 published courtesy of The Library journal. Originally published as ‘“The Choosers”: Posthumous Collections of Stevie Smith’s Poetry’, The Library, 2005 6(3):321–38. Images by Aubrey Beardsley and Goya supplied by the Bridgeman Art Library. Images by George Grosz # DACS 2009. All reasonable effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright in materials reproduced in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future printings if notice is given to the publisher.

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Introduction 1. Reforming a Literary Orphan: Stevie Smith’s Poetry in Context 2. ‘A Poet Reading’ 3. Brought to Book: The Publishing History of Stevie Smith 4. Towards a Constructive Criticism of Stevie Smith 5. ‘Observation, Discipline, and Company’: The Overlooked Reader 6. ‘Beyond Words’: Stevie Smith as a Visual Artist Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations 1. Stevie Smith, ‘What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good’ (1957).1 Published in Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 2. Stevie Smith, ‘Fuite d’Enfance’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 3. Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), Frontispiece for ‘Venus and Tannhauser’, c.1895 (pen and ink), Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, Bedfordshire, UK/Bridgeman Art Library. 4. George Grosz, ‘Suburb’ (1917). Published in George Grosz, The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours, and Prints (1912–1930) (London: Yale University Press, 1977). #

DACS 2009.

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5. George Grosz, untitled sketch (1926). Published in George Grosz, The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours, and Prints (1912–1930) (London: Yale University Press, 1977). #

DACS 2009.

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6. Stevie Smith, ‘Ceux qui luttent’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 188 7. George Grosz, ‘Cafe´’ (1927). Published in George Grosz, The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours, and Prints (1912–1930) (London: Yale University Press, 1977). #

DACS 2009.

8. Stevie Smith, ‘Do Not !’ (1951). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 9. What is this hubbub?, plate 65 of ‘The Disasters of War’, 1810–14, pub. 1863 (etching), Francisco Jose´ de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)/Private Collection/Index/Bridgeman Art Library. 10. Francisco Jose´ de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from ‘Los Caprichos’ (engraving) (b/w photo)/Bibliothe`que Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library.

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1 The dates given here refer to first date of publication, or, if previously unpublished, the probable date of composition.

List of Illustrations 11. Francisco de Goya, ‘Bad Poets’ (c.1818–24). Published in Jose´ Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956). 12. Francisco de Goya, ‘It may be that he is good’ (c.1818–24). Published in Jose´ Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956). 13. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (1957). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 14. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (undated draft illustration c.1957). From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 15. Stevie Smith, ‘Oblivion’ (undated draft illustration c.1971). From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 16. Stevie Smith, ‘Oblivion’ (1972). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 17. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu se´duisante’ (undated draft illustration, c.1966). From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 18. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu se´duisante’ (1966). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 19. Stevie Smith, untitled illustration. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. Published in William May, ‘ “Drawing in the reader”: Looking at Books in the Illustrations of Stevie Smith’, Jubilat 12 (2006), 71–82. 20. Stevie Smith, untitled illustration from a collection of draft drawings. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. Published in William May, ‘ “Drawing in the reader”: Looking at Books in the Illustrations of Stevie Smith’, Jubilat 12 (2006), 71–82.

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List of Illustrations

21. Drawing and inscription in black ink on yellow paper pasted onto the flyleaf of Hamish Miles’ copy of Novel on Yellow Paper (undated). Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 22. Drawing in blue ink on white paper pasted onto flyleaf of Hamish Miles’ copy of A Good Time Was Had By All, dated 1937, with inscription above and below, on the flyleaf. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa.

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Introduction Critics have long seen the problems in reading the work of the British poet and novelist Stevie Smith (1902–71). Her three cryptic and densely allusive novels make demands on the reader akin to the high modernism of James Joyce or T. S. Eliot. Her poetry, whilst often employing simple ballad cadences, is similarly disarming. Its multiplicity of speaking voices consistently overturns the reader’s attempts to ‘place’ the poet. Her forms and genres are notoriously permeable and porous, perhaps explaining the paucity of large-scale studies of her work. Her apparent disregard for the rigour or commitment that would seem conventional characteristics of the serious writer also raises hermeneutical difficulties. She offers us a body of work that veers with unnerving regularity from the bafflingly recondite to the acutely profound. Her writing invites us to react with generous affection or withering dismissal, whilst also encoding the limitations of either response. She is still more likely to inspire cultish websites than serious assessment.1 No wonder that critics, if they agree on nothing else, are in accord over her difficulty as a subject for literary exegesis, finding her ‘too awkward to treat academically’2 or ‘not amenable to interpretation’.3 Her poem ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’ dramatizes this uncertainty about the nature of her written texts by imagining their reception at the very point of their composition. What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good, The young girl laughs: ‘I am in love.’ But the older girl is serious: ‘Not now, perhaps later.’ Still the young girl teases: ‘What’s the matter? To lose everything! A waste of time !’ 1 See the strange attractor website dedicated to Smith: http://strange-attractor.co.uk/ stevie.htm, accessed 1 May 2010. 2 See Geoffrey Grigson’s review of Smith’s Collected Poems in The Guardian, ‘So Glad and Serious’, 7 August 1975, p. 9. 3 See D. J. Enright’s essay ‘Did Nobody Teach You?’, in Man is an Onion: Reviews and Essays (London: Chatto, 1972), 137–48, esp. 148.

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Introduction But now the older one is quite silent, Writing, writing, and perhaps it will be good. Really neither girl is a fool.4

Taken as an explication of her work, the poem and illustration (Figure 1) offer various ways of understanding the author and their text. The illustration shows the act of composition, allowing us to see the writer at work. The poem echoes the depiction, creating a verbal portrait of the same author. Both poem and illustration propose a method of reading the writing figure, suggesting an author-led model of interpretation. Yet the conjoined younger girl signifies our own involvement, affording the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between Smith and her readers. The collocation of the reader and writer here belies a work full of interpretative holes. The poem begins by asking its readers a question the author apparently cannot answer. We peer in vain over the shoulders of this fledgling writer figure in an effort to see the text. The implicit joke is that the picture shows us nothing; like the poem, it only gives us the generative context for the work. We see the reader, the author, and the implement of composition, but the written evidence has vanished. Is the poem itself the missing text on the writer’s desk? The question sets an impossible Escher-like puzzle that asks us whether the picture is an illustration of the poem or the text a commentary on the drawing. What comes first: the poem (Smith’s work) or the picture (her sketched plan for our response to it)? Here they seem inseparable. The writing girl in the picture seems to offer the reader a rare sighting of the ever-elusive author. Yet, compared to the other two figures in the drawing, she is sketchily portrayed. Her short hair seems androgynous, and the pointed dome of her head together with the bunching-up of her eyes towards the bottom of her face suggests a form more foetal than female. Her clothing too could suggest a baby’s suit or, with the jagged line running down her left shoulder, the sacking cloth of a prisoner. This ambiguous function is emphasized by the young girl who looks over the writer’s shoulder, the reader-viewer of the picture. Her two arms, one outstretched to the writer’s shoulder and the other to the writing desk, offer us a number of possibilities. They playfully distract the writer from her craft, an interpretation supported by the poetic text.

4 Stevie Smith, ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 306. All references to Smith’s poetry are to this edition unless otherwise stated, hereafter CP.

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Figure 1. Stevie Smith, ‘What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good’ (1957).1 Published in Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 1

The dates given here refer to first date of publication, or, if previously unpublished, the probable date of composition.

Yet they also pervert the authenticity of the writer’s text through their guiding influence, reducing the author to the role of amanuensis. Meanwhile, in the mystery of the disappearing poem, the blank desk must act as a frame for an absent centre. Smith draws our attention away from the origin to the mask that covers it. This ‘trace’, the empty canvas of the girl’s desk, is drawn in solid lines and yet its squaring off suggests a private room-within-a-room, a space to which access has been denied. Both the writer and the young girl’s eyes are focused on this forbidden space: the writer’s in furrowed concentration and the young girl’s in quiet amusement. Does the triumphal existence of the published poem mitigate its invisibility in the drawing? Perhaps the explication of the text-beyond-the-frame can only be found by examining the third figure

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that eludes detection in the poem: the inscrutable cat that undermines and challenges the young girl’s position. Smith’s preoccupation with cats has offered an easy target for critics eager to sideline her as an eccentric. Yet, as we shall see, the most whimsical aspects of Smith’s work are often the most deliberate. In the introduction to her book Cats in Colour (1959), Smith articulates the connection between this feline spectator and the writer in explicit terms— How nice then to turn to the indifferent cat who can be made to mean so many things—and think them—being as it were a blank page on which to scrawl the hieroglyphics of our own grievance, bad temper and unhappiness, and scrawl, also, of course, the desired responses to these uncomfortable feelings.5

What the cat permits is a double reading; not only an ‘indifferent’ page which allows the writer infinite creative possibilities and the reader infinite interpretative ones but also a chance to inscribe the ‘desired responses’ back onto the page itself. The cat allows multiple readings and then reaffirms them. It is also a repository for any ‘uncomfortable’ responses that must be excised from the page itself. The imperceptible shift in the above passage between visual symbols, hieroglyphics, and writing recreates the reader–writer relationship as a visual process. The cat we see in the picture seems to be both an onlooking warden for the struggling writer figure and itself another blank page, a space on which the writer can define their own position and manoeuvre within their own self-defined parameters. The cat, too, is a territorial creature, described elsewhere by Smith as a ‘marauder’.6 It guards the reader’s access to the text, staking out the boundaries of the writer’s limitations and the reader’s interpretations. The cutesy and fey cat chips away at Smith’s pretensions towards seriousness yet denotes an author highly conscious of her audience. Smith’s writer-protagonist in her novel The Holiday (1949) records that she ‘loves to watch the people and be watched’7 and, with the domestic and sphinx-like guard to keep watch for her, this need for 5 Stevie Smith, ‘Introduction’, Cats in Colour (London: Batsford, 1959), 7–23, repr. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago, 1981), 134–47, 138. 6 Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (London: Virago, 1980), 116; all subsequent references are to this edition. 7 Stevie Smith, The Holiday (London: Virago, 1979), 7; all subsequent references are to this edition.

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surveillance becomes controlled and permissible within the frame of our own desire to see the writing author. Her tactics to resist the gaze of the reader and to elude interpretation—making her part-cat, part-sphinx— become a creative calling card, a way of producing and nourishing her art.8 She resists us, she blocks our gaze, and in diverting our prying eyes, she writes the secret text undetected. The figure of the cat in the drawing is both Smith’s projected subsequent reader and the ideal writer figure, one who escapes identification not by seeking privacy but by wrongfooting the spectators. As in her poem ‘Conviction (iii)’, the cat avoids detection by being mistaken for a shadow of the thing it guards.9 What Smith defines as ‘cat-intransigence’,10 the unreadable face of the cat itself, articulates her own projected position as a writer. She attempts to reject surveillance as a form of oppression for the writer and inscribe it as a creative tool for self-inspection, patrolling and guarding the unseen space of the writing self. By 1957, the publication date of ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, Smith’s readership was vanishing, and she had become an invisible presence in Britain’s literary scene. It was only through poetry performances and broadcasts during the 1960s that her poetic reputation once again began to grow. As reports of her performances attest, the unsettling quality of her sung poems was always underwritten by the spectacle of the author herself: Her appearance manifested [ . . . ] ambiguity. The old-fashioned strap shoes and knitted stockings; the broad headband; the little girl’s white dress: she might look—did, indeed, look—so simple that from a back view you might wonder what so young a person was doing at an adult gathering.11

Smith’s adoption of the child guise during her poetry readings, like her challenging of the reader–viewer in her poems with the illustrations, causes her listener–spectators to look and look again, echoed in this 8 See her review of Arthur Lytton Sells’ Animal Poetry in French and English Literature and the Greek Tradition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958), which argues that ‘poets use animals for their own ends’, ‘Poet among the beasts’, Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1958, p. 12. 9 This confusion is given mythical status in ‘Friskers or Gods and Men’ (CP 268), when the cursed speaker turns into a cat. 10 ‘Cats in Colour’, in Me Again, 142. 11 From a description of her reading given at her memorial address by the Revd Gerard Irvine, as quoted in Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 247. The page references given throughout to Spalding’s biography also correspond to the earlier 1988 Faber edition, unless stated.

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description by Gerard Irvine hovering between how she ‘might look’ and ‘did, indeed look’. Smith draws attention to the public spectacle of an author as a construct; her biographer Frances Spalding has commented on her ‘sharply etched impression that obscured much’.12 At the climax of Over the Frontier, the protagonist Pompey insists she ‘will not be drawn’13 but in The Holiday, we are offered a fleeting glimpse of ‘a middle-aged girl wearing her hair in a brisk bob childishly caught up with hairslides’ (109). Yet again the intimate experience of seeing the author in the flesh is undermined by the ‘ambiguity’ of their appearance. Like the ‘older girl’ writing in the poem who is drawn with the proportions of a baby, the performing Smith ruptures the synchronicity of having the composing author in the room by constructing herself as a woman in child’s clothing, a figure that stands outside of time. Her dress gestures towards the young girl or the burgeoning artist, whilst the disparity between her age and her choice of clothing suggests the retired artist visiting the past, ‘dressing up’ her work to appeal to a new audience, adopting a self-conscious costume. Smith drags her body of juvenilia onto the stage with her, so that her disguise is literally sutured to her own body. Whilst we are shown her dress, the figure and the wound it conceals are conspicuous by their absence. By seeing the author, Smith suggests, we are allowed tentative access to the writing process itself. The writer’s sole purpose, meanwhile, is ‘only to observe’.14 Yet the visual guides Smith offers for interpretation provide instead an opportunity for authorial escape. Merleau-Ponty defines the category of the visual in fugitive and elusive terms—it is the means ‘for being absent from [the] self, for being present at the fission of Being from the inside’.15 The visual, in this formulation, is a process rather than a mode, one that enacts the disparity between the projected and the actual. It frames the point at which the self becomes a constructed creation. Yet how might Smith’s visual construction of a model for reading her work relate to the works themselves? What is the correlation between Smith’s self-portraiture in her drawings and the messy and complex depiction of writers, readers, and onlookers in her prose and poetry? 12

Spalding, Stevie Smith, 208. Over the Frontier, 158. 14 See ‘Full Well I Know’ (CP 294). 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1964), in Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2004), 317. 13

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In Text as Picture: Studies in the Literary Transformation of Pictures (1992), Hans Lund offers a theory of what he calls ‘iconic projection’ in literature: Description proper is less important than the method to use markers in order to appeal to and mobilise a reader’s pictorial knowledge, visual thinking and eidetic ability. The pictorial quality is not primarily manifested by means of a sum of single elements of visual motifs but by emphasising the field of vision as unity structured as a picture [ . . . ] the observer in the text examines reality from some distance through a screening frame which, to him, seems to change the world of objects into a visually aesthetic structure.16

For Lund, a text is pictorial or visual not primarily through its descriptive passages but rather through its prompts or gestures towards framing. This process of framing allows the narrator–author to be both within and without the text. In terms of authorial self-construction, this use of the frame allows the author to effect a perpetual repositioning of their work by stepping in and out of their various markers and boundaries, just as Smith’s Pompey squeezes through a broken window frame in Novel on Yellow Paper (1936).17 The author’s act of writing themselves into the text does not, in this case, bring us closer to them; rather it seals them from us, codifying their elusive quality. Our sighting of them is always temporary and partial, their movements always occluded behind their numerous offers of alternative interpretative markers. The opening appearance of the author–narrator in the first of Smith’s three semi-autobiographical novels, Novel on Yellow Paper, affects just such an ‘iconic projection’: Here am I on a fine day in October riding along the Row with Leonie. (9)

The narrator addresses us as if showing us old holiday photos. This method of narration continues throughout much of the novel, breaking up the text into a series of tableaux or slides. As in The Holiday’s internal rhythm of ‘Snap. Another picture’ (30), her novels’ landscapes become explicitly visual constructs, composed not of verbal descriptions but of

16 Hans Lund, Text as Picture: Studies in the Literary Transformation of Pictures, trans. Kacke Go¨trick (Lampeter: Edwin Mellor, 1992), 197–8. 17 Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Virago, 1980), 31. Windows also provide vantage points and opportunities for escape throughout Over the Frontier (160, 230, 246) and The Holiday (22, 89, 98).

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scenes through which our narrator–host leads the reader. In Novel on Yellow Paper, the reader is addressed by the author-as-tour-guide: You are suddenly not in London or any town any longer, but you are walking along a long straight road, it might be in France, it might be by Utrillo, and there are trees, and there is this long straight road [ . . . ] (80)

Such passages go beyond scenic description to place the reader experientially in the text as a dioramic figure. The novel becomes imagined as a visual, rather than a textual, construct. Its phrases are ‘pictorial in quality’ (147), its characters are ‘extremely set on seeing things’ (44), and its pages are broken up with poems offering ‘something fresh to the eye’ (102). In this newly visualized space, we take the narrative as testimony because it works to give us pictures—we experience its authenticity through the visual rather than through the textual. Yet, in a novel where the authorial ‘I’ leaps off the first page, the process of continual projection keeps us always at a distance. We know the author–narrator through a static series of slides. The operator who takes us through this slideshow pledges her identity to the figure we see in them—‘Here am I’, she offers us—yet remains ultimately shadowy, in darkness. If the novel is largely built from autobiographical reminiscence and private correspondence, it is composed of a patchwork of letters the operator has received rather than sent, a mirrored mosaic of responses to intimacy.18 This escape from the reader’s gaze is emphasized in one of the novel’s most telling images of the act of writing: Why the old pen is getting vicious in its old age, it’s getting real vice into it, we shall have it peeping through the keyhole at a franc a time. (109)

Smith not only links the written to the seen by having the instrument of verbal composition engaged in an explicitly visual act, but also associates the act of seeing with a sordid and voyeuristic sexual encounter, the pen as penis. Our desire for a sighting of the author in their text is not only misguided, in that our range of vision is so limited, but morally suspect, 18 The apparently intimate tone of Smith’s narrative ‘letter’ to her reader has been questioned by Gertrude Wirth, who claimed that Smith had adapted Wirth’s own letterwriting style for the book. See Gertrude Wirth to William McBrien, 2 Feb 1980, Stevie Smith papers, 1924–70, Col. No. 1976.012, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa (hereafter UT): ‘I received Novel on Yellow Paper with an accompanying letter in which “Stevie” apologised for having more or less fallen into the style of my letters from Paris.’

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almost prurient. When Smith considers the act of peeping, she imagines first the pen. The provocation caused by the uneven relationship between the reading and seeing response is as central to her prose as her illustrated poetry. A passage from her 1949 novel The Holiday, taken from the point at which the protagonist Celia is having a conversation about the role of the reader in fiction with her cousin Caz, illustrates this dual mode: He drew off me and began to drawl in a rather loud voice. (This voice was as good as a wink, to pretend that he did not speak before, but his eyes do not draw off from me, his eyes say that it was he who spoke, and not the wind that blew; and not my thoughts that spoke, but his.) (155)

The miasma of overlapping between the seen, spoken, and written here is so complex as to benefit from an analytic list. 1) There is a phonic pun in the first sentence on drew and drawl. The first use of the verb ‘to draw’ describes physical movement, which not only underlines the languorous physical activity of drawling, but points up the proximity between drawing (casually putting pen to paper) and drawling (lazily opening the mouth to speak).19 2) ‘This voice was as good as a wink’ is almost a rewriting of Horace’s assertion ut pictura poesis (what is true of a picture, is often also true of poetry).20 What is spoken or voiced is as communicative as a visual gesture, a wink. Yet to wink is to close one’s eyes, however temporarily, and to negate the act of seeing. Is ‘voicing’ then synonymous with winking, the poem the equivalent of a message handed over at a moment of total darkness? 3) The male subject in the passage now attempts to cover up his speech—‘to pretend that he did not speak before’—as if he can re-assimilate speaking as winking, or looking. 19 Throughout her correspondence with staff at the BBC, Smith makes repeated reference to her voice as a ‘drawl’, suggesting a conceptual link between her audible presence and the visual accompaniment her radio broadcasts necessarily deny. See, for example, Stevie Smith’s letter to Anne Howells, 5 Dec 1965, which apologizes for her ‘nasal drawl’, now at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading. 20 For my translation of this quotation from Ars Poetica, I follow Jean H. Hagstrum, who argues in The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) that the phrase is intended to provoke comparison between the two art forms, rather than asserting all poetry should aspire to the condition of painting (9).

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4) This emphasis on the visual and the seen is underlined by the proximity of ‘eyes’ and ‘draw’ in ‘his eyes do not draw off from me’. This plays on the dormant sense of drawing as a visual activity, even though it is still being using to denote a physical one.21 5) The traffic now heads the other way; just as the man’s drawl became a wink, now his eyes do the talking in order to confirm a previous act of speech-as-winking—‘his eyes say that it was he who spoke’, even though the narrator had suggested that his previous act of speech was aspiring towards a visual gesture. This passage finds continual interference between the visual and the verbal. All sense of agency is lost in both the man’s speech to the narrator and her recounting of it. In this confusion of sight and sound, how can we separate our muddled line of vision from that of the author? If we cannot see what she sees, how can we define what we see, or even what we are being shown? The passage’s dependence on the wink suggests the ambiguity with which Smith’s dual mode operates. A wink finds the eyes neither closed nor open. It is a gesture which is distancing, denying the viewer access to the agents of sight, and private, a barely seen physical interaction between one self and another. The wink is also highly suggestive, a gesture open to interpretation rather than encrypted with meaning, a private act thrown out into a public space with confident indifference about its real intention. I would argue that this elusive and collusive wink, the narrative equivalent of the momentarily closed eye, generates the impetus for Smith’s technique throughout her novels. The wink propels the tableaux forward. In the second that the viewer’s eye is closed, the anonymous operator that controls our navigation through Smith’s text moves to the next slide, leaving the bewildered reader–viewer to translate themselves into the following scene. The same complex processes are at work in Smith’s poetry. A brief survey of the sequence of poems that opens her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All (1936), immediately demonstrates the tensions between the visual and verbal modes. ‘The Hound of Ulster’ begins: Little boy Will you stop And take a look In the puppy shop (CP 15, ll. 1–4) 21 Smith includes a similar collocation in the essay ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’, where she gives ‘a picture of my childhood, so that you may see what it is I have drawn away from’, Me Again (1981), 153–70, 154.

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11

This command to engage in the visual act of looking is both assented to and complicated in the boy’s subsequent response: Thank you courteous stranger, said the child By your words I am beguiled, (ll. 15–16)

His reply immediately sets out the transgressing nature of the textual; it distorts and tricks and, perhaps more importantly, it achieves its purpose even as its ‘beguiled’ object notes its bullying nature. Yet the act of looking that the boy has assented to is a wide-ranging, exploratory act, and the boy’s gaze soon takes in an object the speaker has not intended: What lurks in the gray Cold shadows at the back of the shop?

(ll. 18–19)

Although the speaker urges the boy to hurry from the shop, his description of the tethered dog in the deep shadows of the window alerts the reader to the dangers of ignoring what might lie beyond their range of vision: His eyes are closed and his lips are pale Hurry little boy he is not for sale. (ll. 25–6)

The poem, then, sets up an unresolved tension between what is seen and what is told. The hidden object that is revealed at the end of the poem has closed eyes. He cannot see but neither can he be seen. The elusive tethered figure of the hound is both outside the visual and the textual— his pale lips suggest he cannot speak but then neither can he be spoken about. The hound itself remains obscured; he is never in view of the reader, the boy, or speaker, and becomes an imagined image as well as a textual uncertainty. Like the cat who escapes detection in the poetic text of ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, he patrols the fissure between the visual and verbal realm, hidden in the abyss between what is seen and what is said. This unmapped yet central space between the textual and the visual becomes the site in which Smith’s poems enact their disruptive processes. The following poem, ‘On the Death of a German Philosopher’, shares a similar preoccupation with what is textual and what remains outside the text: He wrote The I and the It He wrote The It and the Me He died at Marienbad And now we are all at sea. (CP 16)

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Here Smith pens an obituary for an imaginary writer whose book titles offer us competing formulae of literary production, a playful prototype for W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, written two years later. Between the chiastic ‘me’ and ‘I’, the repeated ‘it’ might denote either the reader or the text. Yet these ambiguous relationships are never untangled, and the poem’s conclusion finds us ‘at sea’, cast adrift without the anchor of the written word.22 The shadowy half-pun on sea/see, which suggests a formal contrast with the opening verb of writing, is also central to the next poem, ‘Papa Love Baby’. Here, the precocious child’s retelling of her parents’ marital breakdown pivots on her father’s ‘textual’ interpretation of her own gaze: I sat upright in my baby carriage, And wished that mama hadn’t made such a foolish marriage. I tried to hide it, but it showed in my eyes unfortunately And a fortnight later papa ran away to sea. (CP 16, ll. 11–14)

The symmetrical opposition of ‘I tried to hide’ and ‘papa ran away to sea’ suggests the visual rather than the aquatic. Yet here the site of the questing visual eyes have become textual—the speaker’s thoughts show in her eyes, and what is used for seeing and what is looked at become instead something read or deciphered. This cross-cutting between seeing and reading, looking and interpreting, defines the relationship between the child and her absent father and becomes the central movement of the poem. These patterns continue throughout the collection—the depiction of the dog in ‘Heber’ who ‘loves to stare’ on the condition that his owner does not ‘speak to him’ (CP 20), Smith’s subversion of the picturesque in ‘Bandol (Var)’ (CP 17), or the eerie encounter with a child-phantom who is touched ‘not but with an eye’ in ‘The Parklands’ (CP 43).23 The textual and the visual are in constant battle, their lines of interference creating the context in which we come to view her work.24 As with the ambiguous relationship between reader

22

As Paul Muldoon notes in his essay ‘ “I remember” by Stevie Smith’ published in The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Faber, 2006), 140–64, characters in her poems frequently find themselves literally and emotionally ‘at sea’ (157). 23 This poem was originally titled ‘Pour envoyer a` Sir Oliver Lodge’ (CP 10). 24 These oppositions continue throughout her work: see, for example, ‘Love Me!’ (CP 191), where the speaker fears a sea-serpent whose ‘eyes will open and confound me with a mirthless word’, or the ‘flick flick’ of the girl’s eyelids in ‘The Magic Morning’ (CP 205).

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and writer in Smith’s illustrations, theirs is a war provoked by similarity rather than difference. How then are we to begin to re-read Smith’s work, to unpick the complex stagings of the writer she presents for public consumption? Her own comments on poetic careerism are eager to point us away from reading her as a knowingly self-constructed author: I think there is a danger in the air for poets today. There is the danger of being too feted or ‘promoted’. And there is the danger that they may themselves become promoters of poetry, that is they may make their living (as of course they cannot do by writing poetry) by judging fellow poets, sitting on committees, and arranging poet parties—or broadcasting as I am doing now about their opinions. There is also the danger of poets becoming infected with the techniques of the advertising world, and at a still lower level, with the wide boys’ cunning [ . . . ] But the line between art and pretence, between experiment and fraud, is not easy to draw so the little criminals creep in. But let no poet concern himself with these matters but just get on with his writing.25

Her hurried dismissal of the idea that poets might become ‘infected’ with self-promotion or, rather, her subjunctive hope that this shouldn’t be the case, still allows space for Smith’s invocation of the ‘little criminals’ that creep into poetry. The image immediately recalls the foetal-felon figure of her author in the illustration for ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, whose infantile features seem to denote the proximity of art and pretence, experiment and fraud. It is pointedly a drawn line that separates these divides. Yet it is one that critics have been hesitant to cross. The brusque Englishness of the poet ‘getting on’ has been read as the poet’s need to concentrate on the ‘pure’ act of writing, to shut themselves away in the blank-walled room and to compose. Yet this apparent avowal of self-promotion also reveals the poet’s need to ‘get on’ in an explicitly material sense. Here Smith disavows poets broadcasting even as she speaks on the radio. Elsewhere, as in her poem ‘Evangelie’ or in her repeated entreaties to her recalcitrant muse,26 she deflects her craving for financial and literary success onto an invented third person. It is also worth considering that Smith, the 25 Stevie Smith speaking on ‘World of Books’, BBC WA, 23 December 1961, from mimeograph script, UT. 26 ‘Evangelie’ (CP 375). See also her review of G. Wilson Knight’s The Sovereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958), which argues that ‘if the Muse does not marry the world, she will grow too fanciful and fade into eccentricity’ (‘Creative Critic’,The Observer, 7 September 1958, p. 16).

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‘unconcerned’ poet, was repeatedly acknowledged as ‘money-minded’27 at the BBC, and once demanded such high fees in permissions that she prompted an internal memo asking employees to be wary of ‘excessive’ financial demands made by broadcasting poets.28 If Smith’s own agency in her career, both figurative and financial, has largely gone unnoticed, her comments about her own reception seem to have constructed an author who is prone to being misunderstood rather than one who is decisive about how to manage her audience. When deciding on poetry blurbs for her first American collection, she warned her publisher, James Laughlin: I am not sure it is altogether a good thing to use the words whimsical and primitive as it is rather handing a gun to critics and anyway I dont [sic] really think they (tone and metre) are. I am sure you dont [sic] want to do this, but I should hate even a hint of being sold as a Funny Little Thing, Nash-manquee [sic].29

Here Smith’s anxiety about how she is being sold to a new reading public might denote an author scarred by her reputation as a minor eccentric. Yet her letter also reveals a heightened awareness of the author’s own complicity in this process, the sense that by compiling, publishing, and promoting a book they are consciously offering something to their critics. If Smith was concerned about handing American critics a gun, what weapons might she have preferred to offer them? Could they have been all the more dangerous for never being classified as harmful? The various contexts critics and readers have translated from Smith’s writing to their readings—the suburban writer,30 the ‘radical eccentric’,31 the proto-postmodernist32 —all offer us teasing glimpses of her 27 See for example the letter from B. H. Alexander to Janet Quigley, 9 January 1962, now held at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading: ‘knowing Miss Smith is very money-minded, I have no doubt that when she receives my letter she will ask for the individual copyright fees for each poem.’ 28 Internal memo from P. H. Newby to the copyright department at the BBC with regard to Smith’s broadcast, ‘Too Tired for Words’, 1 April 1957, now held at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading. 29 Stevie Smith to James Laughlin, 25 November 1963, UT. 30 See Simon Dentith, ‘Thirties Poetry and the Landscapes of Suburbia’, in Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (eds), Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (London: Longman, 1997), 108–23. 31 See Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 32 See Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Introduction

15

work whilst seemingly obscuring her texts themselves, just as Smith’s illustration gives us the writing desk as a frame for her work in order to obliterate the poetic text. The search for a bankable context in which to situate the full range of her works instead follows Smith’s own ‘con-text’; her tricksy inscription of an interpretative framework in which to view her oeuvre. Whilst her audience at 1960s poetry readings were quick to notice her appropriation of children’s clothing, subsequent reader– viewers of her work, seemingly anxious to overturn Larkin’s accusations of her fausse-naı¨veity,33 have been hesitant to interpret her as a self-stylist or to acknowledge her heavy reliance on self-promotion.34 Yet it was Smith herself who characterized poets as ‘shrewd’.35 It was also Smith who staged an authorial self-portrait in ‘The Story of a Story’ (1946) characterized by ‘the furtive, the careful, the purposeful and the defensive’.36 Her furtiveness seems to have been successful inasmuch as recent Smith criticism ignores this shifty figure, expounding much of its polemical ink in suggesting her work has been misrepresented by the ‘superficial’ readings of previous generations.37 As Romana Huk has recently argued in her expansive study Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (2005), Smith’s oeuvre makes her difficult to co-opt into feminism.38 Yet Huk’s reading of her as a war writer seems similarly unbalanced; her equivocal assertion that ‘indeed, at least in some respects, it would not be wrong to think of Smith as being, broadly defined, a “war poet”’39 is heavily qualified, diluted to the point of negation. Huk’s lengthy book is particularly instructive of the 33 See Philip Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London: Faber, 1983), 153–8, 153. 34 See for example Anthea Trodd, Women’s Writing in English: Britain 1900–1945 (Harlow: Longman, 1998), who describes her inclusion of unpublished poems in her first novel as a ‘hopeful marketing ploy’, suggesting it is misguided gesture rather than a calculated one (26). 35 See her essay ‘History or Poetic Drama?’, T. S. Eliot: a Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday (London: Hart-Davis, 1958), 170–5, repr. in Me Again, 148–51, 152: Poets ‘are shrewd, they feel the cold, too, they know a hawk from a handsaw, a fact from a fancy, as none knows better’. 36 ‘The Story of a Story’, in Mara Meulen and Francis Wyndham (eds), New Savoy (London: New Savoy, 1946), 98–110, repr. in Me Again, 50–9, 54. 37 See for example Huk, Stevie Smith, which establishes the ‘superficial judgement’ of most Smith critics from its outset (16). 38 See ibid., which highlights the interpretative errors of ‘current women’s studies critics’ (4). For a more general examination of the difficulty of recovering women writers through feminist literary criticism, see Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 39 Huk, Stevie Smith, 215.

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Introduction

puzzle Smith poses to critics, as it consistently attributes the difficulty of reading her work to the previous malpractice of past critics: The wildly diverging readings of who she really was by social/political/aesthetic allegiance [ . . . ] are the product of her readers’ picking out only one discursive strain to foreground from her mix of them in order to produce highly suspect sorts of critical judgements, usually in reflection of their own preferred ideological stances or critical prejudices.40

The ‘critical prejudices’ of previous readers come to form the image of the writer we read. Yet Huk’s argument, which, by implication, casts her as a critic without aesthetic allegiance or critical prejudice, pivots on the understanding that critics and readers alike are wrong to fix their reading to a single ‘discursive strain’ and have, through this interpretational bias, distorted our perception of Smith’s work. In this formulation, Philip Larkin’s seminal review of Smith’s work in 1962 is gendered and patronizing, and creates an image of her as a dotty eccentric.41 Huk would argue that Christopher Ricks’ essay on linguistic play in her poetry, published in 1987, sustains the view of her as a poet’s poet, and closes off our understanding of Smith writing at a specific moment in time.42 Laura Severin’s account of her as a resistant feminist in 1997 isolates her from her male contemporaries and, according to Huk, ensures that subsequent readers will miss the wide range of Smith’s cultural critique.43 Huk becomes Smith’s new emissary, dispatched, to use Smith’s own words, to ‘rescue [her] from the oblivion of English Literary studies’.44 This study will argue that the wealth of ‘prejudicial’ writing on Stevie Smith is not the cause of our difficulty in reading her but rather a symptom of Smith’s own concern with the subjective limits of the 40

Huk, Stevie Smith, 4. Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, 153–8. Christopher Ricks, ‘Stevie Smith: The Art of Sinking in Poetry’, The Force of Poetry (London: Faber, 1992), 244–55. 43 Laura Severin, Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1997). There are also wider problems with situating Smith as a feminist, and Hilary Spurling notes perceptively in her review of Frances Spalding’s biography: ‘if it is currently fashionable to blame sexual discrimination for the setbacks and professional putdowns Stevie Smith faced throughout her career [ . . . ] this sort of invincible, infantile helplessness was then, and is still, more familiar as a masculine ploy’ (‘All about Stevie’, ‘Books’ supplement, Daily Telegraph, 5 November 1988, p. 10). 44 Smith notes that Clifford Bax’s The Poetry of the Brownings: An Anthology (London: F. Muller, 1947) rescues ‘Elizabeth [Browning] from the oblivion of English Literary studies’ (‘Mr. and Mrs. Browning’, Tribune, 28 November 1947, pp. 20–1, 20). 41 42

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reading process. It is not that Smith’s work has been overlooked, but more exactly that her own readers unwittingly feel the presence of the overlooking author when assessing her work.45 Her art, with its dense and complicated offers of interpretative models, suggests we are in a continual process of misreading, both others’ words and her own. Smith’s creation of a context for her writing obscures the fact that her involvement with her texts goes far beyond the composition of them; she is simultaneously a reviewer, amanuensis, editor, anthologizer, secretary, scribe, painter, illustrator, and performer. Her foregrounding of the act of composition is then literally an act, a screen that masks a much more complex relationship with her work, one of ‘deep intent and management’, as she hints in her poem ‘The Frozen Lake’ (CP 393). Her authorial projections into her texts, her multiple frames for her poems, and her numerous presentations of the act of composition, all work to encode a response to her writing that insists on its own inadequacy, on its failure to meet the task. In a very literal sense, Smith’s framing of her work produces a concomitant framing of her reader, as Huk’s ‘suspect’ accusations suggest. We, the readers, are charged with the act of misreading and come out, inevitably, as guilty, becoming the ‘little criminals’ that creep into her texts. What methods might we use to mitigate against these recidivist tendencies? Reader-response theory offers useful affinities with the concerns of this study. It is far from being a homogenous critical movement, as both its practitioners and detractors frequently point out.46 In Wolfgang Iser’s work, to study the reader means to describe the physical and phenomenological processes taking place within the reader as they experience the text.47 Ellen Esrock has more recently argued that any phenomenological description of the reader cannot ignore the importance of visual 45

This double meaning of ‘overlook’ is suggested by Smith’s poem ‘The Afterthought’ (CP 256), where the solution to Rapunzel’s predicament ‘just because it is perfectly obvious one is certain to overlook’. The accompanying illustration depicts Rapunzel peering over her tower wall, prompting an interpretation of the poem that includes both definitions of the word. 46 See Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Reader-Response Criticism’, in American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 211–37, 254: ‘That [reader-response criticism] constituted a more or less fragmented site of inquiry was never in question’. 47 See Wolfgang Iser’s summary of his position in ‘Interaction between Text and Reader’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 106–19.

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Introduction

imagery in their interpretative processes.48 For Roger Chartier, a study of reading must take account of literature’s ‘material production’ and ‘distribution networks’,49 and concern itself ultimately with the practical fact of the book itself. Hans Robert Jauss focuses instead on the critical reception of texts to suggest how actual readers have influenced the interpretation of works over time in contrast to the ‘passive’ role played by authors.50 Still more approaches are suggested by J. A. Appleyard’s book Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood,51 which attacks the notion of the individual reader as a stable subject by delineating the development of readers and their interpretative strategies throughout their lives or by Joseph Pucci’s The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition,52 which examines how literary allusions allow a reader to control the interpretation of text. All six of these approaches offer fruitful ways for thinking about Smith’s relationship with reading and readers. Her notoriously allusive poetry is continually looking over its shoulder to see how its audience is responding, making Pucci’s thesis an important starting point for examining her work. She fetishizes and fictionalizes her own life as a reader in her three semi-autobiographical novels and in her numerous book reviews, apparently aligning her with Appleyard’s developmental model of reading. This aspect of her work will be explored in Chapter 2, which will draw on early reading notebooks and Smith’s own personal library to explore how her formative reading experiences impacted on her career as a professional reader. Smith is also acutely aware of the 48 See Ellen Esrock’s attack on reader-response criticism for failing to address a reader’s visual processes in The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which argues that ‘reader-orientated scholars still discuss only sound and meaning’ (2). Her argument neglects the fact that many reader-response critics ground their theories in visual metaphors. See, for example, Hans Robert Jauss’s ‘spectrum of expectations’ and his notion of a literary work as a viewed object in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 21, or Iser’s description of the reading process as ‘a sequence of mental images’ in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978), 36. 49 Roger Chartier, ‘Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader’, Diacritics, 22(2) (1992), 49–61, 49. 50 See Jauss (1982), 32; the ‘history of literature’ is ‘a process in which the passive reception is on the part of the authors’. 51 J. A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 52 Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (London: Yale University Press, 1998).

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book as a material object responsible for establishing the author’s reputation, evidenced in her life-long preoccupation with the form of her published texts. Here a consideration of Chartier’s ‘distribution networks’ would seem to be essential in establishing her own views on the dissemination of her work. Chapter 3 will explore in detail these ‘networks’, assessing how Smith’s unorthodox publication strategies have impacted on posthumous editions of her work. Critics’ insistence on Smith as a misread author makes it vital to consider how her own literary reputation has been constructed over time. Following the historical reception theories of Jauss, Chapter 4 will examine repeating trends in readings of her work, and consider how far Smith’s presentation of herself through interviews, letters, and authorial blurbs might have endorsed or qualified some of these readings. By contrast, Iser’s ahistoric model of the implied reader in the text offers a useful way of exploring Smith’s three novels, which use a variety of narrative strategies to invoke, provoke, and address their projected readers. The disquieting journey of the reader through her texts will be explored thoroughly in Chapter 5. Yet all of these approaches are undermined by the presence of illustrations in Smith’s work. Using critical tools that always assume a reader to be navigating their way through text rather than images, how can we begin to assess the importance of her visual art? Ellen Esrock’s argument for the importance of visual processes in the reading experience becomes particularly pertinent when applied to Smith’s work, suggesting that no study of her reading audience can conclude without focusing on her drawings. Chapter 6 will consider her illustrations alongside her own largely neglected writings on art, and explore how far her insistence on her drawings as capricious and arbitrary might be problematized by their visual sources. There are necessary limitations in offering six related but distinct approaches to an author and their work as opposed to a chronological survey, a thematically arranged study, or an analysis drawing on one coherent literary theory. Classification and categorization often seem an unwelcome imposition for an author who included her own reviews in her novels, quoted her own poetry in reviews, and offered up her development as a reader in her three novels. Yet this monograph will not seek to point the finger at the already-framed reader, to reflexively interrogate its own methodologies. Reader-response theory, which often seeks to do precisely this, is a pertinent but often unhelpful discourse by this reckoning. Instead, by examining Smith’s development as an author

20

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alongside subsequent readings of her work, this book will show how she undermines the act of reading itself, provoking a perpetual cycle of ‘misreadings’. Beginning with how her own reading became instrumental in forming her notion of herself as an author, it will examine her anxiety about the reader–writer relationship in her novels, assess her own complicity in her critical reception, and finally explore how and why her own art moved beyond words towards an explicitly visual aesthetic. By reading Smith in this way, I will unpick the context that Smith constructed for her readers, and suggest how we can read and view her work anew.

1 Reforming a Literary Orphan: Stevie Smith’s Poetry in Context Reading Smith’s poetry is often an exercise in bafflement. Her genres are notoriously permeable and porous, and her use of form both evokes and provokes the traditions on which it feeds. Her tone shifts from the recondite to the profound in a single line, and can be variously hectoring, plaintive, whimsical, indignant, elegiac, stoical, parodic, or portentous. This protean voice makes placing her in a lineage difficult, not only because much of her work pours scorn on the very process of categorizing and canonizing poets (‘To School!’, CP 269; ‘Souvenir de Monsieur Poop’, CP 137), but because it invites and rejects so many competing traditions; her final collection Scorpion, for example, takes on occasional poems (‘O Pug!’, CP 547), monodies (‘Grave by a Holm-Oak’, CP 568), religious verse (‘How Do You See?’, CP 516), myths (‘The Forlorn Sea’, CP 528), dramatic monologues (‘The Galloping Cat’, CP 593), narrative poems (‘The House of Over-Dew’, CP 553), ballads (‘The Sallow Bird’, CP 539), and odes (‘The Donkey’, CP 535). Elsewhere, limericks, epigrams, and concrete poetry complicate the already bewildering mixture. The variety of forms Smith brings into play are only compounded by her inscrutable or dismissive attitude to them; the invocation of genre provides none of the starting points the reader expects, and even as we struggle to attend to formal markers,1 we hear the lyric cry of a voice telling us we’ve already missed the boat: I am becalmed in a deep sea And give signals, but they are not answered

(‘Look!’, CP 369, ll. 1–2)

1 See Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), who argues that ‘the generic markers that cluster at the beginning of a work have a strategic role in guiding the reader’ (88).

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Reforming a Literary Orphan

These unanswered generic signals are always difficult to translate, coming in the form of blessings which seem close to admonitions (‘Admire Cranmer!’, CP 398), otherwise perfect tercets that always leave one halfrhyme out in the cold (‘The Photograph’, CP 145; ‘Gna¨diges Fra¨ulein’, CP 140; ‘The Weak Monk’, CP 251), or epistles written under the influence (‘The Jungle Husband’, CP 332). We also have epithalamion that turn distinctly eerie (‘The Forlorn Sea’, CP 528), dream visions where the dreamer outfoxes the prophet (‘I had a dream . . .’, CP 421), or a recollection in tranquillity which soon breaks into vindictive slight (‘How Slowly Time Lengthens’, CP 131). If Smith’s lines veer from the taut monosyllables of ‘The Best Beast’ (CP 412) to the lolloping indignation of religious poems such as ‘How Do You See?’ (CP 516), the poems themselves gesture to their own deformities and their ambivalence about the search for shape and rigidity. ‘La Speakerine de Putney’ nods to both the limerick and the invocation; yet the poem seems more self-conscious and highly wrought than either of those two markers suggests: This heap of ashes was a learned girl; Oh how the ashes shift to the words’ smoke-curl! Blow wind, blow, blow away the frightful form, scatter The false-girl form and the words’ mutter. (CP 187)

The opening line appears to be a straightforward metaphor, yet reverses a metaphor’s tendency to proceed denotative with connotative and apparently personifies a heap of ashes. This disorientates us: either the reader can understand that a girl has been magicked into a heap of ashes and the remainder of the limerick will unravel the how and whys of the transformation, or the more obvious metaphor ‘This learned girl was a heap of ashes’ has undergone one further stage of figurative translation, and we are meant to understand the lines as a description of a girl, not a pile of ashes. One further possibility is that the line is literal in meaning, and describes an act of cremation. This explanation would then come to embody the act of metaphor itself as a device carrying back and forth meaning between living flesh and the inert, inanimate world. Yet we still suspect, generically, we are in the world of the limerick, and would more readily look for humour in our interpretation than meditations on death or the use of language. The second line ruptures the possibility of the limerick by offering us an ambivalent apostrophe, with a tone closer to frustration or condemnation than wonder. However, it carries forward all three lexical possibilities from

Reforming a Literary Orphan

23

the first line. We might read it as a disquisition on a cremation ceremony, with the speaker attacking a religious official for their sermon on the learned girl’s death. This could still be a satirical portrait of a young girl talking, her words going up in superficial and literal smoke (the accompanying picture of a woman smoking certainly suggests the ashtray rather than the urn). Yet we might also see the line as a deconstruction of the first, drawing attention to the metaphoric technique that would try to compare a girl with a heap of ashes. The self-interrogating reading of the poem seems to dominate the last two lines, where a beleaguered and increasingly King Lear-ish speaker asks for an end to the ‘false-girl form’, although again, this could be the speaker ventriloquizing a crematorium official, or attacking her meretricious subject.2 Yet for a poem preoccupied with form, appearance, and transformation, it cannot make sense of its web of possibilities. Its form is overwhelmed by the connotations of its content. The reader valiantly attempts to keep the first two lines in rhymed iambic pentameter, but we are all caught out by the third. Just as the speaker calls for an end for the ‘false-girl form’ so do the formal characteristics of the poem buckle and ‘scatter’. The closing half-rhyme, which chops the meter from twelve syllables to nine, peters out after the explosion of the third. This very literal destruction of form that takes place in ‘La Speakerine de Putney’ is suggestive of a more general preference for cremation over creation in Smith’s oeuvre, which often sets a torch to its genres rather than offer counter-reformation. In ‘Breughel’, Smith defends the necessary props of line and meter: The ages blaspheme The people are weak As in a dream They evilly speak. Their words in a clatter Of meaningless sound Without form or matter Echo around. (CP 84, ll. 1–8)

If too calculating a form covers the words in a deceptive ‘smoke-curl’, an absence of form finds them clattering in ‘meaningless’ anarchy, 2 Cf. William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), III.ii.1: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow.’

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Smith reminds us in Thomas Hood dimeters. Yet her work is always more cautious of the former danger than the latter. It is telling that the formless or anarchic world Smith imagines in Brueghel leaves its words to ‘Echo around’. The nightmare recurs at the end of The Holiday; the narrative records obliquely ‘ha, ha, ha, came the echoes’ (197). Smith commentators, as if following the poem’s cue, have more usually sought to trace her work through its allusions and lineage rather than its formal characteristics, what Smith describes in interview as the ‘jolly and deceiving game of “influences” ’ where the reader must ‘be prepared to be wrong’.3 Author–protagonist Celia in The Holiday (1947) advertises her poetry as being comprised of a ‘smattering’ of quotations from the Bible, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, religious philosophy, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British poetry; reducing this strange voice to such familiar ingredients is a tempting occupation (87). It is this temptation, and its interpretative consequences, which will be the focus of this chapter. Smith’s final, posthumous volume of poetry was published with an essay by Patric Dickinson which struggled to align her with Emily Dickinson only to reluctantly admit the comparison was more an analogy than a suggestion of influence. Eccentric, reclusive female poets who write about death, dress unusually, and argue with God can perhaps do with the company, is the suggestion, even if Smith never read a word of Dickinson’s verse. Yet the concentrated, idiosyncratic, and distinctive voice of Dickinson only points up further the nomadic and disorientating world of Smith; if Dickinson stretches syntax to breaking point, Smith matches her for tone. Only in the parallel problems they pose for academic criticism do their paths ever really cross, as if two problems might equal a solution. Whilst contemporary reviews of Smith pointed their readers with more assurance to the Grimm Brothers, Edward Lear, or William Blake via Smith’s interest in fantastical journeys, her Gothic view of childhood, her religious ire, or her skittish illustrations, it was not until Hermione Lee’s 1983 critical edition that a Smith reader attempted to nail the poetry more forcefully to a literary mast. Here, the findings were rich and various; whilst Blake and the Bible provided some evident templates, Lee expanded the point of reference to include Virgil, Herbert, Whitman, Tennyson, Racine, Samuel Johnson, and Lord Byron. Yet 3 Transcript of an interview with John Horder for the BBC broadcast World of Books made on 18 March 1961, UT.

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whilst no critic had gone further to pinpoint the ever-wandering and ductile lines of Smith’s poems to particular sources, Lee made her contribution primarily with endnotes rather than expository essays. These were allusions clearly easier to annotate than explicate. Her introduction noted the range and variety of her allusions which are sometimes ‘impersonations’, often ‘reminders, re-workings, travesties’,4 and sketched out a range of illuminating examples, but there was less time to explore how a reference to De Quincey or Euripides might alter our response to a poem. Instead, the edition was designed to act as a catalyst for subsequent scholars to interpret the bewildering play of references and literary nods. Why then the critical reticence to tease out this web of jostling allusions? The call of Edward Lear or James Thurber is perhaps dangerous for a critic trying to reclaim a serious Smith; by contrast, the wide poetic canvas Lee’s edition hints at requires an audience drenched in the traditional, male canon Smith’s work apparently evades, and which recent feminist critics would argue she ultimately rejects. If Smith could be read as mining the past for comedy, her work seems more haunted by the fear of not being funny enough. Tellingly, Romana Huk’s recent study allows Smith’s novels to ‘change the ways [she] reads Smith’s poems’ rather than the poems Smith’s works allude to, as if Smith’s corpus were comprised of a range of hermetically sealed texts in tentative dialogue with each other. How then are we to approach them? Her allusions more often than not seem unfettered by what Walter Jackson Bate has called ‘the burden of the past’5 or the ‘anxiety of influence’6 gripping Bloom’s succession of great poets. Yet her qualifying bathos and the breadth of her allusions, which take in the Western canon alongside nonsense verse and the women’s magazine, also troubles allusive readings of her work that disregard questions of intention or 4

Stevie Smith: A Selection, ed. and critical introduction Hermione Lee (London: Faber, 1983), 25. 5 See W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), who finds the English poet haunted by the question ‘What is there left to do? ’ (3). 6 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). As Joseph Pucci has noted in The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (London: Yale University Press, 1998), Bloom’s argument is far more concerned with Freudian notions of paternity than textual echo, but its appropriation by many textual critics has shifted the sense of Bloom’s original term, despite what Pucci notes is Bloom’s ‘disdain for allusion’ (11–12).

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reception to reclaim her as a ‘poet’s poet’. The articles on Smith’s poetry by Christopher Ricks and Paul Muldoon, both Oxford Professors of Poetry,7 are illuminating and insightful, and their canonical welcome finds Smith taking her place alongside Geoffrey Hill or Philip Larkin in her recreation of Pope, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Tennyson et al. However, both gloss over Smith’s own concerns about how her work should be read. Her verse may invoke Keats or Housman, but does her inscrutable attitude to that material make her their successors? Muldoon’s article in particular offers a way forward which, as ever with Smith criticism, is as instructive in the problems Smith poses as in the answers her work or readers of her work might provide. Before examining his essay, however, it’s important to establish what might be at stake for Smith in the question of allusion. Joseph Pucci’s The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (1998) offers a way of accommodating Smith’s elusive allusions. Whilst Pucci agrees with Christopher Ricks that allusion can be differentiated from plagiarism in its intention to be discovered rather than go undetected,8 he remains sceptical that a ‘specific interpretation of the allusion can be demonstrated in any convincing way to be intended by the author [ . . . ] the allusion requires a reader for its activation’.9 In the ever-vacillating power games played between reader and author, allusion, according to Pucci, is a ball very much in the reader’s court, as ‘the status of the reader is increased radically wherever and whenever that reader reads an allusion, and this status is achieved at the expense of the author’.10 The author, by deliberately calling up a text that invites dissonance with their alluding poem, Pucci argues, empowers the reader to arbitrate between those disparities. Allusion becomes a dangerous game for the poet who wants to limit or control readings of their work. Smith’s own peculiarly resourceful brand of textual echo, generic signpost, or literary allusion 7 Christopher Ricks, ‘The Art of Sinking’, in The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 244–56, and Paul Muldoon, ‘ “I Remember” by Stevie Smith’, in The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Faber, 2006), 140–64. Muldoon’s essay was originally a lecture given under the aegis of his role as Oxford Professor of Poetry, arguably the most prestigious and public academic position for a poet in the UK. 8 See Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader, who argues that ‘plagiarism always seeks to hide itself’ (42), and Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), who sets up plagiarism as allusion’s antithesis, in that ‘the alluder hopes that the reader will recognize something, the plagiarist that the reader will not’ (1). 9 Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader, 42. 10 Ibid. 45.

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must strike a balance between liberating and limiting that suddenly ‘full-knowing’ reader. It might be instructive to test Pucci’s thesis and see how Muldoon’s and Ricks’ allusive treatments of Smith situate her alongside her sources, to explore whether their approaches help to reclassify Smith as an alert and dextrous literary technician, or reiterate their own status as ‘full-knowing’ readers who can make dazzling allusive display from the most unpromising of literary offerings. Muldoon’s resourceful and deft response to ‘I remember’ argues that the poem ‘belongs, most immediately, to a line of English lyric running back to Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy’.11 It was my bridal night I remember, An old man of seventy-three I lay with my young bride in my arms, A girl with t.b. It was wartime, and overhead The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead. What rendered the confusion worse, perversely Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany. Harry, do they ever collide? I do not think it has ever happened, Oh my bride, my bride. (CP 336)

In answer to the bride’s anxious questions of origin and influence, Muldoon’s persuasive account traces the poem through Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, Keats’ definition of poetry as an act of remembrance, and ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’. He calls up more contemporary ghosts, too, emphasizing the poem’s interest in memory and dialogue to bring in ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’ by Edward Thomas. The drama of war surrounding the consummating couple evokes for Muldoon ‘Channel Firing’, ‘In time of “The Breaking of Nations”’, and ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ by Thomas Hardy, and ‘I Remember, I Remember’ by Philip Larkin. A turn towards ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ affords a further point of entry for ‘Two Swimmers Wrestled on the Spar’, ‘There is a Solitude of Space’, and ‘Exultation is the Going’ by Emily Dickinson before ‘I Remember’ comes to rest midway between ‘In the Waiting Room’ by Elizabeth Bishop, and ‘I Remember’ by Thomas Hood. 11

Muldoon, ‘“I Remember”’, 141.

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Once or twice, Muldoon qualifies his ingenious and sometimes tendentious links between fragments of lines and rhymes. He admits that ‘whether or not there’s a direct influence of either of [the] Emily Dickinson poems on “Not Waving but Drowning” is hard to tell. What’s easier to relate is the large number of instances in Stevie Smith of a sea/soul system of imagery which is reminiscent, to say the least, of Dickinson’s system.’12 On Dickinson, agreeing with the earlier essay of Patric Dickinson, it appears the less said the better. The comparison in this instance suggests affinity rather than inheritance. Yet, elsewhere, the poet’s poet is meticulous in providing historical as well as phonic plausibility that Smith was in fact making intentional allusions to over nine poems in an eleven-line lyric. Smith’s early brush with tubercular peritonitis at five gives biographical weight to Muldoon’s invocation of Keats, helping him flag up the poem’s mention of Hampstead or its repetition of ‘bride’ which, for Muldoon, calls up Keats’ ‘unravished’ counterpart. The 1955 publication of Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember two years before Smith’s poem was published provides a memorable fictionalizing of the sinking of the Titanic, legitimating Muldoon’s nod to Hardy’s Titanic poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. The same year also saw the publication of Larkin’s poem ‘I Remember’ in The Less Deceived, another detail which moves Muldoon’s reading from an associative essay demonstrating one poet–reader’s ingenuity to the contextual examination promising scholarly rigour. There is further supporting evidence Muldoon’s account could have drawn on, too, should he have needed to: his link to Hood might be strengthened by noting Smith had prepared a radio broadcast on the poet’s work, whilst his Keatsian thesis might call in the help of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the anthology providing a rich seam of Smith’s poetic language. Muldoon’s combination of poetic conjecture with biographical or historical evidence makes his reading seemingly assured, and suggestive of Smith’s authorial intention. The article stokes the conjectural fires of direct influence rather than offer Muldoon’s own literary tastes and interests as its starting point. Yet if the bride of the poem alludes to two warring parties sent out in opposite directions in danger of colliding, Smith’s own correspondence offers a piece of evidence ensuring hers and Muldoon’s readings of the poem’s allusions will never match up. Asked by Derek Parker about the 12

Muldoon, ‘“I Remember”’, 154.

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inspiration for ‘I Remember’, Smith confessed it was ‘practically a transcript from Llewellyn Powys’ autobiography’.13 Her misremembered source is in fact Littleton C. Powys’ Still the Joy of It (1956), his account of his second marriage to the author Elizabeth Myers, who, like Smith, spent much of her early life in a sanatorium. It perhaps furnishes rather too many of the poem’s incidental details to leave room for the similarly ailing Keats: On Thursday, October 7th, we were married in the little Roman Catholic church of St. Mary’s at Hampstead [ . . . ] Our wedding night coincided with the most spirited German air raid that had been experienced in London for a 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.14

Not only does this source make Muldoon’s allusive points difficult to follow through, but it also raises questions as to the identity of the poem itself. The two main points of imaginative interest for Muldoon in this poem are Smith’s construction of a male speaker and her depiction of a consummation during an air raid, both of which can be traced back to Powys. The poem becomes both more and less allusive than Muldoon has argued. The increasing confusion that Powys remembers from his wedding night and that Smith borrows and amplifies in the poem— ‘what rendered the confusion worse, perversely’—becomes the reader’s own. As if anxious about Muldoon, the ‘full-knowing’ and empowered reader having the final word on the poem, Smith halts the free play of allusive reference from beyond the grave. In their battle for interpretative control, Muldoon attempts to do a service for Smith by canonizing her work in a respected tradition, only to be met with a rebarbative dismissal. The poem’s indebtedness to Powys’ biography does not invalidate Muldoon’s reading, but makes it a reflection of his own tastes and critical practices. Looking to justify the presence of Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson in his roll-call of allusion, for example, we would do better to look to the two previous lectures in his Oxford series on ‘12 O’Clock News’ by Elizabeth Bishop and ‘I Tried to Think a Lonelier Thing’ by Emily Dickinson than to Smith’s reading notebooks or her manuscript drafts. Pucci’s thesis holds here; the enacting of allusion comes via the reader’s desires rather than the author’s 13 14

As quoted by Derek Parker in a letter to William McBrien, 19. September 1979, UT. Littleton C. Powys, Still the Joy of It (London: Macdonald, 1956), 34.

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intentions; it is the reader who becomes absorbed into ‘the purity of the moment in which allusive meaning is constructed, its limitlessness, the momentary burgeoning of potential meanings, all playing for attention and vying for consideration’.15 The game of influence, always difficult to play for the reader, becomes doubly so when Smith is the opponent: if allusion makes the reader ‘full-knowing’, how much does Smith know, and does she know we know? For Ricks, the deft expert on allusion, Smith’s poetry ‘will not let on how artless or artful it is being’,16 and her strategic simplicity becomes the defining characteristic of her work. He identifies that her poetry is at its simplest when the tradition it evokes is at its most philosophically profound (the near-doggerel which Ricks traces back to Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, for example), and uses careful shades to delineate influence or analogy. If Smith knows, then Ricks knows she knows, and he does an excellent job of matching her at her own game. He can be sure that Smith alludes to Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ in ‘The Death Sentence’, because a passage in Novel on Yellow Paper quotes it wholesale. Elsewhere, he states that ‘like Beckett, [Smith] uses literary allusion to catch a paradox of life and death’17—shifting the question to one of contiguity and comparison rather than inheritance. Ricks avoids the traps Muldoon falls into by making those traps, in part, the subject of his essay. Yet, outside of the realm of the poet’s poet, there seems a structural problem in further exploring what Ricks calls the ‘continually allusive’18 echoes of a poet equally as likely to quote a local newspaper, a charity pamphlet, or her own poetry as to invoke a poetic forefather. If, by being ‘continually allusive’ Smith is continually handing the baton to her ‘full-knowing reader’, how will we keep up? Smith’s problem, or rather Smith’s reader’s problem with her verse and voice, is caught in the lament of ‘Old Ghosts’: I can call up old ghosts, and they will come, But my art limps,—I cannot send them home.

(CP 211)

Here we find a rare admission of defeat that suggests a Bloomian anxiety of influence, the makeshift poet able only to imitate rather than innovate, 15 16 17 18

Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader, 43. Ricks, ‘The Art of Sinking’, 246. Ibid. 250. Ibid. 247.

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and never in control of their material.19 Yet if here the past is an awe-full (and therefore awful) spectre, elsewhere Smith’s literary ghosts seem mere figments of the imagination, as in ‘Le Majeur Ydow’. ‘Eh bien! Marche!’, fit le Majeur Ydow, ‘Any more gentleman like that? I’ll see them off !’ But there were no gentleman really, only the phantoms He warred with in his perpetual tantrums. (CP 181)

These two poems play out their own war, not unlike the bombing raiders of ‘I Remember’. On one side, ghosts (from the Anglo-Saxon gast) offer a real and threatening apparition, whereas the Gallic phantom (from the Old French fantosme) is mere illusion, a hallucination more than a haunting. Reading Smith, who at times is seemingly ghostwritten by Blake, Lear, or the Brothers Grimm, forces us to tussle with these two differing models of influence and echo. Are her works full of ghosts, the expected outcome of an author’s deliberate conjuring, or phantoms, symptoms of our own desire to read her into a tradition? Her own comments on the tradition she inherited were typically double-edged. When asked what poetry she read in the 1960s she replied, ‘why, nobody’s but my own’,20 momentarily eliding the verb ‘to read’ with the verb ‘to perform’, and much of her work attempts ventriloquism. Yet she invites comparisons as vigorously as she rejects them. She sets herself up defensively against critics mining her work for a lineage or allusion by signposting another key poet of her inheritance; Tennyson, the Poet Laureate of melancholy. As Pompey asserts in Novel on Yellow Paper, ‘I think of my poems as my kiddo, and no doubt but Tennyson felt that way too’ (23). In the novel, referring to her poems as children guards Pompey against the suburban pressures of marriage and motherhood, dignifying writing as an alternative form of propagation. Yet it is also one of the few branches the recalcitrant Smith holds out to us: the choice of metaphor opens up questions of misshapen and foreign progeny more widely in her poetic oeuvre, which is littered with absconding fathers 19 As Frances Spalding has pointed out, this cry of mismanaged allusion is itself a reference, combining Henry IV Part I with De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 45). 20 ‘Stevie Smith’, in The Poet Speaks, ed. Peter Orr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 225–31, 229.

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(‘Papa Love Baby’, CP 16), infanticide (‘She said . . .’, CP 182), or the over-attentive parent who smothers their child in grief (‘Persephone’, CP 248). The texts themselves, with their complex and conspiratorial combinations of allusion, parody, echo, and lampoon gesture to a series of possible literary antecedents, from Blake, Pope, and Shelley, to Racine, Virgil, and Dante. If Smith’s poems are her offspring, what is their inheritance? It seems telling that in her poem ‘A Mother’s Hearse’ (CP 234), Smith suggests a child would do better to lose its mother than be indulged by her. If by elucidating her allusions Smith might be able to contain and inhibit the troubling vagaries of the ‘fullknowing reader’, what keeps Smith so quiet on the question of their provenance? Perhaps the most fruitful analogy for Smith’s relationship to her literary forefathers is offered by the subject of her poem ‘The Orphan Reformed’, particularly if, as Pucci has argued, writing is ‘an orphan in search of a parent’.21 Here, the orphan of the title travels the world searching for the same, bemoaning her lot and dismissing a series of potential candidates as she goes: The orphan is looking for parents She roams the world over Looking for parents and cover. She looks at this pair and that Cries, Father, Mother, Likes these, does not like those, Stays for a time; goes. Crying, Oh hearts of stone But really she is better alone. Orphan, the people who will not be your parents are not evil, Not the devil. But still she cries, Father, Mother Must I be alone for ever? Yes you must. Oh wicked orphan, oh rebellion, Must an orphan not be alone is that your opinion? 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. (CP 241, ll. 1–19) 21

Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader, 240.

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Here the alienated subject matures not into stoic resignation but coquettishness, using her status as an orphan to play on a range of possible origins. The shadowy half-rhymes between ‘orphan’, ‘rebellion’, and ‘opinion’ is the closest Smith’s subject gets to a homecoming, suggesting she would do rather better to wander. The speaker’s dogmatic approval seems a tacit acknowledgement that this mirrors Smith’s own artistic process. Certainly the orphan’s mercurial loyalties—she ‘stays for a time; goes’—suggest Smith’s creation of a series of competing contexts for her work. Her poems wear their literary hybridity as badges of warning and playful inscrutability. They advertise their lack of inheritance even as they search half-heartedly to reclaim it. For the stability of ancestry can be a mixed blessing, as Smith records elsewhere: Stand off, Mother, let me go! The clock upon the shelf is slow There wants but half a moment E’er I am celled and barred in thy heart’s convent. (‘N’est-ce pas assez de ne me point haı¨r?’, CP 217)

Lineage can contain as well as enrich, it would seem, and if the clock on the shelf here threatens interment, the books that line it may be equally guilty of restriction. As if to emphasize the point, ‘The Orphan Reformed’ itself proves a ‘mild tease’ on the question of genesis.22 Orphan twins pop up elsewhere in Smith (‘We have no father and no mother j We are often taken for one another’, ‘Thank You’, CP 273), and here, the orphaned girl is equally keen to find kinship. She seems to be a distant descendant of Alice Fell, Wordsworth’s idealized portrait of childhood poverty. In Wordsworth’s ballad, the speaker stops his carriage to find a destitute orphan who has torn her ragged coat and weeps for its loss; he goes on to procure her a lavish replacement: ‘My child in Durham do you dwell?’ She checked herself in her distress,

22 See Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), who argues that ‘we should notice when the subject-matter of an allusion is at one with the impulse that underlies the making of allusions at all, because it is characteristic of art to find energy and delight in an enacting of that which it is saying, and to be rendered vigilant by a consciousness of metaphors and analogies which relate its literary practice to the great world’ (9). Here Smith calls into play just such an illusion.

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Reforming a Literary Orphan And said, ‘My name is Alice Fell’, I’m fatherless and motherless’. (ll. 41–4)23

Alice is, as her name suggests, already fallen, but Smith’s poem sets her back in motion; Wordsworth’s pitiable urchin finds in Smith’s orphan both a descendant and a point of descent. Smith’s rereading of Wordsworth sees Alice’s meek resignation as maudlin self-pity, before her reforming eye converts her loss to an expedient misfortune. The most obvious nod to ‘Alice Fell’ comes midway through Smith’s poem: But still she cries, Father, Mother Must I be alone for ever?

Here, she momentarily falls upon the formal inheritance of Wordsworth’s tetrameters, but seems suspicious of their traditional comforts, just as she implies her subject should be. Both poems find their protagonists looking for ‘cover’ but, tellingly, Alice finds shelter in a new coat and Smith’s orphan in heightened self-awareness. For Wordsworth, ‘motherless’ and ‘distress’ make imperfect rhymes but seek solace in each other; Smith’s orphan finds no such pairing for ‘mother’, which struggles to find unity with ‘ever’. Only ‘cover’ offers Smith’s putative parent a full rhyme, which here suggests less protection than alibi. If Smith’s debt to Wordsworth gives her poem the lineage it is apparently so desperate to acquire, the subject of the poem both denies the legitimacy of that lineage and the efficacy of seeking it out in the first place. This is a curiously double-edged attitude, a yearning for and a desertion of tradition, and one that recurs throughout Smith’s poems. Smith’s warning to Muldoon and to all her future readers that we must be ‘prepared to be wrong’ makes clear that the breadcrumbs she drops will more likely lead us to the witch’s house than the parent who sent out the poem into the literary wilderness. It is Wordsworth who provides a starting point for Smith’s dialogue with the past. The cult of the individual, the notion of the poet as seer, and ubi est of Romantic irony all surface in Smith’s work at various junctures accompanied with either pledges of affinity or statements of departure. Wordsworth’s series of poems on the river Yarrow—‘Yarrow Unvisited’ (1807), ‘Yarrow Visited’ (1815), ‘Yarrow Revisited’ (1834)— offer a triumvirate of Romantic mission statements. They explore, in 23 William Wordsworth, ‘Alice Fell’, in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 241.

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turn, the imaginative potential of the site never visited, the ironic disparity between the thing imagined and the thing as experienced, and the mournful loss of returning to a site of past happiness. The first two of these were both included in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and would have been most familiar to Smith but, if, as many critics have suggested, the Treasury forms the backbone of Smith’s poetic influence, she proves more adept at smelting, looting, and minting new currency from her literary piracy than she does at confessing to the crime itself. Wordsworth’s poem ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ sets a possible future visit to the river Yarrow against his expectations of it and finds it wanting: Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown! It must, or we shall rue it: We have a vision of our own, Ah! why should we undo it? The treasured dreams of times long past, We’ll keep ’em, winsome Marrow For when we’re there, although ’tis fair Twill be another Yarrow! (ll .49–56)24

To journey to the Yarrow would force the speaker to forsake their conception of the river for ‘another Yarrow’. If Wordsworth pointedly substitutes these alternative Yarrows in his two subsequent poems he was conscious, too, that the river had already inspired a series of tributes by writers from John Logan to Walter Scott. By choosing, in this first poem, not to visit the Yarrow, Wordsworth exalts the power of his imagination and pays implicit homage to the power of previous poets’ depictions. A primary encounter with the river becomes an unnecessary distraction from the return to other poets’ work. Smith’s ‘The Occasional Yarrow’ is then both homage and excavation, revisiting what, in the first of Wordsworth’s poems, remains unvisited: It was a mile of greenest grass Whereon a little stream did pass, The Occasional Yarrow Only in every seventh year Did this pretty stream appear, The Occasional Yarrow

24

William Wordsworth, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, in The Major Works, 290.

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Wading and warbling in its beds Of grass decked out with daisy heads, The Occasional Yarrow There in my seventh year, and this sweet stream’s, I wandered happily (as happy gleams The Occasional Yarrow). Though now to memory alone I can call up thy lovely form, The Occasional Yarrow I still do bless thy Seventh days Bless thy sweet name and all who praise The Occasional Yarrow (CP 377)

The poem largely retains Wordsworth’s meter, and imposes another formal restriction on itself in the septet stanzaic pattern, mirroring the seven years between the Yarrow’s successive resurgence. The fourth stanza’s ‘wandered happily’ also returns nomadically to Wordsworth’s daffodils. The final three lines are perhaps the closest Smith’s oeuvre comes to signposting itself in a particular tradition, concluding the poem with an envoy that opens itself up to both its forefathers and its successors. It is an apparently uncomplicated addition to a hallowed poetic genre. Yet Smith’s playful and glib allusive gestures in other poems and throughout her three novels makes this reading too straightforward. The wry expression of the girl in the illustration sets the reader looking back to the poem for subversion. If Smith, the literary orphan, here points to Wordsworth as a father, what does the poem gain from solemn reverence for its paternity? Signs of filial dissent first emerge from a comparison of the last stanza with the conclusion of Wordsworth’s ‘Yarrow Revisited’: Flow on for ever, Yarrow Stream! Fulfil thy pensive duty, Well pleased that future Bards should chant For simple hearts thy beauty; (ll. 103–6)25

Matched side by side, Smith’s tribute begins to peter out into bathos. Writing ‘bless’ in 1957 seems affectionately colloquial as well as cryptically archaic. Whilst Wordsworth apostrophizes the ‘simple’ Yarrow into epic proportions, setting it aside the Thames in Pope’s jingoistic Windsor Forest (1713) or John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642), Smith’s diminutive 25

William Wordsworth, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, in The Major Works, 365.

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‘occasional’ seems to underline something more provisional. If we return to her poem, we might ask whether her speaker has encountered the river at all. Their assertion that they can ‘call up thy lovely form’ is both an affirmation of their imaginative power and equally suggestive of Smith’s ability to ape Wordsworth. It then becomes unclear whether it is the river or Wordsworth’s representations of it Smith addresses, as its ‘occasional’ reappearance also suggests its depiction at intervals throughout Wordsworth’s career. Certainly the ‘wading and warbling’ beds seem a mocking nod to the river bard. Her modifying ‘occasional’ may also invoke the occasional poem, slighting the notion of an individual Romantic encounter by suggesting an affinity with court poetry or the Augustan tradition. It is merely another step in a poetic career. If Wordsworth invokes Pope and traditions of political poetry, we might ask what it means for Smith to write a poem about a river in the Scottish borders in 1957, at the height of the Suez crisis? On this point the poem, and its source, is silent; yet her allusion seems as occasional and elusive as the river she addresses—now solemn and respectful, now anachronistic and intransigent, now vanished altogether. Like her orphans, her allusions stay for a time, and go. If her insertion into the British pastoral follows the genre down some enigmatic tributaries, there is more evident sense of diversion in her early poem ‘The Bereaved Swan’. Wan Swan On the lake Like a cake Of soap Why is the swan Wan On the lake? He has abandoned hope. Wan Swan On the lake afloat Bows his head: O would that I were dead For her sake that lies Wrapped from my eyes In a mantle of death, The swan saith. (CP 40)

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Like the unreformed orphan—the downcast are given full coverage but short shrift throughout Smith’s work—here her subject is desolate and grieving. As in ‘The Occasional Yarrow’, the rupture between the Victorian archaisms of ‘saith’ and ‘mantle’ and the pragmatically banal ‘cake of soap’ keep the tone opaque and subliminal. This might be a gentle mockery of the swan’s sentimentality, with the majesty of the swan’s song reduced to staccato monosyllables and the quotidian verbs of speech yet, as so often in Smith’s work, there is a fuzzy line between derision and pathos. Only with careful consideration does the desiccation of the swan, who literally deteriorates into ‘wan’, resemble the flaking erosion of a bar of soap, making the simile more poignant than absurd. Yet the coolly observed grief for a deceased mate is also an act of mourning for a literary predecessor, Tennyson’s ‘The Dying Swan’. Halfway between the sublime and Victorian melodrama, Tennyson’s poem, which appeared in his first collection, is most often remembered for the rousing euphoria of its conclusion: And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds, And the willow-branches hoar and dank, And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds, And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, And the silvery marish-flowers that throng The desolate creeks and pools among, Were flooded over with eddying song. (ll. 36–42)26

Here is a tidal wave of melody at the point the voice itself is extinguished. It cannot be elegy, as its music comes in death, not after it, but it is an affirmation of the swan’s art, momentary and monumental. Smith’s rippling echo of that music seems to mine Tennyson for humour, but it is closer to monody than parody. Her bereaved swan lives in a world drowned by loss, where true song is only possible in death. Like Baudelaire’s ‘La cygne’, another literary swan on the water’s edge here, he is ‘Comme les exiles, ridicule et sublime j Et ronge´ d’un de´sir sans treˆve!’27 (as if in exile, ridiculous and sublime, endlessly gnawed by longing). Yet despite his lamentations of grief and his wish for death or a return home, his bumpy ‘ridicule’ rhythms resist following the grandeur of 26

Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Dying Swan’, in Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill (New York: Norton, 1999), 28. 27 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Swan’, in The Flowers of Evil, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 173.

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self-immolation. Instead, the broken lines of Smith’s poem, read back through Tennyson, suggest the swan’s stoic sorrow, and his suspicion of sentiment; it is this fragmented form which, paradoxically, revives the possibility of hope. We might derive further hope from returning to Tennyson’s poem to discover that Smith’s flat monosyllables are not so far from the poem she is mourning: The wild swan’s death-hymn took the soul Of that waste place with joy Hidden in sorrow (ll. 21–3)

If Tennyson’s ‘The Dying Swan’ finds a joy hidden in sorrow, Smith’s ‘The Bereaved Swan’ reverses the equation, and finds lament hidden in pastiche. Here is bereavement without the consolations of the sublime, or the comforts of ritualistic mourning. The revelation of yet another source for ‘The Bereaved Swan’ suggests such is the distance Smith’s stoical swan wishes to keep from sentimentality, the question Smith’s poem asks of Tennyson’s must be ventriloquized through an intermediary poet: Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prithee, why so pale? Will, when looking well won’t move her Looking ill prevail? Prithee, why so pale?28

If the nod to Sir John Suckling marks an uneasy and uncomfortable distancing between source and tributary poem, one last look back at Smith’s poem alerts us to more fundamental formal gesture of hope. The two verses typographically resemble the wings of a swan, or two swans pointedly separated from each other. In the most unlikely of places, we find an invocation of George Herbert, whose ‘Easter Wings’ (1633) makes a declaration of faith through the fanning out of the poem’s lines: My tender age in sorrow did beginne: And still with sicknesses and shame Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine 28 Sir John Suckling, ‘Encouragements to a Lover’, in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53.

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Reforming a Literary Orphan And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine Affliction shall advance the flight in me.29

Smith’s typography generates the hope her subject cannot. If the swan’s stubby lines struggle throughout the poem to avoid the temptations of death, grandiloquence, and perfect song, that reticence provides the poem with his own graphic replica, a memorial both to his grief and what he has lost. Sometimes, even the reformed and reforming Smith, with her playful wink at poetic heritage, is just donning another mask; in this case, allusion is an act of mourning more than act of mockery. Just as she drowns one tradition, another comes to its rescue. Elsewhere, she makes a traditionally English genre still yet more local. She pits Robert Browning’s interest in criminal psychology against a very British emotional reticence in ‘The Murderer’, creating a dramatic monologue doomed to truncation: My true love breathed her latest breath And I have closed her eyes in death It was a cold and windy day In March, when my love went away. She was not like other girls—rather diffident, And that is how we had an accident. (CP 117)

The speaker’s insistence on his lover’s originality—‘she was not like other girls’—is heavily qualified by Smith’s allusion: the poem and its accompanying illustration both gesture emphatically to ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, Browning’s exploration of male violence and ownership in which the speaker strangles his lover with a lock of hair to preserve her beauty in aspic. As with Smith’s Yarrow poem, the allusive gesture is signalled through subject, speaker, and meter, which all echo her source: The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break (ll. 1–5)30 29

George Herbert, ‘Easter-Wings’, in The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 2004), 38. 30 Robert Browning, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, in Robert Browning, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 122.

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Browning’s sociopath records the ‘sullen wind [ . . . ] soon awake’, only quietened by the entrance of his lover who makes the ‘cheerless grate j Blaze up, and all the cottage warm’. Smith’s poem offers a ‘cold and windy day’; the accompanying illustration shows a flickering hearth. The parrot in the drawing also seems a wry joke at the poem’s act of mimicry. Is the work itself mere summary repetition without meaning? If ‘The Bereaved Swan’ embodied a form of literary mourning, does this poem, like its speaker, want to preserve its victim in a state of suspension? There is no Victorian sentiment to plunder here, and no morbid humour not implicit in the original work. Smith’s conversational addition to, or reduction of, Browning’s monologue substitutes euphemism for motivation. Her ‘accident’, rather than dignify her speaker with the complex pull of aesthetics and desire that accompanies the act of murder in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, shrouds and domesticates murder in the language of suburban social nicety. And yet for all that serendipitous ‘accident’ of rhyme and subject that puts Browning in dialogue with Smith, it is in fact the original poem which avoids naming the act it describes for as long as is lexically possible: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. (ll. 37–41)

By contrast, Smith’s starkly emphatic title sets up her poem in reverse, beginning with the crime scene, describing the landscape surrounding it, and only then moving towards a tentative explanation. If her rewriting of Browning is an act of literary murder, she remains as direct about her usurpation as Browning’s speaker is evasive. Here, she becomes an orphan by her own design. If much of Smith’s work takes whole poems as starting points (as in her rewrite of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, where intimation crosses the line into imitation),31 many of her most disquieting and inscrutable scenarios come from her teleporting of a poetic character into a landscape unfamiliar to them, suggested by several other Browning echoes. The eponymous Pauline of Browning’s early narrative poem washes up in Smith as a valium-addled aristocrat, and must

31

See ‘Intimation of Immortality’ (CP 33).

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give up the entreaties of love in Browning for patronizing jibes from her husband: Love! is not this to love thee, my Pauline? (Pauline, l. 689)32 Chuff chuff Pauline what’s the matter? (‘Drugs Made Pauline Vague’, CP 264, l. 7)

The resplendent beauty of a woman whose ‘calm simplicity of grace’33 exemplifies her native Italy in Browning’s ‘The Italian in England’ is rebuffed in ‘Feminine Charm’, where Smith rejects her for an unremarkable British counterpart: O never girl beneath the skies of Italy Or maiden singing in the vales of Sicily Or matron carding wool in Thessaly Or skivvy washing up in Beverley Gave man such joy as Bessie, Bessie Leigh, Daughter of Mr and Mrs Leigh. (CP 59)

Beginning in the language of paean and apostrophe and ending with the banal echoes of the local newspaper marriage report, Smith weds herself to a tradition whose honeymoon might be rather closer to home than the Grand Tour. In ‘Childe Rolandine’, Browning’s tragic protagonist is transported to the harassed world of a London publishing office with some indignation, where as a ‘secretary-typist’ his feminized equivalent learns that ‘It is the privilege of the rich j To waste the time of the poor’ (ll. 5–6). Smith shifts Browning either from the penetrating to the pithy, from the devotional to the indifferent, or here, from the chivalric to the quotidian. As the previous quotation shows, Smith’s lexicon is also drenched in William Blake.34 If his self-avowedly idiosyncratic position in literary history provides a useful model for considering Smith’s reception, she also drew widely on his revolutionary agitation, his ballad forms, and his biblical imagery of trees, poisoned fruits, and innocence versus

32

Robert Browning, Pauline, in Robert Browning, 24. Robert Browning, ‘An Italian in England’, in The Works of Robert Browning (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 325. 34 Although this debt is commonly acknowledged, few commentators have explored the inheritance in detail. This comparison is only a starting point, and there are many other poems in direct dialogue with Blake not treated here—see for example her rewriting of Blake’s ‘A Divine Image’ as ‘A Human Face’ (CP 175). 33

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experience. This is how the ‘Childe Rolandine’ continues, alerting its readers to an evident Blakean source, which follows below: It is the privilege of the rich To waste the time of the poor To water the 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 Oh the wicked tree of hatred and the secret The sap rising and the tears falling. (CP 331, ll. 5–13) I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears, Night and morning with my tears; And I sunned it with smiles, And with deceitful wiles. (‘A Poison Tree’, ll. 1–8)35

This section from ‘Childe Rolandine’, which appears in the poem as the protagonist’s daily office complaint, puts Blake’s poetry into the mouth of Browning’s hero, a potent and cryptic admixture more typical of Smith’s oeuvre than the easy genealogy of ‘The Occasional Yarrow’. The poem, preoccupied with toil, germination, and fruition, offers up its roots and ancestry even as it descants on the secrecy of the same process. Yet the shift Smith makes from Blake’s homiletic verse is telling: whilst, for Blake, the speaker’s wrath promotes the tree’s growth, which results by the poem’s conclusion in death, Smith’s tree is locked into a perpetual cycle of renewal and promulgation. The ripened fruit ‘manures the parent tree’; here we find an analogy for poetry and allusion where the inheritors of a tradition sustain its growth, but at a cost to their own work, which is both fruit and excretion. Smith’s return to Blake is then also a means of rejuvenating his verse with the political rage and ire that first motivated it, ever conscious, as she suggests in ‘Fallen, fallen’, that his fiery poems might dwindle into ‘a tale told by the fireside’ (CP 150). 35 William Blake, ‘A Poison Tree’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1997), 28.

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Ancestry is on the orphaned Smith’s mind in much of her use of Blake, whether in her speaker’s prickly maternal relationships— Mother, mother, let me go There are so many things I wish to do. (‘The Queen and the Young Princess’, CP 313, ll. 1–2) Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold, But the alehouse is healthy and pleasant and warm; (‘The Little Vagabond’, ll. 1–2)36

—or the love-starved child still hungering after the comfort of their mother’s milk: I had a dream of nourishment Against a breast My infant face was presst Ah me the suffisance I drew therefrom (‘A Dream of Nourishment’, CP 344, ll. 1–4) Twas the voice of the Wanderer, I heard her exclaim, You have weaned me too soon, you must nurse me again, (‘The Wanderer’, CP 257, ll. 1–2) Struggling in my father’s hands Striving against my swaddling bands, Bound and weary, I thought best, To sulk upon my mother’s breast. (‘Infant Sorrow’, ll. 5–8)37

Blake also provides her with the indignation that illuminates her religious and philosophical poems.38 Smith’s continual assertions that her literary heritage gives her only a series of techniques or various scraps and fragments which she throws together with little regard for their provenance is not borne out by this brief exploration of her allusions. With very deliberate gestures, she revisits Wordsworth’s unvisited Yarrow, she murders Browning’s Porphyria, she mourns for Tennyson’s swan, or she suckles at Blake. These are not just echoes but dialogues, exploring the 36

William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 26. Ibid. 28. Compare, for example, ‘Why does thou dally, Death, and tarry on the way?’ (‘Come Death (I)’, CP 108, l. 1) or ‘Oh Christianity, Christianity, j Why do you not answer our difficulties?’ (CP 416, ll. 1–2) with ‘Why art thou silent and invisible, j Father of jealousy? j Why does thou hide thyself in clouds j From every searching eye?’ (‘To Nobodaddy’, ll. 1–4, in Complete Poetry and Prose, 471). The same incandescent ire occurs in her animal poems (see ‘This is Disgraceful and Abominable’, CP 338). 37 38

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nature of inheritance as much as the poetic remains of her ancestors. If the plaintive cry of the wandering ghost weaned too soon makes the disinherited poet an object of fear and pity, we should keep in mind Smith’s knowing orphan. Here, more than ever, it becomes difficult to judge whether she is mourning or mocking the idea of tradition. A final example of Smith’s allusive voice finds one of her evernomadic subjects wandering the streets of suburbia at night: How nice it is to slink the streets at night And taste the slight Flavour of acrity that comes From pavements throwing off the dross Of human tread. Each paving stone sardonic Grins to its fellow masonic: ‘Thank God they’re gone,’ each to the other cries ‘Now there is nothing between us and the skies’. Joy at this state transports the hanging heavens And down to earth they rain celestial dew The pavement darkly gleams beneath the lamp Forgetful now of daylight’s weary tramp. (‘Suburb’, CP 81, l.1–13)

Although Smith’s generic signposts and public statements on influence point readers more readily to Romanticism and Victorian literature than modernism, it is difficult to hear the cadences of this dramatic monologue without thinking of another contemporary flaˆneur: Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. · · · · · Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain.39 39 T. S. Eliot, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, in Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1952), 14, ll. 5–12, 58–62.

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If T. S. Eliot’s lines give us an imperative to abandon probable estimates at Smith’s influence or reading histories and dissolve all ‘clear relations’, the murky lamplight of Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody’ and Smith’s ‘Suburb’ bathe them both in similar shadows. Yet Smith seems impatient with Eliot’s fragmented melancholy, resituating her poem closer to paean than rhapsody. For her, midnight promises release from ‘dreary’ daylight rather than fatalist augur, and the stale ‘old nocturnal smells’ surrounding Eliot’s female figure provide Smith’s speaker with the ‘flavour of acrity’. That keen and alert energy finds wonder in the street detritus that so troubles Eliot and his wasted city. The location of Smith’s poem may provide the clue to moving away from Eliot’s dislocation. If Smith’s suburb is further from the centre of things, Eliot’s modernist city offers only a centre that cannot hold. The undetected suburban explorer becomes then more flexible in their choice of axis, and casts off Eliot for Blake as the poem continues: Down there I know a lane Under the padding rain Where leaves are born again Every night And reach maturity In a remote futurity Before dawn’s light. (ll. 32–8)

Smith’s poem strives towards maturation and growth not through the perils of modernism but, once again, by back-translating its roots to Romantic descendants: In futurity I, prophetic, see That the earth from sleep (Grave the sentence deep) Shall arise and seek For her maker meek, And the desert wild Become a garden mild.

(‘The Little Girl Lost’, ll. 1–8)40

Smith’s prophetic speaker borrows Blake’s vision of the future, which here is horticultural rather than apocalyptic. She soothes the disjunctive tatters of modernist desolation with the promise of Romantic rebirth. 40

William Blake, ‘The Little Girl Lost’, in Complete Poetry and Prose, 21.

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Yet if her collage of two competing traditions and inheritances seems to signal the triumph of the visionary over the shell-shocked, her wanderer’s promise to show us this magic garden appears to have ulterior motives: I will not show you yet Lest you should forget, But when the time is come for your dismembering I’ll show you that you may die remembering. (ll. 43–6)

Having ventriloquized for us both modernist dissociation and a Romantic return to nature, Smith’s speaker pulls off both masks to reveal a malevolent figure suggested much earlier by the poem’s form: the dramatic monologue. Here, the solitary night wanderer is also the sociopath, leading us through the narrative in an attempt to arouse our sympathy and divert our attention until the act of murder can take place. As in her poem ‘The Murderer’, published a year later, Browning’s deadly confessionals are very much on her mind, only now the reader is no longer the spectator or confidante but the intended victim. Yet it is not another Victorian exploration of criminology that generates Smith’s source here but Browning’s portrait of the all-too-human Italian monk Fra Lippo Lippi, whose monologue finds him out of the confines of the monastery and indulging in the pleasures of the city after dark. Whilst his benign tale of artistic endeavours and street-walking cannot provide Smith, as in ‘The Murderer’, with the reason for her speaker’s murderous predilections, it does provide her with a rhyme: Never was such prompt disemburdening.

(‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, l. 144)41

Her nod to Browning’s polysyllabic participle of release (‘die remembering’ / ‘disemburdening’) is suggestive of her own sense of liberation from a literary past. There is, as this analysis has shown, little anxiety about tradition in Smith’s work. If she has a tendency to cast her speakers as dejected isolates wandering from temporary shelter to temporary shelter, they just as often tramp fearlessly over a series of rival traditions. If her readers, as ‘Suburb’ suggests, must ‘die remembering’, her elusive verse and our allusive response to it allows for her own process of ‘disemburdening’, to borrow Browning’s term. Free from the constraints of the lyric ‘I’, her poetic inheritance provides her simultaneously with template, refuge, argument, and unrecognizable disguise. 41

Browning, Works, 31.

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In ‘I Had a Dream . . .’, where the speaker momentarily imagines themselves into Helen of Troy, we are offered another portrait of the apparently chaotic poet whose allusions are unconscious echoes rather than deliberate gestures: Everything one has ever read about Troy As there have always been such splendid writers who were writing Naturally gets into one’s conversation . . . (CP 421, ll. 17–19)

The rich literary representations of Troy make any subsequent poetic trip there full of unavoidable but accidental references. These revisits become soaked in tradition. One strategy to avoid the unwilled emergence of ‘everything one has ever read’ into a line of verse is to flag up a deliberate rewriting of a particular myth or legend, thus controlling it at point of entry. Unlike Smith’s more implicit turns towards Tennyson or Wordsworth in poems already discussed, another distinct strand of her work is explicit about its attempts to refashion and retell. These translations or reworkings provide more clues for how we might situate Smith in a poetic lineage. The notion of the female poet as triumphal revisionist is a commonplace in feminist criticism, and, for writers such as Jan Montefiore in Feminism in Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing, suggests a practice linking poets as disparate as Christina Rossetti and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Montefiore argues that Smith, for example, takes an existing fairy tale and shifts the emphasis of the story, giving ‘a whole new plot’.42 For Romana Huk, too, Smith’s poems engage in a ‘refracted discourse’ with the past,43 prompting ironic rewrites and travesties of a male tradition, and revising fairy tale and folklore to feminist ends. Yet Smith’s idiosyncratic engagement with myth and the epic are perhaps not as conclusive as Montefiore’s feminist template might suggest. In ‘I had a dream . . .’, the speaker begins with the intentions of clarity— I had a dream I was Helen of Troy In looks, age and circumstance But otherwise I was myself. (ll. 1–3)

42

Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 48. 43 See Romana Huk, ‘Eccentric Cocentrism: Traditional Poetic Forms and Refracted Discourse in Stevie Smith’s Poetry’, Contemporary Literature 34(2) (1993), 240–65.

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—but soon the same speaker begins to wonder ‘which of the Helen legends I was’. She is already at sea in a series of competing versions of the story, torn between ‘the phantom’ or the ‘flesh-and-blood one here j That Menelaus would take back to Sparta’. The act of rewriting myth, rather than provide feminist resistance, only makes the struggle for a coherent identity more difficult for its protagonists. The language of phantoms and haunting, so often used by Smith to indicate her relationship to her literary past, is mined here with acute ambivalence: Remembering this, that there was still some uncertainty, Raised my spirits. I must say Dispiritedness was what we were all sunk in, And although the Royal Family may have seemed spectral Their dispiritedness was substantial enough [..] (ll. 30–4)

Like ‘The Frog Prince’’s vivisection of the word ‘disenchanted’ (‘Only disenchanted people j Can be heavenly’),44 here the speaker is caught in a semantic trap. To ‘raise her spirits’ will be to summon up yet more ghosts and phantoms, yet to exorcize the trappings of myth and previous retellings will run the risk of ‘dispiritedness’. The droll wordplay highlights humour as another strategy offered by the revisioning poet, and here the speaker herself attempts to make Cassandra laugh a ‘blasphemous’ laugh that might set her free. But the speaker enters into the epic past only to find she can go no further—balancing Cassandra’s gift of prophecy, she is the emissary sent from the future who cannot change the outcome of events. Cassandra and Hector alike dismiss her protests, and ‘Paris was stupid, it was impossible to talk to him’. The monologue, far from rewriting the story of Helen’s exchange or undercutting the grand tradition with jaunty irreverence, ruminates on the dangers of hindsight with its love of inevitable conclusions: Oh, I thought It is an ominous eternal moment I am captive in, it is always This heavy weather, these colours, and the smell of dead men. It is curious to be caught in a moment of pause like this, As a river pauses before it plunges in a great waterfall. (ll. 64–8) 44 See ‘The Frog Prince’ (CP 407). This poem’s pointed act of retelling has made it a favourite topic for critical discussion, and there is an extended discussion of it in Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Catherine A. Civello, Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith (Columbia: Camden House, 1997); and Laura Severin, Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

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There is an implicit oxymoron in a moment being ‘eternal’ and ‘ominous’, but it captures the speaker’s predicament perfectly. History can be relived but not revised, its consequences can be temporarily erased but never rewritten, and if Smith here ‘pauses’ the source of her poem, she cannot redirect its path. Elsewhere, Smith’s roll call of rebellious female character studies from classical tragedy, Greek myth, and folklore finds them less often asserting independence than pledging allegiance to their upbringing and inheritance. Although Smith’s poem on Racine’s Phe`dre seems to offer itself up as a rewrite—‘Now if I j Had been writing the story’ it announces with mock pomposity halfway through—the majority of the poem, like ‘I Had a Dream . . .’, concerns itself with the perils of misinterpretation or insufficient reverence for the original: I wonder why Proust should have thought The lines from Racine’s Phe`dre Depuis que sur ces bords les dieux ont envoye´ La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae´ to be Entirely devoid of meaning, To me they seem As lucid as they are alarming. (CP 426, ll. 1–7)

This apparently oblique, conversational beginning to the poem draws our attention to one of the play’s most celebrated lines: Tout a change´ de face Depuis que sur ces bords les dieux ont envoye´ La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae´. (I.i. ll. 34–6)45

These words are spoken by Hippolyte, Phe`dre’s stepson, in the first scene; her illicit desire for him will eventually kill them both by the play’s conclusion. The lines have passed into the collective cultural memory both through the phonic beauty of the ‘envoye´/Pasiphae´’ rhyme and their hints at Phe`dre’s doomed legacy. She is descended from Pasiphae´, who was cursed by Aphrodite to be impregnated by a bull, with the monstrous Minotaur as a result. Unnatural passions are built into her genetic code, even as her own incestuous love breaks the

45 Trans: ‘All things are changed since the gods sent to these shores the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae´.’ See Jean Racine, Phe`dre, trans. Margaret Rawlings (London: Penguin, 1992), 4.

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social taboos of family inheritance. The line is a signal to Racine’s audience that whilst Phe`dre is deviating from society’s rules, she is following those of her family.46 However, for Proust’s narrator in the sixth volume of A` la recherche du temps perdu, Phe`dre is a study in psychological interiority, and the eponymous character the narrator finds so many affinities with provides the sole interest in the ensuing drama.47 He mines the text for representations of his own elusive self, disregarding large sections of the character analysis that do not fit with his schema, including what he describes as the authorial contrivance of Phe`dre’s ‘Jansenist scruples’ and the ‘thought of her own fame’.48 Smith, by drawing attention to both Phe`dre’s enslavement to the Gods and her familial inheritance, allows her poem to turn on the line in which Racine identifies her upbringing (‘La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae´ ’). Far from liberating her protagonist here, Smith reinstates her incarceration, lessening her individuality by stressing her lineage. Her bathetic hobbling of the French rhyme substitutes envoye´/Pasiphae´ for envoye´/to be but it doesn’t go quite far enough to make us forget the poem has a serious quarrel with Proust or any reinterpreters with their own agenda, like the actresses playing Phe`dre who indulge in ‘such mature agonizing’. To rewrite a text in one’s own self-image is to debase the original, Smith suggests. Smith’s Antigone similarly resists becoming a modern feminist prototype but restates her allegiance to her family. Smith’s poem ‘Oh Stubborn Race of Cadmus’ Seed . . .’ takes its title from the early scene in Sophocles where Antigone is confronted after disobeying the King’s orders and burying her disgraced brother. Antigone confesses her guilt but asserts her moral superiority, stating that her duty to her family outweighs her

46 It has consequently been the subject of much discussion with its introduction of the barbaric into the play’s courtly setting, as in George Steiner’s treatment of the line in The Death of Tragedy (New York: Yale University Press, 1996 [1961]) or Lytton Strachey’s essay ‘Racine’ in Books and Characters: French and English (London: Harcourt, 1922), 3–24. It is likely that Smith had read at least one of these sources, so in part is ventriloquizing a response to Proust. 47 For a full discussion of Proust’s engagement with Racine see Maya Slater, ‘The Narrator’s Comments on Phe`dre in Albertine disparue: A Character as Literary Critic’, Modern Language Review 87(2) (1992), 300–6, which notes that Proust’s narrator views Phe`dre from a ‘highly one-sided viewpoint’, concentrating on the heroine and her responses rather than her relationship to other characters. 48 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol XI: The Sweet Cheat Gone, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 60.

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debt of honour to the state.49 Like the summation of Phe`dre as ‘La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae´ ’, Antigone’s titular link to Cadmus makes Smith’s rewrite one that reawakens literary and familial connections rather than orphaning yet more texts. Even her translation of Dido’s dying speech from Virgil’s Aeneid is notable for its fidelity. Smith, like the grieving lover she ventriloquizes, is in a sense more faithful than many of her male counterparts, which then ranged from the recently published version by Cecil Day-Lewis to the standard translation by Dryden.50 In place of classical rituals of mourning and the rhetorical questions of the formal lament, Smith resets Dido’s closing speech into the distracted, conversational tone of the stoic English upper-class: As for my abominable brother, I don’t think I’ve been too lenient. Was I happy? Yes, at a price, I might have been happier If our Dardanian Sailor had condescended to put in elsewhere. ‘Dido’s Farewell to Aeneas’. (CP 330, ll. 4–6)

Smith’s version of Dido’s lament cannot forget her brother’s parallel act of treachery even as she forgives Aeneas’, making the speech as much a eulogy for a familial inheritance as an envoy to an absconding lover. Far from being travesties, parodies, or lampoons, Smith’s poems with explicit classical reference points restate and protect notions of lineage and fidelity. Smith chooses tragic heroines at their points of crisis, and her interpretations suggest duty to the original and the antecedent. The burden of retelling without misinterpreting resurfaces in other Smith rewrites. In ‘Die Lorelei’, she translates a Heinrich Heine poem which is in itself a retelling: an unidentified speaker recounts the story of a siren who lures sailors to their death with her enigmatic song. Halfway between translation and reworking, Smith’s poem reopens a dialogue with Heine over the original story’s significance: Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Daß ich so traurig bin, Ein Ma¨rchen aus uralten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.51 49 See Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 74, ll. 519–20: ‘It’s clear this fierce child is the offspring of her fierce j Father!’. 50 See Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Cecil Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) or Virgil’s Aeneid, trans. John Dryden (London: Penguin, 1997). 51 Heinrich Heine, Selected Verse, trans. Peter Branscombe (London: Penguin, 1987), 56.

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Heine’s opening stanza finds its speaker unsure of why the folk story has affected him so deeply, unable to find the ‘bedeuten’ (meaning) behind it. Smith’s poem amplifies this sense of unease, using the speaker’s questions of interpretative bafflement to open and close her poem: An antique story comes to me And fills me with anxiety I wonder why I fear so much What surely has no modern touch? · · · · · This story brings me so much grief I know not how to find relief. Lurks there some meaning underneath?

(CP 380, ll. l–4, 23–5)

Whilst Smith follows Heine’s quatrains and metre throughout, she appends a final fraught line, reiterating the speaker’s submarine excavation for significance. She becomes a reader responding to Heine’s original, so fearful of the ‘antique’ power of the story that she must hide it behind layer upon layer of retelling. Equally drawn to and repulsed by the siren’s song, Smith reanimates the ‘equivocal’ melody of her music whilst seeking to bury it ever deeper underground. Smith’s awe of the original sublime song at the centre of Heine’s poem, like her eccentric reverence for Tennyson’s dying swan, calls into question the notion of her as an irreverent rewriter of myth. If the final line of ‘Die Lorelei’ finds Smith plumbing the depths for possible meaning, her corpus more generally cannot provide explication or interpretation without a concomitant anxiety. The lines that Proust found ‘devoid of meaning’ in Racine were for Smith, as we have seen, ‘lucid as they are alarming’. The words are guaranteed meaning through their ability to unsettle and disarm their reader. An inscrutable poem ‘Under Wrong Trees, or Freeing the Colonial Peoples’ is only further unsettled by the final line’s ‘So should we notice them?’ (CP 420), the speaker’s shoulder shrug performing the interpretative equivalent of ‘so what?’ Meanwhile, the hapless lover of ‘Infelice’ overflows with misplaced devotion to her beloved, recounting the numerous times he deserts her: He jumped into a taxi when he saw me coming, Leaving me alone with a private meaning, He loves me so much, my heart is singing. (CP 107, ll. 3–5)

Here, a Smith speaker confesses a private meaning to us without the usual accompanying anxiety. However, the obliviousness to their lover’s

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indifference entirely undermines their position. It is in fact the reader who comes into possession of a private meaning here, cruelly withheld from the speaker. Meaning in Smith’s retellings is then neither stable nor merely iconoclastic. Rather than play the epic mode for easy bathos, Smith’s reworkings more often leave the re-teller uneasy, asking us for a dilatory response. Their allusive gestures are explicit, but their subtle shifts away from the original prize fidelity over innovation. Here, the reformed orphan is duty-bound to acknowledge the parents she claims to have lost. Smith’s allusive lines and translations offer us mixed messages and anxious envoys on meaning, balancing between disinheriting their sources and staging a reverent reconciliation. This chapter began with a quotation from Smith’s poem ‘Look!’, in which an isolated speaker complains of giving signals that are not answered. Yet to respond to Smith’s poetic corpus following the traditional markers of form, allusion, genre, and inheritance leads us both back and forwards. These approaches help determine her peculiar effects, but can often lead the reader to echo one of Smith’s own vexed cries: Oh what do you mean, what do you mean? You never answer our difficulties. (‘Oh Christianity, Christianity’, CP 417, ll. 29–30)

Although animal cruelty arouses similar indignation and ire in Smith, perhaps this is the most frustrated couplet of all in her corpus, and most akin to the problems of Smith’s readers, faced with some of her more wayward or apparently facile poems. For us, it is often her apparent simplicity which presents the greatest difficulty. Yet behind her incandescent anger at Christian scripture, there may be more than a hint of hypocritical jealousy in these lines: only in the Bible does she find a text which has acquired the hermeneutic status she would like her own works to possess. It is fixed, authoritative, yet always being reinterpreted, and places the burden of exegesis on the reader whilst always limiting the efficacy of their readings. Its omnipotent silence in the face of continual examination was one Smith strove for in her own reading life and public persona. The next chapter will explore why Smith attached such importance to that silence, and how she grew to conceive of the relationship between authors and readers in such combative terms.

2 ‘A Poet Reading’

In a manuscript notebook from 1955, Smith transcribed a passage from Cervantes’ Don Quixote that seems a resonant comment on her own ‘process of becoming’: So eagerly did he plunge into the reading of these books that he many times spent whole days and nights pouring over them; and in the end, through little sleep and mad reading, his brain became quite tired, and he lost his wits.1

As with Cervantes’ titular hero, the quixotic Smith presented herself as a character who had discovered her voice through the texts of others, remarking in a 1961 interview with John Horder that ‘a poet reading is hungry for food’ who ‘eats, gobbles, throws up what he does not like, finds pleasure by chance,’ and ‘feeds himself ’.2 Don Quixote represents a figure who, rather than attempting to articulate himself through bookish study, instead becomes debilitated through his obsessive reading programme, captivated by what Karlheinz Stierle has called ‘the illusory power of the text’.3 Smith’s repeated references to Quixote throughout her work seem an oblique comment on her own relationship with printed texts themselves.4 If her cosy evocations of suburban childhood offer us a generic portrait of Smith as the engaged reader 1

See her reading notebook, UT, transcribed from Miguel de Cervantes’ The History and the Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote (London: Harrison, 1782), 3. 2 Transcript of an interview with John Horder for the BBC broadcast World of Books made on the 18 March 1961, UT. 3 Karlheinz Stierle, ‘The Reading of Fictional Texts’, trans. Inge Crosman and Thekla Zachrau, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Reception (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 83–105, 87. 4 Smith sets up her aunt as ‘an inverted Quixote’ in Over the Frontier (96). However, Don Quixote is also the figure ‘frightened’ by Smith’s ‘typewriter keys’ working like ‘the mill pounding away at night’, in David Garnett’s letter to her, dated 21 June 1939, UT, which critiques a draft of her abandoned third novel.

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from a young age with her loving recollection of reciting verse at school in essays such as ‘Syler’s Green: A Return Journey’, their nostalgia masks an attitude to literature that was often combative.5 If her consciously autodidactic period of reading during the 1920s was an effort to make her into a poet, it left her with an ambivalent attitude to the books themselves. Smith’s comments build from the gentle suggestion that reading is ‘fodder’ for the hungry young poet to creating the image of a poet locked into a compulsive cycle of binging and vomiting. Elsewhere, Smith argues there is nothing a writer will not devour, ‘even if he cannot hold it and it makes him sick’.6 The metaphor reappears in a letter to Helen Fowler, when a queasy Smith confesses to feeling ‘a bit off books, really’.7 The act of reading-feeding, rather than being a means to an end, soon becomes the central focus for the poet–eater. As with Don Quixote, the poet becomes destabilized through the very activity used for self-construction, undone by a surfeit of words. As we have already seen in Smith’s poetry, this reading history can offer both authorial concealment and readerly bait. From the same interview with John Horder, she remarks: If the reader, being himself a writer or a poet, draws something else from it, he is not likely to say so.8

The compulsive poet–reader conceals both what he swallows and what he brings up. Her use of the verb ‘draw’ promises to make the poet’s sources tantalizingly apparent to the seeing eye, but their ‘trace’ will be illusory. The poet will give us no verbal confirmation that our glimpses of their work’s origins are accurate. In Smith’s short story ‘A Very Pleasant Evening’, one character recalls a childhood bookmark with the word ‘No’ embroidered on it at either end.9 Its apparent warning to 5 This essay briefly hints at Smith’s anarchic response to reciting, with her assertion she sang ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ at every church service ‘and it did not matter that everybody else was singing something different’. See ‘Syler’s Green: A Return Journey’, in From the Third Programme: A Ten-Years’ Anthology, ed. John Morris (London: Nonesuch Press, 1956), 72–93, repr. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 83–99, 95. 6 From her written introduction to the poem, ‘Lady of the Well-Spring’ (CP 311), UT. 7 Stevie Smith to Helen Fowler, 15 September 1958, UT. 8 Transcript of an interview with John Horder for the BBC broadcast World of Books made on the 18 March 1961, UT. 9 See ‘A Very Pleasant Evening’, in C. Day Lewis, D. Kilham Roberts, Rosamond Lehmann (eds) Orion III: A Miscellany (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1946), 114–17, repr. In Me Again, 31–4, 34.

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other potential readers suggests that reading is, for Smith, not merely a process of constructing herself as a writer, but of concealing herself, too. It provides both food and shelter for the burgeoning artist. As Michael Cohen has pointed out, reading ‘is a very useful activity for seeming unaware of the rest of the world, but one is aware of watchers, especially persistent ones’.10 Smith’s love of the reclusive French painter Balthus with his prurient portraits of languorous women readers highlights her own provocatively invitational reading stance.11 She not only conceals what she is reading and what she is reading for, but uses the entire posture of the reading artist itself as a way of slipping chance glances to her observing audience, noting and responding to their gazes even as she remains apparently absorbed in her text. Smith’s literary career afforded her the opportunities for many such glances, from her stints as an editorial reader for numerous publishing houses to countless reviews for titles as diverse as Modern Woman and The Listener. Her book reviews, far from creating a dispassionate critical voice, often become explorations of her potential reading audience. She even considers the possibility of reviewing her own work at various junctures in her career.12 Her insertions of her own poetry into her reviews and novels are merely the most obvious ways in which Smith uses her critical voice to assert her own pre-eminence as an artist. These wilful strategies ensure that Smith’s public ‘readings’ of other authors’ work become opportunities for authorial self-construction. 10

Michael Cohen, Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 16. 11 Her reading library contains a catalogue from the exhibition Balthus (London: Arts Council, 1968) at the Tate Gallery in London (4 Oct.–10 Nov. 1968), which includes an introductory essay by John Russell praising the painter for depicting ‘not merely the act of reading [ . . . ] but the look of the act of reading’ (7). Featured paintings in the exhibition such as La Patience (1943) or Les Trois Surs (1964) provide suggestive visual analogues for many of Smith’s illustrations. The recent publication of the art book Reading Women, ed. Stefan Bollman (London: Merrell, 2006), suggests a continuing cultural fascination with the female reader as an iconic image. 12 See for example Smith’s letter from an editor at Modern Woman: ‘NOYP [Novel on Yellow Paper], you probably know, has also been made into a cheap edition, but I suppose that, if you are going to recommend it to Modern Woman readers, you will have to review it under a pseudonym’, dated 4 November 1943, UT, or Norah Smallwood’s suggestion to Smith that she review the reissue of the ‘well known novel called NOYP’ in letter dated 13 November 1954, UT. She reviewed The New Savoy, ed. Mara Meulen and Francis Wyndham (London: New Savoy Press, 1946), and At Close of Eve: An Anthology of New Curious Stories, ed. Kay Dick (London: Jarrolds, 1947), for Modern Woman, both of which included her own short stories (see ‘Books’, March 1947, 83, and ‘Book Notes’, February 1948, 111–13).

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They continue the legacy of Smith’s reading-feeding poet, a figure determined to advance themselves in whatever way possible from the act of reading. To unpick this decidedly double-edged approach to the read text, this chapter will examine how Smith’s reading habits relate to the construction of her authorial persona. I will begin by exploring how her childhood reading experiences shaped her problematic relationship with books. I will then go on to consider how her 1920s reading programme helped establish her own position as a writer, and conclude by detailing how Smith’s reviewing practice throughout the 1940s and 1950s channelled this need to create and disguise herself through the read text. Only when Smith’s own dissembling reading practice has been revealed can the full significance of her oeuvre’s preoccupation with the act of reading become apparent.13 Much of Smith’s work detailing reading or writing concerns itself with the parallel acts of teaching and learning. She revels in assuming the didactic role for her essay ‘At School’, where she imagines how she would teach children to read and interpret verse.14 Certainly, the preoccupation with childhood in her work informs her treatment of reading, and J. A. Appleyard’s developmental model of infant reading patterns seems pertinent in considering Smith’s own descriptions of her reading habits: whatever experience children have of books will be in the company of adults or older brothers and sisters who mediate the experience for them. Thus, long before children can read a page of print by themselves, reading is apt to be an intensely participatory initiation into a world beyond their own immediate experience, with the most trusted persons in their lives as guides and interpreters.15

Appleyard’s model emphasizes infant reading as a shared collaborative act, and, perhaps most importantly, a mediated one. As well as being an escape from a confusing adult world, it is a determined passage towards 13 The representation of readers in Smith’s novels is treated in Chapter 5 of this monograph. 14 Stevie Smith, ‘At School’, in Presenting Poetry: A Handbook for English Teachers (London: Methuen, 1966), 159–64, repr. in Me Again, 119–24. 15 J. A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 22. See also Elizabeth Long, ‘Textual Interpretation and Collective Action’, in Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis (eds), Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Critical Reception (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), 181–212.

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it, albeit one that often takes the form of a pathless ramble. This idea of the child reading in company is exactly the image Smith highlights when describing a memory of one of her first reading experiences in her 1937 essay ‘How to Read Books’: To come back to children’s books proper—and you will see how the habit of rambling grows upon one, it is one of the pleasures of reading—those two great children’s books, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass were read aloud to me when I was too young to read for myself. I remember the feel of that hot summer sultry day when Alice, sitting beside her grown-up sister, complained that the book her sister was reading was dull because it had no pictures and no conversation. And at that moment along came the White Rabbit—‘Oh my whiskers and waistcoat’, and off went Alice to some of the most extraordinary conversations and picture-scenes that anyone has ever thought of.16

This description of an infant reading act seems typically child-like in its trajectory. The naı¨ve reader–rambler hovers between being the receiver of the text and its subject, unable to separate their reading experience from that of the character in the story: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’17

Smith’s assertion that the Alice books were ‘read’ to her, and the ambiguity of whether the ‘hot summer sultry day’ refers to her site of reading or her evocation of the book’s own landscape threatens to dissolve the boundary between the reader and the read subject altogether. Whilst Smith partly situates herself as the deviating reader by donning the anarchic posture of the novel’s protagonist, this in itself becomes a further example of the reader inserting themselves experientially into the text. The confusion as to where Alice ends and Smith begins mirrors the protagonist’s later distress as she descends the rabbithole that she is turning into somebody else.18 Alice’s complaint that her 16 Stevie Smith, ‘How to Read Books’, in Discovery and Romance for Girls and Boys, vol 2 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 267–72, 270. 17 Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (London, Penguin: 1970), 25. 18 This, arguably, is a similarity that Smith grappled with throughout her work—her protagonist in The Holiday (1949) is named Celia, an anagram of Alice, and spends much of the novel crying before nearly drowning in a lake. A draft review of the novel sent to Smith by J. D. Scott tellingly misprints ‘Celia’ for ‘Alice’ throughout, UT. The phrase

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sister’s book has no pictures or conversation again seems to point to the unnamed reader describing their experience—by the final ‘off went Alice’, it is surely herself whom Smith is referring to when she depicts a girl revelling in ‘the most extraordinary conversations and picturescenes anyone has ever thought of ’. This uncommitted child reader, far from dismissing the sequestered text, eventually becomes embroiled in its narrative. If the passage seems merely a typical example of a child’s tendency to fully dissolve into the texts they are reading, it is important not to understate the significance of this image for Smith. Over twenty years later, when asked for a BBC programme how she responds to questions about the creative process, Smith replies: They often make me feel like Father William, in Alice in Wonderland—or is it Through the Looking Glass?—you remember? ‘I have answered three questions and that is enough.’19

Here Smith refers to the section in Alice in Wonderland where a caterpillar asks Alice to recite Robert Southey’s ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them’. Alice deviates from the text whilst reciting, and the line Smith quotes is Alice’s own invention, casting Smith as the young girl wandering off her script. This learned deviation mirrors Smith’s own response to the interviewer’s question, fending him off by concealing herself within a half-remembered childhood text. She becomes once more the engaged infant reader rather than the interrogated author. Smith’s focus on Alice’s ‘grown up sister’ also adds a pointed biographical slant to the description, suggesting it was Smith’s elder sister Molly who first read to her. She chooses Alice in Wonderland as the text to symbolize her childhood reading—and, under interrogation, to cocoon herself within it— because the act of reading described at the beginning of the book is the one that most tallies with memories of her early reading experiences. The infant Smith has jumped straight down Lewis Carroll’s

‘how awful to be Mabel’ finds its way into her review, ‘New Novels’, The Observer, 14 November 1954, p. 9, and in Novel on Yellow Paper Pompey confesses: ‘I often think of Alice, and how she was glad she was not Mabel, and how for one dreadful moment she thought she was going to be Mabel’ (41). See Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 86, 112. 19 Transcript of an interview with John Horder for the BBC broadcast World of Books made on 18 March 1961, UT. Here Smith refers to a passage in The Annotated Alice, 71.

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rabbit-hole, and the adult Smith reconstructing the scene has followed her with equal speed.20 The apparently sun-soaked nostalgia of the passage—as Smith dryly recalls elsewhere, in the past it is always sunny—suggests an idyllic reading infancy.21 This is a tone that continues throughout much of the essay, not least when Smith notes: ‘How much one would like to be able to read these books again for the first time.’22 Yet the comment, coming as it does after the description of being read the Alice books, points up a reading history that, as we shall see, is far from benign. These books, according to Smith, were always read to her: it seems pointed then that she wishes not simply to read the books again for the first time but ‘to be able to’. The first act of reading the book would have been one of remembering the text, piecing together its unfamiliar words from an aural memory of hearing the book previously read by others. Smith, casting Molly as the elder sister to her Alice, is never permitted to read the text for the first time. Even in its first reading it becomes a text that has already been read. Smith–Alice can only perform a rereading, just as Smith’s poem ‘The Orphan Reformed’ invoked Wordsworth’s Alice to hint at its own suppressed sibling. If this interpretation of the passage seems a fanciful stretch on semantics, it is one strongly confirmed by an examination of Smith’s childhood relationship with books, and just as strongly concealed in her subsequent evocations of it. Fredric Jameson has argued that we never really confront a text immediately in all its freshness as a thing-initself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretative traditions.23

For Smith’s work, this postmodernist tenet has biographical implications as well as interpretative ones. Ethel Mary Frances Smith, known throughout her life as Molly, was born two years before Florence Margaret. In comparison to the much-fictionalized Madge Spear who is not only celebrated as Stevie’s ‘lion aunt’ in her novels but becomes the key supporting figure in the two biographies of Smith and the play and film of her life scripted 20 Smith recalls leaving her Aunt’s favourite book down a rabbit-hole in the essay ‘Syler’s Green’, 85. 21 See ibid. 84. 22 Smith, ‘How to Read Books’, 270. 23 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2000), ix–x.

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by Hugh Whitemore, Smith’s sister seems almost entirely excised from her life, a prompt from her autobiographical construction in Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) that all subsequent biographical narratives have followed. Molly’s relative absence from Smith’s narratives of her life seems curious—not only was Molly an avid reader, but went to study English Literature at Birmingham University, and later to teach it. Molly became the literary scholar that Smith, apparently, never desired to be. If any figure would have made an impact on Smith’s ‘initiation’ into the world of reading, it was Molly. Frances Spalding remarks in her biography that whilst growing up ‘[Stevie] seems not to have suffered comparison with her outwardly more able sister’,24 although later their relationship is marked by ‘friction’.25 Certainly, the period Smith spent as a child in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis could support a reading of her life that made her sister only a faint figure in the background of her childhood. Yet an excised passage from The Holiday (1949), the only novel to feature Smith’s sister substantially in her semiautobiographical fiction,26 points to a much stronger connection between the two children. The narrator Celia leaves off a description of her friend Raji giving a talk on the representation of India by British novelists for a related childhood memory: (It was like the time I once went to an Eisteddfodd where my sister was reading ‘Curfew shall not ring tonight’, I could not listen to her, I was so afraid she would make a mistake, and sure enough she got stuck in her lines.)27

This short passage posits an invisible, psychic connection, between the two sisters, a link so strong it becomes, in this instance, nearly unbearable, echoing the portrait of the cryptic sisters who are ‘often taken for

24 Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Faber, 1988); repr. Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 33. 25 See ibid. 263. See also Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Stevie (London: Heinemann, 1985), which typifies their relationship as ‘strained’, and full of ‘skirmishing’ (43). 26 Novel on Yellow Paper contains brief references to Pompey’s elder sister Mary in the context of her childhood illness (72), but Pompey’s later comment that ‘as de Quincey had his sister, so I have the Lion of Hull’ (115–16) removes her sister from the description of her creative life. Another passing reference comes in Over the Frontier, where Pompey accompanies Mary on holiday to Felixstowe (113) and Lincolnshire (124). Although in the published version of The Holiday Celia describes her sister Pearl who works as a schoolteacher, she is a shadowy figure whose primary interaction with the protagonist is in antagonistic and cryptic dream sequences (50, 80). 27 From a manuscript copy of The Holiday, UT.

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one another’ in Smith’s poem ‘Thank You’ (CP 273). The link centres on a read text, Rose Hartwick Thorpe’s Victorian ballad ‘Curfew Must Not Ring To-night!’, with the passage suggesting not only two sisters reading in each other’s company but becoming predictive readers, second-guessing the other’s response.28 If the poem itself finds the heroine stopping the tolling bell that will prompt her lover’s execution, the passage suggests Smith has performed a telepathic silencing of her sister’s song. The image of Molly deviating from her text links the memory to Alice reciting Robert Southey, and Smith’s use of the passage to defend herself from critical enquiry. Its pointed deletion from the manuscript suggests a memory she is unwilling to offer up for public consumption.29 Yet if Smith’s Lion Aunt is brought time and again into her writing to emphasize her unliterary background and the familial indifference to her work,30 this ghostly sisterly presence, the figure from her childhood that would provide a context for her own reading history, and even wrote poems herself,31 is silently removed, her role buried under scored-through manuscripts. What is it about their relationship, specifically their reading relationship, that Smith is attempting to conceal? Smith’s personal library at her death contained over a thousand volumes. Over two hundred of these were inherited from her sister Molly, handed down to her in childhood. These books, often passed back and forth between the girls, reveal a reading relationship between them that records its antagonistic development on the margins of each page.32 Molly’s approach to literature was largely scholarly. Her frequent underlinings and annotations in the texts she read were 28

A letter from Smith to Sally Chilver, 2 Jan. 1938, published in Me Again (1981), p.289, recalls how she ‘played through the tunes’ for her poems ‘and got my sister to do so too’. 29 The difficulty of their relationship is captured in a letter from Smith to Audrey Insch, 15 July 1969, UT, where she details Molly’s suffocating demands that Stevie move in with her, imagining ‘going down with the little sister to the grave hand in hand, after many a long if ageing year close closetted a` deux’. 30 See for example Novel on Yellow Paper, where Pompey’s Lion Aunt ‘has difficulty putting herself on paper’ (90) and is celebrated for not having ‘clever ideas about literature and painting’ (118). 31 Spalding, Stevie Smith, records: ‘Molly Smith insisted on showing Donald Everett some poems, liberally sprinkled with classical allusions, which she herself had written as if to prove that she, too, could write’ (295). 32 See for example Molly’s scrawled note to Smith in her 1909 copy of John Ruskin’s Frondes Agrestes (London: G. Allen, 1904): ‘Cant [sic] find Heroes and Hero Worship. Perhaps you have it?’, UT.

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elucidatory: comments that summarized and explained rather than interpreted. Appleyard describes marking or annotating texts as ‘one of the symbols of apprenticeship as a literary professional’,33 and these notes, it seems, were Molly taking on the didactic role, becoming the systematic researcher who could then pass this information on to younger, less experienced readers than herself. Even as late as 1961, one of Smith’s letters to her accountant Ladislav Horat carries a sense of Stevie as the younger, inferior sister, contrasting ‘Molly (my sister . . . Miss Ward Smith)’ with ‘me, plain Smith’.34 This idea is supported by a biographical anecdote in Spalding’s biography; while watching a television production of Macbeth in 1970, the younger Stevie fidgeted, prompting Molly to remark: ‘the trouble with Peg is she doesn’t understand Shakespeare’.35 Understanding seemed to be the principal aim of Molly’s reading programme. A page of precise notes in the back of Molly’s copy of King Lear divides Shakespeare’s comedies into boisterous, joyous, painful, and romantic. Her full annotations of Matthew Arnold’s introduction to his Collected Poems indicate a scholarly interest in his account of how Latin influences have dominated English poetry and prose styles. Perhaps one of the most telling markings is Molly’s double underlining of Charles Gore’s assertion in The Religion of the Church that one must read books ‘in the sure spirit in which they were written’.36 Although Gore refers specifically to religious texts here, Molly’s response to literature as recorded in the margins of these books seems to bear out this advice; her critical voice seems appreciative and reverential rather than argumentative. Molly’s own conversion to Roman Catholicism after her mother’s death came largely through what she described as her and Stevie’s ‘Roman fever’ of reading.37 Catholic pamphlets brought to their house by Florence Hook fuelled her desire to be ‘converted’ through religious literature. By contrast, Pompey as a young girl in Novel on Yellow Paper struggles and fails to ‘get inside-of this Christian religion’ whilst reading prayer books (173). If Molly’s Catholic conversion, often a source of conflict in their household, centred on alternative interpretations of a text, the schism seemed endemic of their attitude to 33

Appleyard, Becoming a Reader, 126. Stevie Smith to Ladislav Horat, 20 April 1961, UT. Spalding, Stevie Smith, 295. 36 Charles Gore, The Religion of the Church (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1916), 4. 37 From manuscript notes made by Helen Fowler in conversation with Molly Smith, as quoted in Spalding, Stevie Smith, 33. 34 35

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books and reading more generally.38 Their division into reverential and sceptical readers can be traced back to their earliest childhood books. Smith’s wish to be able to read books ‘for the first time’ is newly resonant when considered alongside Molly’s own annotating habits.39 Smith’s first reading experiences were not only pre-empted by the voice of the older sister reading to her but were rendered graphically on the page by the fastidious notes accompanying each book she read.40 Appleyard describes a developmental reading stage that usually happens in late adolescence when readers begin to acknowledge that texts have divergent meanings and that other readers may find different things when they read the same text.41 The conditions of Smith’s early reading practice suggest that she reached this stage much earlier in her life. It is perhaps for this reason that Smith creates a role for herself in these margins as a wayward reader, echoing her comments in the essay ‘At School’ that ‘you never know what a poem may mean to a child’.42 In her childhood copy of Alice in Wonderland, Smith drew a descriptive illustration on the contents page alongside each chapter heading, as if trying to navigate her way through the text by visual means, giving her the opportunity to narrate the story to herself independently without having to rely on Molly to read it to her. Other annotations reveal her subversive nature, her refusal to trust the authority of the printed text. In the leaf of her concise Oxford dictionary, she writes a list of words they have omitted. In her school Greek–English lexicon, we find Smith the anarchic anti-scholar—the phrase ‘3rd class boobies can’t understand Roman figures’ is scrawled throughout the text. Her defiant comment shows a refusal to engage with the text: her obscuring graffiti makes a subsequent reader’s engagement impossible. Frequently, the only trace she left on the books she read were sketches of women’s heads. In place of the comment which would record her response to a work, or her sister’s interpretation of it, Smith illustrates 38 See Barbera and McBrien, Stevie, who note Molly’s conversion ‘greatly grieved the Lion Aunt and did not please Stevie’ (43). 39 For a discussion of sisterhood rivalry as a theme in interwar women’s writing, see Diana Wallace, Sisters and Rivals in British Women’s Fiction, 1914–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 40 See also Novel on Yellow Paper, which details Pompey’s surprise to find her copy of a play annotated by an unknown German reader (241). 41 See Appleyard, Becoming a Reader, 130: ‘readers stop regarding the text as transparent when they confront the fact that other readers find different things when they read the same text’. 42 Smith, ‘At School’, 120.

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her own reading practice with a series of disembodied faces. Her drawings are usually women’s portraits in profile, opinions or expressions unreadable behind thick hair, always turned away from the subsequent reader. In books such as the 1917 poetry anthology Les Cent Meilleurs Poe`mes (lyriques) de la Langue Franc¸aise, Molly and Smith’s marks almost become a collaborative enterprise, Molly’s underlining of pertinent stanzas and editorial comments on the translation contrasting with Smith’s series of female portraits which act as mouthpieces for the verse itself.43 In Smith’s portraits we find a patrolling reader marking their territory, someone leaving a trace of themselves on the page that will, nevertheless, protect their own interpretation from discovery. It is a process that invites comparison with Smith’s construction of a similarly opaque authorial persona through her own marginal illustrations. The few underlinings that Smith makes in her texts are all the more revealing for their scarcity. In her copy of Poetic Values: A Guide to the Appreciation of The Golden Treasury, she marks the quotation by John Stuart Mill differentiating ‘eloquence, which is heard, and poetry, which is overheard. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself.’44 The dichotomy that Mill’s definition highlights is that if poetry is a private process, its completion depends on the presence of another, uninvited listener. Yet the most telling annotation Smith makes in her books is alongside Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802’, a poem that was included in her copy of the Palgrave Golden Treasury. Her annotated response to the poem is, once again, the action of an anarchic reader: she simply writes ‘September 29th 1916’. Smith appends the date of her own first reading as if in direct challenge to Wordsworth’s date of composition, trespassing on the sacred ground of the English poetic canon. The poem becomes important not for the moment it records or the point at which it was written but for the first act of interpretation. Smith’s annotation gives no indication of her own personal reaction to the poem, but here she marks for future, potentially divergent readers and readings the date of first conquest. It is a challenge to both the author and the subsequent reader, and a tactic that threatens to usurp them both, a double strategy of territorial marking and interpretative concealment. The allusive voice of her Yarrow poem, 43

See Smith’s copy of Les Cent Meilleurs Poe`mes (Lyriques) de la Langue Franc¸aise ed. Auguste Dorchain (Paris: Perche, 1917). 44 As quoted in E. A. Lambourn Greening, Poetic Values: A Guide to the Appreciation of The Golden Treasury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 111.

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explored in Chapter 1, finds its true source here. As Celia remarks in The Holiday, ‘“Earth has not anything to show more fair”, ahem, it is different now, is it not?’ (184). The 1920s saw Molly moving to university and beginning her career as an English teacher. With the didactic presence of the elder sister removed,45 Smith began a very deliberate and secretive reading programme. Whilst she now began to record her responses to the books she read, everything about her practice accommodated occlusion. The massive amount Smith read and digested during the 1920s primarily came in the form of the fugitive library book. Reactions to her readings were recorded in private notebooks hid far from prying eyes. Returning to Smith’s essay ‘How to Read Books’, we find another memory of childhood reading that depicts a young person initiated into the adult world through the texts they read: I remember once going on a school charabanc through the Park, and suddenly our driver turned to us and said, ‘This is where Herne the Hunter Harried Henry VIII.’ I knew what he was talking about because I had read Windsor Castle, but I felt that nobody else had or did, because it was not the sort of thing you learn in history books. It was a link between us.46

Here Smith outlines the possibility for reading as an activity that creates secret and invisible divisions, a source of clandestine knowledge. The text in question, a sprawling historical romance by William Harrison Ainsworth, is chosen for its deviation from fact, for its offer of an idiosyncratic non-empirical knowledge that is unlikely to be corroborated elsewhere.47 The passage celebrates reading as a communicative tool, a way of sending private messages between readers.48 This idea of transmitting messages through texts becomes immensely important in Smith’s densely referential and allusive work, which often draws on the 45 For accounts of their relationship in the 1960s see Spalding, Stevie Smith, who claims that towards the end of Smith’s life Molly was ‘always now in the back of her mind’ (293). 46 Smith, ‘How to Read Books’, 268. 47 See William Harrison Ainsworth, Windsor Castle: A Historical Romance (New York: Nottingham Society, 1900), i.197–9, where Herne the Hunter appears as a demon to Harry prophesying the death of his wives and the corruption of his reign, predicting a life ‘stained in blood’ (199). 48 See also the poem ‘A Soldier Dear To Us’ (CP 526), where the speaker learns the horrors of war through reading Robert Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.

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transcriptions she made from books read during this period. Her 1920s reading notebooks do not just record her responses to a range of fiction and history books, but begin the process of constructing an authorial persona through a collage of composite texts.49 If Smith was to find her voice through the many novelists she read in the 1920s and 1930s, many of the comments she makes seem to point towards her own later fiction. The idea of the author presenting or disguising themselves through their central protagonists held particular interest for her; of Sinclair Lewis’ The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928), she asked ‘Did ever anyone so completely reveal himself?’ It is difficult to separate the note of incredulity from her praise, her critical voice still struggling to conceal itself behind rhetorical ambiguity. Reading W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, or the British Agent in 1928 she notes ‘A[shenden] is I suppose Maugham “I’m not such a bad chap after all, you see”’. The eponymous protagonist of Maugham’s novel is a writer who joins the secret service to gather material for his novels only to find himself translating messages ‘into a very complicated code’.50 Smith’s comment is largely non-evaluative, as if wary of revealing her attraction to a writer who fictionalizes their own persona and whose novel may have provided the plot for Over the Frontier (1938).51 Its sceptical tone stands back from a total engagement with the text, or from revealing Smith’s own opinion on Maugham’s authorial strategy. Similarly, she writes of Maurice Baring’s Lost Lectures (1932): ‘This is the sort of book I like. Himself is not his only interest, and yet it very well might be.’ Even in this clearly positive assessment of Baring’s work, Smith’s reading equivocates over the extent to which Baring situates himself in his own texts. This double-edged attraction to and suspicion of the author making fictive versions of themselves undoubtedly informed her own writing practice. The young poet-reader Smith is also drawn to D. H. Lawrence’s philosophical history Apocalypse (1931), which emphasizes the conflicting need for repeated readerly engagement: A book only lives while it has the power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different each time we read it. [ . . . ] The real joy of reading a 49

The fictionalizing of Smith’s reading notebooks in her novels is treated in Chapter 5. W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden, or the British Agent (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1928), 277. 51 A letter from John Hayward to Smith dated 22 November 1938, UT, reveals that she was re-reading Maugham’s work in the late 1930s in order to construct a ‘postMaugham naturalistic style’, suggesting a reference point for the plot of Over the Frontier. 50

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book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.52

Lawrence articulates for Smith the dichotomies of creating and controlling an audience for her work. The writer’s words must imply a range of meanings yet elude a final concrete interpretation. They must invoke an audience without defining them. The importance of Lawrence for Smith as a writer and painter grappling with the relationship between artists and audience is further suggested by her reliance on his work not just for the articulation of this problem but the solution to it. From Apocalypse, she transcribes his description of Mercury who is ‘really Hermes, Hermes of the Underworld, the guide of souls, the watcher over two ways, the opener of two doors, he who seeks through hell or Hades’.53 Lawrence’s discussions of Hermes in his work—not least in Kangaroo (1923), where the protagonist points out that the word contains both ‘her’ and ‘me’—provides a context for Smith’s eventual adoption of the moniker in her first two novels.54 By containing both ‘her’, Smith the invoked author who Smith the woman can both associate with and distance herself from, and the plural of ‘me’, a collection of authorial selves Smith can take up and abandon at any point, Hermes offers Smith both concealment and visibility. The nom de plume allows her to welcome an actual reading audience whilst simultaneously affording her the opportunity to construct an imaginary one, generating two competing models of readership to hover in between.

52

D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (London: Penguin, 1991), 4. Ibid. 62. 54 See D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), where the semi-autobiographical protagonist Lovatt wants to name a boat built for his wife Hermes because the name contains ‘her and me’ (173). Smith acknowledges the debt in Novel on Yellow Paper, where Pompey reveals ‘I have had a great respect for D.H. since I read his Kangaroo’ (110). References to Flinders Petrie and The Bacchae also link the two works. Other probable influences on Smith’s nom de plume include Dean Inge’s Plotinus (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929) who discusses the ‘Janus-faced’ godhead of Plotinian philosophy (11), Milton’s mention of the ‘thricegreat Hermes’ in ‘Il Penseroso’ (Comus and Some Shorter Poems of Milton, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (London: Harrap, 1952), 67), and the sonnet ‘Hermes’ by Francis Thompson, whose poems ‘Assumpta Mariam’ and ‘To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster’ are both quoted in Novel on Yellow Paper (48, 122). Thompson describes Hermes as a poetic muse hovering between the divine and the mortal: ‘His fledged feet declare j That ’tis the nether self transdeified j And the thrice-furnaced passions, which do bear j The poet Olympusward’ (Collected Poems (Sevenoaks: Fisher Press, 1922)). 53

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Authors as viewed by Smith in these notebooks are consequently not to be trusted, as befitting the writer who urged young readers ‘not to be sentimental about authors. They have to make a living like everyone else.’55 The burgeoning poet is here always on her guard against them trying to manipulate their reader or generate a new audience for their work. She remarks of Havelock Ellis’s preface to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928): ‘he writes without discernment, deliberately perhaps, in an effort not to spoil his own market’. Smith’s comments, now no longer afraid to be aesthetically evaluative, are modified by a consideration of the author’s ulterior motives. The professional criticism of Havelock Ellis, who is here drafted in as a sexologist, blinds itself to the merits of the text in hand whilst keeping a keen eye on the potential benefits for his own work.56 A similar qualification creeps into her assessment of Naomi Mitchison’s Black Sparta (1928) which she writes is ‘successful, but all the time you feel you’ve walked into her net’. Here the reader becomes the unwilling fly to the author’s fatal spider, struggling to admire the beauty of their web without getting caught. This comment comes in response to a collection of poems and short stories retelling Greek myths, with Mitchison’s closing ‘Song’ outlining the dangerous possibilities for authorial disfiguration both through the act of writing and the threat of subsequent misinterpretation: When a thing comes to be written It stops being true: As it stands on the page no longer, no longer Oh no longer you!57

Whilst Mitchison’s closing poem admits the fallibility of the reader– writer compact, acknowledging the difficulty of constructing her authorial ‘web’, Smith’s sceptical response critiques her admission of failure, attacking an authorial device Smith’s own novels would later knowingly exploit. A similar motive seems to explain her comments on Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921), which find her consciously resisting an author she 55

Smith, ‘How to Read Books’, 271. Smith’s comments are difficult to tally with a preface that might be faulted more for euphemism than critical negligence, with Ellis praising Hall for ‘the poignant situations’ which are ‘set forth so vividly, and yet with such complete absence of offence’ (Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Covici Friede, 1932), 1). 57 Naomi Mitchison, Black Sparta: Greek Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 320. 56

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evidently admired: ‘Huxley is inclined to repeat himself. The same words and tags are found in several of his books.’ Through this criticism she is able to distance herself from the ‘composite’ writer who comprises their texts of quotations.58 In Hilaire Belloc’s But Soft—We are Observed (1928), ‘the mixture is beginning to be not strong enough to hide its ingredients [ . . . ] stir well and pour in Whitehall, the City, Wall Street, Scotland Yard, Fleet Street—to taste’. Viewed through Smith’s sceptical eye, the title of Belloc’s novel becomes a diagnosis of its own failure; by failing to sufficiently ‘conceal’ the constituent parts of its own formulaic collage, it makes the author into the bumbling magician whose tricks no longer go undetected. Yet a further examination of Belloc’s novel suggests that it is Smith’s own influences that are most at risk from the threat of discovery. The narrative voice provides Smith with many of the playful interjections that would characterize her early work: It is time we got back to Chap 1. And what is more, it is time that you, Unfortunate Reader, were relieved of your natural confusion and embarrassment as to what it is all about.59

Here, amidst a novel ‘not strong enough to hide its ingredients’, Smith perfects a secret recipe for her own narrative style. The critical objections found in her reading notebooks conceal as much behind their surface as the apparently uncommitted and anarchic faces doodled on her sister’s reading library. If the naı¨ve reader faced the danger of being subsumed into the text, the ambivalent and sceptical reader is here revealed as an adopted pose, a mask of resistance that hides the poet gorging themselves on their ingeniously suppressed source material. Virginia Woolf, in contrast to Belloc, was an author whom Smith confessed to finding ‘full of meat’, a sustaining and nourishing food for the poet–eater. Smith responded strongly to Jacob’s Room (1924), and transcribed many passages from it in full. Perhaps most notable is her writing out of the solitary line ‘What does one fear?—the human eye’.60 Woolf’s rumination on the impossibility of escaping visual perception as the primary mode of human interaction seems apposite for Smith, ever mindful of fleeing the watchful gaze of her sister. A similar interest

58 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921). Huxley’s failed poet-protagonist who believes he will never write again may also have signalled to Smith the authorial self-fictionalizing she wanted to avoid. 59 Hillaire Belloc, But Soft—We are Observed! (London: Arrowsmith, 1928), 48. 60 Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 109.

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prompts her transcriptions from Woolf’s essay ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ (1925), where she draws attention to the quotation from Sir Thomas Browne: The world that I regard is my self, it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.61

For Browne, as for Woolf and Smith, individual human perception defines and dictates the frames through which he views the world. Only in a self-conscious reframing, literally a re-creation, does any other view become possible. The surprising biographical similarities between Woolf and Smith’s reading lives, not least Woolf ’s sense of herself as a professional reader and the importance of defining themselves against their sisters, encouraged Smith to self-consciously mimic her own practice.62 The overlooking train reader in Woolf ’s short story ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1921) finds her way into Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), where Pompey is eager to peruse a stranger’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The title of Smith’s essay ‘How to Read Books’ (1937) seems a conscious allusion to Woolf ’s ‘How Should One Read A Book?’ (1926), recasting Woolf ’s interrogative into instruction. A few weeks after borrowing Jacob’s Room from the library, Smith’s notes record a new reading location in their margins: the British Museum. Smith not only learns authorial construction through the texts she reads but readerly praxis, as the following passage from Jacob’s Room suggests: Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final ‘y’ in Lord Macaulay’s name, and the names stretched in unbroken file round the dome of the British Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds of the living sat at the spokes of a cart-wheel copying from printed books into manuscript books; now and then rising to consult the catalogue; regaining their places stealthily, while from time to time a silent man replenished their compartments.63

If this passage presents the collection of readers in the British Museum as numbed and mechanized, Smith’s decision on reading Jacob’s Room to take her place amongst those burrowing in the darkness around a library 61

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), 54–5. For accounts of the creative relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, see Jane Dunn, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy (London: Virago, 2001). 63 Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 143. 62

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that finds ‘no room for a Bronte¨ or an Eliot’ suggests half the autodidact and half the anarchic reader. Smith becomes at once the dutiful interpreter who ‘learns’ the message of her texts and the highly individual reader who makes playfully allusive fiction from what for others is dull transcription. It also points up a belief that reading is a learnt act at the most basic level—not only in the strategies it offers for interpretation but even the very site at which it takes place. By following Woolf ’s directions to this site of scholarly learning only to fill her notebooks with pithy and dismissive comments on what she reads, Smith physically enacts what her writer’s mind has ‘learnt’ from Woolf ’s novels only to parody it. Smith apes female reading sites again in the opening of Novel on Yellow Paper, where the image of her reading Victorian novels ‘sitting in my paternal grandfather’s library in Scaithness, Lincs’ rewrites Jane Eyre’s sequestered and vulnerable reading childhood with bullish irreverence.64 More often, the written response to the books Smith reads are tentative, suffused with what she calls elsewhere ‘an unnecessary habitual caution’.65 If her lengthy transcriptions from particular works suggest a literary engagement, Smith the private secretary keeps her interpretation of those texts a secret. In this she is again following a textual direction from a notebook transcription, here from Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885): it is necessary to make oneself into a perfect ‘medium of reception’ and thus to shun anything that would be likely to impair or destroy the vision66

Her interest in Pater’s ku¨nstlerroman, and specifically in the Paterian model of the artistic mind as a glass receptacle, a capacious ‘medium of reception’ that must remain unsullied by ‘impairments’, is instructive in considering Smith’s own need to ‘purge’ the poet–reader of the texts they consume. She wolfs down Naomi Mitchison only to accuse the author–spider of attempting to devour her. She chews up Hilaire Belloc only to reprimand his work for being piecemeal. Is this defensive attitude to the texts she read indicative of a continuing need of concealment, a fear of confessing to the originant of her authorial voice? Having spent a reading infancy avoiding leaving an interpretative trace on the 64

Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (13). See ‘Who Shot Eugenie?’ (CP 291). Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 127. See Over the Frontier (44): ‘So here it was I came out with this clever idea that if you are going to write, and then why certainly you must go on writing, and above all you must be receptive to your own thoughts’. 65 66

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texts she reads, does her ‘feeding’ off of these texts she read throughout the 1920s necessitate a similar process of purging them from her own writing? Who is she concealing these readings from? Much material in her notebooks, despite existing in a hidden form, seems to acknowledge the possible presence of future readers. Smith sets herself up as the professional writer for whom a reading diary is in fact a highly self-conscious and public medium. One page in her notebook has the titles of several books she has borrowed from the library with large spaces between them, still awaiting her responses. Under an entry for Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), she admits ‘I have left these spaces—but alas I fear they will never glow with illuminating comments.’ Here Smith confesses to her unknown future audience her failure to live up to the role of poet–reader. Yet her open apology to this newly envisioned audience goes on to lament the fact she will not be able to dismiss Frazer’s work with the ‘muslin piece of literary criticism’.67 Her comment seems a tacit acknowledgement of her own need for self-concealment. Her notebooks, whilst promising to reveal the literary sources of her writing, veil her influences, her own readerly exegesis enacting a process of continual obfuscation and misdirection. Her resistance to her sister Molly’s scholarly approach has made her own literary responses as anarchic or as indifferent as the disembodied heads that people the margins of her books. If her comments on The Golden Bough hint at an eventual audience for her notebooks, her first direct address to them comes via a text which, like Smith’s future fiction, is the work of an author-cum-amanuensis. They concern Pierre Louy¨s’s Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894), a book of Sapphic love poems the French poet first claimed he had discovered written in Greek and translated only to be unmasked as their author after the book’s publication in 1894.68 Smith’s response makes it unclear whether she has discovered Louy¨s’s true role:

67 Smith in fact went on to read his anthropological work, perhaps finding material in his discussion of the common tribal fear of speaking people’s names, leading to the everyday use of ‘secondary names [which] are apparently held to be no part of the man himself, so that they may be freely used and divulged to everybody without endangering his safety’ (Sir George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1990), i.403). 68 As late as 1931, the book was published in Britain still professing to be a translation of poems by the Greek courtesan Bilitis. See Les Chansons de Biltis, trans. Pierre Louy¨s, English trans. Charles Clark (London: Chez la Pye, 1931), xvi: ‘I cannot but regret that [Bilitis] has not been more spoken of, and that the writers of antiquity, those at last whose works have survived, are so meagre in their information about her’.

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Gallicised Greece of Sapph’s period. I have written a poem about this which you, gentle reader, hypothetical reader, undersized reader, shall never read.

Through her reference to Louy¨s, the transcribing amanuensis, Smith finally becomes a writer with an audience. As in her later fiction, Smith tantalizes this newly imagined audience with the promise of a secret text our guarded author may or may not provide access to. Her invocation of a subsequent reader in her apparently private notebooks unmasks the whole of the enterprise as a literary performance. She dons the disguise of the reader-as-apprentice-poet, even if half in earnest, and, in doing so, is able not only to construct an authorial persona for herself but a reading audience. Whilst the exact identity of this ‘gentle reader, hypothetical reader, undersized reader’ is unclear, the address evokes Baudelaire’s introduction to Fleurs du Mal, which Smith was also reading at the time.69 Baudelaire urges his reader to abandon complacent boredom, calling them his ‘—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon fre`re!’ (trans. ‘hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!’).70 Smith transforms Baudelaire’s hypocritical reader into her hypothetical reader, and pointedly substitutes ‘undersized’ and ‘gentle’ for ‘semblable’ and ‘fre`re’, once again excising the overlooking sibling-double from her construction of the reader. This unique gesture in her notebooks not only looks forward to her preoccupation with the readerly address in her first two novels, but also marks the point at which the burgeoning writer discovering an authorial voice through their reading becomes the published writer using criticism to manufacture and manipulate their own reading audience. In 1934, Smith sent a large selection of her verse to the agent Curtis Brown. In June of that year, it was returned along with an anonymous reader’s report and a letter explaining: One of our best readers wrote a careful report on your poems. It was by no means intended for your eye, and will probably make you furious.71

Smith’s first experience of the professional reader comes via a response to her own work. Brown, by allowing Smith access to this text, permits

69 The line is also quoted in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) but anecdotal evidence of reading dates suggests her allusion is to Baudelaire. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1961), 53. 70 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies, ed. and trans. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), pp. 20–1. 71 Curtis Brown to Stevie Smith, 28 June 1934, UT. All subsequent references to this report are from the copy included in this letter.

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the author’s roving eye to take in a specifically private critical response. By sending on the report to Smith, Brown collapses the distinction between a private and public reading. The anonymous reader, who finds Smith’s poems ‘formless’ and describes them as ‘the outpourings of a neurotic type of mind’, becomes an inevitable target for Smith herself. In her copy of the report, Smith’s combative and defensive annotations suggest both a desire to address the criticism and to uncover the identity of this anonymous reader. Smith underlines the pronouns in the report which indicate the writer was female, as if attempting to build a portrait of this critical reader. She also dismisses every attack the report makes. The reader’s suggestion that one of her poems is a parody of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘We Have Come Through’ is marked with a decisive ‘not read’. The suggestion that her Greek and Latin verses indicate a ‘classical snobbism which seems quite deplorable’ prompts the response, ‘Why—if it’s apt?’ Smith is also eager to unmask this anonymous critic as an unscrupulous reader; when the report describes with distaste a ‘decoration in pencil’ next to the poem ‘Casual Copulation’ which depicts ‘a melancholy gentleman in a double-breasted coat’, Smith counters ‘this illustrates “Honour and emulate this man of men” not “Casual Copulation” at all.’ Her response to this anonymous report marks her initiation into the world of professional reading. It is a world with a new balance of authority. The author can now only look on helplessly as the critic dissects their work. Their own objections to these professional readings are never heard. Having realized the power of the critic’s voice over the author’s, Smith commonplace books take on a new significance. They have constructed a critical as well as an authorial persona, and these most private of texts can now be made public. By staging herself as a critic, Smith can begin to take control of her work and its readers. Smith’s ‘Statement on Criticism’, written for P.E.N. News in the 1950s, constructs a notion of the literary reviewer as a judge. He must have ‘attention’, be ‘impartial’,72 and disregard any biographical details about the author under review. She argues though that in summing up a work, ‘the judge’s wig slips a little’. Here is the place for opinion, bias, and it is here ‘we may even quote from other books, if there is space and our editor will allow; we may even quote from our own books and poems’. This article, which moves from an orthodox, even banal 72 Stevie Smith, ‘Statement on Criticism’, P.E.N. News (Autumn 1958), 29–30, repr. in Me Again, 173–4, 173.

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delineation of a critic’s duties to a highly individual response is a pointed comment on Smith’s own reviewing practice. By allowing her own verse into her criticism, she could present the first public response to her own work, wresting control back from any anonymous readers who might attack her. It also ensured a wide readership for her poetry at a time when she was struggling to get it accepted by journals or magazines.73 When she read Stephen Potter’s The Muse in Chains (1937), she underlined with interest his assertion that the special problem of literary criticism was that it attempted to deconstruct an art which used the same form as the criticism itself.74 By incorporating her poems into her critical reviews, Smith makes a strength of this tension point, allowing her self-construction as a writer to mask itself under the guise of the impassive critical voice. The way in which her work enters the reviews takes a number of different forms.75 In her piece on John Symonds’ The Magic of Aleister Crowley (1958), a biography of the British mystic, she raids ‘From the County Lunatic Asylum’ (CP 38), noting that a photograph of the sceptic Frank Bennett included in the book looks ‘as if he were quoting the poem: ‘the people think that spiritism is a joke and a swizz j not half it is’.76 As with Smith’s female portraits doodled on her childhood books, here a visual prompt in the books she reads becomes a mouthpiece for her own verse. Her verse is invoked without acknowledgement or preamble—no personal pronoun is attached to her quotation of ‘the poem’. As such, its inclusion places it in a canon of familiar literature: a poem that, over twenty years after its first publication, could be mentioned in a review without the need for explanation. Her poem ‘La Revenant’(CP 267) quite literally haunts a review of Angela Thirkell’s gentle upper class satire Enter Sir Robert (1955); Smith remarks of the characters, ‘gulps they will bring to comfortable throats, but to the mind that is nervous lines rather from a miserable poet: “He knocked upon each door and said, ‘It is much better to be dead’”.77 Here, in knowing parody of 73 See for example Vogue’s rejection of her poems in 1955 accompanied by a letter from Joan Stevenson which invites her to do more reviewing and editorial work for them: ‘I always welcome any comments or criticisms [ . . . ] these are most useful from a reader such as yourself’ (8 November 1955, UT). 74 See Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 257. 75 For a biographical account of Smith’s self-quoting review practice, see Spalding, Stevie Smith (2002), 215–16. 76 Stevie Smith, ‘Beastly Silly’, The Observer (13 April 1958), 16. 77 Stevie Smith, ‘Mr Cary and Others’, The Observer (24 April 1955), 12.

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critical perceptions of her work, Smith is the unacknowledged ‘miserable poet’. She not only conceals the identity of this poet but even the reader who quotes them; in place of a personal pronoun, she hides under the generality of ‘the mind that is nervous’. The uncle’s return from death in the original poem is mirrored by Smith’s reincarnation as a critic. If Smith’s presentation of herself as a poet–critic is sometimes more explicit, as in the article ‘A Poem and A Review’ for Frontier in 1961 which publishes her poem ‘Admire Cranmer’ alongside her review of the life of Dean Inge,78 her criticism often reappears in her poetry. In a piece on Douglas Hewitt’s The Returning Waters (1954), Smith berates the novel’s central protagonist for not realizing that ‘art is as wild as a cat and quite separate from civilisation’.79 This critical response becomes a key line in her poem ‘The New Age’ (CP 308), enacting the wildness her own poem avows. Her art stalks unnoticed into her review and vice versa, prowling there unseen by her reading audience. This tactic not only extends the territory of her poetry, but also allows Smith to construct the border by which it enters. By placing her work in an already-read context, Smith essentially enacts the same process as seen in her childhood books, becoming the self-determined first reader who limits others’ access to the text. Her own reviewing preference was for journals or newspapers where her opinions would rarely be challenged—a letter to Phoebe Paul complains of the ‘fidgety cantankerous reading public’ of the New Statesman that always creates some ‘beastly backwash’80 in response to her criticism. Smith’s words, whether in the guise of the critic or the novelist, struggled to become a series of literary annotations only she could contest. Consequently, writers that grapple with their critical reception or self-construction attract her complaint on every page. Her review of E. H. W. Meyerstein’s letters is critical of the decision to bring his private correspondence into the public domain. Here, she suggests, ‘the writer stands before us self-drawn and self-betrayed’,81 both accused and culpable of unravelling his own authorial persona. She seems indignant, too, at the kind of figure revealed by the publication of Rose Macaulay’s letters: 78 Stevie Smith, ‘A Poem and a Review: An Unbeliever Writes about Two Religious Leaders’, Frontier (Spring 1961), 41–2. 79 Stevie Smith, ‘New Novels’, Spectator (22 January 1954), 108. 80 Letter to Phoebe Paul, 12 December 1940, UT. 81 Stevie Smith, ‘Odd Man Out’, The Observer (2 August 1959), 8.

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She will say in one letter, I am sending you my last novel but do not bother to write about it. Then in a later letter, Did you receive it, what do you think about it. This happens often. And it is very understandable and very human. But what self-knowledge is shown in the process?82

Smith’s critique does not condemn Macaulay for her keen interest in readers’ responses to her work but more for her failure to hide that interest. Her transparency, her failure to cover her traces, makes her trial-by-discovery a necessity. The ‘self-knowledge’ that Smith demands from Macaulay is in fact a plea for self-concealment. Macaulay’s letters transgress yet further, railing against the process of reviewing itself: It is comforting to have someone indignant with the reviews [ . . . ] I suppose the reviewer didn’t happen to like the book, probably didn’t read it at all, perhaps was in the wrong mood for it, or was probably the wrong reader.83

Here Macaulay, mitigating a negative review by attributing it to ‘the wrong reader’, enacts in full view of her reading audience a process of authorial self-appeasement. Smith, whose own private correspondence is as preoccupied with critical and readerly reception as Macaulay’s, attacks her nonetheless for a mistake she herself feels she has only just avoided making.84 A similar impulse seems to underline her response to Theodora Keogh’s first book, Meg: A Novel (1951), which, for Smith, is another example of authors falling in love with themselves when young; especially women authors are apt to do this. It is not explicit, the ladies are not writing autobiographies, but all the same, there it is85

This review, written fifteen years after she took on the moniker of Pompey Casmilus, is a determined effort to distance herself from that persona. Consequently, she must publicly reject a semi-autobiographical

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Stevie Smith, ‘Soul of Gossip’, Spectator (27 October 1961), 595–6, 595, review of Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay; 1950–1952, ed. Constance Babington Smith (London: Collins, 1961). 83 Ibid. letter from Rose Macaulay to Father Johnson, 15th December 1950, 41. 84 See, for example, Stevie Smith to Denis Johnston, 23 September 1936, UT: ‘really [the press cuttings] are so nice that I must show them to everybody but of course the listeners is not so-o-o good I could wring his neck to say that I have the flapper mind [ . . . ] my next book will have to be a learned treatise on some subject I have unfortunately not yet been able to think of to counteract this hateful impression’, an anxiety mirrored in Over the Frontier when a ‘young man’ attacks Pompey’s poetry for being ‘not funny enough’ (25). 85 Stevie Smith, ‘New Novels’, World Review (June 1951), 78–80, 80.

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novel depicting a defiant and anarchic schoolgirl whose comic portraiture recalls the narrative voice of Novel on Yellow Paper (1936).86 The same necessities dictate her response to Naomi Mitchison’s Lobsters on the Agenda (1952), where she lambasts the author for making ‘so bold as to introduce a lady called “Mrs. Mitchison” [ . . . ] this is dangerous’.87 Through her critique of a novel that mockingly fictionalizes its own creator, Smith reveals an ambivalence about her own selfcreated authorial doppelgangers. A stronger avowal of her earlier prose comes in 1952, where she criticizes Pamela Hansford Johnson for filling her novel Catherine Carter full of literary quotations—‘publish and be damned’ is her emphatic response.88 The list of books sent for her to review soon became an often unwelcome gauge of her own reputation. In a letter to a friend she complains: ‘somehow I got the reputation (with various editors) of “knowing about” J.[ohn] C.[owper] Powys. This put me off, awfully. I felt I could not live up to it.’89 Fearing this contextual imposition on her work, she accepts reviews only to use the column space to point up the distance between the public expectation of her authorial persona and her own concerns as a writer. Reviewing becomes a form of defensive self-critique. Smith’s own public presentation of herself as a reader was consistent with the defacing marks in her sister’s reading books. Her interviews deliberately downplayed the significance of her reading programme in the 1920s or the vast volume of literature she reviewed after the war to focus on her love of reading bad translations of Agatha Christie in French,90 trawling through the tomes of Edward Gibbon, or claiming to have read nothing since Beowulf.91 For the interviewer eager to draw comparisons between what she read and what she wrote, Smith delighted in constructing herself as the whimsical reader. Her letter to a BBC accountant in which she declares, ‘if there is a possible way of misreading a document, that is the way I read it’,92 is typical of Smith in its 86

See Theodora Keogh, Meg (London: Peter Davis, 1951). Stevie Smith, ‘New Novels’, World Review (July 1952), 68–72, 72. Stevie Smith, ‘New Novels’, World Review (March 1952), 78–80, 80. 89 Letter to Anna Browne, 30 December 1967, UT. 90 See Stevie Smith, ‘Books of the year’, The Observer (10 December 1967), 9, where Smith asserts, ‘I mostly read Agatha Christie this year (and every year) . . . I often read her in French. It is the sort of Franglais (sometimes) that makes the General so cross.’ 91 See her introduction draft to ‘To School!’, UT (CP 269). ‘Sometimes, the thought of there being so many other poets writing cannot but seep in, however much one may try to keep it at bay by reading nothing since Beowulf’. 92 Letter to B. H. Alexander, 12 March 1956, UT. 87 88

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dogged insistence that she is wrong-footed and perverse, erasing the memory of her as an intellectually vigorous reviewer. Just as she deletes the presence of her scholarly sister from her reading childhood, she edits out any influence of her scrupulousness with equal speed. When discussing her reviewing, her comments eagerly draw attention to her own transgressing methods; in a 1949 interview for Books of To-day, she confesses ‘when I am reviewing books I often, if I have not got my glasses on, misread the words. That sometimes strikes off a poem.’93 She allows that other literature informs her work, but less through its content and more through her eccentric method of reading it. Yet her guise of the deviant misreader who feeds off bad translations and malapropism is in fact a mask for the much more subversive role of the Balthus-esque girl pretending to be reading, using the pose to steal glances out at her unobservant audience. In 1963, Smith wrote a review of Colette’s autobiographical reminiscence The Blue Lantern for The Observer. The title, which refers to Colette’s writing lamp, seems to offer up the props of the writer’s life for readerly interrogation in the same way as Smith’s own Novel on Yellow Paper. The review opens with a passage which echoes much earlier evocations of Smith’s reading childhood: I remember first reading Colette—‘Claudine a` l’Ecole’—when I was about 18. I particularly liked the pictures, beautiful line drawings, as lively and malicious as the story. I even liked those tell-tale passages of soulful pondering, typical of this author’s early work.94

Yet, the review continues, ‘fame brought caution’. This pithy statement is neatly poised between the reviewer and the author under review, suggesting that either Colette’s fame has deformed her writing or Smith’s fame has distorted her appreciation of it. The sense of Smith hovering between being a critical reader and a fellow author continues throughout the review. In The Blue Lantern, Colette presents us with a selection of her fan letters, variously asking her for creative advice, a signed novel, or offering a critique of her work. She explains: My object in quoting [them] is not to offend but to disclose by what methods a reader gets into touch with an author, to the point of fulfilling some imperative need. I believe there is no effective way of escaping his commandeering method. I also believe, after being thoroughly trained for nearly half a century to his 93 94

Stevie Smith, ‘If You Sit Waiting –’, Books of To-day (July 1949), 3. Stevie Smith, ‘Pleasures of Old Age’, The Observer (7 July 1963), 23.

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arbitrary requirements, to the real lack of restraint that guides the pens of lonely women, men with obsessions, and those monomaniacs who persist in asking questions, that I prefer their indiscretion to their silence.95

Smith’s reading and writing practice seem at odds with Colette’s candid attraction to her readers and her preference for their ‘indiscretion’ over their ‘silence’. Smith privately insisted on the need to ignore ‘those amateur asses with their drivelling ineptitude and conceit’, even if her fictional Pompey explicitly invited such correspondence.96 Colette confesses to a ‘crying need for publicity’ whilst despairing ‘there is nothing I can hide from [my readers]’.97 Smith’s review is apparently unable or unwilling to understand her predicament, tartly summarizing: ‘Fame brings readers to an author’s mind, never a good thing.’ Smith’s flat dismissal of the book belies her continuing struggle to frame and maintain control over her own reading public. As Smith goes on to describe Colette’s old age and how she ‘took pleasure in being “adored”’, she seems to be involved in writing an elegy suffused in equal part with kinship and disapproval. Colette becomes a totemic example of the dangers of literary celebrity, less for the readers of The Observer than for Smith herself. Smith’s early experiences of literature were fully conscious of other interpretations and divergent readers. It was this awareness that allowed her to manipulate her audience so successfully through her critical reviews. But, as the melancholy tone of her Colette review suggests, it is an awareness that comes not only at a personal cost, but a literary one. The ‘commandeering’ reader Colette identifies becomes an inextricable part of the author’s texts. Smith’s various poses of the naı¨ve reader, the anarchic reader, and the sceptical reader demonstrate her ability to take on a number of interpretative personae. Yet the continuing secrecy of these reading postures paradoxically ensures they are always conscious of possible onlookers, no matter how successful their disguise. 95 Colette, The Blue Lantern, trans. Roger Senhouse (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), 92. 96 Stevie Smith to Jack Lambert, 4 February 1968, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Ms. Eng. C.2320, fol. 32. See Over the Frontier, where Pompey hopes to arouse the reader’s ‘intrinsic interest to make you write to me’ (101). 97 Colette, The Blue Lantern, 91, 58.

3 Brought to Book: The Publishing History of Stevie Smith Smith was acutely conscious of the factors that shape a writer’s reputation. In her poem ‘The Choosers’, she places the critic squarely between the writer and posterity: Who shall we send to fetch him away This young-man Author of the Month of May? We will send Mr Puff to fetch him away, We are the Choosers and stand in the way. (CP 376, ll. l–4)

The Choosers, and the choices they make, are ill-informed; her poem protests that they pick ‘inferiorly with grafted eyes’. This is an objection raised by a writer who struggled to get her work published throughout much of her lifetime and, as such, reads as a vent of personal frustration. Yet Smith’s emphasis on compromised and, at times, arbitrary choice as an important influence on literary reputation suggests not only the often unknowing decisions critics, editors, and readers have made about her work since her death in 1971 but also an acknowledgement of her own involvement in those same choices. The introduction of the shadowy ‘Mr Puff ’ into the poem suggests an anxiety about agency; her attack on the British literary press only points up the extent to which her own reviews made these same irrevocable and unthinking decisions for many of her contemporaries. The idiosyncratic nature of her reviews which were, as we have seen, often opportunities to promote and contextualize her poems and novels, make her similarly a mediator of her own work. She is then inextricably linked to the choosers she decries here—her adoption of the smug ‘we’ in the poem is not only a technique to highlight her ironic tone, but also a grammatical admission of partial guilt. The choices made about Smith’s work continue to define her as both an obscure and notorious literary figure, frequently anthologized yet

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unevenly received.1 Yet if she too is involved in this choosing process, the question arises as to how far it is in fact her own invisible presence which stands between her work and posterity. Smith’s relative neglect in academic circles comes in response to a body of work that suggests hostility to both the literary scholar and the critical editor. The 2009 British Library CD of her poetry performances has made them newly accessible to the reading public,2 but they fight shy of traditional printed documentation; her illustrated texts similarly undermine the authority of the printed page. Over the Frontier (1938) takes the academic Professor Dryasdust as Smith’s starting point for a prolonged attack on the pedantry of scholarship, the profession that ‘covers the living limbs of the poets with the vile slime of commentary’ (54). Whilst her earlier Novel on Yellow Paper is highly conscious of itself as a published text and commodity product, imagining its own pages ‘ready for binding in limp yap and setting on your rich aunt’s breakfast plate’ (28–9), an unpublished poem describes publishers as ‘puffed-up strutting things j Who give themselves the airs j Of fathers in heaven’.3 More specifically, in ‘Dear Karl’, she gently mocks her lover for the disdain she anticipates at an edition of Whitman’s selected poems she has sent to him— ‘How dilettante’, I hear you observe, ‘I hate these selections Arbitrarily made to meet a need that is not mine and a taste Utterly antagonistic, wholly alien, egregiously coercionary Of individualism’s, egotism’s, insolence’s light-fingered traffickings.’ (CP 125, ll. 2–5)

Here, the poet argues for the ‘sixpenny’ text, the edition produced for economy rather than the university library. The desire to buy an author’s complete work is moderated by financial concerns and Karl’s 1

See her inclusion in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, ed. Philip Larkin (London: Faber, 1973), The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair (New York: Norton, 1973), and The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945–1980, ed. by D. J. Enright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). More recently, she has been included in An Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, ed. Keith Tuma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2, ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (London: Pearson Longman, 2006), and Poetry: a Pocket Anthology, ed. R. S. Gwynn (London: Longman, 2007). On this evidence, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ and ‘Pretty’ continue to be her most popular poems. 2 See Stevie Smith, The Spoken Word: Stevie Smith (British Library, 2009). 3 From a manuscript notebook, UT.

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pomposity is apparently deflated and critiqued. In Over the Frontier, Smith conflates the figure of Karl and his hatred of ‘excerpts, anthologies and all of that’ (102) with the reader of her own text. In pleading with Karl, she is pleading with us. Yet, in ‘Dear Karl’, a love-letter in which the bad edition of a poet’s work becomes a rhetorical lever, Smith concludes not with another scathing attack on the scholar or her imagined reader but with an envoy that seems half-Whitmanesque, half-Chaucerian,4 bidding her lover to Fare out, Karl, on an afternoon’s excursion, on a sixpenny unexplored uncharted road, (l. 22)

We are encouraged to read the text receptively, to treat the idiosyncrasies of the sixpenny book with tolerance.5 Smith comes to the defence of the dilettante. Far from being trampled down by a particular editor’s choice, here the arbitrary selection allows readers to approach the poems with a fresh eye by removing the overweening gaze of the controlling author. Smith’s potentially antagonistic aims towards her texts seem borne out in the uncertain response to the reprinting of her work since her death. Her posthumous publishing history reveals a group of editors and critics continually reshaping her oeuvre for what Marghanita Laski described in 1981 as the ‘Stevie Heavy Industry’.6 As recently as 2002, Selected Poems (1978) was reprinted in the Penguin Modern Classics series. The accompanying blurb described it as ‘one of the books of the century’7 and the glossy silver design marked it out as a staple of any serious poetry collection. And yet, for all this acknowledgement, the collected poems remain out of print. Readers who do not access her work through libraries or second-hand bookshops are now most likely

4 See Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barry Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984), V.l.1176. 5 See also her description of the Lion Aunt in a letter to Denis Johnston, 8 December 1937, who is ‘staunchly’ reading Hamlet ‘in the most repulsive sort of family bible edition of Shakespeare dated about 1800 full of engravings of him all leaning on pillars rather like the statue in Leicester Square except that there are no pigeons to misbehave themselves’ (Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 265). 6 Marghanita Laski, ‘Not So Far Out As You Thought’, Country Life (17 December 1981), 2207. 7 This is attributed to John Carey, although his remark actually came from an article entitled ‘Books of the Century’ in Sunday Times (31 October 1999), 14, on The Frog Prince and Other Poems (London: Longmans, 1966), a volume now out of print.

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to encounter Smith’s writing in an ‘arbitrary’8 selection made by her literary executor, with no access to her full body of work, a situation strangely analogous to the subject of ‘Dear Karl’. Only the sixpenny version of her oeuvre is available in the marketplace. Most of the publishers and editors of Smith’s posthumous collections would argue that they are helping to sustain the writer’s reputation and ensure she continues to be read and discussed. Yet, inevitably, other forces are at work in each separate collection, and these all impact upon the version of Stevie Smith that we read. By examining Smith’s own editorial practice in relation to posthumous collections of her poetry, I will reopen the debate surrounding the treatment of her work by scholars and editors.9 In doing so, I will not only reveal what kind of author the ‘multo-in-parvum’10 selections are selling to her readers, but also establish how far Smith’s tactics throughout her career to mitigate the control publishers had over her work have impacted on her posthumous reputation. Immediately after Smith’s death, the largest selection of her verse available in one volume was Two in One (1971), a Longman reprint of The Frog Prince and Other Poems (1966) and Selected Poems (1962) in one book. This, in essence, represented her own choice of poems from her thirty-year career as well as her preferred versions of those poems— she re-edited several of the early poems when collecting them for the individual volumes. As Spalding notes, in the last year of her life Smith was in regular contact with John Guest, the publisher planning the edition, and we can assume that she would have seen this book as her final poetic legacy.11 However, four years later, her executor James MacGibbon published Collected Poems (1975). What we are being given in this much larger volume, the preface and layout repeatedly insinuate, is the ‘definitive’ Stevie Smith with all the loose ends tied up—MacGibbon notes that ‘this book preserves [the poems] complete and as Stevie wanted them to be. When anomalies to this system have 8 The preface to Selected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978), states that the selection is ‘inevitably a subjective, even an arbitrary one’. 9 See Michael Horowitz’s attacks on the editorial practice of Stevie Smith’s editors in ‘Stevie Smith Revisited: Part Two’, Literary Review (July 1981), 24–7, and ‘Leftward Ho!’, Spectator (24 November 1984), 32–4. 10 Literally, ‘much in a small space’. This is the Latinate phrase used to describe the edition of Leaves of Grass in ‘Dear Karl’. 11 Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Faber, 1988); repr. Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 297.

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arisen a note has been made’.12 In ‘I’ll Have Your Heart’, for example, a new stanza is added with an editorial note at the bottom of the page informing the reader in which collection Smith made these changes.13 We are also assured that no unpublished material has been discovered. The only action of MacGibbon as a ‘Chooser’ comes with his choice of drawings, which he acknowledges ‘have been included here according to her original caprice but within the dictates of book makeup [ . . . ] this is the only point on which Miss Stearns and I have worked slightly arbitrarily’.14 Yet this appearance of finality and editorial consistency in the preface is less evident elsewhere. MacGibbon uses the periodical publication of many of the poems to justify his approach to Smith’s illustrations, which he calls ‘strictly supplementary (after all, they seldom if ever, appeared with the poems when they were originally published in periodicals)’.15 Yet it is his disregard for these periodicals that denies the reader access to their original publication dates and suppresses a sizeable amount of material from Collected Poems altogether.16 We are also told that the versions in Selected Poems have been accepted as definitive for the purposes of the edition but, as Hermione Lee has pointed out, Collected Poems often reverts to the first published version.17 In several instances, Smith had revised the titles of her poems for the 1960s republishing of her earlier work, often in ways that suggested links across different genres of her writing. In her poem ‘The Ambassador’ (CP 247), first published in Harold’s Leap (1950) and later in Selected Poems (1962), the depiction of the eponymous underworld warrior who ‘rides on a white horse through hell looking two ways’ was prefaced in the Selected Poems edition with a quotation from the classical scholar John Lemprie`re (1765–1824): 12 CP 11. In claiming to follow final authorial intention, MacGibbon largely follows the Greg Bowers school of critical editing, yet the anomalies in his collection point to the limitations in the method outlined by G. Thomas Tanselle’s essay ‘The Problem of Final Authorial Intention’, in Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 310–54. 13 ‘I’ll Have Your Heart’ (CP 148). 14 CP 10. 15 Ibid. 16 Over 30 poems published in periodicals and newspapers but not available in book form during Smith’s lifetime were later published in Me Again. 17 See Stevie Smith: A Selection, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Faber, 1983), which lists the variants between the poems as published in The Frog Prince and Collected Poems in its endnotes.

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MacGibbon possibly found the explanation of the poem’s ambassador a riddle that set more problems than it solved, and excised the subtitle from the text. Yet the moniker of Casmilus is key to Smith’s work, and becomes the sobriquet for the protagonists in two of her novels. The connotation of the name Casmilus, the Phoenician god who was allowed passage in and out of hell, dominates readings of her novels yet has never been applied critically to the personae in her poetry.19 By offering us a tidier version of Smith’s titles, MacGibbon closes off possibilities in reading across the range of her poetry and prose. MacGibbon’s editorial statement purports to follow final authorial intention yet, as is the case with ‘The Queen and the Young Princess’, a poem first published in Not Waving but Drowning (1957) and then collected in Selected Poems (1962), MacGibbon often follows no published version whatsoever. Here are the first six lines as they appear in Collected Poems: Mother, mother, let me go There are so many things I wish to do. My child, the time is not yet ripe You are not yet ready for life. But what is my life that is to come to be? Much the same, child, as it has been for me. (CP 313, ll. 1–6)

No note accompanies this poem, and yet all the full stops MacGibbon introduces here are editorial. The poem as it originally appears is a breathless exchange. The dialogue between the mother and daughter is often difficult to demarcate, as befits a poem that concludes the young princess will eventually turn into her mother. Here, the additional punctuation generates a new rhythm, and certainly a differently nuanced argument. MacGibbon’s presence is apparent again in the ‘The After-thought’ (CP 256), where he contradicts his stated practice and reverts to the earlier version of the poem first published in Harold’s Leap (1950). In 18 Selected Poems, 62. As Smith notes in her performance introductions to the poem, this was a misprint for Camilus, UT. 19 See, for example, Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II (London: Macmillan, 1998), 197–202, or Kathleen Wheeler, ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 141–61.

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Smith’s 1962 version of the poem, she had added the last two lines of the poem onto the second stanza, but MacGibbon reverses her decision. Syntactically astute he may be, but editorially transparent he is not. It is only with his memoir of Smith in the 1990 reissue of Some Are More Human Than Others that we learn he has only ever seen one of her poems in manuscript form.20 Such knowledge makes the idea that MacGibbon was following some as yet undiscovered master text unlikely; more probably the ‘temperamental and mercurial’21 editor had his own version of Stevie Smith he wished to propagate. His Collected Poems is spaciously presented, well laid out, and, for the most part, scrupulously indexed. Yet his reluctance to draw attention to his sometimes inconsistent practice gives the impression of editing by stealth, an impression borne out by the wholly uncritical response to his edition on its initial publication. It was not until six years later that someone would question his editorial practice in print.22 The reviews of Collected Poems are notable not only for their serious treatment of Smith’s work, but also their almost unanimous assertion that her poetry works best in bulk. Peter Washington remarked in the Spectator that ‘above all, she’s complete’,23 whilst Ian Hamilton in New Statesman noted how the power of the trivia in the collection derives from ‘what one knows of the poet from her other poems [ . . . ] one needs to have seen the same artlessness at work in other, more shrewd and waspish, guises’.24 Smith becomes a poet of cumulative power and her Collected Poems ‘the bedrock of [her] growing reputation’.25 Yet, the popularity of Collected Poems (it is reprinted four times in the first six years of its publication) by extension suggested a ‘multum-in-parvo’ edition, a selection that would bring her to an audience not likely to spend £8.50 on a 552-page hardback book. Three years later, her

20 MacGibbon includes a photograph of a postcard with ‘Scorpion’ written by Smith, and remarks that it is ‘the only poem by Stevie that I have seen in manuscript’ (Some Are More Human Than Others: A Sketch-Book, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Peter Owen, 1990), 17). 21 From James MacGibbon’s obituary in The Times (6 March 2000), 19. 22 See Michael Horowitz, ‘Stevie Smith Revisited: Part One’, Literary Review (June 1982), 23–7. 23 Peter Washington, ‘Poetry Review’, Spectator (6 September 1975), 314. 24 Ian Hamilton, ‘Review of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems’, in New Statesman (8 August 1975), 173. 25 Sanford Sternlicht, Stevie Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 99.

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executor went down the ‘sixpenny uncharted road’, and published Selected Poems (1978).26 The problems Smith had when choosing previously published poems to be included in Selected Poems (1962) and The Frog Prince and Other Poems are well documented. She and her publishers struggled to agree on what constituted her best work.27 MacGibbon, too, admitted that his task was formidable. His apologia is worth quoting in full: The choice is inevitably a subjective, even an arbitrary one, but my broad guidelines were to omit poems that were somewhat repetitive or unoriginal (in terms of a poet who was notably original) and the occasional trivia [ . . . ] inevitably many poems of merit and interest have had to be omitted from this edition, but perhaps it will direct readers to the complete edition.28

By the time of the edition’s reprint as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2002, where no amount of direction would help a reader to an outof-print book, the well-meaning purpose of the selection seemed undermined even as its ‘classic’ status was acknowledged. Although MacGibbon admits that his edition works by a process of omission rather than selection, he fails to note its largest absence: Smith’s drawings. Whereas Collected Poems boasts nearly four hundred drawings over around five hundred pages, his 260-page Selected Poems (1978) includes just twenty. In direct contrast to the thinking behind Smith’s own Selected Poems (1962), where she ‘would never mind cutting a poem to make room for a full-page drawing’,29 MacGibbon directs disappointed parties to her book of illustrations. Inevitably, with an average of two poems a page, Selected Poems (1978) begins to resemble the cramped edition Smith describes in ‘Dear Karl’. The heavy print, the capitalized titles and the narrow pages all work against the poetry, particularly with her shorter works, which are often reduced to banality by the necessary constraints of the space allotted to them. Although two-thirds of Smith’s poems are here, the lack of correspondence between the poems chosen by MacGibbon and, say, Hermione Lee, who is working within the limits of a much smaller book, is 26 Selected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). I have included the publication dates of both Selected Poems within the text where necessary to avoid confusion between the two works. 27 See Spalding, Stevie Smith, 252, and Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Stevie: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1985), 241. 28 Selected Poems (1978), 20. 29 Stevie Smith to Jocelyn Baines, 11 October 1961, photocopy, UT.

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surprising. Amongst the omitted ‘trivia’ are Smith’s translations, her informed parodies of writers like Wordsworth and John Cowper Powys, and what a later editor would call the most important poem in her whole body of work.30 MacGibbon’s omissions suggest he is keen to protect her from accusations of being fausse-naı¨ve 31 or writing ‘light’ verse. One omitted poem, for example, is ‘Croft’, which Smith once described as a self-portrait:32 Aloft, In the loft, Sits Croft; He is soft. (CP 195)

Certainly MacGibbon might have predicted that critics would struggle to make sense of this poem. It seems to resist analysis whilst inviting easy and dismissive criticism. But by denying readers and critics the opportunity to judge these problematic works, MacGibbon performs a wellintentioned literary guardianship that seems antithetical to Smith’s own wishes. In a radio broadcast on Thomas Hood, Smith had warned, ‘[Hood’s collected poems] is certainly not a heavy volume in the intellectual sense, but be careful how you skip, you may miss something good, suddenly, unexpectedly.’33 Her comment sounds a cautionary note here, casting MacGibbon more as posthumous warden than guardian. Her reference to the critically maligned Romantic poet suggests the necessity for a volume of her poetry which allows its readers, rather than its editors, to make the most important choices. With the reprinting of all three of Smith’s novels by Virago in 1979 and 1980, the whole body of her work was in print for the first time. The publication of Me Again in 1981, a collection of Smith’s stories, essays, reviews, letters, and poems previously only published in periodicals expanded this corpus further, yet hinted at tensions in the 30 See Stevie: A Motley Selection of Her Poems by John Horder and Chris Saunders (Warwick: Greville Press, 2002), which suggests ‘To Carry the Child’ is her most important work (22). 31 This term is used memorably by Philip Larkin in his review of herSelected Poems (1962), ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’ in New Statesman, 28 Sept. 1962, p.416. For a full discussion of the implications of his comments, see Chapter 4. 32 See her letter to Kay Dick, dated 1945, as included in Me Again, which details her poetic ‘self-portraits’ (288). 33 Script for the programme ‘Thomas Hood’ for Book of Verse, 87, produced by John Arlott and broadcast on the BBC Eastern Service on 8 June 1946, held at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading.

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propagation of her posthumous reputation. The introduction by editors Jack Barbera and William McBrien which asserts that she ‘delighted in death’34 is explicitly contradicted by James MacGibbon’s preface which ‘[does] not always agree with their conclusions in the introduction’.35 Disagreement is apparent, too, in the question of biography— MacGibbon’s preface suggests that this collection lessens the need for such a work, as if to invalidate the book that the editors are by this time writing. Yet the dispute is much more than wrangling over the production of an authorized biography: as both the preface and the introduction note, the versions of the poems contained in Smith’s essays have been doctored to conform to the ‘definitive’ versions in Collected Poems. MacGibbon goes as far as calling them ‘Stevie’s definitive versions’, when even a cursory examination of MacGibbon’s editorial technique makes this description contentious.36 Critics inevitably picked up on this discrepancy, with Michael Horowitz in Literary Review expressing both ignorance at the extent to which her poems had been ‘posthumously “standardised”’ and deep scepticism at the motivation behind it, finding it ‘bureaucratic’, ‘heavyhanded’, ‘cloth-eared’, and ‘most un-Stevieish’.37 The competing ‘editions’ of her work were less a sign of authorial indecision than an attempt to re-illuminate a poem by its particular setting. Owing to the difficulty of obtaining many of these ‘undoctored’ versions, Horowitz’s critique has never been followed up; by returning to Smith’s essays and stories in the context of their original publication, the extent of this posthumous ‘standardisation’ becomes more apparent. ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, Smith’s most frequently anthologized poem, was first published in book form in the eponymous 1957 collection. Yet it had been published twice before: firstly in The Observer in August 1954,38 and again in 1956 in an essay entitled ‘Too Tired for Words’, which appeared in Medical World. The essay, when reprinted in Me Again, contains the full ‘definitive’ text of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ as it appears in the 1957 collection:

34

Barbera and McBrien (eds), Me Again, 1. Ibid. x. Ibid. 37 Horowitz, ‘Stevie Smith Revisited: Part Two’, 24. 38 See Barbera and McBrien, Stevie, 186–7, who reveal the poem was originally written for Punch magazine but first published in The Observer (29 August 1954), 8. 35 36

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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. (CP 303)

Here is the earlier version of the poem as it appeared in Medical World: 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’.39

In a poem that relies so heavily for its effects on its various speaking voices, the addition of inverted commas constitutes a significant substantive variant. Whereas in the 1957 version of the poem, the speaker in the last stanza is ambiguous, the punctuation in the earlier version suggests that the drowning man utters the closing lines from beyond the grave. Perhaps then, these are changes for the better; certainly Smith chose the 1957 version of the poem for inclusion in her Selected Poems (1962). Her first published version of the poem in The Observer is also closer to the Collected Poems text, although ‘I was much further out’ is there preceded by a comma, rather than a colon, lessening the sense that the 39

591.

Stevie Smith, ‘Too Tired for Words’, Medical World 85 (December 1956), 588–96,

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third and fourth lines are the man’s reported speech.40 Yet an alternative way of punctuating the four most famous words that Smith ever wrote does seem a variant worthy of documentation. In offering an alternative interpretative strategy for a much-discussed poem, the 1956 version deserves more than discarding. However, rather than allowing for a range of different editorial approaches to these multiple versions, MacGibbon polices the editorship of others, determined not only to establish the definitive Stevie Smith but to challenge those who would do otherwise. Barbera and McBrien’s publication of a Smith bibliography with Helen Bajan in 1987 continued to defy MacGibbon’s control with the huge breadth of material it covered, listing all known reviews, published works, recordings, films, or critical pieces on her work.41 Yet, perhaps inevitably, all further publications by the scholars (as by MacGibbon) retained a sense of antagonism. Even as late as 1990, when MacGibbon was in his eighties, he inserted a new personal memoir into the reprint of Smith’s sketchbook, Some Are More Human Than Others, as if to further invalidate any other biographical work by Barbera and McBrien. He also included a facsimile of an original manuscript by Smith on a postcard she sent to him, and closed the book with ‘Come Death (2)’, the poem she mentioned on her deathbed, as if determined to have the last word. Whatever was at stake in the conflicting editorial aims of MacGibbon, McBrien, and Barbera, it was rarely a battle that seemed to elucidate or do justice to the writer it so heavily contested. The Faber selection edited by Hermione Lee in 1983 brought scholarly detachment and editorial clarity to the growing shelf of Smith collections. It was also the first to identify its audience, announcing itself as an edition ‘designed especially for students but also for the general reader’.42 This umbrella term allowed Lee flexibility in her editing: the problems of intertextuality that dogged Me Again are here fully referenced as a point of scholarly interest, the endnotes signposting other versions of poems as they appear in their various different forms. This is also a selection keen to establish Smith’s credentials as a serious subject of academic study—the short prose selections from Over the 40 The only other textual variant is the absence of the comma after the opening ‘Oh’ of the final stanza, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, The Observer (29 August 1954), 8. 41 Jack Barbera, William McBrien, and Helen Bajan, Stevie Smith: A Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987). 42 Stevie Smith: A Selection, back cover.

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Frontier emphasize the political debates within the novel rather than its fantastical elements, inviting the text into canons of postcolonial writing or war literature.43 It is noticeable, too, how many of Smith’s drawings she reinstates in comparison to MacGibbon’s Selected Poems (1978), offering us a writer who doesn’t need to be tidied up to gain academic canonization. Yet Lee, by making her purpose and presence known, becomes the first posthumous editor to attract widespread negative criticism at the stage of initial publication. Horowitz’s vociferous attack finds the selection ‘pedantically arranged’, ‘inappropriately laboured’, and hampered by explanatory notes which appear to target an ‘ill-read, semiliterate and non-British readership’.44 The tone of the article makes it clear that the very idea of a scholarly edition of Smith’s work is, for Horowitz, untenable. Smith’s scorn for academia apparently disqualifies her editor from being anything other than a silent and invisible figure. Similarly, Derek Stanford talks of Lee attempting to ‘winkle out’ the ethical element of Smith’s work, describing her somewhat mockheroically as the ‘hierophant’ to the writer.45 Whilst the TLS commends the selection,46 the hostile reaction it generates in many corners of the British press suggests a reading public with entrenched ideas about what sort of writer merits a critical edition. The desire to continue viewing Smith’s work as eccentric and haphazard overrides the need for a more serious assessment. The reluctance to adopt Smith as an academic subject seems to come not just from within the academy but from outside it. Two 1990s selections from either side of the Atlantic suggest the possibility of selling Smith to new, ever more clearly defined, target audiences. Smith the sparkling humorist is pushed to the fore in the New Directions’ book, A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith: Selected Short Prose (1995). The title in this context seems severed from the irony with which Smith used it in her eponymous short 43 This is an invitation which subsequent critics have followed. See, for example, Adam Piette, ‘Travel Writing and the Imperial Subject in 1930s Prose: Waugh, Bowen, Smith, and Orwell’, in Kristi Siegel (ed.), Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle and Displacement (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 53–66, or Phyllis Lassner’s British Women Writers of the Second World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 44 Horowitz, ‘Leftward Ho!’, 32. 45 Derek Stanford, ‘Poetry Review’, Books and Bookmen (October 1983), 28. 46 Vicki Feaver, ‘Alarming Domesticities’, Times Literary Supplement (5 August 1983), 840. Hereafter TLS.

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story, which describes a dinner party interrupted by a wartime bomb raid. The volume makes a point of not including the story itself, as if to deny its readers access to the original context of the phrase. The slim volume, with its tasteful geometric design, promises urbane comedy and ‘deadly sophistication’ on its back cover blurb, heralding the British answer to Dorothy Parker. The drawing used to illustrate the front cover shows a thin and gamine woman wearing a short skirt, one of Smith’s few sketches in which the bodily proportions of the figure conform to the standards of the catwalk. Yet, with just as little intervention on the part of the publishers, Smith was being sold in Britain four years later as a children’s author via Faber’s Our Bog is Dood: Selected Poems for Young Readers (1999).47 Here, the bright design and reliance on her drawings reposition her output in the light of recent successes such as Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, published by Faber the previous year.48 Gothic grotesque and whimsy are hinted at in the preface by Jane Weaver, which introduces poems about ‘a galloping cat, a frog prince, a girl who possesses a magically transforming hat and a parent who may have witnessed a dreadful crime’.49 If the selection seems a pertinent tribute to an author who prepared an edition of children’s verse so challenging that subsequent reissues removed the word children from the title altogether,50 its stark contrast to the New Directions volume suggests a disarmingly malleable author. The most recent edition of her work retains a sense of anxiety about the posthumous promulgation of her poetry. Stevie: A Motley Selection of her Poems by John Horder and Chris Saunders (2002) makes the act of compilation into a reflexive meditation on its own selection process. The small A5 23-page pamphlet with its plain grey cover is presumably designed for the enthusiast or the scholar rather than the general reading public. Yet if its audience is small, its aims are bold: the inclusion of the editors’ names in the title ensures that no claims are being made to being definitive, impartial, or invisible. The collection is divided into two discrete sections headed by each editor’s name, emphasizing the sense we are reading two individuals’ versions of Smith, and the whole work is underlined by the closing ‘Envoi: to Stevie’s future biographers’. Here, 47 The Faber website recommends this work for 8–11 year olds: http://www.faber.co.uk, accessed 1 March 2004. 48 Tim Burton, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy (London: Faber, 1998). 49 Our Bog is Dood: Selected Poems for Young Readers (London: Faber, 1999), 3. 50 The Batsford Book of Children’s Verse was compiled by Smith in 1958, but was reissued as Favourite Verse by the Chancellor Press in 1970 (see Bibliography).

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Horder attacks the ‘immaculate biographer’ Frances Spalding and the ‘psychologically pig ignorant American duo, Tweedledum and Tweedledum’ (Jack Barbera and William McBrien) and advises all future biographers to read The Drama of Being a Child by the American psychologist Alice Miller.51 He argues for the work of the child psychologist as illustrative of the underlying biographical theme of Smith’s poetry—‘the three-year-old touch-deprived child who tyrannised Stevie’s entire life until the day she died’. For Horder, Smith’s most important poem becomes ‘To Carry the Child’, a piece that captures the misery of the stunted adult who must ‘peer outside of his prison room’ (CP 436). It is one omitted by MacGibbon for the Selected Poems. Horder uses his selection to bolster his thematic supposition, and consequently we read these poems in a sharply defined ‘contexture’.52 Everywhere we see maternal rejection (‘The Sad Heart’, CP 184), the instability of the family structure (‘Tenuous and Precarious’, CP 408), and the emotionally damaged child (‘One of Many’, CP 101), often in specifically psychological terms. The theme carries over into Chris Saunders’ selection, where ‘Bog-Face’ (CP 171) becomes a sadistic dialogue between mother and child and the subject of ‘I Do Not Speak’ (CP 57) becomes a victim of early neglect. The overwhelming persuasiveness of Horder and Saunders’ argument-through-selection prompts its readers to question the motives behind the editors’ choices and, more importantly, to question the motives behind previous editors’ choices. The sense that Smith has been consistently misrepresented through publication and criticism is reflected throughout the book. Repeating a poem in a selection is perhaps the most obvious way of urging readers to attend to the arrangement of an edition. Horder, pertinently, has the poem ‘How Far Can You Press a Poet?’ at both the beginning and end of his 14-poem ‘cycle’. Here is the poem in full: How far can you press a poet? To the last limit and he’ll not show it And one step further and he’s dead And his death is upon your head. (CP 23) 51 Stevie: A Motley Selection, 22. See Alice Miller, The Drama of Being a Child (London: Virago, 1987). 52 A term used by Neil Fraistat to refer the context of poems in their selection, detailed in his introduction to Neil Fraistat (ed.), Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 4.

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In this re-emphasized context, the verb ‘press’ in the title and first line of the poem carries a strong sense of the noun (the printing press) transfigured back into a verb. The collection manipulates the poem’s sense so that instead of suggesting the frailty of the poet figure in the question ‘How Far Can You Press a Poet?’, the piece specifically elucidates the poetical fatigue produced by reprinting and republishing. How many more times can we include ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ in a verse anthology before Smith’s poetic legacy is completely disfigured, the selection seems to ask. Smith’s own poetic voice is resurrected here to provide a comment on her texts from beyond the grave. The closing envoy, with its critical suggestions and elevation of one work above all the others in Smith’s corpus, does not provide a final answer to the poem’s interrogative. But Smith’s own involvement with her published texts may help to reframe the question. Could the editor’s act of interpretation, an individualized reading of Smith that wrests her from a particular context, be simply a continuing collaboration with a writer who inscribed editorial mutability into her work itself? Might the arbitrary vicissitudes of posthumous publishing be sheltered by the leaky umbrella of an idiosyncratic and inconsistent authorial strategy? Roger Chartier has argued that authors do not write books, but rather ‘texts which become objects copied, handwritten, etched, printed, and today computerized’.53 Yet Smith’s first printed ‘text’ insists on its status as a book from its opening paragraph.54 Her publishing history offers further gestures of defiance. Throughout her life, Smith insisted on publishing her work in a form that made her own editorial input essential to the finished product. Whatever her apparent uncertainty might have been about particular lines in her verse, her determination to couple her poems with drawings in every volume placed Smith herself squarely between her work and posterity, rather than any editor or publisher.55 A passage towards the end of Novel on Yellow Paper insists on ‘the importance of selecting all the time and discarding as the years go on, making yourself into this sort of a very definite person’ (183), yet 53

Roger Chartier, ‘Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader’, Diacritics 22(2) (1992), 49–61, 57. 54 See Novel on Yellow Paper (9): ‘Beginning this book (not as they say “book” in our trade—they mean magazine)’. 55 See Wendy Steiner’s The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (London: University of Chicago, 1982), which argues that ‘illustrations reveal the central contrast between the teleological wholeness of the text and the mere additive structure of its material vehicle, the book’ (143).

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the tension between ‘sort of ’ and ‘definite’ enacts Smith’s own conflicted approaches to her work. If she insisted on authorial control, she also treated her published texts as decidedly provisional: she amended poems in her own and friends’ editions,56 cut out drawings from published texts for subsequent collections,57 changed lines of poems depending on her audience,58 and even wrote her poems on the pages of magazines that had rejected her work.59 Her popular readings of her work during the 1960s were the final summation of this authority; her introductions to her poems and her off-kilter musical settings gave her the opportunity to continually reinvent her work, each time reclaiming narrative and interpretative integrity. Only in an anxiously deleted passage from The Holiday does Smith ever question the efficacy of an authorial strategy that relies on her continued presence for the successful dissemination of her work. Discussing her sung poems, her protagonist Celia confesses: oh, how these tunes bother me, how can I get them written down, and if I do not do that, when I am dead who will know how they should be sung?60

Alongside this interventionist and mercurial attitude to her printed texts came her steely determination to manage the mechanics of her own literary career. Her impatience for mediators when negotiating permission fees and reprinting rights is a constant throughout her correspondence; her withering objection to John Guest—‘I dont really see what an agent can do that we (you, me, and the copyright department) cant’ [sic]—a typical pronouncement.61 Her practical grasp of the publishing industry and literary climate led her friend Olivia Manning to declare 56 See for example her copy of Mother, What Is Man which details inspirations for some of her poems and notes which have been set to music in a scrawled subtitle, now in UT. 57 See her copy of The Frog Prince, which has illustrations cut out that have been ‘sent to Knopf publishers’, as her own annotation records, now in UT. 58 She creates two versions of her poem ‘Donkey’ when it is requested for a children’s verse anthology by Anthony Thwaite; Smith’s letter to Thwaite dated 16 June 1969 asserts ‘the “I aspire to be broken up” ending wasn’t so good as the other one—for children’, UT. 59 She writes her poem ‘Sappho’ onto an empty space into her copy of Agenda 4 (Autumn 1960) below Peter Whigam’s ‘Seven Translations from Sappho’, 25. Smith’s act of defacement might be read as a defiant dialogue with Sappho herself, a poet typified by blank spaces and erasures. 60 The Holiday, manuscript copy, UT. See also her letter to Sally Chilver detailing how carefully she notated the transcribed tunes for her poems ‘so that nothing should get rubbed off or smudged [ . . . ] I am still haunted by the missed-shot tunes I seem to hear and cannot always reproduce by singing’ (2 January 1948, 2:2:5). 61 Stevie Smith to John Guest, 20 November 1969, UT.

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she ‘could make a fortune as a literary agent’.62 These skills were developed early on in her career and never deserted her. Even in the mid-1930s, she was tenacious enough to set a royalty level for her first novel dismissed by her publishers as ‘quite impossible’.63 Elsewhere, she advises a young poet to publish in journals before seeking book publication, enabling them to sell ‘twice over—to say nothing of the anthologies’.64 Her continued championing of books by her friends and those she read for publishers testified to her shrewd and usually accurate assessment of a book’s probable market. Frequently, her interest in the commercial possibilities of her work conflicted with, and often overrode, her own sense of its merits and literary qualities. When attempting to secure a lucrative deal that would see the publication of The Holiday in the USA, Smith only sends her prospective American publishers reviews of the novel that present it as a commercial viability, even if they are the ones that most misunderstand the novel’s themes and concerns. ‘If you can’t sell straight, sell sexy’, is Smith’s insistence.65 Her own desire to sell ‘twice over’ often explains the multiple editions of her poems, which were sometimes subject to minor changes to allow republication without paying permission fees.66 If her involvement in the publication of her work suggests her need for authorial control, her attitude towards the selling of her work sees her happy to partially loosen the reigns in order to ensure financial success.67 Would

62

Olivia Manning to Stevie Smith, 25 September 1942, UT. ‘What a little tiger you are—not a shark, but a tiger, and since you have the attractiveness of that beast, we have to give in to you every time. The scale of the royalties you suggest is quite impossible [ . . . ] but since you press it, we will revise the royalty scale’ (Rupert Hart-Davis to Stevie Smith, 30 April 1937, UT). 64 Stevie Smith to Reginald Clark, undated, photocopy, UT. 65 Stevie Smith to Elizabeth Knopf, 27 April 1949, UT. Smith is referring to a review by John Scott for Horizon, although it was never printed. 66 ‘Pretty Baby’ was included in the American collection The Best Beast (New York: Knopf, 1969) as a new poem, Smith arguing that its previous appearance in The Sunday Times on 22 December 1968 could be discounted as it was printed with the title ‘Sweet Baby’. Her tactic came unstuck with her realization that she had also published it in Queen under the title ‘Pretty Baby’, who originally commissioned the poem for their 1968 Christmas edition. An anxious annotation on a proof of the poem notes, ‘same title used unfortunately—a slip’, UT. 67 See Spalding, Stevie Smith, for a detailed discussion of Smith’s involvement in the promotion for her first book of poetry to be published in the USA (259). Although Smith and her publisher disagreed about the best way to market her in the States, a letter from Smith to James Laughlin agreed on the ‘desirability of selling her work’ (2 September 1963, UT). 63

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Smith perhaps then have welcomed attempts to repackage her work for subsequent generations of readers? Her publishing history begins, notoriously, with rejection. Ian Parsons from Chatto and Windus received a bulk of her poetry in the 1930s and advised her to ‘go away and write a novel and we will then think about the poems’.68 To his surprise she did exactly that. This anecdote, much mythologized by Smith and repeated in her two biographies and the play based on her life, casts her as a subservient subject to the publishers’ whim.69 Yet the novel produced under these conditions in fact subverts her publishers’ request, and coyly inserts poems into the text explaining that she wants the reader to ‘get the first look in’ (25). Her blocking tactic here allows the publisher no intrusion into the reader–writer relationship: she steps out from behind the edited work in order to restate her textual authority.70 The first manuscript of Novel on Yellow Paper was originally submitted to Jonathan Cape unpunctuated, Pompey’s thoughts running outside conventional syntax. At the publishers’ request, Smith added the requisite number of full stops and speech marks. Yet, once again, this seeming acceptance of their editorial suggestion is undermined by the insertion of a passage into the novel which lampoons her publishers’ assertions: And for my part I will try to punctuate this book to make it easy for you to read, and to break it up, with spaces for a pause, as the publisher has asked me to do. But this I find very extremely difficult. (39)

Here Smith parodically performs adherence to the editor whilst staking out in combative terms her objections to their decisions and emphasizing the personal compromises of her concessions. Her profession of enslavement also reveals more tacit editorial shifts in the text. In an early draft of Novel on Yellow Paper, she confesses that novelists flinch from representing life as it really is because ‘writers are a bit timid’.71 In the final version, the charge has been redirected to the

68 From a private letter from Stevie Smith to Hans Hausermann dated 17 October 1957, held at University of Neuchaˆtel, quoted in Spalding, Stevie Smith, 111. 69 See for example Barbera and McBrien, Stevie, 75, or Spalding, Stevie Smith, 111. 70 In a similar way, the poor sales for the book of drawings Some Are More Human Than Others prompted her to include drawings without accompanying poems in her collection The Frog Prince and Other Poems (1966), using the poetry book as a commercially viable expedient for her own artistic impulses. 71 Novel on Yellow Paper typescript, DP/156/1, Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull.

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publishers, their own commercial anxieties making them useful scapegoats (152). By acknowledging the shadowy figures that have at least partial ownership of the text, Smith obfuscates her own responsibility for her work. The devices used in her first novel to perform this submission become a mask that Smith was to adopt and discard throughout her career. By the time of The Holiday, the poems Smith inserts to get ‘off [her] hands’72 are included as a way of shaping their interpretation, disguising her hermeneutic intrusion behind the pose of the editorially compromised author.73 Elsewhere, her aggrieved postures give way to apparent indifference. On a draft copy of her poem ‘The Best Beast’, she records her ambivalent reaction to her American publisher’s decision to use the poem’s title for her first US collection: ‘Good title? Rather coy?? Yes? No? Too weak to care!’74 Here she is apparently debilitated by the necessity of making a definite choice. In an interview given in the last few years of her life, Smith continued to insist on her own uncertainty about published versions of her work: I’m terribly undecided—I don’t think there was another poet who was so nervous about their work [ . . . ] there isn’t an editor in London who hasn’t been asked to collaborate with me. ‘I enclose two last verses. Which do you think is the better?’75

Here, once again, Smith presents herself as the dithering poet-indistress. Yet her dependence on a ‘collaboration’ with an editor in fact points up her refusal to be bound by their decisions. Each editorial exchange becomes collaborative because Smith always makes her presence felt. In her own example, she offers up two alternative versions for the ending of a poem and asks the editor to decide which one is more appropriate. Yet this insistence that the editor, her first reader, must ‘choose’ how her poem ends casts them by necessity as the fixer of her work. They become the chooser that Smith is then at liberty to lambast and ridicule.

72

See Novel on Yellow Paper (23). See Smith’s interpretative framing of poems such as ‘Fuite D’Enfance’, ‘Voices against England in the Night’, ‘The Castle’, and ‘Wretched Woman’ in The Holiday (128–9, 161–2, 174–5, 190). 74 Draft of ‘The Best Beast’, UT. 75 John Gale, ‘Death is a poem to Stevie Smith’, The Observer (9 November 1969), 21. 73

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An excised portion of a radio interview from the 1960s reveals that preparing poems for a published text was in fact a crucial stage in Smith’s own creative process: this delightful moment comes, which is the moment that I like best, in fact the only moment I really like, when a book of poems is going to be published and you choose the right drawing for the poem and you have all these drawings on the floor, on the table, and you think well that one will do and that one and then when you’re looking one of the drawings will often inspire another poem, then you write another poem.76

Smith’s uncertainty about finalizing the forms and structures of her poems is then a public mask for a very intimate creative act. The ‘threat’ of finality is transmuted into ‘the only moment [Smith] really likes’. The need for a definitive version of her poems prompts a process of deferring and delaying. Her poetic texts, as they hover between private words and public works, generate further poems and drawings, each new poem or drawing making the task of finality more impossible. Yet, paradoxically, her art relies on this deadline for closure, her own act of composition incited by the demands of her publishers. Her final compiling process not only produces a new range of works but keeps the transactions between the poems and drawings in a state of flux. Smith’s reluctance to settle on any particular arrangement of her poems, far from betraying a general indifference to the published text, indicates the centrality of the compiling and editing process to the genesis of her work.77 By following one poem from composition through publication and performance, we can begin to see how the tensions between the provisional and definitive dictated the form and content of Smith’s poetry.78 The full text of Smith’s poem ‘Pearl’ as it appears in The Frog Prince and Collected Poems is as follows: Pearl To an American lady poet committing suicide because of not being appreciated enough. 76

From a tape-recording of an interview with Jonathan Williams, 13 September 1963, UT. 77 The importance of juxtaposition in Smith’s poems and illustrations is discussed more fully in Chapter 6. 78 Comparing various published versions of Smith’s poetry is an important and largely neglected aspect of interpreting her work. Owing to the constraints of space, this chapter focuses primarily on unpublished drafts and performance variants of her poems rather than the differences between her poems in her novels and poetry collections.

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Brought to Book Then cried the American poet where she lay supine: ‘My name is Purrel; I was caast before swine.’ (CP 457)

In both published editions, the poem is flanked by two illustrations, one of a sexually androgynous figure lying on a hill at sunset, the other of a woman throwing herself into a river. These illustrations and the poem’s subtitle seem to highlight the dual reference points of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, the poem’s first publication date making both allusions historically feasible. Yet the published version of the text is neither the first nor the final incarnation of the poem—the two pictures that surround the text may dwarf it in size but are unable to tether it to the printed page. The first surviving version of the poem appears in one of Smith’s manuscript notebooks from the late 1950s, suggesting that the reference to Plath, if emphasized by Smith at the time of the poem’s eventual publication, was only a later addition to a tissue of possible interpretations of the work. Although the main body of the poem is the same as the printed version, Smith’s framing context entirely rewrites its subject. Here, the subtitle of the poem announces it as ‘a self-portrait in American disguise’,79 making the poem very specifically about Smith’s own suicide attempt in the early 1950s. The name she gives to the poet, Pearl, is shared by the fictional representation of her sister in The Holiday, another indication that Smith is interested in the poem as refracted self-portrait. This first subtitle is candid not only about its subject but also the author’s attempt to conceal it. It is a self-confessed ‘disguise’. The humorous phonetics of Pearl’s voice become starkly pitiful when juxtaposed with the authorial commentary, an admission of the poet’s need for personae and masks in order to write the self.80 In later drafts of the poem, Smith amends the subtitle to ‘a self-portrait in a dreary disguise’. Here the emphasis shifts away from Smith’s conscious self-concealment and instead constructs a new self-deprecating veil. The comic bathos of ‘dreary’ suggests morbid humour rather than a desperate confessional of neglect. It makes fun of its own creator, rather than revealing their fear of intimate contact with their reader on the page. 79

From a manuscript notebook, UT (Smith’s emphasis). Here I follow Martin Pumphrey’s reading of her poetry in his influential article ‘Play, Fantasy, and Strange Laughter: Stevie Smith’s Uncomfortable Poetry’, Critical Quarterly 28(3) (August 1986), 85–96, which suggests that ‘the elusive “self ” of the poems is not to be found in any one mask or image but rather, obliquely implied, in the endless play of construction and deconstruction the poems demonstrate’ (95). 80

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Over a series of subsequent drafts appearing at intervals throughout the same notebook, Smith reworks the title to shift the poem from selfportrait to envoy. In the third version, the subtitle of the poem is removed, and is reabsorbed into the main title itself, becoming ‘Pearl: Epitaph for an American Poetess committing suicide’. Here the occasional title reframes it as a parody less of the poem’s subject than the kind of poetic tributes she might inspire. Not only has the subject’s nationality become an identity rather than a disguise, but the titular emphasis moves the reader’s focus away from what the subject represents to how it is being represented. The final version appearing in the notebook is titled ‘Pearl: lines on a failed American poetess committing suicide’. Perhaps having realized that the poem now reads as a parody of the poetic epitaph form itself rather than the poem’s subject, Smith removes the generic markers of the title and instead offers a frame for the poem which presents it as fragmentary and half-improvised. Through ever smaller changes, Smith continues to downplay the sense in which her poetry is a conscious form, making the most heavily revised version of her poem the one that communicates least about its tendency towards disguise or artifice. After the poem’s publication in 1966, Smith included it in many of the performances she gave before her death five years later. Yet, perhaps conscious of the poem now appearing as a cruel caricature of Sylvia Plath, Smith’s introductions attempt to mitigate the sense of the poem having a specific historical referent without opening up the work to biographical interpretation.81 Her first draft for an introduction to the poem depicts Pearl as a fictional character the performing Smith is about to bring onto the stage: Pearl, the American lady poet who comes next, thought she was not as appreciated as she should be, I have made her American as I want two syllables on Pearl, or something nearer than you get in English.82

81 This ambiguity has influenced modern readings: note Deryn Rees-Jones’s qualified suggestion that ‘we need not be blamed in supposing that the poem refers to Sylvia Plath, who died in 1963, and with whom she had a single but friendly correspondence [ . . . ] “Pearl” is a curious poem to write in memoriam, particularly in the light of Smith’s own preponderance for death’s seductive charm’ (‘ “Tirry-Lirry-Lirry All the Same”: The Poetry and Performance of Stevie Smith’, in Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets, (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 70–92, 83). Jack Barbera and William McBrien speculate: ‘it is tempting to surmise that the undated holograph of Stevie’s poem “Mabel”, which is the only copy we know to exist, was written after Stevie heard of Sylvia Plath’s death’ (Me Again, 6). 82 ‘Pearl’ introduction draft, UT.

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Here, Smith makes clear that the subject’s nationality is a phonic necessity rather than an indication of a real-life referent. Yet the framing device reintroduces the sense that Smith has transformed her original subject, raising questions about the primary source for the work. The second draft for the introduction (and one that Smith used when performing the poem at the Edinburgh Festival and readings throughout 1969 and 1970) simply removes the information that Smith has ‘made her American’, entirely eliminating the sense that Smith has reworked the poem from a self-portrait into a mask.83 The published version of ‘Pearl’ is then neither a definitive nor an accidental text. It is, in essence, a highly wrought compromise; sufficiently coded to prevent absolute biographical interpretation, yet sufficiently open-ended to provide Smith subsequent opportunities for further reframing and repositioning. Her revisions not only highlight her understanding of how paratextual aspects of a work contribute to subsequent interpretation, but suggest how she resisted establishing an absolute version of her work whilst still committing herself to the necessity of a definitive text. Proofs and performance drafts of other poems support the sense of Smith as drawing attention to pre- and post-publication as the states that most inform the medial text itself. Her last-minute changes to galley proofs often cause minimal typographical disruption whilst having major interpretative consequences for her texts. The lonely girl desperate for release in Smith’s 1950 poem ‘Do Take Muriel Out’ (CP 250) is finally led off by a ‘deceiver’ rather than, as the galley proof had it, a ‘believer’.84 The speaker in ‘Fish, Fish’ (CP 453) who, at proof stage, ends up waiting ‘happy’ is, in the published text, waiting ‘impatiently’.85 The proofs of her poem ‘Angel Face’ (CP 488) dither over whether the poem’s subject will ‘cover me’ or ‘smother me’.86 The addressee of ‘I Rode with My Darling . . .’ (CP 260) rides off ‘thoughtfully’ at proof stage, only for his pensiveness to be later substituted for ‘angrily’.87 Smith’s homomorphic substitutions highlight the fissure between typographical and interpretative stability, her editorial pen delighting in changes that will barely register with typesetters 83 84 85 86 87

‘Pearl’ introduction draft, UT. Poem draft of ‘Do Take Muriel Out’, UT. Poem draft of ‘Fish, Fish’, UT. Poem drafts of ‘Angel Face’, UT. Poem draft of ‘I Rode With My Darling . . . ’, UT.

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but will often profoundly alter the reading of a poem. Mirroring the sway of her vacillating texts themselves, her revisions hover between nervous rewritings and playful paragrams. Other reworkings suggest Smith again trying to avoid biographical and historical specificity. Her bluntly allegorical poem ‘The Crown of Gold’ (CP 506) imagines her novel The Holiday as a child compromised by the attentions of a ‘German-Jewish man’ who offers it praise (‘a crown of affection’) rather than publication (‘a crown of gold’). The poem refers to her friend Leo Kahn, who attempted to publish her novel only to withdraw his offer when his relative inexperience of the publishing industry led him into financial difficulties.88 The explanation behind this otherwise puzzling narrative is given in the draft subtitle ‘Messrs. Kahn and Ullstein and How Difficult it was to get The Holiday published’. By the second draft Smith anxiously revises a character assassination into a fond tribute, the subtitle becoming a dedication ‘to Leo Kahn, who gave me back the galley proofs to take to Chapman and Hall’.89 By book publication, the poem’s subtitle is ‘an English writer in search of an established English publisher’, modifying the poem from personal attack to an obscure indictment of the publishing industry. Smith here risks readerly unintelligibility rather than offering an incriminating framework for interpreting the poem. Repeat publication also offered Smith the chance to rework the thematic context of her work. Her first publication of ‘The Word’ in The Observer presents itself as a religious poem, as if hoping to capitalize on the newspaper audience created by her iconoclastic Whitsun poem ‘How Do You See?’, which had been printed in The Guardian three years earlier to much controversy.90 Its epigraph, taken from the Book of Common Prayer, reads ‘O Lord, open thou our lips. And our mouths shall show forth thy praise’. The poetic text is in direct dialogue with this subtitle, beginning: My heart leaps up with streams of praise, My lips tell of drouth; (CP 516)

88

For a full description of their relationship, see Spalding, Stevie Smith, 191. See poem draft of ‘The Crown of Gold’, UT. ‘How Do You See?’, The Guardian (16 May 1964), 7. For details of the letters published in response to the poem, see Barbera and McBrien, Stevie, 227, and Michael Tatham, ‘That One Must Speak Lightly’, in Sanford Sternlicht (ed.), In Search of Stevie Smith (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 132–46. 89 90

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Yet by the poem’s publication in Scorpion, the epigraph has been removed, and ‘joy’ is substituted for praise.91 Printed with an illustration of a bewildered-looking girl with a bow in her hair, the poem shifts its lexical field to become a refracted self-portrait. The speaker’s admission that ‘I fear the Word, to speak or write it down’ is transmuted from an anxiety about biblical interpretation to a meditation on the difficulty of poetic self-expression. All readings of this poem have followed the interpretative prompts of the book version, casting Smith as a writer ambivalent about communication.92 Yet if the poem’s speaker concludes the ‘fear’ of misinterpretation has ‘turned my joy into a frown’, Smith herself allays such fears: by offering two competing versions of one poem, she mitigates the threat of interpretative fixity. Smith understood in a very practical sense how far the mechanics of publishing might allow her to transfigure her work, yet her strategies relied less on authorial control than methods of proliferation, dilution, and alteration, turning her verbal self-portraits ‘outwards, upon imaginary personages’.93 Consequently, the printed text is coded and mistranslated both visually and verbally, leaving the reader once again to doubt its authenticity. Far from being reticent or indifferent to how her work was presented, Smith employed a number of techniques to keep the printed text as a thing in flux, an unstable body delineating its own fallibility. Poetry performances allowed her yet another opportunity to undermine her published texts. First-hand accounts of her recitals usually focus on her dirge-like singing and startling dress.94 Yet the bewildering visual and musical prompts offered by Smith to her beguiled audience conceal the fact that she enacted her most strident disorientation through the introductions to her poems themselves.95

91

Here Smith’s posthumous editors followed her proof draft of the poem, UT. See, for example, Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which argues the poem ‘enforces and defies the high modernist dismissal of Romantic emotional spontaneity’ (114). 93 From Smith’s description of her poetic process in an introduction draft for ‘Yes, I Know’, UT. See CP 458. 94 See, for example, Alan Brownjohn, ‘A Few More Steps’, Scotsman 27 (July 1963), 2; Karl Miller, ‘London Diary’, New Statesman 66 (26 July 1963), 102. 95 Here I differ from Laura Severin, who interprets Smith’s performances without mentioning her introductions in Poetry off the Page: Twentieth-Century British Women Poets in Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). In disregarding Smith’s framing contexts, Severin is able to argue Smith’s sequence of poems read during the 1965 Edinburgh Festival ‘undermine concepts of nation and empire’ (61). 92

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Her poem ‘The Persian’ is an enigmatic portrait of a lonely woman named Agnes who befriends her gas fire, unsure whether she is seeking death or companionship: The gas fire Seemed quite a friend Such a funny little humming noise it made And it had a name, too, carved on it you know, ‘The Persian’. The Persian! Ha ha ha; ha ha. Now Agnes, pull yourself together. You and your friends. (CP 430)

It invites comparison with Smith’s jokingly morbid comment to John Guest in a letter from 1969, explaining that she ‘keeps casting loving looks at the gas oven, if only it were more up-to-date, poor darling, something with flashing chromium [ . . . ] as it is (dated about 1911 I shd. think) I haven’t the heart’.96 Her introductions for performances of the poem in the 1960s offer her audience the same teasing biographical interpretative possibility: Here is a lady who had only her gas fire for a friend. It was an old-fashioned make of gas-fire called ‘The Persian’ with a zorostin design in wrought iron. I have one in my room at home.97

Both in Smith’s ‘here is’ and in her partial identification with the poem’s subject, we find her pledging authorial proximity to Agnes. The poem’s request to ‘pull yourself together’ is mirrored in her introduction’s melding of author and subject. Yet at subsequent performances, Smith is not only careful to tell her audience she ‘had one in her room at home—new one now’, but also amends the tense of the poem to distance herself further from its subject. Whilst the printed text of ‘The Persian’ offers us ‘such a funny noise it makes’ of the gas fire, an observational comment prompting a further linking between Smith and Agnes, later performances change the verb to ‘made’, recasting Smith as a distant narrator rather than onlooking double to the suicidal girl she describes.98 Whilst her letter to John Guest unravels this construction, with Smith’s purchase of a ‘new’ gas oven bringing her closer to suicide 96 97 98

Stevie Smith to John Guest, 15 May 1969, from a photocopy, UT. Introduction note for ‘“The Persian”’, UT. Introduction note and text for ‘“The Persian”’ dated 1970, UT.

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rather than further from it, her public presentation of the poem ensures her sufficient demarcation from her isolated subject. Anthony Thwaite has written of Smith’s performances that ‘her readings became her poems’, suggesting not only that they offered a complementary addition to her printed texts but that, in some sense, they acted as aggressive substitutes.99 Hoping to ‘score’ at the reading by ‘explain[ing]’ her work,100 she often rewrites what she perceives as a failure by casting herself as the poetic experimenter. The printed text of ‘Was It Not Curious?’ (CP 392) begins by highlighting the hypocrisy of St. Augustine, who was prompted by the sight of heathen English slave children in Rome to send Christian missionaries to Britain. She points out that his evangelizing mission never found fault with the slave trade itself. Having relied on the joking half-rhymes of Au´gustin/children/ thing to propel the poem forward, the final stanza reveals their apparently expedient phonics have been in vain: Was it not curious of Gregory Rather more than of Au´gustin? It was not curious so much As it was wicked of them. (ll. 13–16)

The poem, by finally confessing to its misattribution of Gregory the Great’s words to St. Augustine, undermines its sacrifice of sense for sound. The integrity of its rhyme scheme throughout the first three stanzas has been compromised by the factual necessity of the subject’s name. Yet it is the name itself, rather than all its approximate rhymes, that is ultimately incorrect. The ‘curious’ interrogative of the poem’s title then relates not to the inherent contradiction in Gregory’s words but in the poem itself. Did Smith begin writing it aware of her misidentification? Is the poem attempting to weigh up history, fiction, and misattribution, or is it a flawed verse further compromised by its author’s self-confessed inaccuracies? Smith’s introduction for the poem underlines, rather than answers, this interpretative quandary:

99 Anthony Thwaite, Poetry Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry 1960–1984 (London: Longman, 1985), 26. 100 See her letter to Jack Lambert dated 4 February 1968, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS. Eng, c.2329, fol. 32: ‘Where one scores at poetry readings is that one can explain the poem.’

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There is a poem here, which I am not quite sure is allowable, but the soft missed rhymes seduce me so much I will read it to you. I began it carelessly forgetting it was Gregory not Augustine who said Non Angli sed Angeli.101

The opening of this introduction describes the poem as an alreadywritten object. It lies before its author–performer, daring them to read it against their will. Its formal achievements are without any mediating agency, its ‘soft missed rhymes’ a self-evident attribute of the poem rather than the work of an unseen creator. The incursion of the writer’s ‘I’ in the second sentence seemingly undoes this sense of the seductive, authorless verse. Yet if Smith’s admission that she ‘began it carelessly’ apparently wrests control back from the finished work, it invokes her only as a distracted, half-conscious presence. Consequently, the poem hovers between self-contained entity and consciously crafted product. These introductions which, as a contemporary reviewer noted, ‘were so carefully prepared that it was often difficult to discern where the poems began and ended’102 elide the position of the author outside and inside the text. From this liminal position, Smith could define the apparently throwaway ‘O Happy Dogs of England’ (CP 84) as a ‘political poem’,103 or insist that ‘Valuable’ (CP 447) explored a ‘religious theme’.104 She could equally present her poems as a series of authorless ‘positions’ or ‘situations’, sides of a debate the performer had no part in. She could argue that her poems were ‘about literary stresses and peculiar temptations writers have’,105 only to present herself as a committed existentialist poet in a subsequent performance.106 Whilst her tunes may have spun gently off-key, her verbal framing of her work permitted an unnoticed exoneration of her poetic technique, her introductions perfect pitches for the spoken poems themselves. The editorial 101 From her introduction to the poem, UT. The phrase, usually translated as ‘not Angles but Angels’, is synecdochic of Gregory’s visit to Rome and his subsequent evangelizing mission. For an account of Gregory’s life from the period, see Pierre Batiffol, Saint Gregory the Great, trans. John L. Stoddard (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1922). 102 Unsigned review, ‘Poet of the Year’, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald (26 July 1963), 16. 103 An introduction draft for ‘O Happy Dogs of England’, UT. 104 An introduction draft for ‘Valuable’, UT. 105 An introduction draft for ‘Voice from the Tomb (1)’, UT. See CP 461. 106 Here Smith upsets the model for performing modern poetry outlined in Balz Engler’s Reading and Listening: The Modes of Communicating Poetry and Their Influences on the Texts (Bern: Francke Verlag Bern, 1982). His thesis ignores the possibility that an author might capitalize on the ambiguities of a printed text to revise a poem through performance.

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discrepancies and interpretative contradictions of her posthumous publishing history are then perhaps best understood as a vindication of her own authorial strategy. The recent attempts to sell her work as everything from dinner-party satire to children’s verse seem in dialogue with her own reluctance to fix the form or frame for her writing. Whilst Smith’s poem brings the ‘choosers’ to book for their arbitrary selections, her own tacit involvement deflects the agency of her accusation. Throughout her career, Smith’s mixture of insistence and ambivalence ensured that her body of work, like her own authorial persona, invited a range of competing editions. Scorpion (1972), Smith’s final collection of poetry, was published the year after her death. As such, it is a quasi-posthumous text, hovering between the authorially chosen and the subsequently collated. Patric Dickinson’s introduction characterizes her poetic technique as ‘shrewd, naı¨ve, and devilishly clever, with a hint of God correcting the proofs’.107 If this image qualifies her talent with the implied intervention of a celestial editor, it also suggests the presence of the recently dead author looking over the shoulder of her executor. This ‘hint’ of an unidentified collaborator is picked up in a review of the volume by Douglas Dunn. For Dunn, Smith’s poetry is the result of yet another dare from beyond the grave, the consequence of ‘Thomas Hood, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll urging her to compile a Smith’s Own comic-cum-grotesque almanac of illustrated entertainments.’ She becomes a collator rather than a creator, an amanuensis constructing a treasury of dubious merit. Denying her textual authority becomes yet one more way of downplaying her poetic agency. Yet if reading Smith’s work is, for Dunn, ‘a task of sorting her authentic poems from a mass of quisquilliae’,108 casting us as the final editor of her messy collations, Smith’s own attitude to her published texts suggests our selections may be less the product of individual choice than implicit authorial instruction. 107 108

Stevie Smith, Scorpion and Other Poems (London: Longmans, 1972), 6. Douglas Dunn, ‘The Voice of Genteel Decay’, TLS (14 July 1972), 820.

4 Towards a Constructive Criticism of Stevie Smith When I was a student in the late 1950s, I picked up a second-hand copy of Novel on Yellow Paper from a bookstall in Cambridge Circus. I was entranced and fascinated. I discovered that the author, Stevie Smith, had also written several volumes of poetry.1 Frances Spalding first discovered Stevie Smith in Erin Pizzey’s bookshop in Caterham, Surrey, where as a teenager she came across the intriguing title Novel on Yellow Paper. On reaching university, she was dismayed to learn that its author was a cult figure [ . . . ]2 I remember one day picking up a copy of a faded blue book of poems from the thirties in Bertram Rosa’s bookshop in Vigo Street, London. I asked Arthur Uphill, who was tending the store: so who’s Stevie Smith?3

These three descriptions of first encounters with Stevie Smith (from the playwright who staged her life, the art historian who wrote her biography, and the writer who interviewed her in the 1970s) all emphasize an aspect of reading that literary criticism finds little space for: the serendipitous act of discovery. All three accounts are keen to stress the local detail—Frances Spalding and Jonathan Williams both locate exactly the bookshop where they first came across her work, and Hugh 1

Introduction to Hugh Whitemore, Stevie: A Play by Hugh Whitemore (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1977), 7. 2 Author biography on front page of Frances Spalding’s Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Faber, 1988). The ‘Critical’ is absent from the 2002 revised edition. 3 Jonathan Williams, ‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’, Parnassus (Spring/ Summer 1974), 105–27, repr. in Sanford Sternlicht (ed.), In Search of Stevie Smith (New York: Syracuse Press, 1991), 38–49, 38.

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Whitemore’s evocation of the bookstall in Cambridge Circus has a casual authenticity of its own. Williams even name-checks the bookseller Arthur Uphill, presenting himself as a regular in his shop, a genuine booklover. These testimonies are more than the fetishizing of that first teasing contact between author and reader. They work as character references, offering up the playwright, the biographer, and the interviewer as people qualified to discuss Smith’s work. And what is it that makes them so well suited to their positions? Spalding’s account holds the clue: her reported ‘dismay’ to learn of Smith’s cult status recovers an unquestioned truism about our conception of readers, writers, and critics. The reader who falls upon the writer anonymously, by chance, has a relationship with them at once more intimate and more integral than anything to be found in a critical anthology or a book club. To read ignorant of context, or prior to context (although the second-hand bookstall is in itself as pervasive a context as any other), is to read authentically. There is no small irony then that Whitemore’s look-what-I’ve-just-found introduction prefaces a work that would ensure many readers would come to know Stevie Smith as a character played by Glenda Jackson long before they would discover a book of her poetry.4 Hans Robert Jauss has argued that ‘the understanding of the first reader [of a text] will be sustained and enriched in a chain of reception from generation to generation’5. Yet this model of ongoing refinement and increasingly nuanced interpretation is problematized by Smith’s critical reception. The sense of her as an author who needs to be ‘rescued’ from literary criticism often finds its way into studies of her work. All three introductions by these writers stage a nostalgic and unattainable desire to return to the ‘first’ reading of Smith’s texts, mirroring Smith’s own wish to be able to read books again for the first time, to be the pioneer reader.6 They gesture to a reflexive reception history that would purport to give us a corpus entirely deformed by dismissive readings from contemporary 4 These three examples are typical of writing about Smith. See also Catherine A. Civello, Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith (Columbia: Camden House, 1997), which begins by assuring its readers ‘I first came to read Smith by accident in 1978’ (3). 5 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 20. 6 See Chapter 2’s discussion of Smith’s essay ‘How to Read Books’, where Smith reflects: ‘how much one would like to be able to read these books again for the first time’ (270).

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critics and subsequent well-intentioned correctives.7 It is just this assumption that I would like to challenge in this chapter. In doing so, I will not only uncover a constructed critical approach to Smith’s work but also suggest a more constructive way of writing about her oeuvre. Using her dust-jacket blurbs, interviews, and biographical notes, I will trace the repeated critical professions of interpretative adequacy back to Smith herself. I will begin, however, by outlining the kinds of critical responses that have shaped many of the debates around her work, debates often vainly struggling to answer Williams’ very same question, ‘so who’s Stevie Smith?’ The question of authorial identity has troubled critics since the publication of Novel on Yellow Paper in 1936. Despite Jonathan Cape’s huge advertising campaign in the same year to ‘make [the] name known’,8 Stevie Smith has remained a difficult sobriquet. Florence Margaret’s appropriation of not one pseudonym for her writing but two, through the moniker of Pompey Casmilus, suggests multiple layers of authorial veils that must be removed to reveal the writing subject.9 A typescript draft of Novel on Yellow Paper, which shows its protagonist’s name gradually being revised from ‘Miss Smith’ to ‘Miss Smart’ and then finally ‘Pompey Casmilus’, shows this double identity in the process of construction.10 Yet Pompey’s admission of ‘swashbuckling forgery’ (203) in her role as Phoebus Ullwater’s private secretary raises further speculation over the legality of her authorial signature. After the publication of Smith’s first novel, her publisher Jonathan Cape was flooded with letters along these lines: 7 See, for example, Hermione Lee’s introduction to Stevie Smith: A Selection (London: Faber, 1983), 18: ‘The suspicion that she is an overrated minor English comic writer is likely to persist.’ 8 Rupert Hart-Davis to Stevie Smith, 30 April 1937, UT: the letter reveals that Novel on Yellow Paper made a loss because ‘[Cape] spent a good deal on advertising, more than was economically practical—since we believed we should get it back in the end by making your name known’. 9 See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 2nd edn (London: Yale University Press, 2000), which considers ‘the fundamental alienation a woman (especially, perhaps, a woman poet) feels from her “own” name; it is not hers to risk, nor hers to publicize, not even hers to immortalize’ (555). 10 Novel on Yellow Paper typescript, DP/156/1, Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull. The published text mirrors this process with Pompey’s admissions that she was christened ‘Patience’ (20) and nicknamed ‘Patty’ (158) as a child, her description of a girl ‘christened Gladys’ who ‘got herself called Prunella’ (21), and her insistence that Miss Hogmanimy had ‘a name you would certainly want to get married out of ’ (124). Celia in The Holiday is called Patsy as a child, providing a nominal link between the characters (78).

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Who is Stevie Smith? From her photo in Now and Then, she seems to bear a slight facial resemblance to the Duchess of Windsor. Is she an Oxford graduate, or has she been ‘finished’ in Switzerland? And . . . dare I ask . . . how old is she? And was she christened Stevie or Smith?11

The fervent media speculation as to who this new writer might be—a column by her friend John Hayward in the New York Sun promises that ‘if I can find out anything about the new star I’ll let you know’12— makes her identity itself into a literary guessing-game, the obvious referent of the novel’s subtitle. Naomi Mitchison’s ‘fan-mail’ letter wonders whether Smith will be like ‘the you your readers cannot help imagining you to be’.13 It was a promotional strategy that both Smith and her publishers were keen to capitalize on, and Smith playfully extended to her publishers themselves—a letter from her editor Rupert Hart-Davis enquires whether she signed her last letter Margaret ‘out of Stevieish absentmindedness, or so as to administer a snub’.14 Even when, as here, she reverts to her baptismal name Margaret, it is read through the lens of her pseudonym, the adjective ‘Stevieish’ projecting a fundamental characteristic created from an assumed nickname.15 The publisher’s use of the adjective ‘Stevieish’ seems to encode transience and capriciousness rather than authorial fixity, insisting on its own approximation. Smith herself hoped to take on yet another pseudonym when beginning her work as a reviewer in 1937 for London Mercury, and was disappointed to find her idea rejected.16 Her failure or unwillingness to realize that their offer of reviewing was dependent on the fact of her name itself suggests her ambivalence towards the cult of literary celebrity, her reticence to acknowledge that an author’s name is not simply a part of speech but, as Michel Foucault has argued, a classificatory marker, 11

Cyril M. Wood to Jonathan Cape, 13 March 1939, UT. John Hayward, ‘London Letter’, New York Sun (29 September 1939), 8. Naomi Mitchison to Stevie Smith, dated 1936, UT. 14 Rupert Hart-Davis to Stevie Smith, 9 December 1937, UT. Smith treated the editors at Chatto and Windus in the same way, often filling her correspondence to Ian Parsons with ‘enticing self-portraits’ according to a letter from Parsons to Smith, 14 January 1949, UT. 15 The adjective is used in a similar sense by Michael Horowitz, ‘Stevie Smith Revisited: Part Two’, Literary Review (July 1982), 24–7, esp. 24, when he describes James MacGibbon’s editing practice as ‘most un-Stevieish’, contrasting MacGibbon’s preference for uniformity over whimsy and caprice. 16 Stevie Smith to Rupert Hart-Davis, 27 August 1937, UT: ‘I thought it a nice name to write under Angel Heart but they wont have it it must be my own name’ [sic]. Her notebooks also reveal her plans for an author’s gossip column written under the pseudonym Mrs. MacMurdoch, UT. 12 13

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informing a text’s status and its manner of reception.17 When Smith tactfully revised her 1940s poem ‘Murder’, which vengefully imagines the death of Reggie Smith, Olivia Manning’s husband, she capitalized on their shared surname to replace his mention in the poem with ‘Filmer Smith’.18 This thinly veiled disguise, whilst provoking comparisons between her poetic target and Smith herself, also betrays her continued sense of her name offering expedient anonymity rather than a means of incrimination. Many of the fictive names of characters in her poems, novels, and short stories recur throughout her work, suggesting a gallery of plural identities.19 Yet her tactics of concealment in effect promote further intrigue: the slippery adoption and rejection of names in her writing created an authorial persona wrapped in intoxicating mystery, an onomastic defence that critics were eager to remove. If the name of the author, as Philippe Lejeune has argued, sums up ‘the whole existence of what is called an author’, offering the reader the only subject within a literary text whose existence is ‘legally certifiable, a matter of record’,20 the use of a moniker underlining their self-construction proves a temptation too ready to ignore. In 1937, the poet Robert Nichols attempted to unmask Smith as Virginia Woolf, writing to Woolf to congratulate her on having written her best novel yet.21 He was able to mistake the talking cure of Pompey’s narrative for the solipsistic modernism of Woolf ’s The Waves (1931). One year later, Louis MacNeice mis-memorialized Smith as a poet in the comic American tradition in his book Modern Poetry, situating her in a group of ‘ “hard-boiled’, mocking poets”’ that included e. e. cummings and Dorothy Parker.22 The apparently unmistakable English accents of her early poetry, with collection titles such as A Good Time Was Had 17 See Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38, 123. 18 For a full discussion of her relationship with Reggie Smith, see Spalding, Stevie Smith, 108–9. 19 See for example Muriel, whose lonely ruminations begin in ‘Do Take Muriel Out’ (CP 250), and continue in ‘The Sorrowful Girl’ (CP 378). 20 Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Pact’, in On Autobiography, ed. John Paul Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1989), 11. 21 Robert Nichols to Virginia Woolf: ‘You are Stevie Smith. No doubt of it. And Yellow Paper is far and away your best book’, as quoted by Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1980), 75. 22 Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 187.

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By All (1937), were unproblematically transplanted onto an American tongue via the Yankee vowels of her forename. Even as late as 1962, the critic Ian Mair could write in an Australian national newspaper: Stevie Smith’s name is a portrait of its bearer. He is as English as his surname [ . . . ] yet Mr. Smith is also a Stevie, a Stephen without a crown, a martyr in undress, bearing witness to a world of woe.23

Here Mair unpacks Smith’s self-constructed ‘portrait’ only to uncover a male poet underneath. He insists Smith is as English as ‘his’ surname only to overlook that she is less androgynous than her forename. In 1964, after writing a letter to The Times, Smith was not only unrecognized as a poet and novelist in many of the replies she received, but in one letter was ‘identified’ as ‘Stephen Smith who attended the Men’s Discussion Class at David Thomas Memorial Church’.24 Even a recent interview with the poet Fleur Adcock saw Smith’s significance as a woman poet belittlingly dismissed with: ‘Well she was such an oddity. She was Stevie Smith, bless her!’25 ‘Stevie Smith’, rather than grafting a particular meaning onto her text, apparently hands its authority over to the reader, allowing them to challenge and rewrite her sex, her nationality, her persona, her work.26 If her first novel flooded her publishers with a torrent of ‘interesting correspondence’,27 the letters contained within it were notable for their lack of correspondence over Smith’s true identity. This cycle of misattribution and misidentification inherent even in the author’s own name, that one point of the text apparently offering interpretative stability, becomes a pattern that continues throughout Smith’s reception history. Each new study of Smith’s

23 Ian Mair, review of ‘Selected Poems’, The Age (24 November 1962), 23. See also her letter from G. A. Anderson dated 22 October 1953 which addresses her as ‘Sir or Madam’, UT. 24 Enid Shears to Stevie Smith, 6 June 1964, UT. She is also dubbed ‘Stainless Stephen Smith’ by Hugh Walpole in a letter to Rupert Hart-Davis praising Over the Frontier (1938), 1 February 1938, UT, and is addressed by Kenneth Clark as ‘Pompey’ in an undated letter, UT. 25 Julian Stannard, ‘An interview with Fleur Adcock’, Thumbscrew 17 (Winter 2000/1), 5–15, esp. 13. 26 See Smith’s essay ‘Simply Living’, Queen (12 February 1964), 4, repr. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 108–10, esp. 109, which praises ‘these masters of incongruity who give names’. 27 Rupert Hart-Davis to Stevie Smith, 30 November 1936, UT: ‘What interesting correspondence you provoke!’.

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work or life has typically begun with an authorial deliberation about how to address their elusive subject.28 If her name invited these confusions of identity, there is a sense that larger biographical portraits of Smith have also repeatedly been subject to the same inadvertent misassumptions. As early as 1970, Kay Dick declared to Smith that ‘I do so want to write the piece on you’,29 but, as Olivia Manning records in a letter to Kathleen Farrell, Dick’s interview, published as Ivy and Stevie, prompted yet more competing versions of the writer rather than creating a definitive portrait: A funny thing happened when I was reading [Ivy and Stevie]. I thought Kay had been too kind to that sly puss so I started writing, on smallish pieces of paper, my own memories of some of Stevie’s arch-bitchyness towards me, most of it dating back a very long time [ . . . ] As I wrote, I was lying on the sofa and I put each finished page on top of the books at my elbow. When I gathered them together I found that the first three pages were missing [ . . . ] I can only think that Stevie has been playing a trick on me. Very much what she would do. The trouble is I cannot now remember what I wrote.30

Manning’s eerie anecdote is not without personal spleen, but it is instructive in situating Smith as the posthumous interventionist, returning from the grave to defend her literary reputation. In a prompt from Smith’s illustration ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’ (Figure 1), Smith becomes the enigmatic ‘sly puss’ as Manning, the overlooking reader alert to the text’s deviations and distortions, attempts to become the corrective eulogist. Yet the alleged misapprehension of Smith is finally attributed not to Kay Dick, but to the insinuations and insertions of Smith herself. The most cryptic of wardens, now reincarnated as a feline domestic patrol, is able to orchestrate her reception even after death. Manning’s use of arbitrary circumstance to make wider statements about Smith and her personality also sheds light on later, larger biographical 28 See for example Spalding, Stevie Smith, xviii: ‘Like others before me, I have found it necessary to refer to my subject as “Stevie”, the name by which she was familiarly known. This is partly because it would be too laborious to employ her full name in every instance and too impersonal to use only her anonymous surname.’ I have followed recent scholars such as Romana Huk (Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)) and Laura Severin (Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)) in primarily using only her surname, although I use ‘Stevie Smith’ when considering her as a literary ‘product’. 29 Kay Dick to Stevie Smith, 29 September 1970, UT. 30 Olivia Manning to Kathleen Farrell, 10 November 1971, UT.

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projects. The play and film Stevie (1978) by Hugh Whitemore incite both anger amongst those who knew her during her lifetime and a fear that, as a necessary panacea, those same people will now have to ‘reveal what she was really like’.31 Smith becomes the blank page for her vainglorious contemporaries to re-inscribe their ‘desired responses’. The wrangles between Smith’s first biographers, Jack Barbera and William McBrien, and her literary executor, James MacGibbon, in 1984 escalate into a humiliating literary row, which results in Stevie (1985) being publicly denounced as ‘toweringly boring’ and ‘naı¨ve and unselective’32 before it has even been published. MacGibbon’s subsequent commissioning of an authorized life of Smith when one was already researched means that Stevie must conclude by underlining its provisionality, detailing how its readers would come to learn ‘from a prefatory note by Stevie’s executor, that a second biography was in preparation’.33 This second, authorized work becomes by extension a difficult reassembly of already-interviewed subjects, prompting John Carey’s comment that writing a Smith biography should be the ‘advanced test’34 for an imagined guild of literary biographers. Spalding confesses early on in her book that ‘facts concerning Stevie Smith’s life take on a fictional air’.35 Smith’s own playful adoption of names and identities in her own lifetime seems to prompt a subsequent posthumous confusion, a constant proliferating body of writing selves. The critical reception of her work offers us similar patterns and parallels. Hans Robert Jauss has argued that ‘a literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific 31 Olivia Manning to Kathleen Farrell, 27 March 1977, UT: ‘I have not seen Stevie and I’m not sure that I want to. I do intend to write [an article about her for The Times] but am worried when I think about Stevie—should I reveal what she was really like?’ 32 This row was played out in the biographers’ open letter to publishers and journalists detailing MacGibbon’s refusal to allow their work to continue. See also E. J. Craddock, ‘Controlling Interest’, The Times (16 April 1984), 10, which attacks MacGibbon’s ‘proprietary interest’, and MacGibbon’s subsequent letter to editor of The Times, which draws attention to Craig Raine’s criticism of their work quoted above, and highlights their ‘strange alternation between scholarly detail and sudden corruptions of somewhat brash naı¨vete´’ (25 April 1984, 13). 33 Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Stevie: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1985), 301. 34 John Carey, ‘Praise for the Poet of Palmer’s Green’, The Sunday Times, ‘Books’ supplement (23 October 1988), 3. 35 Spalding, Stevie Smith, 2.

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kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions.’36 Yet the specificity of these ‘overt and covert signals’ and ‘announcements’ seems undermined by a debut work at once so allusive and elusive as Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). Its early reception shows its first readers struggling to decode the interpretative ‘announcements’ made by the text. Responding to a novel with no generic instructions other than a goose chase of authorial identity, Smith’s first reviewers disguise their own bafflement behind the hasty construction of an imagined reception. Their reviews construct an ill-informed reader who has underestimated the scale of Smith’s achievement, allowing the reviewers to measure, by contrast, their own interpretative success. Douglas West, reviewing Novel on Yellow Paper in 1936 for the Daily Mail, imagines a probable reader who sits ‘like little Jack Horner, pulling out plum after plum, relishing them and thinking how clever he is to work it out for himself and all the time it is Miss Stevie Smith who is clever.’37 West uses Smith’s own pre-emptive subtitle, Work it out for yourself, as a lever for qualifying the significance of the reader in her novel. The imagined reader he describes, by wrongly attributing his enjoyment in the text to his canny interpretation rather than the writer’s own ingenuity, denies the centrality of Smith’s role as author of the text. West’s review acts as a corrective to no particular existing response to the novel but rather his own experience in reading it. Something within the text prevents him from asserting his critical authority over Smith’s. Even an undated fan letter from Kenneth Clark asserts that ‘[Novel on Yellow Paper] is not at all like what Mr. Cape’s readers imagined’, suggesting a work that no amount of publishers’ advertising can prepare the reading public for.38 Ian Parsons’ review in Now and Then takes a similar delight in creating a potential reader only partially aware of what the novel is trying to do; after offering a brief plot summary of the book in his column he confesses that ‘one takes a certain pleasure in writing down these facts, imagining the kind of production they must instantly suggest to the apprehension of the reader so far and no farther instructed’.39 His review questions its impact on subsequent readers even as it ‘instructs’ them, highlighting the difficulty of recording 36 37 38 39

Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 23. Douglas West, ‘Thoughts at Random’, Daily Mail (17 September 1936), 16. Kenneth Clark to Stevie Smith, undated, UT. Ian Parsons, ‘Novel on Yellow Paper’, Now and Then (Summer 1936), 39–40, 39.

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a response to her work that does not derail future interpretations. Smith’s work from its outset seems to promote a reflexive and self-questioning standpoint. Her first readers seem unable to ignore the expected critical deluge, anticipating it even before it has begun. It is this sidestepping of authorial culpability that becomes the clearest ‘announcement’ these first reviews make to the novel’s future audience. The construction of the imagined reader-in-distress by Smith’s first reviewers creates a template for subsequent assessments of her work, promoting the idea of a Smith review as a discursive essay recording the process of reading and interpreting the work. Questions of intentionality or influence always come second to the prankish sport of the reader’s quest through the novel. The Bystander assures possible readers of Over the Frontier, ‘you will have fun reading the novel or trying to’,40 whilst a review by George Stonier is not alone in wondering ‘how on earth am I to describe Stevie Smith to anyone who hasn’t read her?’41 Country Life asserts ‘the taste for Miss Stevie Smith needs a little practice; it is well worth acquiring’,42 as if her work were a tedious but rewarding domestic handicraft, her surname exploited here to point up the implications of her readers being ‘skilled workers’.43 Pointedly, it is a craft its assumed audience have not yet mastered. Meanwhile, Arnold Palmer in the Yorkshire Post records his thoughts whilst he devours the novel alongside a bottle of wine. The review becomes a mock-parody of a sexual encounter—‘How brilliant Stevie Smith was, and how brilliant I was too! And the wine must have been first rate’.44 Yet the attempt to present his reading of her work as some sort of staged intimate performance is mitigated by the unknown quotient of the wine. Palmer’s difficulty in knowing where to ascribe the novel’s ‘brilliance’, turning at last to the scapegoat of alcohol, reveals the uneasy encounter between the reader and writer in Smith’s work. Her sparkling authorial persona demands to be matched by her scintillated readers, yet the challenge is one that even Palmer’s mock-bravado seems to find too much. If reading the novel becomes a collaborative act, any lack of ‘brilliance’ indicates the reader’s failure to respond appropriately to the author’s 40

Alan Thomas, ‘The Bystander Bookshelf ’, Bystander (26 January 1938), 16. George Stonier, ‘Five Poets, Five Worlds’, New Statesmen and Nation (3 December 1938), 930. 42 V.H.F., ‘Reviews’, Country Life 85(1) (April 1939), 334. 43 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), vol. II, defines ‘smith’ as ‘a skilled worker [ . . . ] in arts and crafts’ (2888). 44 Arnold Palmer, ‘Winter-Flowering Novelists’, Yorkshire Post (19 January 1938), 9. 41

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demands. Consequently, reviewing the novel becomes a metatextual description of the reader’s interpretative processes, an exercise in qualifying their own bafflement. Smith’s command to ‘work it out for yourself ’ becomes the gauntlet thrown down in challenge to her readers, an imperative command to grapple with a work that insists on its own complexity. If reviews in journals and newspapers ranging from the internationally distributed Bystander to the ladies’ journal Country Life show remarkable similarities in their efforts to disavow an imaginary careless reader, two longer articles arguing for a more serious assessment of Smith’s work from different periods in her career demonstrate the difficulty of rewriting an author’s reception without reaffirming previous critical orthodoxies. Naomi Mitchison’s influential 1937 piece in Now and Then is insistent that readers’ responses to Smith’s verse are unlikely to be traceable to the writer herself. Contrasting Smith with the majority of 1930s writers who, because of the dominance of political poetry, have their eye on ‘what a particular kind of imagined posterity will think of [them]’, Smith uniquely ‘can still be an “I”’,45 an authorial self apparently unburdened by thoughts of posthumous reception or compromised by her attempts to ‘control’ misreadings of her work. Mitchison creates an author we must work hard to understand; any negative response to her work can be ascribed to the reader’s fallibility.46 The article is the first to ‘periodise’ her, but situates her outside of the two major genres of ‘poet’s poetry’ and ‘people’s poetry’, leaving her to meander between the two. She becomes a writer ‘aware of [her] epoch’ but never ‘done in by it’, drawing back both from contemporary relevance and the promise of longevity. The review attempts to argue for the importance of Smith as a literary figure by discussing her in the context of serious political writing, only to conclude that she fits none of the patterns her contemporaries have laid out for her.47 It is then an isolating piece, heightened by Mitchison’s inclusion of her own writing 45

Naomi Mitchison, ‘Bouncing with Blake’, Now and Then (Winter 1937), 27. Even would-be publishers of her work adopt this apologetic approach; Paul Bailey rejects her drawings for Nova magazine in 1969 with the qualification that ‘I can’t be enthusiastic’ but ‘the fault is probably with me anyway’ (Paul Bailey to Stevie Smith, 8 December 1969, UT). 47 This view has often been restated. See, for example, Anthony Thwaite’s review of her Collected Poems for the BBC Radio programme Book Talk, 31 July 1975, which calls her ‘the least political of poets’ although she wrote in a period ‘conventionally thought of as dominated by politics’ (transcript in UT). 46

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in the categories she argues that Smith’s eludes. Her later confession to Smith that she had ‘written quite a different review from the one I’d meant’48 only underlines the uneven intention behind her critical enterprise. Like Arnold Palmer’s figurative bottle of wine, Mitchison’s subsequent ambivalence about her ‘reassessment’ suggests an unidentified mediating agent at work. Philip Larkin’s 1962 review for the New Statesman provided Smith with her first in-depth critical piece for over twenty years. His essay, reprinted in In Search of Stevie Smith (1991), becomes the review that sets out to ‘change people’s perception of her oeuvre’, as Spalding has argued.49 However, its own reception points up the difficulty of such a task.50 Larkin opens the article with his discovery of Not Waving but Drowning ‘in a bookshop one Christmas some years ago’.51 Once again we find Smith stealing up on the reader, offering them an unexpected encounter. As with the introduction to Spalding’s biography and the play Stevie, Larkin suggests his disregard for the critical perspectives that have already hampered interpretations of her work, his personal overture promising intimate fidelity to her poetry. He goes on to explain that he bought several copies of the volume for his friends who were ‘bothered to know whether I seriously expected them to admire it [ . . . ] the more I insisted that I did, the more suspicious they became’. In a replay of many earlier reviews, Larkin sets himself up as the ideal Smith reader by negative exemplum. His sceptical friends become the straw men that his article can finally prove wrong, the only method for convincing a cynical audience as to the merit of her oeuvre. Similarly, the only way he can assure us of the seriousness of her work is by offering us a comic anecdote. Whilst Larkin praises Smith for being ‘completely original’, he sees critical responses to her work as being homogeneous, ill-informed, and mired in the wash of general misinformation. The more individual and 48

Naomi Mitchison to Stevie Smith, dated 1937, UT. Spalding describes the review as ‘the one that changed people’s attitudes to Stevie’ (Stevie Smith, 257). 50 See for example Alison Light’s argument that Larkin’s review relegates Smith to ‘an idiosyncratic world of one, somewhere between the lovable and the obscure’ (‘Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice’, English 43(177) (1994), 237–59, esp. 240), or Michael Horowitz’s denouncement of Larkin as a ‘slapdash reviewer’ in his review of Spalding’s biography (‘Stevie Smith’, The Independent, 29 October 1988, 42). 51 Philip Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London: Faber, 1983), 153–8, 153. 49

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daring her work becomes, the more orthodox and banal are the responses to it. Yet if Larkin’s article offers a serious assessment of Smith’s work, it also confesses to expediency, revealing that his focus on her religious verse is a strategic one: I stress these aspects of her work because it may correct the bias of general opinion towards the view that she is a lighthearted purveyor of bizarrerie. (158)

What Larkin chooses to emphasize in Smith’s work is, by his own admission, the aspects of it that seem most misunderstood. This attempt at critical resuscitation backfires: the phrases most often quoted from his review, such as description of her as a ‘lighthearted purveyor of bizarrerie’ or as ‘fausse-na¨ive’ are the ones which his article had been intent on refuting, or as relegating to describe her less successful work.52 He retraces inaccurate readings with such care that he inadvertently becomes their author. The totemic failure of Larkin’s review was still being underlined by Patricia Beer nearly thirty years later, who remained puzzled it had not served as a ‘perpetual corrective’ to ‘those who think and say (as they do) that Stevie Smith is dotty’.53 Beer’s bewilderment as to why the review only qualifies rather than ‘corrects’ ‘general opinion’ suggests a growing concern that Smith’s reputation may be inexplicably beyond rescue. Smith’s posthumous reception corroborates these anxieties. As early as 1957 Anthony Cronin remarked in Time and Tide ‘it seems odd that there are no books about [Smith], monuments, debates, unreadable essays in the bulkier American reviews. They could so easily call her a Christian existentialist if they were stuck’.54 Cronin wryly recommends her as an endlessly malleable subject for suitably unscrupulous academics, a topic for countless misreadings and ideological impositions. Yet her posthumous construction for literary and academic study merely reruns previous debates. These new participants attempt to correctively reshape the by now critically deformed writer helplessly adrift in a sea of misconceptions. 52 See for example Christopher Ricks, ‘Stevie Smith: The Art of Sinking in Poetry’, in The Force of Poetry (London: Faber, 1992), 244–55, who argues that all the quirks of ‘fausse-na¨ive’ are right for this ‘truly quirky poet’, and wrongly suggests it is Larkin’s ‘route into the world of Stevie Smith’ (244). 53 Patricia Beer, ‘Retold but Unrevealed’, review of Spalding’s biography, TLS (11 April 1988), 1222. 54 Anthony Cronin, ‘Facing Facts’, Time and Tide (7 December 1957), 1559.

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In 1971, Smith’s friend Marghanita Laski used a review of Kay Dick’s Ivy and Stevie (1971) to commend the critical response to Smith since her death earlier that year: Part of the evidence of Stevie’s quality [ . . . ] is that this book and all else her friends have chosen to do in the way of remembrance since her death has been humbly to try and recall her, without a blotching fingerprint [ . . . ] it’s as if Stevie’s personality [ . . . ] was so stalwart, so coherent, so totally formed that her friends, though often powerfully creative people themselves, wanted, chiefly and tentatively, only to recover their memories, never to gloss or re-create.55

Laski not only suggests her memory be preserved in aspic, but uniquely attributes the unwavering fidelity of various posthumous ‘memorials’ to the integrity of Smith herself. By keeping their ‘blotching’ fingerprints away from her own self-portrait, Smith’s contemporaries avoid the recidivist compulsion of the criminal misreader. Yet the implicit cautioning this review sends out to prospective critics is amplified in Laski’s review of Me Again ten years later, which sounds the curious warning bell that Smith’s work may now be being over-read: Her talent is a delicate, evanescent, and private one, and increasingly it is going to be hung out on the line, over-exposed for its own good [ . . . ] I fear that the cumulative effect of what is rapidly becoming the Stevie Heavy Industry will be to push Stevie Smith’s work over-soon into that trough of disesteem into which fashion must push all artists for a time.56

Though Laski’s frantic comments can be read as personally motivated, her sense of Smith as a writer prone to ‘over-exposure’ raises larger concerns about her literary legacy. Laski’s attack on her posthumous reception uses a visual metaphor to suggest her concern is primarily with the film produced of her life in 1981,57 but her assertion of Smith’s ‘private’ talent suggests a wider distrust of potential new audiences. The description of her ‘talent’ also betrays a continuing confusion about agency and the mechanics of Smith’s reception. It begins as a domestic metaphor, with Laski nervously fetishizing her ‘talent’ as a pile of drying 55

548.

Marghanita Laski, ‘Frankie and Johnny’, The Listener (21 October 1971), 548–9,

56 Marghanita Laski, ‘Not So Far Out As You Thought’, Country Life (17 December 1981), 2207. 57 See also Christopher Ricks, who argues ‘there has been something spurious about Stevie Smith’s posthumous reputation’, noting how she has had ‘her poems and nature cropped so that she might be plausibly rendered on stage and screen by Glenda Jackson’ (‘The Art of Sinking in Poetry’, 255).

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laundry being pulled from trough to line. Yet the ‘Heavy Industry’ she describes sets up the biographies and critical studies as part of the manufacturing sector; Smith’s own home-spun and handmade works, her crafted oddities, are offered no chance of survival in such a ruthlessly capitalist market. This staged contest between her own ‘cottage-industry’ and the ‘Heavy Industry’ that seeks to promote it perpetuates a myth of Smith as the victim of her literary celebrity, rather than the creator of it, a complete reversal of Laski’s previous position. Possible readers of her work are now not only liable for possible misinterpretation but also for corrupting her entire literary legacy, irrevocably distorting her posthumous reputation. Laski’s fears about Smith’s co-option by audiences with new agendas perhaps underestimate the extent to which the familiar professions of readerly inadequacy would find their way into academic debate. Nearly twenty years of scholarly reviews, authorized biographies, and literary surveys later, readerly culpability would still seem to be the defining feature of any writing about Smith, the clearest ‘announcement’ offered by her reception. A 1999 review by Romana Huk of Laura Severin’s book Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics and Catherine A. Civello’s Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith is tellingly entitled ‘Misplacing Stevie Smith’. Huk points up both meanings of her title’s implicit criticism: recent feminist critics have not only repeatedly situated Smith in the wrong context, but are consequently in danger of losing the most important qualities of her work altogether.58 In the article, Huk puts forward a curiously apologetic mission statement that reads half as clarion-cry, half admission of failure. Smith criticism means ‘feeling inadequate to the task, or should’,59 she writes, asserting that critics ‘lose much of what she’s done in order to wrest from her very complex, challenging, and at times rather messy collected works a clear outline drawing.’60

58 There are numerous other critical articles taking Smith’s reception as their starting point: see Diana Austin, ‘Over the Frontier and into the Darkness with Stevie Smith: War, Gender, and Identity’, in Stella Dean (ed.), Challenging Modernism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 35–53, esp. 49, or Ingrid Hotz-Davies, ‘“My Name is Finis”’: The Lonely Voice of Stevie Smith’, in C. C. Barfoot (ed.), In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 219–34, 219. 59 Romana Huk, ‘Misplacing Stevie Smith’, Contemporary Literature 40(3) (1999), 507–23, 523. 60 Ibid. 510.

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Eight years later, Huk devotes the first chapter of her own full-length study of Smith’s work to an interrogation of the multiple misreadings performed by critics over the past seventy years. Yet rather than uncovering an ongoing trend in her reception history, suggesting an author who delights in creating these misreadings, Huk places much of the blame on feminist and poststructuralist readings during the previous ten years.61 She asserts that ‘re-readings of readings of Smith’s work indicate much about the history of re-reading literary modernism from feminist perspectives’.62 Failing to attribute Smith’s reception to anything other than historical trends or critical prejudice, she reaches the high watermark of self-reflexive criticism and repeatedly implicates her own previous scholarship on the subject: I too have been guilty, in my own initial work on Smith, of ‘lioness-ising’ her [ . . . ] wanting to see her as just the sort of proto-poststructuralist feminist [Laura] Severin and [Richard] Nemesvari make of her.63 I also wrote myself into believing she was working before her time from a transcendent position of gendered difference, but I now understand this kind of reading as constituting excessive use of what predecessors in rereading literary modernism provided by way of insight.64

This opening admission to a study of a still-neglected writer has a startlingly evangelical zeal in its confessions of guilt, in its movement from misguided ‘belief ’ to ‘understanding’. Revealingly, Huk ‘writes’ herself into misreading, suggesting the very nature of her academic practice has distorted her assessment of Smith’s work.65 This confessional’s repeated linking of Huk’s 61 Michael Schmidt is one of the few writers to relate Smith’s uneven critical reception to her own self-created public persona, arguing in An Introduction to Fifty Modern British Poets (London: Pan Books, 1979) that if critics describe her as ‘naı¨ve’, ‘this reveals the success with which she projected the mock-innocence of her public image’ (200). See also Marina Warner’s review of Me Again in The Sunday Times, ‘A Skeleton in the Nursery’, which argues ‘she wasn’t nearly as artless as she liked to make out’ (‘Books’, 25 November 1981, 11). 62 Huk, Stevie Smith, 6. 63 See Richard Nemesvari, ‘“Work it out for yourself ”: Language and Fictional Form in Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper’, Dalhousie Review 71(1) (1991), 26–37. Whilst the article is informed by poststructuralism, it is primarily a close textual reading of Smith’s first novel. At no point does Nemesvari project anachronistic theoretical paradigms onto Smith’s writing process. 64 Huk, Stevie Smith, 11. 65 See also the British poet Vicki Feaver’s admission that ‘I began by loving Stevie Smith. Then I tried to write a PhD thesis on her and hated her. Now I love her precisely because she is so resistant to academic criticism’ (‘Castaway Poems’, Poetry News (Spring 2001), 8).

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misjudgements with those of previous critics—‘I too’, ‘I also’—offers up Huk as a qualified Smith interpreter precisely through her acknowledgement of past misdemeanours. She can only ‘rescue’ Smith by first aligning herself with the growing gallery of past offenders. She is the careless imaginary reader first invoked by Douglas West’s 1936 review for the Daily Mail who, having undergone punishment, is now suitably chastened to assume interpretative authority. She is akin to the first set of biographers denounced by Smith’s executor as ‘not up to the job’.66 She is qualified by dint of her inadequacy, not despite it.67 In linking her previous misreading to a reliance on the work of ‘rereading’ predecessors, Huk would seem to have moved as far from the original text to metacriticism as is syntactically possible. If, as Jauss has argued, falsifying previous interpretations usually indicates ‘neither historical errors nor objective “mistakes”, but rather falsely posed or illegitimate questions on the part of the interpreter’,68 Huk erases the veracity of both her previous reading and her critical corrective. Yet Huk’s self-incriminating position is in fact strikingly similar to the anonymous reader’s report made on Smith’s poems when they were first submitted to Chatto and Windus in 1934, over seventy-one years earlier. After a damning dismissal of Smith’s work which, as we have seen, raised serious moral and artistic objections to its subject and form, the report closed with a puzzling equivocation: ‘perhaps there is some quality in them this reader has failed to find’.69 These are comparable examples of interpretative fallibility in two of the most unlikely of contexts. Their striking similarities raise questions as to whether Smith’s posthumous reputation is of the critics’ making, or her own. In the need to propagate the image of Smith as a ‘misplaced’ author, have assessments of her work neglected to see what a good job she has done of hiding herself ?70 66

James MacGibbon, ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Times (27 April 1984), 13. See also Michael Horowitz’s review of Barbera and McBrien’s biography, which indulges in another confessional apology: ‘Hermione Lee for one has rebuked them for making Stevie’s life and work seem boring. She does this in much the same terms as I— perhaps too waspishly—chided her Stevie Smith: A Selection’ (‘A Laughing Butterfly’, Spectator (1 February 1986), 30–1, 30). 68 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 185. 69 Included in a letter from Curtis Brown to Stevie Smith, 28 June 1934, UT. 70 Smith herself second-guesses this response in a radio talk for schools: ‘You will say: But your poems are all story poems, you keep yourself hidden’, revised script for Books, Plays, Poems: Poems by Living Poets, transmitted 15 June 1966 on the BBC Home Service, UT. 67

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Throughout her career, Smith adopted a range of paratextual strategies which would allow her to have a hand in shaping her own reputation, of trying to ensure she would not spend her life waiting for critical approval, a sensation she described as ‘sitting on some draughty provincial station waiting for a beastly train that somehow never comes’.71 The remainder of this chapter will examine some of those strategies, exploring how far the mythic woman memorialized by Ogden Nash was one of Smith’s own making.72 Canonical reception is continually a concealed topic of interest for Smith, whether in her review of a Gerard Manley Hopkins biography which clings to an image of him as the poet ‘with never a beautiful word he wrote understood until he was dead, and everybody preferred before him’,73 or the telling biblical inscription Tom Clarkson makes on her copy of one of his novels—‘refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears, for thy work shall be rewarded ’.74 In her refracted selfportrait, ‘The Poet Hin’, Smith considers whether it is better for the misunderstood poet to be bitter or philosophical about their probable posthumous reputation, reaching the equivocal position that: both truths have validity, The one meanly begot, the other nobly, And as each alone glosses over What the other says, so only together Have they a full thought to uncover. (CP 552, ll. 31–5)

But if Hin struggles to find ways to sustain his reputation, how might Smith go about shaping the response of her projected future readers, conscious that it was the ‘literary intelligentsia’ who would finally decide whether she would go down in history?75 Smith’s rare public interventions in her own reception posit her work as always in danger of being misinterpreted. Phyllis Bentley’s review of The Holiday (1949) in the Yorkshire Post praises the novel’s discussions about the unicorn of fancy but declares itself ‘tired of [Smith’s]

71

Stevie Smith to Helen Fowler, 20 March 1964, UT. ‘Who or What Is Stevie Smith? j Is She a Woman, Is She a Myth?’, Ogden Nash’s poem written for the launch of Selected Poems in the USA, included on a promotional postcard, UT. 73 Stevie Smith, ‘The Converted Poet’, Tribune (23 Jan. 1948), 18–19, 19. 74 From her copy of Tom Clarkson, A Certain Summer (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1966), UT. 75 As quoted in a letter from Murray Briggs to William McBrien, 5 May 1979, UT. 72

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unconventional conventions’. In place of a conclusion it offers the reader a mocking parody of Smith’s prose style: But oh Stevie I said, oh do shut up, do be quiet, oh Lord, listen I said, we are tired of all this. Ah, ah, ah how tired the Unicorn is of all this. He wants a holiday. Lock him up and let the Lion out. You will? Hurra three times.76

Parody seems a particularly incendiary crime for Smith—not because it offers up her work for ridicule, but because it suggests a reader who has seen through the allusive and gauche prose style and decoded her. As she had understood from reading D. H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, ‘once a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead.’77 Whilst Smith may have bristled at the lampoon of her work, her letter to the editor published the following week attempts a businesslike clarification of a technicality: In her review of my novel ‘The Holiday’, Miss Bentley picks out a passage which she thinks shows that I have at least one good idea. It is where Casmilus is talking to his cousin about ‘the Lion of common sense, and the Unicorn of fancy’. This, he goes on at once to say, is not his idea, but something he has read somewhere. He has forgotten where he read it, but I have not. It was, of course, in Santayana’s ‘Soliloquies in England’. If I were so immoral as to pass this idea off as my own (which I am not) I still hope I should not be so foolish. The passage is well known.78

Here Smith avoids the appearance of defending her novel by undermining the reviewer’s positive comments rather than their criticisms. She distances herself from the unscrupulous characters in her fiction who might dare to quote an author without acknowledgement.79 The letter works instead by qualifying Bentley’s interpretative authority. Smith’s insistence that ‘the passage is well known’ allows her to 76 Phyllis Bentley, ‘Novelists Who Face Modern Problems’, Yorkshire Post (30 June 1949), 2. 77 D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (London: Penguin, 1991), 4. 78 Stevie Smith to editor of the Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Post (12 July 1949). See George Santayana, Soliloquies in England: and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable, 1922), 41: ‘The lion is an actual beast, the unicorn a chimera; and is England not in fact always buoyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other by a sense for fact?’ 79 The separation between an author’s and a character’s misattributions are rarely as clear as Smith suggests. Novel on Yellow Paper includes a quotation from Shelley that the narrator wrongly attributes to Tennyson before correcting herself (28). The original draft wrongly corrects the same quotation to Keats: ‘it is not Tennyson but Keats but it’s all in the same period if you see what I mean’ (Novel on Yellow Paper typescript, DP/156/1, Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull).

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maintain her authorial integrity whilst simultaneously questioning the suitability of her reviewer, prompting the following reply: I am sorry that, like Casmilus, I did not remember the origin of the lionunicorn idea. I did not, however, suggest that Miss Stevie Smith had only one good idea. On the contrary, I said that among all the irritations of her writing ‘there are still some jewels of observation’. Her letter shows that her prose can be terse and straight-forward enough, when she chooses.80

Here Bentley questions Smith’s right to comment on the novel at all. By aligning herself with the character Casmilus, something that Smith has had to deliberately avoid doing in order to preserve her authorial integrity, Bentley suggests that post-publication, interpretation and exegesis are to be worked out between the characters in the novel and their readers, the novelist merely an observer. Her comment on the fissure between Smith’s prose in her novels and letters further highlights the artful construction of Smith’s apparently unconscious narrative style. Smith, for once, is outmanoeuvred.81 If the mythical unicorn must be tied to an authorial source, Smith’s novel must be released from one. Her more successful interventions would be her most surreptitious. A famously terse biographical note once offered by Smith to an interviewer read: ‘Born in Hull. But moved to London at three years old and has lived there ever since.’82 Accompanying the note, Smith wrote mock-apologetically explaining ‘I began with a biographical note, but didn’t get very far as you see.’ This anecdote has been repeated in her two biographies and numerous reviews.83 It offers an image of Smith as a writer either uninterested in her public persona, or implicitly mocking of the reader’s need to tie a poem down to its author’s biography. Yet other evidence conflicts with the abiding image of Smith as a reticent enigma. Writing to James Laughlin about the editors of a proposed 1960s poetry anthology in America, a prickly Smith notes their failure to consult her for their biographical entry: It seems a complete waste of space to give my baptismal names (Florence Margaret). They are never used, except by lawyers and the Stock Exchange. 80

Phyllis Bentley’s reply to Smith’s letter, undated, UT. See Smith’s protest to Kay Dick in a letter dated 23 September 1953, published in Me Again, 297: ‘Why can one not see one’s writing as something separate from oneself, & not to one’s own credit either, & so speak freely about it?’ 82 Stevie Smith to Peter Orr, 16 Nov. 1964, photocopy, UT. 83 See, for example, Giles Gordon, ‘A Singer of Songs’, The Scotsman (24 April 1965), 5; Barbera and McBrien, Stevie, 9; Spalding, Stevie Smith, 1. 81

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I always use the name Stevie, in the telephone directory, correspondence, and personally, and as I acquired this name long before I began to write (it was given to me because I was supposed to ride like a jockey and Steve Donoghue was the pet British jockey at the time). Again, about Hull. As I came to London at the age of three and have lived there ever since, it might just be better to call me a Londoner. A further point, when biog. notes pop up (and without, I hope, appearing a self-advertiser) should not information about publications and awards be included, as they are in Who’s Who? e.g. (at briefest): Eight books of poems and drawings, three novels, the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry 1966 (again, as in Who’s Who, but there of course, full titles and dates are given) and contributor to The Observer, Sunday Times, The Listener, etc.84

The length and vitriol of Smith’s attack, couched though it is in incredulous politeness, suggests a profound concern with the construction of her public image for an American audience. Whilst apparently only highlighting her publishers’ factual errors, Smith cannily uses the opportunity to argue for the inclusion of more material in her biographical note.85 She parenthetically draws attention to her anxiety about ‘appearing’ a self-advertiser, removing any personal pronouns from the request of the main clause, but her insistence that anthologists mention volumes that have never been published in the States suggests an author keen to establish a personal poetic legacy. Throughout her career, Smith explored the possibilities biographical information provided for situating her work in particular contexts. One letter to a journalist breezily promises to ‘write up an entirely fictitious biog., full of relations one never had, and places one had never lived in’.86 Her mock-exasperation at having to provide interviewers and critics with biographical notes conceals her understanding of their importance in establishing her public persona. Referring to an entry originally written for Over the Frontier which stated she had lived for a time in Germany, Smith confesses in a private letter ‘it’s a bit made up, 84 Stevie Smith to James Laughlin, 9 December 1967, UT, in reference to a biographical note for the planned volume, ‘Honey and the Hall’ (the anthology was never published). 85 See also her concern over the biographical note written on her behalf for The Phoenix Book of British Humour, ed. Michael Barsley (London: Phoenix House, 1949); ‘He got some facts out of me and said he would show me the proofs, but that was many months ago and I have seen nothing’ (letter to Menina Mesquita, 13 December 1948, UT). 86 Stevie Smith to Giles Gordon, 5 February 1965, UT. Her suppressed irritation at writing biographical notes is also caught in a letter to James Laughlin, where Smith comments, ‘I felt like putting something really wild like “Khyber Pass during the second Afghan War” but refrained’ (9 June 1964, UT).

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as I did not stay very long [ . . . ] not more than a month all told!’.87 Seeking to authenticate the novel’s themes of power and cruelty with lived experience, Smith offers feigned testimony as a bolstering frame for her fiction. In The Holiday, the process is reversed, with the protagonist’s childhood memory of India eventually becoming an accepted part of Smith’s own past, even though she never left Europe in her life.88 Appropriately, Smith’s short story ‘Getting Rid of Sadie’ was first written for the Evening Standard series ‘Did it Happen?’, which asked its readers to guess whether the featured works were fiction or autobiography.89 As Smith understood it, the bare facts of her life were not manacles which enslaved interpretation but rather tools for repositioning and re-contextualizing her work. Long before John Cowper Powys assured her in 1951 that her ‘peculiar’ style of poetry would ‘more and more and more, create the taste by which it was appreciated ’,90 Smith had realized the same. The blurbs for her books were another way of stimulating a response to her work from the safety of the dispassionate third person. The blurb for her early poetry collection Tender Only To One (1938) finds her still attempting to define and expand her reading audience: Stevie Smith—readers of A Good Time Was Had By All need no telling—is, in her poetry, all things to all men. She can make you ache and cough, wince and weep, ponder and jeer. Now she writes with malice aforethought; now she parodies; now she is in the kindergarten and now she is writing, with no hint of satire or shyness, poems steeped in a wry and unfeigned emotion which is never negligible. Stevie is unique; and of a Protean variety. If she is ‘tender only to one’, it is to the idea of Death, which, in this volume as the last, has produced some of her most original and moving poems. Her drawings, which appear again as illustrations to her poems, are in their own way evidence of a bittersweet unorthodoxy which is the special savour of all that Stevie Smith writes; 87

Stevie Smith to ‘Miss Jebb’, 16 January 1956, UT. A letter from Smith to Helen Fowler notes friends have begun to say ‘there’s some Indian connection, if one went back far enough’ (20 May 1958, UT). 89 ‘Getting Rid of Sadie’, Evening Standard (22 November 1955), 19, repr. in Me Again, 39–43. 90 John Cowper Powys to Stevie Smith, 20 December 1951, UT. He is invoking William Wordsworth’s advice to Lady Beaumont in a letter dated 21 May 1807: ‘never forget what was I believe observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished’ (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. II, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 150). 88

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and in them as in her poems, fantasy, satire, comedy are inextricably linked with an evident and undeniable seriousness.91

Here, Smith writing as reviewer-cum-editor presents her work in a form that is in constant conflict.92 She is ‘all things to all men’ and yet ‘undeniabl[y]’ serious, both ‘unique’ and of a particular ‘variety’. The blurb tantalizingly gives us Smith the dramatized author in the present tense—‘now she is in the kindergarten and now she is writing’—as if she might be conjured up by collective invocation, yet this illusion of readerly intimacy is challenged by the repeated double negatives. The ‘never negligible’ qualities of her writing or the ‘bitter-sweet unorthodoxy’ of her work in fact suggests a previous reader who finds her both negligible and orthodox. The very fact of the blurb itself, which turns Smith the writer into Smith the first reader, allows her to insert these implied responses. Just as the blurb insists on conflicting irrefutable qualities of her verse, it also suggests a homogenous interpretative group who read her previous collection. Whilst those readers ‘need no telling’ about her merits, new readers will require interpretative support; the blurb proclaims itself as an indispensable preamble to her verse. This already complicated conflict of concealment and control, drawing attention to the necessary job of the paratextual blurb whilst inviting new readers to join the unanimously converted audience of her last published work, highlights the tensions implicit in such as promotional strategy. By the time of Not Waving But Drowning (1957), Smith is keen to define aspects of her work beyond ‘protean’: No-one else writes poems quite like these, ferocious, melancholy and funny. Reading them, one laughs, as though tickled by a feather, one then sees that it was not a feather but a knife that has got under the skin. The rhymes are subtle and though they seem plain, are sometimes deceptive. When the author reads her poetry on air—the last time in a fifty-minute programme feature on the Third Programme—it is noticeable that the stress does not always fall where it appears to, and that her poems are as graceful as they are pointed.93

91

Dust-jacket blurb, Tender Only To One (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938). There is no correspondence confirming the authorship of Smith’s pre-war blurbs, but no one working with her on these collections has claimed to have written them. As early as 1948 she was being praised for her ‘admirable blurb’ for The Holiday in a letter from J. McDougall, 17 November 1948, UT. 93 Dust-jacket blurb for Not Waving But Drowning (London: Andre Deutsch, 1957). 92

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The description demonstrates Smith’s complicity in her image as a misread author. By having her imagined reader mistake a tickling feather for a lacerating knife, Smith promotes a violent division between the effect of her poetry and its intent. The reader’s final interpretation should be in direct opposition to their initial response, creating a reader who not only should dismiss the readings of others but, like Huk, should insist on the fallibility of their own previous readings. Smith also suggests the limitation of the printed book form by indicating the acroamatic nature of her poetry performances. The blurb emphasizes an aspect of the author’s work the reader may never experience, only serving to increase their inability to meet the task of interpretation. The ‘sometimes deceptive’ aspect of Smith’s verse is perhaps not her ‘subtle’ rhythms but her dissembling self-presentation, her unnoticed construction of an audience who will never quite come up to scratch. Her blurb for Selected Poems (1962) continues this trend, carefully balancing the popular appeal of her verse which ‘unlike most poetry today’ is ‘capable of evoking an immediate and wide response’ with the reiterated warning that its ‘apparent ease is deceptive’ and its ‘featherweight touch is apt to take the reader unawares’.94 It creates a reader on their guard, but primarily for their own reactions, lest they should be ‘deceived’ by the poetry’s apparent simplicity. Meanwhile Smith constructs herself using the perpetual decoy of the reader’s interpretation. The need for careful attention to Smith’s dissembling texts is emphasized again in her blurb for The Frog Prince (1966), where she cautions those familiar with her poetry performance that ‘always with the spoken word, something is lost [ . . . ] if the poems cannot be seen, read, and reread, on the printed page’.95 Here Smith reveals an anxiety about the immateriality of the performed poem, as if it might disappear into thin air unless tethered to a printed text. The wide radio audience for her work must follow her into print. Yet this seems more than a commercial concern: Smith’s emphasis on rereading suggests a readership whose ‘immediate’ response must be checked and found wanting. Smith’s blurbs not only outline the ways in which her poetry might be underestimated or misconstrued, but also construct an ideal reader who will return again and again to her work, always conscious of their fallible attempts to decode her writing. Huk, as we have seen, has argued 94

Dust-jacket blurb for Selected Poems (London: Longmans, 1962). Dust-jacket blurb for The Frog Prince and Other Poems (London: Longmans, 1966). 95

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that Smith criticism means ‘feeling inadequate to the task, or should’: Smith’s frames for her poetry uncover the curious subjunctive that underpins Huk’s assertion.96 We initiate ourselves as Smith readers by accepting culpability, responsibility, and failure. By defining her writing in terms of readerly fallibility rather than authorial strategy, Smith’s selfwritten parameters limit our access to both interpretation and intention. The interview provided Smith with the most obvious opportunity to publicly construct her work. Her blurbs and her practical involvement in her writing career suggests a shrewd and canny author, always aware of how many copies her book had sold and how best to go about getting them reprinted.97 Her continued emphasis on the ‘deceptive’ nature of her verse also suggests she was acutely conscious of how she was being read. Yet Smith repeatedly dodged questions relating to her reading audience and her own conscious presentation as an author. In 1946, she received a fan letter asking her ‘how much of the apparent carelessness is deliberate?’98 Smith never replied, but drew an enigmatic doodle of a young girl in the margin alongside the question. The drawing enacts the apparent carelessness Smith found herself unable to comment on either way, a blocking tactic to deny the reader’s access to authorial intention. In 1965, Shirley du Boulay invited Smith to talk about her work on the BBC Radio programme Woman’s Hour. A pre-interview letter asked her, ‘how can the urge for self-expression be reconciled with the need for privacy?’99 In response Smith is evasive, explaining in a late reply that ‘I have been rather stuck—at home—no char etc.—so please forgive me’.100 Her failure to respond directly suggests the very need for privacy raised by her interviewer’s question. It is perhaps because of this reticence for dialogue that Smith remained hesitant at offering herself up to in-depth analysis.101 She was most at home with the journalist requiring a pithy statement, 96

Romana Huk, ‘Misplacing Stevie Smith’, Contemporary Literature 40(3) (1999), 507–23, 523. 97 See for example her review of the literary magazine Bristol Packet, ‘Shorter notices’, Tribune (1 December 1944), 18: ‘let us hope this regional magazine will lead to a brisk regional culture. Meanwhile, for the established writer who can acquire a regional qualification—perhaps by leaving a suitcase overnight—they offer a profitable market for second serial rights.’ 98 Leila Stevens to Stevie Smith, 4 June 1946, UT. 99 Shirley du Boulay to Stevie Smith, 31 March 1965, UT. 100 Stevie Smith to Shirley du Boulay, 11 April 1965, UT. 101 See the reference to her being ‘subjected to [an] amount of high-flown analysis’ on a recent radio programme in a letter from ‘Tom’ to Smith dated 1 July 1969, UT.

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evidenced by the flurry of short interviews she consented to after her receipt of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1969. Here she could assert that her writing was ‘entirely selfish’ or that she wrote poems ‘as if they were toys and I was a child playing alone’ without recourse to further examination.102 But in extended interviews, fearful of realizing ‘how much one has said and shouldn’t have’,103 her tactics needed to be more devious, as John Horder records: Who else but an adult, tyrannised by the omnipotent child, would have dared to have completely rewritten my interview with her for The Guardian and Giles Gordon for The Scotsman, and got away with it?104

Horder’s statement not only highlights the extent of Smith’s control over her longer interviews but also enacts it. Rather than explaining her behaviour as that of a public figure anxious about her persona, Horder reads her intervention as a child’s playful sport. Smith’s authority is total here; she not only persuades both her interviewers to change their articles for her but is also able to conceal from them why she is doing so. Smith had remained intractable throughout much of an earlier interview with Horder for a 1961 World of Books broadcast, recalling her satirical portrait of a BBC interviewee in The Holiday who ‘never finishes a sentence’ (41). At one point during their conversation he presented her with a possible ‘thesis’ outlining the misappropriation of her work: I put it to you that the poetry public haven’t perceived as they might the profundity of your poems, and they have been rather swept away by the comic, by the slight, and the more, shall we say Lear, or Carroll, or Betjeman touch to them.105

This is a view shared by Smith, expressed implicitly through the thirdperson guise of her blurbs, and continually repeated in contemporary and posthumous assessments of her writing. Yet here Smith plays the part of the absent-minded spinster, and replies:

102

See Yvonne Thomas, ‘A Polite Murder, Cookery, and Melancholy’, Evening Standard (3 December 1969), 22, and Frank Entwistle, ‘Such a Nervy Business . . .’, Evening Standard (24 November 1969), 5. 103 Stevie Smith to Giles Gordon, 5 February 1965, UT. 104 John Horder, ‘Hugging Humans’, The Listener (12 April 1979), 512. 105 Transcript of an interview with John Horder for the BBC broadcast World of Books made on the 18 March 1961, UT. Subsequent quotations from the interview are from the same source.

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Well, again you see I don’t know what they see in them. I think some of them are very funny, but you know I like . . . the man who sort of thought the other—his old friend in this park, you know, had said newt, when really he’d said mute.

Her cryptic reply refers to her poem ‘In the Park’ (CP 373) published in Not Waving But Drowning (1957), in which a gentleman walking by a lake bids his companion to ‘pray for the mute’ only for his request to be heard as ‘pray for the newt’. As a poem signalling human incomprehension and the difficulty of communication between two people, it offers an oblique comment on the interview itself. Yet Smith’s deviating tactic uses the anecdote of the ‘mute’ misunderstanding to silence the interviewer, confessing ignorance as to the popular response to her work before descending into whimsy to avoid further questioning. By substituting a consideration of authorial reception with an apparently unrelated and obscure anecdote about malapropism, she stresses the importance of interpreting her texts as arbitrary documents of chance and misreading. She creates what she describes elsewhere as ‘a concealing stupidity, deliberately adopted for some purpose’.106 Other questions engaging with issues of literary context also arouse Smith’s distaste: she deletes from the broadcast interview a segment in which Horder situates her amongst poets such as Martin Bell and Peter Porter, contemporary writers who work ‘with strong conviction’. Such wilful tactics suggest Smith’s continued need to present herself without either a visible audience or context. As in her assertion that ‘no poet ever works in my poems who is not the poet Smith’,107 the question of influence, like that of reception, becomes one she is unwilling to answer. Yet if public statements on her work attempt to downplay her interaction with other writers, she is eager to dispel the notion that she has a unique or recognizable style. When Horder describes her poem ‘A Washy Dog (From the Italian)’ (CP 402; titled as ‘From the Italian’) as ‘absolutely typical of her’, Smith is quick to rebut any notion of her having a typical voice, pointing out confidently that ‘that is an absolutely literal translation you know [ . . . ] I didn’t really write it, did I?’ Smith, who acted as her own agent throughout her career, can now deny any agency whatsoever, casting herself as the dotty translator

106

Over the Frontier (148). As quoted in Derwent May, ‘Oh lor!’, review of the film Stevie in The Listener (9 November 1977), 8. 107

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to avoid being pigeonholed.108 If the poem is typical of Smith, then her hedging response to it seems even more so. Her allusive poetry and prose become a further strategy of authorial concealment. Rather than allow the interviewer to identify influences and references in her work, Smith uses the insinuations of allusion to deny any authority over the text whatsoever. A similar strategy explains her cautiousness throughout her career about promoting fixed biographical readings of her work, even as she toys with the line between fiction and autobiography in much of writing. She scores through with dark lines her off-guard comment to Jonathan Williams for Parnassus: The poem really might be stated to be about a cat and it might be about a cat but its [sic] really about you yourself.109

In using the cat as a totemic cipher for self-representation in her work, she is anxious not to let it out of the bag. She must conceal that the patrolling feline warden is in fact the writer herself, or that what her poem is ‘stated to be about’ might be peeled off by the reader to reveal the hidden subject. Her public statements must then tread the difficult line between distancing her work from light verse whilst avoiding questions of biography, influence, style, or technique, leading to equivocal assertions like this one, made by Smith on Woman’s Hour in 1970: My poems are serious without being solemn [ . . . ] I think they are deeply serious, and I think because they are simply cast, some people think that, you know, for some people straightforwardness is the ultimate trick, but they’re wrong. They’re not full of tricks. They are quite sort of straightforward with a great deal of thought underneath I think.110

The oscillations in Smith’s statement between professions of authenticity and complexity seem in continual combat. Even at this late stage

108

See also her ‘confession’ about the source for the poem ‘I Remember’ as discussed in Chapter 1, p. 29. 109 From unpublished draft script of her interview with Jonathan Williams, UT. This comment was later published but with the sense of authorial intervention removed: ‘The poem can claim to be about a cat but it’s really about you yourself ’ (‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’, 46). 110 Photocopied script of interview with Honour Wyatt for ‘Poet Talking’, Woman’s Hour, 16 February 1970, UT.

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in her career, her second-guessing of her audience’s responses (‘some people think that’) can never be specifically alluded to; her euphemistic ‘you know’ avoids attaching the idea of a duplicitous author to any personal pronoun. Her use of the verb ‘cast’ also affords her an expedient slipperiness, implying both a gradual formation of her work that suggests the conscious artist, the trained ‘smith’ that her surname invokes, and also the sense of ‘cast’ as flinging or discarding, a definition she used elsewhere in interviews, describing poetry as something she ‘throws off ’.111 The modifying ‘simply’, which hovers between the phatic ‘merely’ or the more problematic ‘facilely’, is similarly conflicted in its implications. The difficulty with which recent critics such as Huk and Severin have attempted to construct Smith as a complex and serious author are inextricably linked to her own efforts to do the same; her selfconstruction becomes a balancing act but one where it is the reader who is more frequently made to walk the rope. Meanwhile, the ‘misplaced’ Smith is in fact the hidden ringmaster who watches from offstage. 111 See her interview with Yvonne Thomas in the Evening Standard, where she states: ‘When I write poetry, I throw it off. It is not very nice for the readers, but I get rid of it that way’ (‘A Polite Murder, Cookery, and Melancholy’, 3 December 1969, 22).

5 ‘Observation, Discipline, and Company’: The Overlooked Reader As Smith worked on the finals proofs of her first novel in 1936, she wrote a note to her publishers at Jonathan Cape imagining how various projected readers might respond to the tentative title for her literary debut, ‘Under the Haystack’. The psychologist, she surmised, might envision it as a picture book for children, the art mistress might see the title as denoting a work featuring ‘something very rural, idyllic’, and the sales-manager of a potted meat firm might declare it ‘sloppy’.1 Though an arch piece of correspondence, typical of Smith’s writing style in the mid-1930s, it suggests a very real preoccupation with attempting to second-guess the audience for her work. Smith’s oeuvre is full of readings and readers. Her novels’ protagonists, Pompey Casmilus and Celia Phoze, devour books as fiercely as they struggle to write them. The chronicles of their writing lives are entirely bound up with the sense that they will discover their authorial voice through the books they read. Smith’s poems and illustrations throng with characters attempting to read each other or themselves. They are forever glancing over their shoulders, straining to see how their actions and words have been interpreted. The idiosyncratic narrative voice in Smith’s three novels is so aware of and, at times, confrontational with its imagined reader that the text becomes a kind of uneven symposium between Smith’s fictive author–protagonist and her ventriloquized audience. Yet if Smith creates a vacillating and elusive authorial persona throughout her published books, interviews, and poetry performances, her representations of the reader are similarly diverse. The reader is both confidante and rival, an object variously of pity, scorn, and anger. As 1 This note is undated, but was later included in correspondence from Rupert HartDavis to William McBrien, 5 November 1980, while the latter began work on Smith’s biography, UT.

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Ingrid Hotz-Davies has noted, Smith’s reader is also ‘a potential enemy, forever ready to point his finger at the sore point, and much of her poetic energy is taken up with hiding herself from [him]’.2 Her projected reader is both too obtuse and too intellectual, disregarding yet never observant enough. The narrative voice in her novels wavers between addressing its readers in the first and third person, adding to our double view of the author–protagonist. Her inscription of the reader into the text is a tactic of disorientation; our position is never predictable, our view of her fleeting and capricious. Smith sketches out the limits of our perception and, by inference, our interpretation. What we are shown through these readers is deliberately partial. Throughout her novels, these projected readers are locked in uneasy combat. Pompey’s discussion of the Bacchae in Novel on Yellow Paper is mediated not only through the influential figure of her classics mistress who is ‘dead shot on Euripides’ (127), but ‘the still more too human translator [Euripides] now has in England’ (128).3 The bastardized text she reads is disfigured even before her teacher attempts to impose her own interpretation. When Pompey goes on to offer her own retelling of the story, she must do so as yet another messenger, assuring us her speech was ‘got by heart by some difficulty’ (127) only to later confess she was a ‘bit sketchy on the language side’ (136). The transmission of the text necessitates transformation. By Over the Frontier, Pompey insists that ‘so many writers’ thoughts, so much of English literature’ is ‘melodramatized’ (60). The original texts themselves now fall prey to fallibility, bloated and disfigured by the writers’ emotional inflation of their source material. Acts of reading and writing are often under threat, diverted by subjective agendas, mercenary concerns, or idle complacency. In Smith’s creation of her reader, there is a concomitant framing of the author. In Novel on Yellow Paper, for example, just as she cites the fictional construct of Coleridge’s Wedding Guest reader from ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1795), so too does the text find room for Miss Bedworthy (the imaginary lowbrow women’s writer created by George

2 Ingrid Hotz-Davies, ‘ “My Name is Finis”: The Lonely Voice of Stevie Smith’, in In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry, ed. C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 219–34, 232. 3 Smith may be referring here to Gilbert Murray, who would have been the best known Euripides translator at the time. See his edition of The Plays of Euripides (London: George Allen, 1911).

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Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying4) and Miss Snooks (the H. G. Wells character who bears ‘a name invented by novelists’5). Smith’s imaginary readers take their place in a world full of invented authors and selfconfessed fictional characters. The teasing insertion of autobiography into her novels, which challenges its readers to draw links between the characters and Smith’s own social circle, only raises further questions about what the apparently imaginary readers that people her narrative might denote. There is also an implicit conflict between the author– protagonists, who are reading in order to create, and the reader– reviewers, who are reading in order to critique. What is the relationship between these two configurations of the reader, and what might mark the transition in Smith’s texts from one to the other? The role of the reader in a literary text is still one that divides theorists and critics. Pompey’s cry of ‘to hell with the reader’ (63) in Over the Frontier is no more extreme than the polarized and provocative positions taken by writers like Stanley Fish or E. D. Hirsch throughout much of their interrogation of the relationship between reader and author.6 The desire to find model readers in the texts we read, and to create those models when we cannot find them, suggests a dogged need to explicate our own interpretation. The confusion of reading figures in Smith’s work is mirrored in the academy by the proliferation of ideal interpretative reading models theorists like Wolfgang Iser have put forward. Elizabeth Freund’s summation of Iser’s work, which, she argues, promotes a ‘wandering viewpoint which fails to reach a destination’,7 is entirely analogous to our own nomadic passage through a work like Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), which distorts and derails us at each attempt to interpret it.

4 See George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (London: Penguin, 1962), 22, where a bookshop browser is offered a novel entitled ‘Almost a Virgin’ by Barbara Bedworthy. Orwell’s sexual pun is carried through in Smith’s reference in Novel on Yellow Paper (141), where ‘Miss Bedworthy’ is introduced into the text to denote a sexually submissive wife. 5 H. G. Wells, ‘Miss Winchelsea’s Heart’, in Twelve Stories and a Dream (London: Macmillan, 1904). Fictive novelists also appear in her poems of the period, such as the ‘novelette by Miss Hull’ in ‘Death Came to Me’ (CP 50). 6 Compare for example E. D. Hirsch’s argument in The Aims of Interpretation (London: University of Chicago Press, 1976) that ‘the reader should try to construct authorial meaning, and he can in principle succeed in the attempt’ (8), with Stanley Fish’s position in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretative Communities (London: Harvard University Press, 1980), which begins by asserting that the logical conclusion of Hirsch’s work is that there is no such thing as a text (vii). 7 Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader (London: Routledge, 1987), 147.

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In his book The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth argues for the consanguinity of the writer and reader figure created by the author of a literary text: The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement.8

Yet if there is not only disunity in the image of the author and reader but a bifurcation in the image of the reader themselves, what might constitute a successful reading? The splitting off of the image of the reader into all its various formations throughout Smith’s oeuvre makes the process of reading her work into a spectacle of erasure; we watch as various notions of the reader and author are sketched and then replaced. In this chapter, I will be looking in detail at the ways in which Smith creates this spectacle, and suggest how her multiplicity of reading figures relates to her own authorial self-construction. By tracing the development of these figures from the reader-as-emerging-writer to the readeras-critic, I will explore how and why the reader becomes both a spectator and spectre in her work. As we have seen, Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) provided Smith with a chronicle of the emerging artist. Yet she amends Pater’s model by creating a fictionalized running account of her own intellectual journey as a reader–writer. Pompey, the burgeoning poet depicted in Novel on Yellow Paper, seeks out a community of thinkers who discover themselves through reading. The references in the novel to Henry Adams’ intellectual autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1918), particularly in the context of Pompey Casmilus as a narrator who thinks she has ‘read too much’ (12), points us to a source work where the central figure is ‘a desultory reader of everything he found readable’.9 What is striking, too, is the way in which Adams’ engagement in a reading programme away from a formal educative system results in an attitude to writing that is both fertile and febrile: The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over and over again and to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too 8

Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, (London: University of Chicago, 1961), 137. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35. 9

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well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged.10

Writing is here celebrated as a plastic art for the maverick self-educator, the creative reward for being the ‘desultory reader’ or, in Pompey’s case, the writer who has ‘read too much’. Yet the models of the readeras-writer Adams introduces often seem specifically to exclude figures like Pompey and, by implication, Smith herself.11 Smith quotes Henry Adams’ assertion that ‘private secretaries are servants of a rather lower order’ (42) with disdain but resignation, her own transcribing of his comment in itself an inevitable nod to the secretary’s textual enslavement. Adams begins his book by bemoaning the absence of autodidact reader models, and suggests that for examples of ‘self-teaching’12 one must return to Benjamin Franklin. Smith also opens the narrative of Novel on Yellow Paper with a reference to Franklin; yet her allusion seems all too conscious of his status as an intellectual suspect— It’s a world of unequal classes, not the way B. Franklin saw things [ . . . ] so he put equality on paper and hoped it would do, and hoped nobody would take it seriously. And nobody did. (11)

This shoulder-shrugging of authorial intention and readerly interpretation suggests an anxiety about the status of the autodidactic writer. The passage, the first reference to reading in Smith’s entire oeuvre, introduces an immediate attack on the idea of writerly authority. In this case, it would appear that any author who discovers their voice through solitary reading will inevitably inscribe their awareness of the reader’s control over the text back into their own work. Franklin knows that subsequent readers will not approach his written text with deference. The only tactic available to him is to renege his claims to authority altogether. His treatise on equality hardly promotes its central theme in the destabilized relationship between the reader and writer: it only delivers its message in as much as both author and reader deny its veracity to the same degree. Using the same obviating tactics as Franklin, Smith vilifies the notion of the reader-as-writer even as she partially identifies her protagonists in 10

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 325. See Liz Stanley’s The Auto/Biographical ‘I’: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), which argues that women’s exclusion from male autobiographical discourse creates ‘a distinct autobiography . . . always in the process of construction, characterized by its self-conscious and increasingly selfconfident traversing of conventional boundaries between different genres of writing’ (225). 12 Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 7. 11

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this mould. In Novel on Yellow Paper Pompey reads John Inglesant (1881) to get ‘into the inside-of the Christian religion’ (175), but her readerly model Inglesant devours books ‘with a lazy facility which always gives a meaning’ but ‘often an incorrect one’.13 Elsewhere, she makes the identification of obscure literary quotations into cruel jest, poking fun at the would-be intellectual keen to assert their worth. She also includes a specific attack on the autodidact through her reference to Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (1934),14 a play that gives an autobiographical portrait of O’Neill in Richard Miller as the young boy whose autonomous search for knowledge makes him a social and familial oddity. Smith’s narrative reserves much of its venom for Miller’s partial knowledge— This boy had read Swinburne. So? So that’s the boy that read Swinburne. And by and by he was still never getting any further than being the boy that read Swinburne. But by and by I remember he was also reading Kipling [ . . . ] he certainly was a clever boy. Upon nothing, very thin and fine, was the spreading. Over and upon nothing. (185)

There is no artistic growth or sense of enlightenment in Smith’s depiction of Miller. The texts he reads become merely nominal appendages, failed attempts to deliver him from obscurity. As Smith goes on to write, ‘this boy who read Swinburne, that was this boy’s projection of himself’ (186). The reading writer is revealed here as a mythmaker, a figure desperate to create a context for his work through the texts he reads. The invective directed towards O’Neill’s Miller who is, like Pompey, another fictionalized autobiographical reader–writer, works as a preemptive strike to deter Smith’s own readers from casting her in this role.15 It is also a determined statement that Smith has left this stage of

13

Joseph Henry Shorthouse, John Inglesant: A Romance (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 22. 14 Compare Novel on Yellow Paper (185) with Eugene O’Neill, Ah Wilderness! and Days without End: Two Plays by Eugene O’Neill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), where the protagonist Richard Miller professes his love for the poetry of Kipling and Swinburne (28–9). Smith makes a specific reference to the play in a review of Walter Clark’s Tim Hazard (London: William Kimber, 1951), which she describes as a portrait of the author ‘when young, like Ah, Wilderness! ’ in ‘New Novels’, World Review (March 1952), 78–80, 79. 15 Smith’s tactic has been largely successful; only John Simon, ‘The Poems of Stevie Smith’, Canto, Spring 1 (1977), 181–98, dismisses her macronic poems as ‘silly [ . . . ] the autodidact’s need to show off her culture’ (185).

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reading behind her, a way of differentiating her own reading programme from Miller’s superficial parade of knowledge. A similar motive would seem to explain Smith’s character Professor Dryasdust in Over the Frontier, her portrait of a young professor based on Walter Scott’s fictional reader imagined in the prefaces for his novels.16 For Smith, Dryasdust comes to represent Richard Miller twenty years on: He has a great deal of book knowledge, and outside of books he knows nothing. He is a clever baby, will he ever be anything more, I do not know, in a moment of irritation I guess not. (89)

As with her reference to Miller, the creation of Dryasdust allows Smith to contrast her own reading practice with that of an imagined alternative reader, setting up the pattern her first reviewers eagerly followed. Dryasdust is a reader whose impulse to write is deflected by the promise of academic mastery. His attack on Pompey, who has threatened to discuss his thesis subject Paracelsus in her novel, allows Smith to rebut criticism of her idiosyncratic reader-as-writer approach within her own narrative. In response, Pompey attributes Dryasdust’s anger to a submerged desire within him to create rather than critique, asking him: Is it perhaps because you wish yourself to write? Me? Roars Dryasdust, I am writing a thesis on Paracelsus. (90)

By contrasting her work with Dryasdust’s, which makes no distinction between the creative and the critical response, Smith emphasizes the original nature of her textual ‘recycling’. Her refusal to make a scholarly monument of her own reading makes her project quite literally the antithesis of his. She also uses Dryasdust to highlight the maturity of her literary tastes. When Dryasdust offers to ‘educate’ Pompey by reading her Pater, Smith cannot resist the opportunity to toast her own readerly sophistication: [ . . . ] the succulent young voice of the insufferably teaching young professor, the falling back of the years since I read Pater [ . . . ] Yes at twenty one may read Pater—but not aloud to friends, not that, never that, at twenty it is even commendable to read Pater, it shows that at least one has an ear for the less subtle harmonies of English prose. (93)

16 See Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Faber, 1988); repr. Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 92–3, for possible biographical sources for the character.

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This passage, like Smith’s evocations of childhood reading, carries strong associations between reading and the developmental stages of the writing mind, locating each read text within a specific moment in the artist’s life. Yet it also introduces the idea of a private reading programme that must be concealed from others, a body of literature that must be devoured but then subsequently denied or derided. It is religiously recited and transcribed in one’s twenties, and dismissed as second-rate ten years later. If Smith’s inclusion of Richard Miller or Professor Dryasdust allows her to construct herself as a reader writing, it also suggests that this early ‘vulnerable’ stage in an author’s life must subsequently be concealed or rewritten. Pompey’s unwitting quotations from Pater in the final section of Over the Frontier, where she compares a friend to ‘a vampire that has learnt the secrets of the grave’,17 suggests the difficulty of such an endeavour. In The Holiday, Celia Phoze takes on the mantle of the failed artist, with her unpublished novel ‘My Humiliations’,18 and the fallible reader— she confesses to her cousin that she has ‘a superficial mind’ and catalogues the list of books she has not or cannot read: I did not read Dante, you will understand that is difficult, but I can remember the lines that I have heard said, I whisper in my cousin’s ear, ‘Galeotoo fu il libro e chi lo scrisse, e quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avanti ’. [ . . . ] Oh, well (I hurry on), and I did not read I Promessi Sposi. And in German I did not read Dichtung und Wahrheit or Die Leute von Seldwyla or Die Bernstein Hexe. (87)19

Central to this inventory of truncated reading is the line that Celia misremembers from Dante, taken from the description of Paolo and Francesca’s courtship—‘quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avanti ’ (trans.

17 Over the Frontier (122) echoes Walter Pater’s description of Da Vinci’s La Gioconda which, he suggests, ‘has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave’ (The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 80). Pompey signals her irritation at failing to shake off his influence with a parenthetic ‘oh shut up, Dryasdust’, suggesting that the professor and Richard Miller are both fictionalized versions of herself as a reader. 18 This manuscript is linked by allusion to Smith’s own aborted novel, ‘Married to Death’. See The Holiday (66): ‘Lopez says: You are married to Death and Hades; all my friends are married to Death and Hades.’ 19 Celia’s sweep of nineteenth-century German prose takes in Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (1827), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–31), Gottfried Keller’s Die Leute von Seldwyla (1856–74), and William Meinhold’s Die Bernstein Hexe (1844).

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‘that day we read no further’).20 Whilst Francesca is simultaneously distracted from her reading and incited by its amatory content, Celia’s relationship with the text, like her love for her cousin, is always at second remove. The allusion seems to signal a permanent departure away from the idea of reading, suggesting that the artist’s texts must now stand alone without the support of literary progenitors. Yet the suggestion of a newly independent authorial voice seems uncertain and wavering: the novel’s catalogue of abandoned recitations and readings are broken off more with a self-incriminating regret than a Pompey-like defiance.21 The young writer’s notebook, that most fetishized of artist’s possessions, is also fictionalized and immolated in The Holiday, as if Smith were attempting to destroy the evidence of her reading apprenticeship through the very staging of its destruction. In an argument towards the end of the novel, Celia attempts to pacify Uncle Heber by reading out quotations from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground which she has transcribed into her writing journal: I now go on turning the pages of my notebook. Listen to this, I say, now just for one moment, Uncle, do not scold, listen. Oh, I think, this is something that must prick home to every writer who has a sensibility and a desire, to establish himself. (192)

Yet whilst Dostoevsky’s text has been transcribed by the reader–writer here to ‘establish’ herself, Celia’s offering up of this mediated text to others has precisely the opposite effect—she drops her head on her book and collapses on her bed, ‘despised, rejected; cut off, cast out, condemned’ (194). Her barrage of quotations throughout the novel gives her no safeguard against the isolation of her position. One of Celia’s final actions in the novel is to destroy a composite text—a sermon she has been preparing for her minister uncle based on her notebook 20 See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. 1: Inferno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), trans. Mark Musa, Canto V ll. 137–8. See also Smith’s subtitle to the poem ‘At School’, which describes it as a ‘Paolo and Francesca situation’ (CP 361). Her interest in the passage may stem back to Keats’ sonnet, ‘On a Dream after Reading of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno’, and its opening invocation to Hermes with ‘his feathers light’ (Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), 235). 21 Celia’s friend Tom abandons reading a novel only to play a Beethoven piano sonata he can only half-remember (72), Dean Inge’s public reading of his work sees him ‘letting ten pages flip by with never a word read’ (145), whilst Celia must sing certain lines of hymns under her breath to conceal her wavering commitment to the Anglican Church (118).

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transcriptions of Edward Gibbon is torn into pieces. These composite fragments, which Celia passively lets ‘fall on the floor’ are, like her writing notebook, then abandoned as Celia goes into a deep sleep. She finally puts aside both her reading and her writing: at the novel’s conclusion her eyes are firmly shut. If Smith identifies the reading writer as a temporary stage in an author’s development, it seems this burgeoning artist figure must consequently be partly erased or dismembered for the relationship between the writer and their reading public to begin. Celia’s symbolic destruction of her composite sermon suggests the point at which Smith’s authorial voice must abandon its analects in order to construct its audience. The primary means of beginning this focus on the reader is by turning to the tradition of the readerly address. Smith invokes a plurality of different traditions through this device. The references to her ‘wretched Reader, so mishandled and provoked’ in Novel on Yellow Paper (228) attempt to humour our passage through her experimental style, situating her novels alongside works such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67) and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Autour de ma Chambre (1794).22 Occasionally, a direct mention of the reader comes as a profession of narrative fidelity—‘Dear Reader, I will tell you the truth’, she insists on the same page—casting Pompey in the tradition of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). Smith also frequently dons the authorial disguise of a George Eliot or a Charlotte Bronte¨, her mocking entreaties to her ‘gentle reader’ recalling the moral prompts of the nineteenthcentury novel.23 Yet all these traditions, by no means discrete in themselves, are destabilized by the more contemporary influences at work in her readerly addresses. We have already seen the influence of Hillaire Belloc’s playful admonishments to the reader in But Soft—We are Observed! on Smith’s authorial voice. Huk has also identified Smith’s authorial nudges of ‘do you see’ as an explicit reference to Joseph Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness (1889).24 In this context, the interpretative fixity of the ‘gentle Reader’ is undermined by a much more ambiguous 22 Smith described her own reading whilst ill as a ‘voyage autour de mon bookshelf ’ in a letter to Joan Robinson, February 1939, King’s College Cambridge. 23 Her own personal library included Charlotte Bronte¨’s Shirley: A Tale (London: Routledge, 1892) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram, a Tale (London: Richard Bentley, 1836), both novels which rely heavily on addresses to their reader. 24 Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 70.

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authorial voice. Yet these modernist and middlebrow allusions to Conrad and Belloc are further qualified by Smith’s frequent references to 1930s women’s magazine readers via her secretary–protagonist Pompey. The relative surety with which Pompey’s boss, Sir Phoebus, can talk of a discrete audience for his magazines, defined as they are through the products they buy and the letters they write to the editor, only highlights the grey area that is a novel’s ‘reader’.25 If the use of this dissembling vocative is always slippery in a work of fiction, what do Smith’s addresses represent beyond their allusions to a generic authorial device? The one existing draft copy of Novel on Yellow Paper shows that many of the addresses to the reader first enter Smith’s novels as a form of authorial self-appeasement. In all the sections added to the novel in its final stages, the reader is invoked to explain recent changes that she has had to make to her text. Her publishers’ insistence that her prose follow the dictates of conventional punctuation and lineation, as we have seen, is represented in the novel by a prolonged readerly address, a textual insertion carrying tacit disapproval of their decision. Yet this technique is also used to record her discarding of material for more personal reasons. Towards the end of the novel, during a profession of genuineness momentarily recalling the style of a Defoe heroine, Pompey confesses to us that a humorous letter she has described from her friend Tommy conceals a letter our narrator feels she cannot share with us: Dear Reader, I will tell you the truth. It is indeed not a happy truth. There is at this moment a certain letter in my mind, a letter that I have received—not long ago, but now; not funny at all, but bitter; not from Tommy, but from Freddy. (228–9)

In the earlier draft of the novel, this quoted section is absent. The section replaces the very letter from Freddy that Pompey’s revised text mentions: He wrote to me and said. I cannot continue any longer as your lover without marriage. Other people can no doubt Harriet may be able to but I cannot. The strain is too much [ . . . ] But he never has been my lover perhaps if he had he would not have felt this funny strain he is always talking about but he might have been if he liked but always there was something funny happening that he let prevent it.26

25

A similarly homogeneous interpretative audience is denoted in Smith’s mention of the ‘Registered Reader’ in her poem ‘The Suburban Classes’ (CP 26). 26 Novel on Yellow Paper typescript, DP/156/1, Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull.

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There are obvious speculative explanations for the deletion of this passage in the published version of the novel. Most probably, the autobiographical nature of the passage (Freddy has been widely identified as Smith’s fiance´, Eric Armitage) necessitated its removal. But what is striking about its existence is that it reveals Smith’s adoption of the verisimilitude topos as a disguise for what is, in effect, total autobiographical honesty. Unlike Moll Flanders, Pompey’s testimony is painfully accurate. The readerly address then offers Smith an authorial veil, a vital mode of disguise which still permits the narrative integrity of her semi-autobiography. The addresses act as a form of defence against her writing self for her later, editorial decisions. What then are the concomitant implications of manufacturing a reading public, and how does Smith fashion them throughout her novels? The early sections of Novel on Yellow Paper, despite their staunch commands to ‘work it out for yourself’, continually seek to engage the sympathies of their imagined readers. Most of the parabases in the novel take the form of appeals to the reader’s experience and knowledge, giving the impression of the reader as an undecided browser to be included and pandered to: Don’t you see what I mean about this family and about the way people are good to me, and how lucky I am? (27)

Pompey’s aside implies the existence of a disagreeing imagined reader. Rather than castigating them, this early address finds Pompey emphasizing certain aspects of the narrative thus far in order to coerce her sceptical audience. Ever aware that her text must find a ‘good circulation’ (232), Pompey takes every opportunity to sell and resell her narrative to her customers. Another early passage finds Pompey offering generous speculation about us, her embryonic readers: Well, Reader, I sometimes get the feeling that you are one of those figures at Larry’s party that Larry would take me up to after I’d had a word or two with kind brother Henry, and say: Oh here’s, Pompey, darling, you’ll love each other. And Pompey would start right off the mark, Pompey No Weakness, was my motto that I lived by, like I was Danton. (59)

Yet the casual flirtation and apparent equanimity of this situation—the reader and writer as two strangers conversing at a party—is here undermined by both the pre-emptive assertions that these strangers will ‘love each other’ and Pompey’s subsequent self-mythologizing as Danton, the French revolutionary. She retreats into the third person, anxious to have

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the narrative upper hand, effectively staging her own rejection of readerly intimacy. The narrative ‘circulation’ then seems to describe not only Pompey’s projected sales figures but her own continuing retreat round and back behind the covers of her own book.27 Pompey’s slip into the third person becomes a more frequent authorial tactic in the later stages of the novel and throughout Over the Frontier. Developing from Smith’s insertions of possible responses to her work,28 the addresses to Pompey herself, as if from her reader, are both distancing and inclusive, as the following passage from the end of Novel on Yellow Paper suggests: Oh quiet now Pompey, think of the little birds. Have you ever thought of the birds? Do they fuss and fume for love? Oh look at that little bird sitting on the low bough swinging and singing to himself. (237)

This new mode of address is deliberately disorientating. The indirect speech directed at Pompey might equally come from her imagined reader, from Pompey’s own interior consciousness, or from Stevie Smith the writer, exasperated by the constant despairing of her authorial creation. In the latter interpretation, the passage promotes a secret compact between Smith and her reader that sidesteps Pompey herself. Yet if it is intended to mimic the workings of Pompey’s mind, the passage seems to exclude us, turning away from us as addressees towards a new, more solipsistic dialogue. Towards the end of Over the Frontier, Smith effectively stages the death of her addressed reader. The novel returns to its opening scene, which found Pompey in a picture gallery. This passage opens with the dialogue Pompey heard in the gallery, sending her back to the beginning of her narrative. Very witty this painter, is he not? What did you say, what did you say there Pompey? Why now, remember to be very careful here, oh please remember to be so careful, because this Painter Business circles in the widest outsweeping flight to the very first words that you have written. But oh what a trajectory, to attain such an encirclement, to hit back to the beginning, oh what an enormous great parabola you have described. (162–3)

27

There is also a pun on human cardiology, Pompey attempting to achieve a ‘good circulation’ for her text by ordering her readers to ‘brace up’ (232). 28 See, for example, Novel on Yellow Paper’s ‘if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation’ (38).

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The italicized speech, which has previously been used in her novels only to denote literary quotations or the direct speech of other characters, is here reappropriated to suggest Pompey’s words themselves. This then inserts the reply into the mouth of the reader who is, for two sentences, permitted ‘control’ of the text. Yet our ventriloquized pleading with the protagonist to be careful, with us as well as with herself, turns out to be our final dialogue: for the closing ninety pages of the novel, there are no more direct addresses to the reader. Smith returns to the beginning of her narrative only to rewrite her text without acknowledging us. Novel on Yellow Paper contains around thirty-five readerly addresses, the first section of Over the Frontier over forty. Yet by the novel’s final section, Pompey is now experientially within the text rather than narrating it retrospectively to her audience. Her own self-recriminations—‘How hateful you are, Pompey’ (267)—replace our once-ventriloquized voice. The manuscript of Over the Frontier was begun before the publication of Novel on Yellow Paper, as its own narrative reminds us.29 The last section is the only part written by a published author aware of a real and all-too-present reading audience for her work. Smith’s rejection of the readerly address here suggests her anxiety about provoking a sustained dialogue with a fictional reader now that a real, and potentially incongruous, reader exists.30 A similar switch is evident in her poetry. Her direct addresses to readers are all in early poems, from the cautionary ‘Reader before you condemn, pause’ (‘Infant’, A Good Time Was Had By All, 1937, CP 33), the morally indignant ‘Is it surprising Reader do you think?’ (‘Analysand’, A Good Time Was Had By All, 1937, CP 54), or the arch ‘And you who stand and read this rhyme j How do you do, Tomnoddy?’ (‘Suicide’s Epitaph’, Tender Only to One, 1938, CP 155). Yet if Smith is unwilling to pit her implied reader against an actual audience, how might the abandonment of the readerly address in her work deform or erase this unacknowledged presence now banished from the text? 29 Jack Barbera and William McBrien note that the final manuscript was submitted to the publisher early in 1937, four months after the publication of Novel on Yellow Paper (Stevie: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1985), 104). 30 For evidence that Smith’s writing was influenced by the public reaction to her debut, see her letter to Denis Johnston, 23 September 1936, UT: ‘really [the press cuttings] are so nice that I must show them to everybody but of course the listeners is not so-o-o good I could wring his neck to say that I have the flapper mind [ . . . ] my next book will have to be a learned treatise on some subject I have unfortunately not yet been able to think of to counteract this hateful impression.’

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No manuscript of Smith’s subsequent cancelled novel ‘Married to Death’ exists, although David Garnett’s telling criticism that ‘you’ve been writing for yourself and not for us’31 suggests a work anxious about its possible audience. Yet strikingly, The Holiday rejects the narrative props of the addressed reader and the first-person narrator. The one direct address to the reader enters the text parenthetically, as if by accident.32 It is only at this safe distance that Smith permits herself her most sustained symposium on the relationship between the writer and the reader, here cloaked in the words of Celia’s cousin, Caz: Writers’ books may, of course, hold useful matter, went on Caz (of which the writer himself is not always fully conscious), for all that the writer may be persons of low moral standing, not to be associated with by the fastidious, scum of the earth, indeed, of value only in their books, and only then by the sifting process of the judging mind of the reader. So that in one long book, said Caz, there may be only two thoughts of beauty and of worth, and for these two thoughts the reader must plunge and dive. The writer himself is to be considered as a felon, put to hard labour in a solitary cell, his work scanned by his warders, they are his readers, scrutinized by them, and judged for what worth there may be in it. (157)

Here the reader is the intrepid diver who must hunt the book’s murky waters for gold. The writer is incarcerated. Whilst Caz’s image of servitude and surveillance partakes of the Romantic idea of the writer trapped in a mortal world, the specificity of the image in terms of the physical prison and its method of control shares much with Michel Foucault’s explication of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon:33 The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions—to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide—it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting 31

David Garnett to Stevie Smith, 21 June 1939, UT. His concern that ‘one does not know who is who or what is what’ in the manuscript also points to a confusion about the role of the author, protagonist, and reader in her mooted novel. 32 See The Holiday (100). Smith’s ‘believe me, reader’ comes in a digression about a childhood memory of a swinging ape in India, echoing her performance introductions for the poem ‘Le Singe Qui Swing’ (CP 252), UT. 33 Smith herself would have been partially familiar with Jeremy Bentham through her reading of Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (Oxford: University of California, 1993), which remarks on the ‘eyeless heroism’ of Bentham’s teachings (149). She had also read Stephen Potter’s The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), which describes the literary critic as a ‘voyeur’ (19).

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and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which is ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.34

The ‘trap’ of readerly visibility that the writer-as-felon has fallen into suggests that neither the author nor their audience can ever be released from their uneven contract. The image also seems pertinent to Smith’s own staging of herself throughout her novel trilogy. Whilst her interpolation of her poetry both published and unpublished into her narratives offers her the opportunity to defend and reposition her work, it also presents her with the danger of never escaping ‘full lighting and the eye of a supervisor’. A deleted phrase from Novel on Yellow Paper casts Pompey early in her narrative as the ‘female delinquent’.35 Here, Smith’s dejected paranoid final novel seems to construct the writer as a fugitive criminal. This idea of the reader as a warden, a watchful figure that distorts the writer’s text, is recurrent throughout Smith’s work. Explaining her abandonment of novel-writing to Hans Ha¨usermann, Smith mentioned the ‘dreadful fear that pursues always, and that has no form or substance’.36 This formless and ominous presence, the actual reader, appears even as Smith refuses it entrance to her texts. The Holiday is full of wariness about intruders and onlookers, from Tiny’s frequent ‘unnecessary glances[s] over his shoulder’ (45) to the furtively ‘torn letters in the waste paper basket’ (182) at the Ministry. Towards the end of the novel, Celia proposes a philosophical model of human existence to Tiny represented by a man, the cards he is playing, and an enigmatic figure who ‘watches over his shoulder’ (50). Yet tellingly, these three discrete elements are subsumed into one ‘mixture’, the overlooking presence eradicating both the player and the cards they play.37 In ‘Is There a Life beyond the Gravy?’, a short story published two years before The Holiday and using the same central characters, Smith

34 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 201. 35 ‘I am the female delinquent that Lombroso said’, Novel on Yellow Paper typescript, DP/156/1, Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull. The reference is to The Female Offender (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895) by Professor Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero, which attempts to construct a psychological model of the female criminal. 36 Letter to Hans Ha¨usermann, 17 December 1957 as quoted in Spalding, Stevie Smith, 180. 37 This passage draws on theological rather than literary models, primarily Dean Inge’s study of Plotinus (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929), which outlines a tripartite model of divinity (11).

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outlines the implications of this voyeur figure for the creative artist. In this supernatural tale written for At Close of Eve: An Anthology of New Curious Stories (1947), Celia, Cas,38 and Tiny visit their Uncle Heber’s house only to be transformed into ghostly spectres returned to playroom infancy. The final scene finds Celia regressed to the stage of learning how to write: Celia began to print a sentence in coloured chalks in her copy-book, there was a different chalk for each letter. Cas looked over her shoulder and read out what she had written: ‘Is there a life beyond the gravy?’39

Her malapropism and Cas’s subsequent correction calls up the ‘black shadow’ of Augustus, an apparition who ultimately reveals Cas and Celia themselves to be ghosts. This move from visible persons to invisible presences is prompted then by misreading. The figurative death both of the author and of Cas, her reading audience, seems to assert, albeit comically, the unknowable threat of this overlooking warden.40 What then might be its impact on the numerous authorial figures that litter Smith’s text? Foucault has asserted: ‘it would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the “authorfunction” rises out of their scissions—in the division and distance of the two.’41 The idea of the author being characterized by disunity and schism recurs throughout Smith’s three novels. In Novel on Yellow Paper, the author figure begins as a strident secretary named Pompey but ends as a dying tiger named Flo.42 The ‘uncertain pads’ of Flo’s feet after she is resuscitated link her to the jotting notebooks of Pompey (232), but cast aspersions over the integrity of the divided author and 38 Smith partially differentiates the character of Casmilus in her short story and in The Holiday by using variant spellings of his name. 39 Stevie Smith, ‘Is There a Life beyond the Gravy?’, in Jeremy Scott (ed.), At Close of Eve: An Anthology of Curious Stories (London: Jarrolds, 1947), 75–86; repr. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago, 1981), 60–73, 72. 40 In her performance introduction to the poem ‘Yes, I Know’, the audience are asked to recreate the overlooking reader themselves: ‘Now here you must imagine two souls (in paradise, perhaps), leafing through the pages of an expensive Art magazine. They pause at the portrait of a beautiful lady. And speak of her’ (UT). 41 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38, 129. 42 Romana Huk notes the name Flo recalls the dog that is shot by Flory in George Orwell’s Burmese Days in Huk (Stevie Smith, 87), but Smith’s own baptismal name Florence seems a more pertinent reference point.

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their work. Pompey reminds herself in Over the Frontier ‘to be wary and watchful’ of any threats to her assumed identity (32), but numerous allusions and quotations in the text suggest a historical lineage of writers who have failed to be appropriately cautious. Canonical authors are understood to carry cultural or social capital only to have their signification questioned by Smith’s sceptical narrators. Weimar erects a statue to Shakespeare in Novel on Yellow Paper, but ‘only the knowing Pompey’ notices the ‘nasty wild cynical look in his eye’ (45), as if scornful at his displaced memorial. A reference to Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice is unsettled by his conflation with an anonymous boy at the British embassy to become ‘Sir Cale Spring Rice’ (18). The opening section of Novel on Yellow Paper, with its paean to Victorian nostalgia, evokes Alfred Lord Tennyson as shorthand to symbolize a particular discrete model of England’s past. Yet the fixity of Tennyson as a symbol is then immediately undermined: Then I think of the wild wet days of the wild wet Lincolnshire of the younger Tennyson. How, were there two? Yes, but I mean younger than the pet of the Old Queen. Younger and sadder. Oh the sad sweet over-sweet Alfred, so haughty, so proud, and so disagreeable. (14)

Before Tennyson becomes subsumed into the structures of the monarchy— his baronial status accorded in 1884 is fleetingly alluded to with Pompey’s discovery of a baron’s corpse just before this passage—he is an untamed animal. Public adoration dilutes his work. Smith’s continued linking of Tennyson and Pompey’s boss, Sir Phoebus— often alluded to as ‘Sir Baronet’ (6)—also situates him within the strictures of commercial publishing, his work of no more literary importance than the two-penny weeklies churned out by Pearson and Newnes. One of his poem’s epitaphs ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’ is used as the basis for a woman’s magazine romance column later on in the novel (147), effectively sealing his metamorphosis from impassioned poet to public cipher.43 Pompey boasts that ‘nothing is too deep for words for a poet like [Tennyson] and me’ (28), the comparison suggesting that Smith, 43 See ‘Mariana’, The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 6. The epitaph comes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. See The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), III.i.276. The borrowed source suggests a cycle of appropriation running throughout Tennyson’s work and its reception.

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too, may run the risk of misappropriation. Yet if her final novel pours scorn on the ‘Tennysons of our days’ (156), Smith returns to him for a final defence of the writer figure in The Holiday, as we saw in Chapter 1: And what did Tennyson say when the reader bit at him, when the sheep-like shallow-pate of a reading public ventured a word of protest, ‘A word in your ear, if I may make so bold’—if they dared demur? What the great Tennyson, the supposedly meek and mild Old Blether of a Queen’s pet baa-lamb, said was this: Vex not thou the poet’s mind With thy shallow wit Vex not thou the poet’s mind For thou canst not fathom it (176–7)

This final reference to Tennyson in her novels comes as a defiant exoneration of his art. Yet, as Smith suggests, by differentiating his poetry from its reception, Tennyson must engage with the parameters of his own public image. Smith’s linking of the ‘sheep-like’ reading audience with the ‘baa-lamb’ poet certainly highlights the public’s own responsibility in creating the myth of Tennyson as an ovine stooge, but his subsequent ‘biting’ at his reader simply creates a new mythical beast in response to the old one. Once the authorial self is divided, split into the contested roles of public image and private self, neither half can escape unscarred. Like Smith’s Janusfaced muse in ‘The Ambassador’ (CP 247), the ‘master of the mysteries’ falls prey to public speculation, and ‘in the market place j He is known’. Similarly, a discussion about the Roman emperor Claudius in The Holiday soon opens out to a debate about the very notion of how a public figure is created. Celia responds to Caz’s comments on Roman corruption by questioning the idea of Claudius as a discrete cultural signifier: I do not know whether you are talking about the Claudius of the history books and the research material, or about the Claudius of Robert Graves, I say, but that is the only Claudius I know. (132)

The significance of Smith choosing Robert Graves’ Claudius novels here is that their impact on ideas about Claudius as a historical figure are achieved through their use of a feigned first-person testimony:

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In the present work, I swear by all the Gods, I am my own mere secretary, and my own official annalist: I am writing with my own hand, and what favour can I hope to win from myself by flattery?44

Whilst Graves-as-Claudius purports to offer us a true authorial self (even as his self-divisions into secretary, annalist, and scribe seem to point up the difficulty of any such endeavour), Smith-as-Pompey/Celia attempts to become her own secretary quite literally, balancing between the role of amanuensis and narrator. Meanwhile, Smith’s allusion to Henry James’ short story ‘The Private Life’ (1892)45 in Novel on Yellow Paper voices her protagonist’s anxiety that she may simply be a mosaic of public and mythical masks: Then what sort of a man is Pompey whose friends are ‘all of different kinds’? Is there any Pompey at all? Is Pompey a chimera, a creature such as Lord Mellifont in The Private Life, whose existence depended on the presence of his friends? (197)

In James’ playful tale of spectres and authors, the narrator discovers that a famous writer, Vawdrey, is in fact two people—a public intellectual who dines out and gives addresses and an unseen writer with a private life.46 This very literal scission of the author figure suggests a way in which the writer might be both public property and reclusive artist. But, as the story progresses, James’ narrator then realizes that another writer friend, Lord Mellifont, only exists in public; he is, in fact, an artist that his audience has wholly created. The author is revealed as a sham, a fabrication with no integral identity. A writer can exist as a divided self perhaps but, unless he has an audience, he cannot exist at all. It is telling then that Smith turns to Mellifont rather than Vawdrey by way of comparison with her own narrative disguise. Unlike Vawdrey, Smith is unable to separate and manage the two halves of the writing self.47 Pompey, like Mellifont, is 44

Robert Graves, I, Claudius, as published in The Claudius Novels (London: Penguin, 2000), 5. 45 Romana Huk incorrectly suggests, in Stevie Smith, that the reference is to Alexander Korda’s series of private life films made in the 1930s (82). 46 An earlier version of this passage is less explicit about the allusion but more emphatic in its sense of authorial identity as a detective game: ‘I forget the gentleman’s name and even the exact name of the short story Mr. Henry James done it, Reader, look it out for yourself ’ (Novel on Yellow Paper typescript, DP/156/1, Brymor Jones Library, University of Hull). 47 See also Celia’s comment ‘it might be Charles Morgan, it might be Sparkenbroke ’ in The Holiday (131), which aligns Charles Morgan with the eponymous hero of his novel Sparkenbroke (London: Macmillan,1936). The novel itself is preoccupied with

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a finite creation, ostensibly operated by an unseen offstage author, but actually dependent on a reading audience for her existence. The point at which James’ narrator realizes that Vawdrey must, in fact, be two different people, one public and one private, highlights the dangers of division that Smith is so adamant to inscribe into her texts: ‘If it wasn’t he who in the world was it? That a strange gentleman, looking exactly like [Vawdrey] and of like literary pursuits, should be sitting in his room at that hour of the night and writing at his table in the dark,’ I insisted, ‘would be practically as wonderful as my own contention.’ ‘Yes, why in the dark?’ my friend mused. ‘Cats can see in the dark,’ I said. She smiled at me dimly. ‘Did it look like a cat?’ ‘No, dear lady, but I’ll tell you what it did look like—it looked like the author of Vawdrey’s admirable works. It looked infinitely more like him than our friend does himself,’ I pronounced.48

The narrator’s assertion that he has finally found the ‘true’ author relies on a necessary severing of a writer from their works. Meanwhile, under the cover of darkness, a prowling, enigmatic facsimile reveals the gap with the material the author writes and the text that bears their name. Smith’s admiration for James’ ability to ‘out-James himself ’,49 to not only engage with his critical legacy but rewrite it, suggests a model author who distances himself from the writer figures in the main body of his text whilst conducting his reader’s passage through his supernatural stories with a spectral authority. Elsewhere in Novel on Yellow Paper, authors provide degenerate and immoral exempla, from Ouida, the nineteenth-century novelist who died in penniless squalor (186), to Francis Thompson, the failed Catholic minister turned opium addict (48, 122). Perhaps the last gasp for authorial freedom in Smith’s novels comes in her discussion of Boethius in The Holiday. What seems to particularly interest Smith about the Roman philosopher is that it was only his total removal from public life that permitted his work to take place: themes of literary reputation, and opens with a description of the poet Sparkenbroke’s house which, after his death, has become a literary pilgrimage (5). 48 Henry James, ‘The Private Life’, in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1986), 189–232, esp. 212. 49 Reading notebook, UT.

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prison life gave Boethius time to get on with his studies, and before he was executed he wrote his most famous book—The Consolation of Philosophy [ . . . ] Boethius is the sort of person one can admire. (52–3)

Through an image of authorial confinement, the writer is allowed his ‘selfestablishment’ (56) without falling prey to accusations of worldliness. Yet the context of this passage in The Holiday denies Smith the promise of authorial freedom by imprisonment: it takes the form of a review that Celia is typing up for the Ministry of an academic study of Boethius’ work by Helen Barret. Celia is denied access to the original text composed whilst Boethius was facing the death penalty. She knows his work only through the mediating prism of the critic. Although Boethius might have written his greatest work without any conception of a reading audience, subsequent exegesis must choose an already-existing interpretation. However, if Smith cannot have access to Boethius’ private cell, she affords herself much more flexibility by her own constant concealments and disguises. The review included in the novel is in fact Smith’s own, originally written for John O’London’s Weekly.50 In The Holiday manuscript the review is simply pasted in from a newspaper clipping, blurring the boundaries not only between the protagonist and the author’s narrative voice, but between the relationship readers and writers have with the published text itself.51 The literary manuscript, that fetishized object offering the reader unrivalled private access to the unconscious workings of an author’s mind, reveals itself as a collage of previously published writings. The absent text tantalizingly invisible to viewers of Smith’s illustration ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’ is finally discovered only to entirely dissolve the boundaries between the act of composition and self-construction. Smith’s audience, it seems, must not only make the uneasy choice among the fictional protagonists in her novels, the cacophony of voices we find in her poetry, and the eccentric suburban spinster we find in her biopic but also grapple with a writer who is simultaneously reader, reviewer, and author of her own work. She deflects the gaze of the overlooking reader figure by donning their identity as yet another authorial mask. 50 Stevie Smith, ‘Philosophy Written in Prison’, John O’ London’s Weekly, 43 (16 August 1940), 535. 51 See the draft manuscript of The Holiday, UT. The original review is of Helen Barrett’s Boethius: Some Aspects of His Times and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), Smith altering the spelling of the author’s surname as if to nominally fictionalize her.

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Smith reclaims the reader’s panoptic control once more in the poem ‘Fuite d’Enfance’, where the female speaker is again the subject of surveillance: I have two loves, There are two loves of mine, One is my father And one my Divine. My father stands on my right hand, He has an abstracted look. Over my left shoulder My Divine reads me like a book. Which shall I follow . . . And following die? No longer count on me But to say goodbye (CP 158)

Yet in this ‘self-portrait’52 poem, originally published in Tender Only to One (1938), the act of looking is far from straightforward. The father’s ‘abstracted’ look is both a description of his appearance and the manner of his looking, an ambiguity compounded by the accompanying illustration, where the two sexually malevolent onlookers are sketchily drawn, one with large bags under his eyes (Figure 2).53 The female figure, wearing what resembles both a hat and a halo, recalls Alice in Wonderland or the playful overlooking reader from ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, her expression impossible to decode as she hovers in the midst of her threateningly overpowering wardens. In contrast to the depiction of the father, the figure of the divine is apparently omniscient in his ‘reading’, his insight further suggested by the knowing glance he is throwing to the female figure in the drawing. Yet the poem’s collocation of ‘Divine’ and ‘reads’ conflates the first word with its latent transitive verb, to divine, adding a hint of conjecture to his apparently deific perspective. This is compounded by the use of the personal pronoun; ‘my Divine’ has little of the universality we might expect from an immortal figure. As the speaker teasingly promises to choose between these conflicting readings, the poem further disorientates us by shifting into an entirely new register and language— 52

See her letter to Kay Dick, dated 1945, as included in Me Again, 287–8. Romana Huk describes the poem’s illustration as ‘the most terrifying in Smith’s Collected Poems ’ (Stevie Smith, 259). Also see Huk for a discussion of the Shakespearean sources of the poem. 53

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Figure 2. Stevie Smith, ‘Fuite d’Enfance’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). A leur insu Je suis venue Faire mes adieux. Adieu, adieu, adieu.

The Divine’s reading is revealed as a misreading through this arrie`repense´e, his pretensions to omniscience subverted by the speaker’s ventriloquizing of a new, coded voice, which speaks and acts ‘insu’ (unknown) to its onlookers. The idea that he can read the subject like a book is further undermined by the illustration which, unusually, frames all three characters within an uneven rectangular box, suggesting that they themselves are on a book cover, fit to be determined and read by yet another reader. We become the reader in the poem, overlooking the apparently divine subjects who claim to have the perspective from which they can see everything. Our superior position is only mitigated by the realization we have made the same assumption: we echo the misinterpretation of the poem’s ‘divine’ figure, not aware of the readers who will in turn look

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over our shoulder and over-read us. The phrase ‘to read like a book’ is scrutinized with such an unflinching gaze in this poem that it ceases to be an expression of omniscience, and becomes a profession of particularly sublime ignorance. To read is to submit to a perpetual process of divination in which you are neither the first nor the last. The likely visual source for Smith’s illustration,54 Aubrey Beardsley’s frontispiece from Under the Hill (1895; Figure 3), confirms the hidden autonomy of Smith’s position. In Beardsley’s picture, Venus, the symbol for creativity throughout much of Smith’s novel trilogy,55 is watched over by two malignant figures, her arms stretched behind her back in a pose halfway between bondage and coquettishness. Yet here, tellingly, the figures guard the writer rather than survey her. The author-figure is inviolate, suggesting that Smith’s staged incarceration is in actuality another tactic to prevent her readers from drawing closer. Smith, the writer always threatened with entrapment, is in fact the figure in her poem ‘The Sorrowful Girl’ (CP 378), who is ‘imprisoned’ but does ‘not need to be freed’. Throughout her work, then, Smith matches the reader’s gaze with her own. If her texts are full of surveyed writers always seeking to outmanoeuvre their audience, acts of reading are also rarely private. The darkest moment of Novel on Yellow Paper occurs when an anonymous stranger watches Pompey on a train as she is reading: So I went on reading, reading, and he was staring at me [ . . . ] so then he leant across, very magnetic in his eyes, and said: I know everything you are thinking. (111)

Here, the shadowy overlooking figure uses a text not to interpret the author but the person reading it.56 Pompey’s ‘reading, reading’

54 Smith was extremely familiar with Aubrey Beardsley’s work, and in the opening section of Over the Frontier (1938) compares George Grosz’s paintings with ‘the faces of some of the slim full faced degenerate people you have in the drawings of Beardsley’ (11). There are also striking visual similarities between the illustration and William Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Behemoth (1809), which Smith praises in an unpublished 1970 essay on Lord Nelson for Vogue magazine entitled ‘My Hero’, UT. 55 At the opening of Over the Frontier, Venus is represented by a chintzy and kitsch gallery statue (10), but her misappropriation conceals an angry force that ‘tears’ at Pompey and makes her ‘suffer’ for her creation in Novel on Yellow Paper (222). 56 See Katherine Wheeler, ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 153, which argues that Pompey points her finger ‘not merely at the reader, but at the reading—at the reading reader, drawing attention to how she is reading, responding, and participating’.

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Figure 3. Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), Frontispiece for ‘Venus and Tannhauser’, c.1895 (pen and ink), Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, Bedfordshire, UK/ Bridgeman Art Library.

not only falls prey to surveillance but also, from its first description, is immersed in a kind of incestuous double-response. The ‘reading, reading’ suggests an act stripped of immediacy, evoking the ‘response to a response’ that Stanley Fish has identified is taking place in any

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interpretative act.57 The novel’s protagonist offers a hermeneutic model for Smith’s first reviewers, and one which they were eager to accept. An author’s text is used not to interrogate writerly intention, but readerly interpretation. In Over the Frontier, Smith reworks the overlooking train reader image to cast herself as the precocious onlooker eager to access the text: But here in my case now I guess I was at fault, for the more the man beside me in the corner, the more and the more he tried to conceal what it was that was so holding his attention to read and not to be overlooked, so the more did I make no bones at all to overlook and to wait and to bide my time. (55)

As this passage suggests, the subsequent reader’s desire to intervene increases proportionately to the initial reader’s urge to protect their own relationship with the text. The book in question here, a lurid factual history of human torture by John Swain entitled The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (1931), only mimics the overlooking reader’s prurient urge to ‘know’ the text first hand. Swain’s opening definition of torture in the book creates a gruesome parallel with Pompey’s interest in the person reading it: if A dislikes B and meeting him alone flogs him, this is not torture; but if A orders another to flog B while he looks on, it falls within the definition.58

Swain acknowledges the importance of surveillance as a prerequisite for torture. This suggests immediate comparisons with the insertion of a third surveying party into a private contract between a reader and a writer. The voyeur figure not only changes the behaviour of the reader and, by implication, their response to the text, but also the nature of the reading itself. It is now a morally culpable act. Whilst the text’s writer is transformed from complicit and consenting participant to victim through this proliferation of spectators, the reader has become a criminal. It is this reader, rather than the writer-felon, who will now have to stand trial. The final section of the novel, in which Pompey becomes a codebreaker, sends out further warnings to the recidivist reader. The narrative plunges its protagonist into a world of empty manuscripts, erased palimpsests, and invisible ink where even the blotting paper is ‘thirsty’, hungry for the power of textual erasure (190). The battle Pompey is 57 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretative Communities (London: Harvard University Press, 1980), 50. 58 John Swain, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (London: Noel Douglas, 1930), 9.

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fighting is unsure of its combatants but aware of its stakes, setting its war horses ‘adance for the sake of a piece of white paper’ (218).59 Pompey then volunteers responsibility for these missing textual sources not as a writer or creator, but a code-breaker, an interpreter. The reader, guilty as charged, finds the texts have been removed as a temptation too ready to ignore. If the writer, as Caz suggests in The Holiday, should be put to work in a ‘solitary cell’, the reader of Smith’s novels is made to serve their time in an overcrowded one, each subsequent inmate in her ‘captive audience’60 able to point the finger at the previous warden. ‘Observation, discipline, and company’ is one of the many apparently disjointed remarks that make up the stuttering train of conversations in The Holiday (194). The ascending tricolon inverts the reader’s journey through Smith’s novels. We begin as a necessary audience, cajoled and humoured into Pompey’s confidence. She shares with us her own reading experiences, offering an olive branch from a writer to their public. Soon our companionship moves to confinement via the disfigured and misrepresented authors littering the pages of her texts. We identify ourselves as warders to our imprisoned writers, permitted totalizing control over their work through our discriminating gaze. Yet with our patrolling powers comes an accompanying responsibility and visibility: the overlooked readers throughout Smith’s novels suggest the monitoring and limiting of our own interpretative power. Our textual search for the ‘fons et origo’61 of Smith’s ku¨nstlerroman is another ill-advised paperchase revealing nothing but the extent of our own exegetic failings. Our over-readings eventually become oversights. If, as Murray Krieger has argued, visual art is a medium that unpicks personae and artifice, playing the role of ‘revealing the mask as mask’,62 it is perhaps only through Smith’s visual rather than verbal art we might begin to ‘observe’ the author herself rather than simply catching another glimpse of our fallible attempts at interpretation.

59 The battle for textual clarity is mirrored in Smith’s poetry of the period. See, for example, ‘Private Means is Dead’ (CP 74), where her portraits of military veterans are reliant on a ‘tattered journal’ that is difficult to read. 60 Smith uses the phrase with similar undertones in a letter to Rachel Marshall, 13 December 1964, published in Me Again, 312: ‘I have been doing quite a lot of reading (and singing) my poems—it is wonderful what a poor captive audience has to put up with.’ 61 See Novel on Yellow Paper (150), where Smith argues that ‘marriage is not that fons et origo’. 62 See Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 260.

6 ‘Beyond Words’: Stevie Smith as a Visual Artist Ah! Then, if mine had been the Painter’s hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land The consecration, and the Poet’s dream;1

This quotation, highlighted by Smith in her copy of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, may seem a curious reference point, considering she was once described by Barbara Clutton-Brock as someone who ‘had no critical judgement about pictures and very little interest in any of the arts apart from writing’.2 In fact, her novels, essays, poems, and illustrations all betray a marked attraction to the visual arts. Her poems comment on El Greco, Brueghel, Turner, and Renoir. They are also preoccupied with themes of viewing and perception. Her novels consider the work of George Grosz, Francisco de Goya, and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as paintings by William Blake, John Everett Millais, and Vermeer. Their densely allusive prose includes references to artists ranging from Walter Sickert to Maurice Utrillo and James Whistler. They have a structural as well as topical connection with the visual: the narratives of Novel on Yellow Paper and Over the Frontier work as a series of tableaux, built from a succession of framed scenes. In The Holiday, the protagonist describes a park as a ‘collector’s piece’, the landscape offering itself up as an art object (102), whilst ‘the sky is a shutter’ (163). 1

William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumount’, in The Works of William Wordsworth (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 578. 2 As quoted in Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Stevie: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1985), 119.

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Novel on Yellow Paper’s Pompey is a ‘broken Roman statue’ (20), Smith’s alter ego aligned with a fractured classical sculpture. Elsewhere in her writing, Smith descants on her ‘telescopic’,3 ‘leica-memory’,4 often ‘not quite in focus’,5 suggesting a writer’s mind composed of still images. Even Smith’s apparently artless illustrations, as I will go on to argue in this chapter, are often knowingly based on works by artists and illustrators she admired. Yet Clutton-Brock’s dismissal of Smith’s multimedia art highlights the ambivalent way she presents her own engagement with the visual. Smith’s mention of her ‘leica-memory’ provokes comparisons with Christopher Isherwood and the 1930s documentary writers; yet her ‘mass-observation’ of the period through her first two novels eschews documentary realism for idiosyncratic subjectivity.6 Her comments on her illustrations were quick to play down their status as art, often disguising their deliberate references to particular painters even if Smith herself was ‘full of writing and painting’.7 An early draft of The Holiday portrays Celia as an artist, and contains several scenes describing her painting process. Smith’s removal of these passages from the novel suggests her reticence to fictionalize herself as someone with a serious commitment to her own visual art.8 She also ensures that alongside her interest in canonical Western painting comes a typical disdain for its viewers and curators, and the critics whose words attempt to rationalize and contextualize her appreciation: ‘supposing you do know about pictures and books, supposing you do know in the rich full way about them’, Pompey rages in Novel on Yellow Paper, ‘what credit is that?’ (119). How then does Smith view art if it is not through the prism of

3 See ‘The Ironing Board of Widow Twanky’, Queen 219 (20 December 1961), 11: ‘I have a telescopic memory for the Christmas theatres and pantomimes of the past, one thing slides into another. I remember Peter Pan and being near enough the stage to see the wires supporting the hazardous lights, and even more hazardous landings on mantelpieces and picture rails.’ 4 Over the Frontier (242). 5 Novel on Yellow Paper (114). 6 Smith is sceptical about the documentary aesthetic in her review of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, arguing that his ‘disarming simplicity’ conceals the fact that he ‘knows what he sees’ (‘New Novels’, Modern Woman (May 1943), 85). 7 See ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’, in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago, 1981), 155–70, 156. 8 See excised passage from The Holiday draft manuscript, UT: ‘I took my paint box out from the drawer in my desk and began to go on colouring some pictures I had begun.’

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the critic or the artist, and what importance might this have for her own work? In 1960, Smith was approached by David Wright of the Quarterly Review for an illustration ‘which analyses visually so to speak the relation between poets and criticism’.9 Although no response to this letter survives, the idea of poetry, criticism, and art forming a triangular relationship is an instructive model. As Mieke Bal has argued, ‘images are readings’, and offer ‘not a re-telling of the text but a use of it’.10 Yet if the visual might be seen as a critical response to a text, Smith more often situates it before the verbal. When explicating her poetry, she relies on visual tropes to describe the primary perceptual responses that govern her word choices. As she writes in ‘What Poems Are Made Of ’, ‘colours are what drive me most strongly, colours in painted pictures’.11 They become the engine for Smith’s verbal art. In ‘Simply Living’ she notes the importance of ‘looking at colours’.12 Her essay ‘Too Tired for Words’ again situates her creative processes beyond the verbal realm, celebrating how a poetic scene ‘shifts wonderfully in the light of the words that are, by the reason of the tiredness, just a bit off-beam’.13 The continued linking of her poems’ words to lights and beams encodes the composition process as an explicitly visual phenomenon, a passive act of recording sense impressions. Her writing becomes an off-kilter form of Surrealist automatism. The fact of her being ‘too tired for words’ transforms her language into a visual display.14 The essay continues: ‘and yesterday, writing about the great Freud, instead of Austrian Jew, which I meant, I wrote “Autumn Jew”. And that too is an eerie shift.’ The mention of Freud in Smith’s essay on her creative process is surely not accidental, even if her malapropism was. It sets her description of the creative process within a subconscious and pre-verbal state. 9

David Wright to Stevie Smith, undated letter (c.1960), UT. Mieke Bal, ‘On Looking and Reading: Word And Image, Visual Poetics, and Comparative Arts’, Semiotica 73 (3/2) (1989), 283–320, 291. 11 Stevie Smith, ‘What Poems are Made Of ’, Vogue (15 March 1960), 37–8, repr. in Me Again, 127–9, 127. 12 Stevie Smith, ‘Simply Living’, Queen (12 February. 1964), 4, repr. in Me Again, 108–10, esp. 109. Her reliance on colour is also apparent in her fictionalizing of Palmers Green, which, as if turning the wheel on a colour chart, becomes ‘Bottle Green’ in Over the Frontier (34). 13 Stevie Smith, ‘Too Tired for Words’, Medical World 85 (December 1956), 588–95, repr. in Me Again, 111–18, 111. 14 Pompey also considers the idea in Novel on Yellow Paper, noting that ‘there’s a great deal of useful observations to be made’ when ‘you are getting so tired, or you are getting so ill’ (115). 10

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Might this primary visual response form a necessary corrective to the idea of critics and readers perpetually overlooking her work? In 1937, the same year that Smith published her first book of ‘poems and drawings’, as the subtitle has it for A Good Time Was Had By All, she wrote an essay for the book London Guyed starkly titled ‘Art’. Yet what the essay describes is not art per se but the exhibition gallery, the social space where art is viewed and interrogated. Her essay’s apparently comic description of a school party wandering through the National Gallery leads her to ask one of the most important questions facing critics who grapple with her oeuvre : ‘How do people see pictures?’15 In typically bathetic fashion, Smith immediately qualifies her direct challenge to the reader; ‘it was such a hot afternoon,’ she notes, ‘the question is such a lazy one.’ Yet her enquiry, however brief, into subjective perception, finds its answer in the essay itself, whose discursive eye roams much more keenly around the gallery visitors and catalogues than the exhibited art. The essay’s implicit reply to the question favours context over content. People see pictures via the frame that surrounds them and the wall they are mounted on. Our responses to paintings are entirely governed by the situations in which we view them. Yet if, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has argued in her book Museums and the Interpretation of Material Culture, the art museum ‘unifies and rationalises, pictures and presents relationships’,16 that is to say, presents art as something structured, contextualized, framed, curated, and deliberate, what interest does this space have for Smith, whose sketchy illustrations for her poems seem messy, anomalous, unfinished, and accidental? Could there be a relationship between the unconscious visual impulse that apparently inspires Smith’s poetry and her interest in ‘curated’ forums such as the museum space and the illustrated page that situate text and image alongside one another? I will argue in this chapter that Smith’s illustrations, like her writing, weave a difficult path between the two extremes of the exhibited artwork and the unconscious ‘doodle’, as she herself referred to her drawings. I suggest it is only by unpicking her own wayward ‘curation’ of her illustrations that we can finally see the deliberateness pervading all her work even when, as with her doodles, it is at its most insistent on 15

Stevie Smith, in William Kimber (ed.), ‘Art’, London Guyed (London: Hutchinson, 1938), 153–64, 154. 16 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 17.

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the arbitrary. I will begin by examining Smith’s prose depictions of galleries, and then go on to explore the treatment of visual art in her poetry. I will then sketch out the various critical responses to her illustrations before finally considering the hidden contexts of the drawings themselves. Smith’s publication of her essays ‘Art’ (1937) and ‘Private Views’ (1938) came at a time when the supposed authority of the gallery space was repeatedly being undermined. The expedient propaganda of Nazi Germany’s 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich exploded the myth that the gallery was a mummified, apolitical space.17 A year earlier, the London Surrealist Exhibition used the gallery itself as a blank canvas, smearing its walls with a new art that seemed both formless and ungovernable.18 It is in the context of this perceived ‘threat’ from the avant-garde that Smith’s apparent championing of the Victorian, fusty interiors of the National Gallery needs to be understood. Smith equates London galleries with ‘museums and graveyards’ in her essay ‘Art’. Everything contained within the space of the gallery seems at first distanced, ordered, and contained. One solitary man is described as ‘a computer of distances, a mere measurer’.19 He responds to the art by regulating its perspective, making its painterly depth into a dry tally of figures and vanishing points. A party of young girls being led around the exhibition by a nun is described as ‘clean and oldfashioned’.20 Smith, too, seemingly professes an attraction to the gallery’s efforts to order and contextualize: Catalogues, as you see, have a language of their own, terse and evocative: ‘S. John, centre, facing right, wearing a lavender-grey dress. Left S. Francis, profile right, S. Lawrence, in grey, with rose range collar with cuffs and hands joined, S. Cosmas, leaning forward, in mulberry headdress and gown, and blue under-sleeves.21

17 For a full account of the travelling exhibition and its impact, see Stephanie Barron (ed.), ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991). 18 See the exhibition catalogue The International Surrealist Exhibition (London: New Burlington Galleries, 1936). The exhibition was held at the New Burlington Galleries in London (11 June–4 July 1936). 19 Smith, ‘Art’, 158. 20 Ibid. 153. 21 Ibid. 159.

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Smith offers us no gloss or personal description of these works, although she subverts the process of objective cataloguing by providing readers with a campy and idiosyncratic mirage of colour. Yet the reduction of the paintings to a mass of stances and humorous sartorial descriptions is apparently adequate for a general visitor’s aesthetic appreciation. As Hooper-Greenhill argues, the modernist museum ‘understood its visitors as deficient. They were those who were in search of something they did not have, who lacked information, who were in need of instruction’. As she goes on to suggest, the ideal gaze of the visitor was ‘calm and measured, as neutral as possible. It engaged the rational mind directly, but, in the same way as Descartes’ disembodied eye, was not susceptible to emotion or to passion.’22 Much of Smith’s essay seems to reflect this notion of the art viewer as either an empty rationalist or uneducated onlooker, from the ‘absent-minded’ nun who takes her school party through the Italian rooms with an unengaged sense of duty to the ‘self-conceit’ of the copyists who make uncommitted replicas of famous works for sale at the gallery shop.23 Yet running alongside this humorously detached description of art and institutional galleries comes Smith’s positioning of herself as a somewhat more unbalanced art spectator, someone who might progress through the gallery space without consulting catalogues or computing distances, as her description of Canaletto’s painting suggests: Canaletto’s Venice has a dangerous swift current to draw me through the picture glass, into the sheds behind the washing-troughs, the third-storey window, the black gondolas, the black shadow on the high church across the river, the river itself, to ride the current to the open sea.24

Here the painting and the viewer have broken free of the anchoring context of the gallery. The reader’s eye follows Smith’s into the frame and finally passes right through it. This threat posed by the paintings— Smith describes Poussin as ‘especially dangerous’—creates a constant struggle between the authority of the gallery’s walls and the anarchic gaze of the viewer. If the viewer can remove both the containing room and the fixing frame, how will the gallery reclaim its own contextual authority? Smith’s essay holds back from fully escaping the strictures of the exhibition hall or considering the possibilities of a new, unmediated 22 23 24

Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, 129. Smith, ‘Art’, 153, 156. Ibid. 160.

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art. Yet her final rhetorical question to her reader suggests the importance of art’s ‘dangerous’ currents: ‘is this escape-into-the-frame a fine game for a hot afternoon,’ she writes, ‘or is it not rather something that conceals itself beneath a frivolity?’25 Just as the austere and regimented catalogues of the National Gallery sought to restrain the anarchic threat of the works on display, so does the apparently light-hearted quest to the space beyond the gallery frame hide its own significance. This suggests a serious layer of meaning that can only be accessed through irreverence, through the very ‘frivolity’ that Larkin was so keen to exclude from Smith’s work.26 The passage rewrites the gallery as a place of energizing friction: the curator’s desire for stasis versus the viewer’s passion for movement, the catalogue’s emphasis on neutrality versus the painting’s wish for wild subjectivity. Could it also alter the way we read Smith’s poems and illustrations? Might her doodles track the reader’s journey through the frivolous layers of her work? Smith’s 1937 poem ‘Spanish School’ was included in the 1980s anthology Voices from the Gallery alongside works by W. H. Auden, Thom Gunn, and William Carlos Williams.27 Yet Smith’s response to painters such as El Greco and Ribera questions the efficacy of such voices: Dr Pe´ral In a coat of gray Has a way With his mouth which seems to say A lot But nothing very good to hear (CP 27, ll. 25–30)

Here Smith refers to Francisco de Goya’s Don Andre´s del Peral (c.1798). Goya has managed to frame Pe´ral’s words, to emphasize the potential for an unspoken language that can only be accessed through looking rather than listening or reading. Yet the speaking mouth, frozen in the space of a painting, can never verbalize its image. Its words are ‘nothing very good to hear’ because the viewer of the painting can extract nothing

25

Smith, ‘Art’, 161. See his description of her drawings as the ‘hallmark of frivolity’ in Philip Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London: Faber, 1983), 153–8, 153. 27 Daniel Abse and Denise Abse (eds), Voices in the Gallery (London: Tate Publishing, 1986). 26

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intelligible from them. Consequently, the poetic text moves from enargeia to inertia.28 In ‘Silence’, an undated holograph subsequently published in Me Again, she suggests that the poem, too, is insufficient as a total art form: in an age of ‘too many words’, a verbal portrait will always be secondary to the thing it describes: It is better to see the grass than write about it, Better to see the water than write a water-song, Yet both may be painted and a person be happy in the painting, Can it be that the tongue is cursed, to go so wrong?29

Whilst this poem is in part concerned with the inability of language to provide adequate representation, its final disavowal of the ‘cursed’ tongue is a tellingly bodily metaphor, shifting the blame from the medium to the artist. The painter’s position is enviable not only because their work offers a more accurate depiction of their subjects, but because they are less likely to be implicated in the shortcomings of their chosen art form. The idea that a person might ‘be happy’ in a painting becomes literalized in ‘Deeply Morbid’, a poem that takes Smith’s essay ‘Art’ to its fantastical conclusion. Enthralled by the beguiling sea spray of a Turner, the poem’s heroine is transported into the painting never to be seen again: Wild yet captured, wild yet captured By the painter, Joan is quite enraptured. (CP 297, ll. 35–6)

The dichotomy between the ‘wildness’ of the ocean in the painting and the ‘capturing’ that goes on in any form of art suggests why Smith must keep returning to this apparently sterile gallery space. As in Over the Frontier, the narrative parabola must take the reader back to the exhibition hall before the story can continue.30 The Turner painting offers an energizing tension between unbridled subjectivity and a curator’s stultifying frame, an analogue for Smith’s own illustrated poems.

28

This term is used by Longinus to describe the vividness of an image, and is used to refer to literary texts by Jean H. Hagstrum in The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 29. 29 Stevie Smith, ‘Silence’, in Me Again, 236. 30 See also her review of C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: G. Bles, 1952), which asks ‘could anything be better than to start off with than a fine picture of a sailing ship on the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ (‘Nursery Books’, Britain Today (December 1952), 48–50, 48.

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Yet as early as 1942, Smith suggests the limitations of the apparently liberating illustrated book form. In her poem ‘A King in Funeral Procession’, she describes the staged public spectacle of George V’s funeral, the mourning public clamouring to see the king’s coffin.31 Smith ends her poem by voicing the thoughts of the dead man himself: Oh Lord I am not high minded I have no proud looks Not one proud look have they left me I am their picture book. (CP 164, ll. 24–7)

This, the only mention of a ‘picture book’ in Smith’s poetry, equates it with reappropriated public property.32 Whilst the gallery painting in ‘Deeply Morbid’ offers the poem’s subject freedom from social pressures, the democratic form of the illustrated book here falls victim to an ungoverned republic. The first two lines of the stanza, with their echo of Psalm 131, suggest that the unnamed speaker is King David. In this reading, the diminutive picture book we view him through is an illustrated Bible, questioning the apparent irreverence of the picture book.33 The psalm suggests that, at source, Smith’s presentation of her art as marginalia is an attempt to defend her from charges of being ‘high minded’, an idiosyncratic gesture of poetic humility. Yet the poem’s unavoidable pronoun making the picture book ‘theirs’ rather than Smith’s posits the illustrated book as a form eluding its author rather than its audience. The publication of Some Are More Human Than Others in 1958 signals an increasing need to separate her pictures from her poems, to create a page ‘beyond words’, as her putative title for the volume had it.34 She confesses to Jonathan Williams that ‘lately’ she likes to gather her illustrations ‘into a book of just drawings with only captions,’35 her use of the habitual present hinting at plans for further sketchbooks. 31 There are obvious parallels here with poems like ‘Fuite D’Enfance’ and ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’. 32 See Over the Frontier (261–4), where Pompey looks at a picture book from the Archbishop before realizing the true identity of her military commissioner. 33 See Psalm 131, v.1, which is titled ‘A song of degrees of David’: ‘O Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty’ (The Holy Bible: King James Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 648). 34 Other possible titles had included, ‘Words Are Not Everything’, ‘Words Do Not Go Far Enough’, and ‘It Wasn’t Something You Could Say’, from Smith’s notebooks, UT. 35 Jonathan Williams, ‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’, Parnassus (Spring/ Summer 1974), 105–27, repr. in Sanford Sternlicht (ed.), In Search of Stevie Smith (New York: Syracuse Press, 1991), 38–49, 46.

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Several poems in her later collections explore new ways of combining word and image, as if frustrated by the inherent conflict of the illustrated poem. In ‘Voices about the Princess Anemone’ (CP 295), from Harold’s Leap (1950), a drawing of the princess separates the title from the poem’s text, making the seven short stanzas into a range of different responses to the illustration. Not only do the profusion of ‘voices’ suggest the subjective nature of the princess’ portrait, but the description of her as ‘the first who ever wrote j The word of fear, and tied it round her throat’, makes text itself into something displayed and subjected to scrutiny.36 A similar idea emerges in ‘Magnificent Words’ (CP 457), where Smith celebrates the unknown person ‘who chooses at the Daily Telegraph each day j Magnificent words out of all of them, to display j From the bible’. Again, the poem collapses distinctions between verbal and visual mediums with its emphasis on ‘displaying text’; yet it also crosses the boundaries between the gallery and the illustrated page. If any printed text consists of ‘words on display’, what will guide us through the displayed words themselves? Do the poems or the pictures create the exhibition?37 Smith’s later works, written during an increasingly busy schedule of public readings, reiterate her ambivalence towards the visual–verbal medium of the illustrated book. Her poem ‘Pretty’, from the early 1960s, seems at first to be a meditation on the limits of poetic language. Her performance introduction offers the poem as the reason ‘why I was wishing not to have to put things in words’.38 The poem applies its titular adjective to a range of natural images—the great fish, the November leaf—until the word becomes meaningless and, in the end, menacing. Yet this progression is impossible without the visual, the central fifth stanza being the axis on which the poem turns: Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough, 36 For a full discussion of this poem’s dialogue with its illustration, see Sheryl Stevenson, ‘Stevie Smith’s Voices’, Contemporary Literature 33(1) (Spring 1992), 24–45. 37 For a theoretical discussion of words as visual display see W. J. T. Mitchell, who argues ‘writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the “imagetext” incarnate’ (Picture Theory (London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 95). 38 Introduction note, UT. See also her letter written around this time to Hans Ha¨usermann, 9 March 1965, which expresses her wish to ‘be done with words altogether’, as quoted in Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Faber, 1988); repr. Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 276.

180

‘Beyond Words’ Out of the wood it climbs. This is prettier A field in the evening, tilting up. (CP 469, ll. 17–20)

The limitations of language have become perceptual, an indication of the failure of vision. Smith’s ‘eye abashes’ collocation makes the eye into a knowingly deficient body, a vessel that cannot tie up the irregularities of what it sees and reads. Its elevation out of its constricted medium—the dense woodland, the closed gallery, the unstable illustrated book—becomes the only possibility for expanding its horizon. The eye in ‘To Carry the Child’ is similarly constrained, again enclosed in a framed and limited cube: But oh the poor child, the poor child, what can he do, Trapped in a grown-up carapace, But peer outside of his prison room With the eye of an anarchist? (CP 436, ll. 30–3)

However ‘anarchic’ the eye, the medium always limits and constricts the viewer and the viewed. Yet it is the very process of imprisoning that fuels this perceptual ‘anarchy’. Trapped in a form even as potentially liberating as the illustrated book, Smith’s art must seemingly always balance between constriction and misappropriation. Later poems such as ‘The Word’ from Smith’s posthumously published collection Scorpion emphasize the move from friction to silence. Even silence itself becomes impossible to voice in the following poem in the collection, where the failure of communication is expressed in the circumlocutory phrase encompassing the poem’s title ‘He said no word of her to us j Nor we of her to him’ (CP 543). Narrative poems such as ‘The House of Over-Dew’ (CP 553) or ‘Angel Boley’ (CP 530) might be read as the final rejection of a possible composite art form. In such conservatively chronological poems as these, illustrations would seem to become mere decoration, ornaments for a story that, unlike Smith’s three novels, move through linear time without frame or disruption. Her later attempts at ‘stringing several poems together on a theme’39 strive for a loosely structured collage effect rather than the formal antagonism of earlier collections. What then is at stake in this confused and confusing range of responses to texts and pictures?

39 See her letter to Hans Ha¨usermann, 6 April 1959, as quoted in Barbera and McBrien, Stevie, 229, which gives ‘Thoughts about a Person from Porlock’ as an example of one of these poems.

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Theories grappling with the relationship between word and image have either struggled to divide them completely or subjected them to perpetual comparison. In 1766, Lessing suggested that ‘objects or parts of objects which exist in space’ are the subject of painting whereas ‘objects or parts of objects which follow one another’ are the subject of poetry.40 Poststructuralist theory has attacked this temporal division of language and art and, through semiotics, has linked word and image as the comparative use of different signs. For Roland Barthes, text is a way of fixing the ‘floating signifier’ of the illustration, of limiting the endlessly ‘polysemous’ image.41 Barthes describes the relationship as if wandering through a gallery, the curatorial text helping to navigate the reader–viewer through the endless possibilities of the visual. Yet the combination of the verbal and visual on the page has historically engendered disorder and contradiction, particularly in the medium of poetry. Virginia Woolf argues in her 1926 essay ‘The Cinema’, ‘the images of a poet are not to be cast in bronze or traced by pencil. They are compact of a thousand suggestions of which the visual is only the most obvious or the uppermost.’42 To promote only the most obvious analogue of the poet’s ‘image’ is to degrade and simplify a writer’s work. There seems a further problem in Smith’s balancing act between the illustration and the doodle, a form of visual expression which, as Rosalind Krauss has noted in The Optical Unconscious, may be derived from a destructive rather than a creative urge: she suggests that the purpose of a doodle is not ‘to make something; it is, instead to despoil a surface’. It becomes then ‘an act of defacement’,43 an overflowing creative impulse that devalues what it embellishes. As Smith’s anarchic faces in the margins of her sister’s reading books suggest, this urge was often foremost in her drawing process. If Smith’s doodles are then both reductive according to Woolf and destructive according to Krauss, what do they contribute to her ‘exhibition’ of poems? Smith’s comments in interviews provide a starting point for assessing the role of illustrations in her work. In conversation with Peter Orr in 1961, she states:

40 Gotthold Ephrain Lessing, Laoco¨on: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78. 41 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 38. 42 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 169–70. 43 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (London: MIT Press, 1993), 152.

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I just sort of sit and draw sometimes [ . . . ] I am not a trained drawer, you know. It’s rather more like the higher doodling, or perhaps just doodling without the higher. But I enjoy doing it, and sometimes the dogs which come have such a look in their eyes that you can’t believe that you’ve done them. And the faces that come!44

Smith’s mocking use of the phrase ‘higher doodling’ evokes the hierarchical divisions between higher journalism and criticism repeatedly explored throughout the 1930s.45 The allusion furnishes the term with an in-built interpretative interrogation, balancing her drawings midway between newspaper caricatures and serious art. Smith explicates her artistic practice as both approximate—she ‘sort of ’ sits and draws— and passive—the dogs and faces ‘come’ to her page unbidden by her pencil, as if responding to an unconscious invocatory force. Her focus on the facial expressions of the sketched figures suggests they provide speculative responses to the poems they accompany. This would align them with the invocations to the reader in her novels. They are lifeboats or warnings thrown out to an as-yet undetermined audience. However, a comment made a few years later in interview places much more emphasis on Smith’s authorial agency: If I suddenly get caught by the doodle, I put more effort into it and end up calling it a drawing. I’ve got a whole collection in boxes.46

Here, Smith counteracts being ‘caught’ by the unconscious visual image by both ‘calling it a drawing’ and collating a ‘whole collection’ in boxes. It becomes a drawing then not primarily through an artistic process but through a nominal one, an act of naming which allows the author to become a curator of their art. Smith applies a conscious framing device to an unconscious artistic impulse, becoming both warden and curator of her own exhibition of doodles. In tandem with her own mutable statements, the changing fashions of New Criticism, poststructuralism, and interdisciplinary studies have variously valorized and marginalized the role of her illustrations. The most recent study of Smith’s work suggests that we hear a ‘chorus of

44 See ‘Stevie Smith’, in Peter Orr (ed.), The Poet Speaks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 225–31, esp. 229. The interview took place in 1961. 45 See for example Denys Thompson, ‘A Hundred Years of the Higher Journalism’, Scrutiny 4(1) ( June 1935), 25–34. 46 Williams, ‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’, 46. The interview took place in 1964.

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disapproving voices’ on the subject of her doodles from ‘all but her most recent and strongest supporters’.47 This statement is neat but misleading. The TLS review of the first collection provides a much-needed corrective, finding her illustrations ‘particularly helpful’. It considers the drawings sufficiently important to reprint one of them in the review itself, tellingly concluding ‘whether you class the result as comic or not will depend on which you think the more important, the words or the picture’.48 Critics writing soon after her death, eager to secure her posthumous reputation, found it necessary to distance themselves from such an apparently capricious addition to her poetry. Jonathan Williams comments mock-stoically in 1974, ‘I think we will just have to put up with the doodles, albeit wishing the memo pads had disappeared in the fire.’49 Philip Larkin, too, notes their ‘amateurishness reminiscent of early Lear, Waugh, and Thurber, without much compensating felicity’.50 Whilst feminist criticism has recently reassessed her illustrations as ‘planned encroachments on the male-dominated formalism of the printed page’,51 the need to recover Smith as a complex and serious writer means that the drawings remain a problem, badges as they appear to be of unconscious artlessness. Huk’s recent study offers a sustained attack on previous criticism by Kristin Bluemel and Laura Severin in place of an alternative way of interpreting Smith’s drawings, suggesting they stubbornly resist incorporation into her oeuvre.52 In this sense, the illustrations function as goalposts to denote how deficient previous critics have been in their assessment of Smith’s work. They are graveyards of other readers’ responses. Yet if Smith’s work is generated by an unconscious visual impulse, it is framed by a highly conscious one, one that strives to accord the reader 47 Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 20. 48 Unknown contributor, ‘Other new books’, review of A Good Time Was Had By All, TLS (8 May 1937), 365. 49 Williams, ‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’, 46. 50 Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, 153. 51 Here I quote John Carey’s review of Spalding’s biography, ‘Praise for the Poet of Palmer’s Green’, The Sunday Times, ‘Books’ supplement (23 October 1988), 3, which suggests the possibilities of reading Smith’s drawings using feminist criticism. 52 See Laura Severin, Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 49, who argues the drawings work by ‘questioning traditional gender roles’, and Kristin Bluemel, ‘The Dangers of Eccentricity: Stevie Smith’s Doodles and Poetry’, Mosaic 31(3) (1998), 111–32, esp. 112, who suggests the drawings critique the ‘idealised domestic sphere’ which ‘defined the lives of most English women’. There is a detailed critique of these readings in Huk, Stevie Smith, 235–54.

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only partial views of the textual subject. Her illustrations are frames that patrol and guard our access to her poetry, making her verbal art into a series of exhibitions that the reader can only attend under watchful surveillance. Rather than querying the efficacy of previous assessments of the drawings, might we do better to question the reliability of Smith’s own curating? In her essay ‘Art’, Smith describes the eccentric women who transcribe masterpieces into their sketchbooks for eventual sale at the gallery shop. These figures immediately suggest Smith’s own drawing process. In her reading notebooks from the 1920s, her short responses to various exhibitions are accompanied by hurried reconstructions of the artworks themselves, as if to help her remember the images. Yet her dialogue with these various artworks goes beyond the equivalent of the museum shop postcard or the aide-memoire. After a visit to a Spanish painting exhibition in 1927, Smith made a list of the paintings she ‘needed’ and ‘wanted to own’.53 This ownership refers less to the physical painting itself than a desire to reappropriate the image in her own work. Reviewing Smith’s illustrations in the context of Grosz suggests a continued engagement with his work that runs throughout the first four volumes of her poems. What is it about his art that prompted her interest? Grosz, with his violent Neue Sachlichkeit paintings, is considered as much the unofficial documenter of Weimar-era Berlin as Smith is of 1930s London suburbia. Like Smith, his art occupied a position as defiantly marginal as his geographical location. His biographer records: Though he was an aspiring artist who made his eccentric presence known in the cafe´s of the Kufu¨rstendamm, Grosz lived in an attic in Su¨dende, a dismal, poverty-stricken suburb on the southern outskirts of Berlin, far from the middle class or artistic neighbourhoods.54

His literally eccentric arrival from the outer suburbs to the artistic centres of Berlin helped to identify him as an outsider. The two writer–artists also shared a desire not to move from the suburbs inwards to the metropolitan centre but outwards, to unknown places. Whilst Smith records that she always ‘felt at home’ when holidaying in Berlin,55 Grosz was described throughout his life as an Anglophile. He dressed ‘l’anglaise with a 53

See Smith’s reading notebooks, UT. Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 19. 55 Letter from Stevie Smith to Molly Smith, 12 July 1931, UT. 54

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homburg’,56 anglicized his surname, and came to artistic maturity at a time when, as his biographer Beth Irwin Lewis records, much of Germany was looking abroad for a ‘a spurious Anglo-Saxon mythology’.57 Yet if Smith found a cultural mirror in Grosz, what impact does her visual dialogue with him have on her work? Grosz’s 1917 drawing ‘Suburb’ (Figure 4) depicts the suburbs of Berlin as sites of disordered chaos. As the industrial city smokes in the

Figure 4. George Grosz, ‘Suburb’ (1917). Published in George Grosz, The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours, and Prints (1912–1930) (London: Yale University Press, 1977). # DACS 2009.

56

Walter Laquer, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933 (London: Phoenix, 2000),

229. 57

Lewis, George Grosz, 27.

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background, George Grosz, identifiable in his pictures with his cane and English bowler hat, faces the viewer in bewilderment. A malevolent onlooker gazes from a window ledge at the desolate scene, whilst a hanging man lies unnoticed in the right of the picture. In a later, more neutral depiction of the suburban streets from 1926 (Figure 5), Grosz’s shop fronts, rich in detail, seem to dwarf the huddled suburbanites as they hurry past. Smith’s illustration for her poem ‘Ceux qui luttent’ (Figure 6) incorporates aspects of Grosz’s drawings yet demonstrates the optimism of the human spirit in the face of urban squalor. Whilst the disdainful onlooker in the central window above the shop fronts recalls the malevolence of Grosz’s figures, many of the faces in her bustling street scene are open and inviting. Her characters interact in a way that represents the full gamut of emotions—anxiety, self-effacement, companionship, and curiosity. Her translation of Grosz’s self-portrait, which substitutes his cane and bowler hat for a butcher’s knife, finds him much more grounded within the picture’s characters than in the original drawing. If many of Grosz’s depictions of Weimar Germany before his emigration to America in 1933 underline his status as a misanthrope, Smith seems determined to create a dialogue with him that rewrites his totalizing dismissal of mankind. Grosz’s 1927 drawing of a cafe´ in a Parisian suburb (Figure 7) again finds his human figures caricatured and critiqued. In this cafe´ scene the men are porcine grotesques, the women merely items for display and sexual gratification. Soldier, doctor, musician, and waiter alike are all implicated in this tableau of vice and debauchery. No level of society escapes Grosz’s critique. The obvious links between this work and Smith’s illustration for her poem ‘Do Not!’ point to it being her visual source; yet, once again, the changes she makes to the scene are more revealing than the apparent similarities (Figure 8). The faces in her illustration are all open and inviting, full moons of conviviality. The whole cafe´ is overlooked by a portrait of a mother and child, a benignly holy corrective to Grosz’s dystopian vision. The stairs which, in Grosz’s picture, presumably lead to a brothel are here emptied of people and reversed in direction, now pointing towards the picture of the virgin mother, as if to underline the possibility of mankind’s spiritual ascent. In the right corner of Smith’s picture we find a man in a bowler hat bashfully slinking into the distance. Is this her redrawing of Grosz’s self-portrait? The poem that accompanies this illustration, entitled ‘Do Not!’, seems a direct rebuke to his position:

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Figure 5. George Grosz, untitled sketch (1926). Published in George Grosz, The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours, and Prints (1912–1930) (London: Yale University Press, 1977). # DACS 2009.

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Figure 6. Stevie Smith, ‘Ceux qui luttent’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). Do not despair of man, and do not scold him, Who are you that you should so lightly hold him? Are you not also a man, and in your heart Are there not warlike thoughts and fear and smart?

(CP 285, ll. 1–4)

Yet if the poem reads as a staunch rebuff to Grosz, the marginality of his portrait in Smith’s re-sketching also suggests her need to suppress the

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Figure 7. George Grosz, ‘Cafe´’ (1927). Published in George Grosz, The Berlin of George Grosz: Drawings, Watercolours, and Prints (1912–1930) (London: Yale University Press, 1977). # DACS 2009.

Figure 8. Stevie Smith, ‘Do Not!’ (1951). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978).

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original source of her illustration. Her drawing was subsequently published in Some Are More Human Than Others with the subtitle ‘Wag, wag!’58 Whilst the caption underlines the importance of her ‘conversation’ with Grosz, it also points up her own waggish removal of its source. If there is the possibility that through her poems and drawings Smith might have created an ongoing dialogue with modern art, it seems one she is unsure of including in explications of her work, anxious about imposing such an inflexible context or being accused of ‘unspirited j Imitation’.59 If her poem ‘Do Not!’ addresses Grosz with a commanding imperative, her concealment of the allusion carries its own sense of necessity. Smith’s tentative engagement with Grosz suggests an anxiety about subjecting either his work or her own to the curatorial equivalent of the National Gallery frame. A similar motive seems to underwrite her response to Goya’s etchings. In Over the Frontier, Smith includes a lengthy digression on his response to the Napoleonic war, setting him up, like Grosz, as an artist preoccupied with cruelty and conflict.60 Once again, Smith is interested in the ethics of representation, the difficulties of differentiating the great artist’s depiction of war from a diseased mind capitalizing on our own prurient interest in suffering. She asks: There is then this division between the laborious cruelty-fan and the artist also with his artist’s soul creating and brooding upon the darkness of pain? Why certainly there is this division. But where is the line of severance? Ah yes where is it? This is already getting dangerous. (62)

Yet if the ‘line of severance’ in the novel represents the problems of separating political art from sadistic voyeurism, her visual dialogue with Goya is both furtive and ambivalent, making it a line she is reticent to acknowledge, let alone cross. In an excised draft of an introduction to her poem ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, Smith

58 Stevie Smith, Some are More Human than Others (London: Gabberbochus, 1953). The book is unpaginated. 59 See Stevie Smith, ‘Salon d’Automne’, in Me Again, 240–1. Her ambivalence about visual sources for art is apparent in her review of George Frederick Wingfield Digby’s Symbol and Image in William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), where she argues that drawings communicate a ‘direct experience’ and ‘this must stir and be shared before it is interpreted in terms of source material’ (‘Books of the Year’, Observer (22 December 1957), 10). 60 Fittingly, Smith had planned to publish her lecture ‘On the Necessity of Not Believing’ accompanied by some ‘harrowing Goya etchings’ with the Gaberbocchus Press, as revealed in a letter to David Wright, 1 May 1959, UT.

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appears to have at last revealed the source behind her most enigmatic poem, one that embodies the central concerns of this study: I prefer the melancholy and the contrite [poems], and to blame oneself if one is not like the splendid girl in the next poem who is getting on with her writing. The setting is this: there are two girls in a room, one is writing, the other is trying to interrupt her, the writing one of course must just has to go on. The title is another Goya title one from one of his etchings: What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good (only Goya’s was ‘he’).61

This excised introduction seems to pledge her affinity with the writing girl in the illustration, refusing to let the overlooking figure disrupt her work. The presence of the cat in the illustration is ignored here, its protective patrol seemingly immune from discovery. Yet Smith’s explanation of the source for her poem is misleading: no such Goya etching exists. If her misremembering of his work suggests a casual disregard for her influences, the excising of the comment itself highlights her determination to be read without visual sources. Her admiration for Goya’s ‘strange elliptical titles’62 is mirrored by the elusive nature of her own drawing. In place of Smith’s suppressed sources for her Grosz illustrations comes an admission of allegiance to a non-existent artwork. There are in fact four Goya etchings that may have provided the visual stimulus for her illustration; their titles and images alternating between readers, writers, and overlooking figures as the controlling agents of the central text. The etchings not only emphasize the elusive quality of her poetic meditation on reception but suggest her reticence to take her ‘higher doodling’ seriously. The year before publishing ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, Smith chose A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: The Expression of Truth and Liberty by Jose´ Lo´pez-Rey as her book of the year in The Observer.63 The book collects together Goya drawings which, as its introduction notes, had been exhibited and reproduced individually but never recognized as ‘a cycle deliberately composed by the artist’.64 Here, through a posthumous act of retrieval, the book form offers the artist the opportunity to create 61 Introduction draft for ‘What Is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’, UT. The whole text is scored through with red pen in the draft. 62 Stevie Smith, ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’, in Me Again, 153–70, esp. 158. 63 Stevie Smith, ‘Books of the Year’, The Observer (23 December 1956), 6. 64 Jose´ Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956), 15.

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Figure 9. What is this hubbub?, plate 65 of ‘The Disasters of War’, 1810–14, pub. 1863 (etching), Francisco Jose´ de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)/Private Collection/Index/Bridgeman Art Library.

and collate their work.65 Yet Smith’s curation, with ‘excessive inattention’, reabsorbs various Goya sources to reorder his gallery of etchings.66 The interrogative mode of Smith’s title for the poem comes from Goya’s series Disasters of War, where his etching ‘What Is All This Noise About?’ (1863; Figure 9) depicts a man studiously trying to get on with his writing while the detritus of war ravages the world around him.67 It throws a degree of ambivalence on Smith’s assertion that her author– protagonist must always be ‘getting on with her writing’. By using as her 65 See also Pompey’s insistence that Grosz’s book A Post-War Museum (London: Faber, 1931) represents him as he really is (Over the Frontier, 13). 66 See Over the Frontier (245), where Pompey boasts of her ‘excessive inattention’. 67 This title is also the likely influence behind the poem ‘Who Is This Who Howls And Mutters?’ (CP 370). Throughout this discussion of Goya’s works, I refer to the translated titles for his etchings as used in books Smith owned or had reviewed, as these provide the source material for her poem’s title.

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source an image in which the writer’s blinkered ignorance of the world is an object of satire, Smith’s overlooking spectator is refigured as one symbolic of the outside world. Can the writer afford to dismiss life for privacy, to shut out the world they are in the process of recording? Whilst Goya’s inclusion of a woman throwing her hands in the air and a braying dog suggest obvious reference points in Smith’s drawing, her reframing of the titular question to make the writer rather than the thing that disrupts them the object of enquiry reveals a hidden preoccupation with her own audience. Another source that seems to infiltrate the final poem and its accompanying illustration is Goya’s ‘Sleep of reason produces monsters’ from Los Caprichos (1799; Figure 10). Rather than the overlooking figures in the drawing representing the writer’s worldly need to ‘get on’ in an explicitly material sense, here they represent the demons called up by submitting to the creative act itself. Read through this etching, Smith’s association of the visual medium with the highly instinctual and unconscious creative impulse becomes conflated with her similarly in-depth exploration of the visual as a category for framing and exhibiting. Yet if the etching offers us links between conscious and unconscious artistic acts, its status as yet another ‘mis-curated’ source in Smith’s oeuvre underlines her ambivalence about revealing those same links. In ‘Bad Poets’ (c.1818–24, Figure 11), a drawing featured in the Goya cycle published in 1956, the overlooking reader of Smith’s illustration is revealed as another poet. Here, both similarly condemned by Goya, the two writers struggle for the viewer’s attention. Their consciousness of being watched only highlights the likely prurience of their own poetic material. The seated poet, whose dress casts him as a public dignitary, appears to be ‘getting on’ materially and socially, but his art will consequently suffer. If his priggish seriousness is being critiqued by Goya, similar scorn is reserved for the poet who plays the public fool. His grinning face suggests the final limitations of the ‘wayward’ mask. Smith’s anxious reaction to the drawing is reflected in an earlier alternative title for the illustration given in her notebooks, ‘What Harm Had I Done?’68 Wanting to identify herself with neither figure, Smith erases the possibility of her readers attempting the same process. Goya’s use of ‘malos’ as a moral rather than an aesthetic judgement is carried through to the drawing that provides the most obvious titular 68

Smith’s writing notebooks, UT.

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Figure 10. Francisco Jose´ de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from ‘Los Caprichos’ (engraving) (b/w photo)/ Bibliothe`que Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library.

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Figure 11. Francisco de Goya, ‘Bad Poets’ (c.1818–24). Published in Jose´ Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956).

source for Smith. Taken again from the cycle published the year before her poem, ‘It May Be That He Is Good’ (c.1818–24; Figure 12) depicts a Benedictine monk in an act of contemplative reading. Yet the title’s subjunctive suggests the ambiguity of the monk’s expression which, as Lo´pez-Rey notes, ‘appears to lie on the borderline between intellectual inquisitiveness and craftiness’.69 Smith’s translation of the source creates further uncertainties: in shifting the agency of the title from the monk’s moral qualities to an evaluation of the girl’s writing, she appears to invite a conflation of the author and their work. Yet perhaps the most 69

Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings, 80.

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Figure 12. Francisco de Goya, ‘It may be that he is good’ (c.1818–24). Published in Jose´ Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956).

telling shift Smith makes is from reading to writing. Although a pen hovers in the monk’s hand, the editor’s description casts him as a reader who ‘broods over a tome’.70 Smith’s ‘leica-memory’ fails her, and she re-curates both the drawing and its textual implications, only to subsequently suppress the source altogether. If Smith is unmasked as the wayward gallery attendant in her uneven engagement with canonical Western artists such as Grosz and Goya, the disguise points up further stealthy acts of curation taking place in her own work. Critics who have included her drawings in their interpretations 70

Lo´pez-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings, 80.

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have tended to see them as undermining or subverting the meaning of the poem they accompany. Readings of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ by Seamus Perry, Christopher Ricks, Catherine A. Civello, Janice Thaddeus, and Kristin Bluemel all highlight the perplexing mismatch between the poem’s male speaker and the female figure depicted in its illustration (Figure 13).71 In a poem whose effect relies upon the ambiguity of the final stanza, which can be voiced either by the drowning male subject or the poem’s narrator, the addition of a third possible referent via the enigmatic girl in the illustration further disorientates the reader’s perspective. The illustration then works in the same way as Smith’s doodles of

Figure 13. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (1957). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 71 See Seamus Perry, ‘Practical Criticism: Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning” ’, English Review (September 1998), 14–15; Christopher Ricks, ‘Stevie Smith: The Art of Sinking in Poetry’, in The Force of Poetry (London: Faber, 1992), 244–55, Catherine A. Civello, Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith (Columbia: Camden House, 1997), 72–3, Janice Thaddeus, ‘Stevie Smith and the Gleeful Macabre’, in Sternlicht (ed.), In Search of Stevie Smith, 84–96, 95, and Bluemel, ‘The Dangers of Eccentricity’.

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female faces on her inherited childhood books. It stakes a prior claim to the text, never allowing the reader to trace the source of the third stanza. The girl’s half-smile in the drawing suggests she is the reader who has ‘got there first’, and is now quietly amused at our attempts to tie up her presence with the words of the poem. Yet the original illustration for the poem, which was used alongside it at proof stage is seemingly a much more straightforward accompaniment to the text (Figure 14).72

Figure 14. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (undated draft illustration c.1957). From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 72 All the drawings discussed here, often drawn directly on the proofs produced immediately prior to publication, were evidently conceived after the poems. It is also likely that the published illustrations were also created before them. However, their existence seems to predate the matching of poem to illustration, which took place relatively late in the process of creating the book. For this reason, I am describing them as the ‘first’ illustrations, taking the date of an illustration to be the point at which it is matched to a text rather than when it was originally drawn.

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Like the later illustration, it does partly contradict the poem; it shows the man being rescued, although the figure being dragged out of the water here may be dead. Yet in sharp contrast to the published drawing, it enacts closure on the text. It silences the moaning dead man by adding a final narrative gesture of the poem’s speaker dragging the man from the water. The facial gestures, too, augment the mood of the poem rather than subverting it. The mournful face of the figure dragging the man from the water makes the picture an appropriate narrative frame. Smith’s decision to abandon this drawing for the apparently unrelated figure of the smiling girl at publication stage suggests her need to qualify the idea of a definitive reading of her work.73 This casts her then less as a capricious illustrator, as she would have it, but more as the wayward curator. She offers us no unifying theme and refuses to explicate her selections, delighting in the disjunction of juxtaposing texts and images from rooms at opposite ends of the gallery. A similar process underlies the illustration to the poem ‘Oblivion’ (CP 562) from her final collection Scorpion (1972). The drawing used at proof stage for the poem expands on various textual prompts in the poem (Figure 15). It shows us, at its centre, the poem’s speaker who stands ‘in a sweet and milky sea, knee deep’. It sketches in the figure of the ‘human and related voice’ who calls out to her to ‘come back’. Only the bathetic figure of the shark at the far left of the page suggests a subversive humour in the poem’s illustration, at odds with the description of the ‘gentle mist’ of oblivion in the text. Yet the printed illustration, as with ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, shows us the seemingly innocuous expression of an enigmatic young girl (Figure 16). She seems to identify herself both as the human voice calling on the poem’s narrator to return to the living world and as an illustration of oblivion itself, which in the poem Smith personifies as female. Like the girl barring our way to the speaker in ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ she stands between us and the poem. The girl’s expression in the drawing is again enigmatic, halfjocund, prompting us for an interpretation that is tentative and partial. The oblivion of the poem’s title indicates our own infinite hermeneutic struggles.

73

See Deryn Rees-Jones, ‘“Tirry-Lirry-Lirry All the Same”: The Poetry and Performance of Stevie Smith’, in Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 70–92, who argues that Smith’s drawings are a ‘gesture towards provisionality’ (72).

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Figure 15. Stevie Smith, ‘Oblivion’ (undated draft illustration c.1971). From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa.

Figure 16. Stevie Smith, ‘Oblivion’ (1972). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978).

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In the poem ‘From the French (I)’ (CP 397), Smith offers us a portrait of an ‘Indolent youth j Drawn by everything in turn’. Yet their process of being ‘drawn’ finally suggests fatal torture rather than universal engagement, the poem concluding that ‘By not being decided enough, I lost my life’. Smith’s illustrations draw her readers in the same way, expanding our responses in opposite directions until they become untenable. Her inscrutable depictions of young girls offer us a range of refracted self-portraits, revealing an unknown third party interfering in the relationship between the text and reader.74 The very process of constructing these destabilizing figures seems to be the subject of her poem ‘Si peu se´duisante’, where Smith shifts from English to French and back again to produce a coded description of a young girl. Il e´tait une petite fille de dix ans, Si peu se´duisante, Qui entra dans le wagon-restaurant Pour retrouver ses parents. Elle portait son school uniform, Si peu se´duisante, And a perfectly frightful little pair of shoes, Mais ses yeux, malgre´ des lunettes hideuses, Etaient si pleins de bonte´ et de franchise Que tout autre aspect of this little schoolgirl, Si peu se´duisante, Really only made one like her more. (CP 435)

Smith’s switching between two languages blurs the poem’s apparent aim of giving us a stable meaning or reliable verbal portrait. The speaker’s perspective is further modified by the repeated titular phrase, qualifying her presentation of the ‘petite fille de dix ans’. The intruding English in the poem’s conclusion makes it emphatically ambiguous: does the closing ‘like’ refer to the speaker’s affection for the girl described or present the speaking subject as a facsimile of the original? The like and the unlike are further contrasted in the changes made to the poem’s illustration at publication stage. The final proofs offer us a visual accompaniment to the poem (Figure 17). 74 See also, for example, her illustration to ‘Company’ (CP 443); the poem details the suicide of a man lying on a ‘bed of languor’, but the published version substitutes a picture of man’s face for the original illustration of a figure lying on a bed, published later alongside the essay ‘Too Tired for Words’ in Me Again. Her poem ‘The Listener’ (CP 451) similarly substitutes the figure of a witch-like woman for the original illustration of a man listening to the radio, the subject of the poem itself.

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Figure 17. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu se´duisante’ (undated draft illustration, c.1966). From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa.

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The drawing, as in many of her early drafts, emphasizes the authenticity of the verbal text—we see the girl’s ‘perfectly frightful pair of shoes’, dressed in ‘school uniform’ with her eyes hidden behind ‘des lunettes hideuses’. Yet if Smith’s first illustration shares her subject’s ‘franchise’ (sincerity) in its fidelity to the printed poem, the published drawing shows the girl stretching the lexical possibilities of the text, a figure dressed up by the poem’s repeated refrain of ‘si peu se´duisante’ (Figure 18). Smith consciously erases the visual indications that the drawn girl is the one in the poem, removing her glasses and making her ‘frightful pair of shoes’ tantalizingly out of reach. The girl’s myopic eyes become our own, as we struggle to tie up what we see with what we read. The safe authority of a portrait, framed by its author and its readers, is undermined by Smith’s amendments to her drawing. Smith’s attempts to be ‘liked’, that is, to create an engaged and responsive readership, relies on her continued ability to create ‘likes’—repeated versions of herself, competing editions of the authentic original.75 In one of her later self-mocking character studies, ‘Mrs Arbuthnot’, Smith depicts a female poet whose ‘talent has left her’ and who now ‘lives at home by the sea’. The early frequent puns on sea/see made in her first collection here denote Mrs Arbuthnot’s failing poetic eye. The sea becomes symbolic of the innumerable poems she can now no longer write: I should write a poem, Can I look a wave in the face If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave, Putting the words in place.

If ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ finds at its centre human loneliness and our tendency to misread others’ actions, the staged poetic failure of ‘Mrs Arbuthnot’ suggests the impossibility of writing that poem in the first place. The wave must be transmuted into ‘a poem about a sea-wave’ that is, a see-wave, a poem about the poet’s perception of the object. Yet

75 See Alfred and Gertrude Wirth’s letter to Smith, 10 June 1937, which thanks her for the photograph she sends ‘showing Margaret [Smith] tramping on a boat, not older than a ten-year-old boy’ together with her book of poems which works by ‘contradicting the snapshot-Margaret’, UT.

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Figure 18. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu se´duisante’ (1966). Published in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978).

here, interestingly, the reluctant poet does not protest that the words don’t come but rather that she does not have the inclination to ‘display’ them. Smith returns to the gallery, to the image of the poet constructing her own gallery audience. Her fatigue at ‘putting the words in place’ evokes the act of writing itself as a permanent process of exhibition, of

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framing each word and situating it in its appropriate context.76 This notion of writing is contained within a poem which itself acts as a frame, a comic facsimile of Smith as a female poet. The extent of Smith’s act of curation then seems to include the whole gamut of her work: her drawings’ references to various painters and artists, her deliberate selection of conflicting illustrations for her poetry, her disorientating presentation of poems in performance, and her use of various texts both published and unpublished in her composite novels, their pointed misquotation hovering between oversight and insight. Her use of different versions of her poetry in her essays, reviews, and novels constantly reworks and restructures the viewing contexts for her work, feigning authorial indifference as a smokescreen for an ongoing process of self-construction. Smith offers up her authorial persona as a knowingly curated act, a body that her semi-autobiographical novels and essays might reframe and repackage for subsequent readers. In this sense, the continued debate about the overlooked and misread Smith speaks less of a passive authorial voice needing recovery and reclamation for an uncomprehending literary public and more of an assured and astute curator. Her various self-exhibitions orchestrate the interplay between author and reader so intricately that the puppet of a critic cannot even feel the pull of invisible strings. 76 This idea is picked by Francis Wyndham in his review of Harold’s Leap for The Observer, who describes Smith as ‘an expert at selecting and arranging words’ (‘Personal View’ (7 January 1951), 7).

Conclusion It is lovely quickly to write a poem and then quickly it is finished, it is all over and to be forgotten. But alas it is not. For now with the passage of a good many years, oh yes a good many years, there are already these so many pieces of paper and backs of envelopes and this litter of paper—Oh the mechanics of authorship are frightful.1

It is difficult to attempt to ‘close the book’ on an author who seems at once wedded to the provisional and insistent on her liability to be misread. As Jauss has argued, an artist’s work survives ‘not through eternal questions, nor through permanent answers, but through the more or less dynamic interrelationship between questions and answer, between problem and solution, which can stimulate a new understanding and can allow the resumption of the dialogue between present and past’.2 It was Smith’s instinctive understanding of this process that prompted her to fashion such a mutable and self-correcting response to her own work, even if it was a strategy that often seemed to threaten obscurity rather than longevity. The oddball figure of Miss Pauncefort in Smith’s poem ‘The Songster’ (CP 30) is instructive here, the very fact that ‘nobody knew what she sang about’, enabling her off-key warbling to carry on unaffected by reception.3 If reviewing and assessing Smith’s work proved difficult for contemporary reviewers, her seeming malleability as an academic subject has also created problems for critics attempting to place her in a historical 1

Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (London: Virago, 1980), 107. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 70. 3 For a full discussion of this poem as a self-portrait, see Deryn Rees-Jones, ‘“TirryLirry-Lirry All the Same”: The Poetry and Performance of Stevie Smith’, in Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 70–92, 70. 2

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literary context. She has offered herself up as everything from a 1930s political novelist to a 1960s performance poet. The introduction to Jane Goldman’s Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (2004) lauds her as ‘one of the most important writers in English of the period’, yet this is her only mention in the book, her eminence apparently easier to assert than explain.4 In Neil Corcoran’s English Poetry Since 1940 (1993), an entire chapter is devoted to her work but it is discussed in conjunction with R. S. Thomas, the two writers thrown together as both their works are ‘sui generis’ and ‘impossible to categorise’.5 Michael Schmidt’s vast Lives of the Poets (1998) offers her acceptance via inclusion, but finds her work equally ‘bright, wise, and silly’.6 With Smith’s absorption into many of these histories being either nominal or problematic, the rogue element that disrupts the otherwise neat chronology of literary themes and trends, two more recent efforts to fix the apparently eccentric Smith into the traditional literary survey suggest alternative methods for making her a canonical subject. Randall Stevenson’s The Last of England? (2004), the twelfth part of the thirteen-volume Oxford English Literary History, focuses on British literature from 1960 to 2000. Smith is co-opted as a proto-postmodernist, writing poems which ‘seem to despair of making language function convincingly’.7 This ahistoric construction appears to be the same one that Huk attacks in Between the Lines.8 Yet, alive to the contradictions of Smith’s work, Stevenson’s argument hinges on an authorial voice which is at once emblematic, ‘unique, historically and socially, to England in the late 1950s and early 1960s’, prescient of the postmodern theories that would follow ten years after the author’s death, and deeply nostalgic, Smith’s poems presenting themselves as ‘swansongs for the vacuous gentility whose longevity so riled A. Alvarez in 1962’. In pointed opposition to the ‘canon-maker’ Alvarez, Smith appears as a warning from the past, a dusty relic whose very anachronistic presence becomes curiously symptomatic of a period unsure of its future.9 4 Jane Goldman, Modernism: 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004), xiv. 5 Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), 71. 6 Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 756. 7 Randall Stevenson, Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: 1960–2000: The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 227. 8 See Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), which outlines the dangers of seeing Smith as ‘before her time’ (11). 9 This recalls Smith’s own comment to Peter Orr that the ‘times will just have to enlarge to make room for me’ (‘Stevie Smith’, in Peter Orr (ed.), The Poet Speaks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 225–31, 229).

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The entrance of Smith into Stevenson’s canon marks the point at which the canon interrogates itself, welcoming subjects that point the way backwards as well as forwards. It is if as her adoption of a child’s costume at 1960s readings represents a much larger sense of Victorian Britain haunting the apparently modern and liberated society that Smith unwittingly inhabits. If this neat reinsertion of Smith into the post-war period as a cultural barometer of the times suggests that she can be absorbed into larger contextual studies of British literature, Stevenson’s survey significantly dodges more specific questions of literary context by making Smith an influence on, rather than a product of, literary culture. Poems such as ‘Pretty’ or ‘Angel Boley’ are in dialogue with other writers only through their impact on the next generation of female poets. Stevenson is then able to group Smith with Fleur Adcock and Veronica Forrest-Thompson, suggesting how they ‘extended her self-doubting idiom’, her ‘inclination to question poetic language and tactics within poems themselves’.10 Smith is accorded canonicity by making her own canon. The sense that Smith can only enter literary surveys as a read poet, her effect felt by a younger school of burgeoning writers, is also implicit in Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle’s A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry. Structurally, Smith is pivotal to their book, as their introduction notes: Stevie Smith, the only poet who has a chapter of her own, is a conduit between modernist and postmodernist principles of representation.11

Yet if giving Smith ‘a chapter of her own’ highlights her centrality to their survey, the Woolfian overtones of the phrase suggest a writer that repels influences and literary inheritance. Pointedly, her position as an isolated figure is only challenged by subsequent responses to her work by later writers. The contrasting reactions to Smith’s death in 1971 point the way forward to the two discrete schools of female poets that will follow in her wake. Dowson and Entwistle compare posthumous tributes to Smith by the poets Patricia Beer and Jeni Couzyn, noting that: Like many leading critics, Beer elevates Smith partly for peculiarity, implicitly amused by the ambiguities of her idiom. For the younger, more feminist, more partisan Couzyn, who illustrated her own work with whimsical Smith-like 10

Stevenson, The Last of England?, 228. Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6. 11

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sketches, there seems nothing ambiguous about so ‘relevant and poignant’ a presence.12

Smith’s adoption into a history of female poetry becomes possible finally not through the repeated attempts of Laura Severin and Catherine A. Civello to recover her poetry’s interest in domestic ideology but rather through other female poets’ posthumous engagement with her work. In a feat that would have pleased Smith, her entry into the literary canon comes from poets rather than critics. It is an approach that relies not on telling us how to read Smith but, in time-honoured fashion, examining how she has been read. Smith after all cast herself as Hermes, the messenger who interprets but also, as Vincent Crapanzo points out, the messenger who ‘given methodologies for uncovering the masked, the latent, the unconscious, may even obtain [their] message through stealth’.13 Smith’s talent allowed her to relay those same messages back to her subsequent reader with equal furtiveness. Perhaps then Smith’s work and its reputation tells us less about the vicissitudes of her critical reception and what Kristin Bluemel has called ‘the dangers of eccentricity’,14 and more about our own agendas and assumptions when attempting to ‘recover’ an author for academic debate. Mapping an author’s critical reception throughout their lifetime and after their death might prompt us to plot the continual rise and fall in their reputation, to historicize and objectify views of their work; yet perhaps it should, more importantly, reveal continuing trends and concerns in their work itself, a trail that leads us back to the text rather than a layer of sediment we must remove. As Jauss argues, ‘questions left unposed are opportunities for the subsequent interpreter [ . . . ] they must not lead to the point of completely abolishing the answer that the

12 Ibid. 100–1. Their comments refer to Patricia Beer’s poem ‘In memory of Stevie Smith’, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), 114, and Jeni Couzyn’s article ‘But at Heart You Are Frightened’, in Poetry Dimension I: A Living Record of the Poetry Year (London: Robson Books, 1973), 83–6. 13 Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 43. Smith read a similar account of Hermes in George Santayana’s Soliloquies in England: and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable, 1922), which depicts him as the ‘master of riddles’ who is ‘never caught in the tangle’ and ‘laughs to see how unnecessarily poor appointed mortals befool themselves, wilfully following any devious scent once they are on it by chance, and missing the obvious for ever’ (41). 14 See Kristin Bluemel, ‘The Dangers of Eccentricity: Stevie Smith’s Doodles and Poetry’, Mosaic 31(3) (1998), 111–32, 111.

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predecessor found in the text to his questions.’15 It was after all Smith herself who unwittingly predicted the possible fate of her work in 1946, when she described Thomas Hood’s poems being ‘all too faithfully collected, unpruned, printed and set off on their hundred year of kicking if unlaurelled life’.16 Smith’s Collected Poems in fact managed less than thirty years in print, a difference that may or may not condemn her, finally, to equal obscurity. Yet her works make their bid for longevity less through their professions of seriousness now being hurriedly uncovered by a second wave of feminist critics and more through the demands they make on subsequent generations of new readers. Rereading Smith’s work is not an alibi to dislodge a previous interpretation, but an opportunity to return to her texts, to pore over her books from cover to cover and, when finished, as the instructions from one of her more flippant poems has it, to ‘read it again then’.17 The most recent canon-makers, perhaps unwittingly, have followed Smith’s own comments on how she would like her work to be anthologised. In 1951, Smith rubbished Marjorie Bolton’s plans for a history of women’s poetry, stating: I don’t—if I may say so—much like the idea of a book about women poets because I don’t like that sort of category, but I think something on poets who influence, poets who follow trends and poets who are eccentric in the strict sense of the word, might be really good, as a piece of categorising and also fairly rewarding from the point of view of comment and analysis.18

Smith’s comments make it clear to which camp she believes her own idiosyncratic work belongs. She inscribes herself outside of the hodiernal circle in a position of full visibility but safe from the centrifugal forces of canons and schools. Her curious current status in popular and literary culture seems less an anomaly needing urgent correction and more a fulfilment of her own wish to preside over the category of writers who are ‘eccentric in the strict sense of the word’. Meanwhile, critics looking for yet more imaginary readers to blame and castigate for the deformed interpretation of Smith’s work perhaps need look no further

15

Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 185. Script for the programme ‘Thomas Hood’ for Book of Verse, 87, produced by John Arlott and broadcast on the BBC Eastern Service on 8 June 1946, held at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading. 17 See ‘To An American Publisher’ (CP 270). 18 Stevie Smith to Marjorie Boulton, 1 June 1951, UT. 16

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than the panoply of unreliable readers thronging the pages of her own novels and poems themselves. In this recently published drawing,19 we see Smith once again sketching a possible response to her work, presenting the book as a catalyst for disruption and division, an intractable object whose contents become an interpretative battleground where a final outcome is never declared (Figure 19). The

Figure 19. Stevie Smith, untitled illustration. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. Published in William May, ‘“Drawing in the reader”: Looking at Books in the Illustrations of Stevie Smith’, Jubilat 12 (2006), 71–82. 19 Published in an article by the author, ‘ “Drawing in the Reader”: Looking at Books in the Illustrations of Stevie Smith’, Jubilat 12 (2006), 71–82, from a collection of draft drawings, UT. The following illustration comes from the same source.

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published text quite literally boxes its readers into corners, daring us to back down or jump. Perhaps the only thing stopping the girl in the left of this picture from launching herself over the precipice might be her suspicion that what the other girl holds in her hand might not be, in fact, the final word on books. The summit both girls stand on could itself be a much larger book, a yet bigger space for demonstrating control, one more frame to out-read the first. Smith pointedly removed the book altogether when she published an altered version of the drawing alongside the poem ‘Yes I Know’ (CP 458), the text becoming the invisible point of departure her illustration was reluctant to reveal.20 If it is tempting to view the picture biographically through Smith’s reading relationship with her ‘gate-crashing sister’ Molly, a more important interpretative decision to make is whether Smith depicts herself as the combative figure confidently striding off with the book under her arm or the tentative earlier reader, fearful of the possible conclusions made by an unknown audience.21 The latter is the choice of most recent critics, who depict Smith as having been edged out by her modernist contemporaries or repeatedly dismissed by her belittling reviewers. Yet our own uncertainty about who is who in the drawing must finally cast us as the bewildered and anxious reader severed from our text. Smith, meanwhile, charges on without us, her forbidding hand gesture halting all future interpretations. If the illustration depicts the precipice of obscurity, prompting Smith’s readers to make a stark choice between viewing her as a misread author or a reader with a hidden agenda, another unpublished drawing presents an alternative. Whilst the contested text polarizing the two reading sisters is a closed book, a work that has become more important for what it represents than what it contains, private reading offers up a perennially open text (Figure 20). In this drawing, Smith remains the active reader and writer even beyond death, taking the open book with her to a makeshift coffin. She reverses the visual source of Henry Wallis’ The Death of Chatterton

20

See also her earlier illustration for the poem ‘Torquemada’ (CP 224), which surrounded the three depicted figures with books, UT. 21 Pompey notes the unwelcome appearance of someone’s ‘gate-crashing sister’ in the final section of Over the Frontier (205).

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Figure 20. Stevie Smith, untitled illustration from a collection of draft drawings. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. Published in William May, ‘“Drawing in the reader”: Looking at Books in the Illustrations of Stevie Smith’, Jubilat 12 (2006), 71–82.

(1856), with its pervasive image of the young poet killed by negative reviews, and rewrites the Romantic myth to cast the author as agent rather than victim of their own critical reception.22 Safe from onlookers yet privileged with a panoramic view of their expectant audience, the poet reads and writes unobserved, creating the contextual frames for their work whilst the canvases still lie blank. Death itself becomes a smokescreen for Smith the interventionist author here, now apparently subservient to posthumous reputation whilst her works continue the covert job of constructing her readership anew. In this ‘nice bed in a wide lofty room’ envisioned by Pompey in Novel on Yellow Paper (37), the author is offered perspective without detection, allowing the possibility of an ‘unreceived’ writing self. I want to conclude by examining Smith’s inscriptions in Hamish Miles’ copies of her first two publications.23 In his copy of Novel on Yellow Paper, Smith sketches herself as the proud and proprietorial 22

She enacts this same rejection verbally in ‘The Crown of Bays’, where she mocks the public figure driven to suicide by fear of his audience (CP 276). 23 Both inscriptions and illustrations are described in Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Stevie: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1985), 78, 110.

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Figure 21. Drawing and inscription in black ink on yellow paper pasted onto the flyleaf of Hamish Miles’ copy of Novel on Yellow Paper (undated). Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa.

mother, beaming in reflected glory (Figure 21). If her poetic predecessors prompted Smith to don the disguise of the tricksy orphan, her published texts prompt a grudging acknowledgement of lineage. Meanwhile her child-text looks on with an awkward anxiety, raised up on the uncomfortable pedestal of his own story. Smith’s accompanying note acknowledges Hamish as her literary midwife, assuring him ‘if it hadn’t been for you believe me, my child would never have seen the light of day’;24 yet the same child’s unease at suddenly being thrust into

24 Hamish responds to the inscription in a letter to Smith dated 3 December 1936, casting himself as an ‘accoucheuse’ to her work, UT.

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the spotlight casts doubt on the smug superiority of the bystanding author. If the equivocal sketch suggests Smith’s profound uncertainty about her newfound position as ‘one of the principal subjects of discussion at literary tea-parties’, as a contemporary gossip column had identified her,25 the illustration she includes in Hamish Miles’ copy of A Good Time Was Had By All suggests a worried acknowledgement the party may now be over (Figure 22). Her three published books make a dejected trio, scanning the shore for an author–mother they cannot see, and may even have had a hand in burying. Here, they are the

Figure 22. Drawing in blue ink on white paper pasted onto flyleaf of Hamish Miles’ copy of A Good Time Was Had By All, dated 1937, with inscription above and below, on the flyleaf. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70. Col. No. 1976.012. McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa.

25

Arnold Palmer, ‘Winter-Flowering Novelists’, Yorkshire Post (19 January 1938), 6.

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unreformed orphans now punished for their playfulness. They also seem to share a complicit acknowledgement that, having spent their day in the sun, it may now be their own graves they are digging.26 Smith’s inclusion of lines from ‘Advice to Young Children’—‘Children who paddle where the ocean bed shelves steeply j Must take care that they do not paddle too deeply’—predates their published context, where Smith goes on to mock the killjoy parents who would deny a child adventure in the interests of safety.27 In this context, the ‘shelves’ of the ocean bed denote the precipitous drop from the library bookcase into obscurity. Smith adopts the role of the nervous guardian, hinting at a lingering regret about allowing her children-texts out in the first place. The accompanying inscription suggests a fear of not matching audience expectations, admitting to Hamish Miles that ‘next time I may disappoint you’. She goes on to confess: This thought turns my verse alas ends my rhyme for me Goodbye goodbye goodbye.28 Excuse Stevie.

However there is, as always with Smith, a question mark undermining this negative reading. In fact, the bold interrogative tattooed into the sand seems less a questioning of our response than a parody. The apologetic sign-off ‘Stevie’ phonically completes the rhyme her envoy explains she cannot continue. Her ‘excuse’ is also an excuse, an expedient apology to request a leave of absence. Yet the inscription seems to pivot on the verb ‘turns’. At first glance, the sense of ‘turn’ here suggests hostility, or an unwelcome corruption. Smith’s readers distort and upset her art, both as an imagined idea when she writes her works and as a collective audience when they read them. Yet the verb ‘turns’ also plays on the etymology of ‘verse’ from vertere, to turn. In this sense her readers, far from providing a distraction or impediment to her art, are in fact the most important cog in its wheel. 26 The lines quoted from the poem also begin Smith’s story ‘Beside the Seaside: A Holiday with Children’, in Oswell Blakeston (ed.), Holidays and Happy Days (London: Phoenix House, 1949), 147–61, repr. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago, 1981), 13–25. 27 ‘Advice to Young Children’ (CP 174). 28 This obsessively repeated farewell provokes comparisons with her closing ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu’ in the poem ‘Fuite d’Enfance’ (CP 158).

Bibliography 1. WORKS BY STEVIE SMITH i) Published books Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936); rpt. with an introduction by Janet Watts (London: Virago Press, 1980). A Good Time Was Had By All (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937). Over the Frontier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938): rpt with an introduction by Janet Watts (London: Virago Press, 1980). Tender Only to One (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938). Mother, What is Man? (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942). The Holiday (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949): rpt with an introduction by Janet Watts (London: Virago Press, 1979). Harold’s Leap (London: Chapman and Hall, 1950). Some Are More Human Than Others: A Sketch-Book (London: Gaberbocchus, 1953): rpt with a personal memoir by James MacGibbon, a manuscript draft for the poem ‘Scorpion’, and the poem ‘Come Death (2)’ (London: Peter Owen, 1990). Not Waving But Drowning (London: Andre Deutsch, 1957). Cats in Colour (London: Batsford, 1959). Selected Poems (London: Longmans, 1962). Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1964). The Frog Prince and Other Poems (London: Longmans, 1966). The Best Beast (New York: Knopf, 1969). The Batsford Book of Children’s Verse, ed. Stevie Smith (London: Batsford, 1970): rpt as The Poet’s Garden (New York: Viking, 1970), and as Favourite Verse (London: Chancellor Press, 1984). Two in One (London: Longmans, 1971): rpt of Selected Poems and The Frog Prince and Other Poems. Scorpion and Other Poems (London: Longmans, 1972): with an introduction by Patric Dickinson. Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Allen Lane, 1975): reissued in paperback as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1985 with ‘Goodnight’ added to the collection, and in 1994 as a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic. Selected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): this is reissued as a Penguin Classic in 1985, in the Penguin Poetry Library in 1990, and as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2002.

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Bibliography

Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981). Stevie Smith: A Selection, ed. and critical introduction Hermione Lee (London: Faber, 1983). New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith, ed. W. W. Norton (New York: New Directions, 1988). A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith: Selected Short Prose, ed. W. W. Norton (New York: New Directions, 1995). Our Bog is Dood: Selected Poems for Younger Readers (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). Stevie: A Motley Selection of Her Poems by John Horder and Chris Saunders, ed. John Horder and Chris Saunders (Warwick: Greville, 2002). ii) Essays and poems in books and periodicals1 ‘How to Read Books’, in Discovery and Romance for Girls and Boys, vol. 2 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 267–72. ‘Private Views’, New Statesman and Nation, 15 (7 May 1938), 765–7, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 130–3. ‘Art’, in William Kimber (ed.), London Guyed (London: Hutchinson, 1938), 153–64. ‘Not Waving But Drowning’, The Observer (29 August 1954), 8. ‘Getting Rid of Sadie’, Evening Standard (22 November 1955), 19, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 39–43. ‘Syler’s Green: A Return Journey’, in From the Third Programme: A Ten-Years’ Anthology, ed. John Morris (London: Nonesuch Press, 1956), 72–93, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 83–9. ‘Too Tired for Words’, Medical World 85 (December 1956), 588–96, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 111–19. ‘Statement on Criticism’, P.E.N. News (Autumn 1958), 10–11, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 173–4. ‘History or Poetic Drama?’, T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Neville Braybrooke (London: Hart-Davis, 1958), 170–5, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 148–52. ‘The Ironing Board of Widow Twanky’, Queen 219 (20 December 1961), 11.

1 I only include the periodical publication of poems specifically discussed in this monograph.

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‘Simply Living’, Queen (12 February 1964), 4, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 108–10. ‘How Do You See?’, The Guardian (16 May 1964), 7. ‘At School’, in Presenting Poetry: A Handbook for English Teachers (London: Methuen, 1966), 159–64, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 119–24. ‘What Poems are Made Of’, Vogue (15 March 1969), 37–8, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 127–9. ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’, in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 155–70. iii) Short stories ‘A Very Pleasant Evening’, in C. Day Lewis, D. Kilham Roberts, and Rosamond Lehmann (eds), Orion III: A Miscellany (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1946), 114–17, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 31–4. ‘The Story of a Story’, Mara Meulen and Francis Wyndham (eds), New Savoy (London: New Savoy Press, 1946), 98–110, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 50–9. ‘Is There a Life beyond the Gravy?’, in Jeremy Scott [Kay Dick](ed.), At Close of Eve: An Anthology of Curious New Stories (London: Jarrolds, 1947), 75–86, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 60–73. ‘Beside the Seaside: A Holiday with Children’, in Oswell Blakeston (ed.), Holidays and Happy Days (London: Phoenix House, 1949), 147–61, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 13–25. ‘Getting Rid of Sadie’, Evening Standard (25 November 1955), 19, rpt. in Me Again, ed. Jack Barbera and William McBrien (London: Virago Press, 1981), 39–43. iv) Reviews2 ‘Philosophy Written in Prison’, John O’ London’s Weekly 43 (15 August 1940), 535 [review of Helen Barrett’s Boethius: Some Aspects of His Times and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940)]. ‘New Books Reviewed by Stevie Smith’, Modern Woman (May 1943), 85 [review of nine books including Christopher Isherwood’s Good-bye to Berlin (Hogarth: London, 1943)].

2

Full details of Smith’s reviews and the books they covered are available in Jack Barbera, William McBrien, and Helen Bajan’s Stevie Smith: A Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987). Photocopies of all the reviews are also held in the Special Collection of the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.

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‘Books of the Year’, The Observer (22 December 1957), 10 [review of George Frederick Wingfield Digby, Symbol and Image in William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957)]. ‘Poet among the Beasts’, Daily Telegraph (3 April 1958), 12 [review of A. Lytton Sells, Animal Poetry in French and English Literature and the Greek Tradition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958)]. ‘Beastly Silly’, The Observer (13 April 1958), 16 [review of John Symonds’ The Magic of Aleister Crowley (London: Muller, 1958)]. ‘Creative Critic’, The Observer (7 September 1958), 16 [review of G. Wilson Knight’s The Sovereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958)]. ‘Odd Man Out’, The Observer (2 August 1959), 8 [review of Rowland Watson (ed.), Some Letters of E. H. W. Meyerstein (London: Neville Spearman, 1959)]. ‘A Poem and a Review: An Unbeliever Writes about Two Religious Leaders’, Frontier (Spring 1961), 41–2 [review of Adam Fox, Dean Inge (London: John Murray, 1961)]. ‘Soul of Gossip’, Spectator (27 October 1961), 595–6 [review of Constance Babbington Smith (ed.), Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay; 1950–1952 (London: Collins, 1961)]. ‘A Painter’s Phantoms’, The Observer (6 May 1962), 28 [review of Oskar Kokoschka, A Sea Ringed with Visions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962)]. ‘Pleasures of Old Age’, The Observer (7 July 1963), 23 [review of Collette’s The Blue Lantern (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963)]. ‘Books of the Year’, The Observer (10 December 1967), 9 [review of three novels including Agatha Christie, Endless Night (London: Collins, 1967)]. v) Anthologies featuring Smith’s work Abse, Daniel, and Denise Abse (eds). Voices in the Gallery (London: Tate, 1986). Barsely, Michael (ed.). The Phoenix Book of British Humour (London: Phoenix House, 1949). Damrosch, David, and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (eds). The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 2006). Ellmann, Richard, and Robert O’Clair (eds). The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (New York: Norton, 1973). Enright, D. J. (ed.). The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Gibson, James (ed.). Let the Poet Choose (London: Harrup, 1973). Gwynn, R. S. (ed.). Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (London: Longman, 2007). Hollis, Matthew, and Paul Keegan (eds). 101 Poems Against War (London: Faber, 2003). Lach, William (ed.). Fairyland: In Art and Poetry (New York: Harrap, 2001).

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Larkin, Philip (ed.). The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). Morpurgo, Michael (ed.). Because a Fire Was in My Head: 101 Poems to Remember (London: Faber, 2002). Motion, Andrew (ed.). Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry (London: Faber, 2001). Orr, Peter (ed.). The Poet Speaks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). Oswald, Alice (ed.). The Thunder Matters: 101 Poems for the Planet (London: Faber, 2005). Schmidt, Michael (ed.). An Introduction to Fifty Modern Poets (London: Pan Books, 1979). Tuma, Keith (ed.). An Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Waters, Fiona (ed.). Mother and Daughter Poems (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). vi) Unpublished works3 Radio script for the programme ‘Thomas Hood’ for Book of Verse: 87, produced by John Arlott and broadcast on the BBC Eastern Service on 8 June 1946, held at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading. vii) Recordings The Spoken Word: Stevie Smith (British Library, 978-07123-0592, 2009). 2. CRITICISM ON STEVIE SMITH i) Reviews and newspaper articles Beer, Patricia. ‘Retold But Unrevealed’, TLS (11 April 1988), 1222 [review of Spalding’s biography]. Bentley, Phyllis. ‘Novelists Who Face Modern Problems’, Yorkshire Post (30 June 1949), 2 [review of The Holiday]. Brownjohn, Alan. ‘A Few More Steps’, The Scotsman 27 (July 1963), 2 [review of a 1963 poetry reading]. Byatt, A. S. ‘Preemptory Muse of the Lost Girl’, The Times (19 December 1985), 11 [rev. of Barbera and McBrien’s biography]. Carey, John. ‘Praise for the Poet of Palmer’s Green’, The Sunday Times, ‘Books’ supplement (23 October 1988), 3 [review of Spalding’s biography]. —— ‘Books of the Century’, The Sunday Times (31 October 1999), 14 [review of The Frog Prince and Other Poems]. Cronin, Anthony. ‘Facing Facts’, Time and Tide (7 December 1957), 1559 [review of Not Waving But Drowning]. 3 Here I include works which have been broadcast or made publicly available without being published in book form.

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Dunn, Douglas. ‘The Voice of Genteel Decay’, TLS (14 July 1973), 820 [review of Scorpion]. Entwistle, Frank. ‘Such as Nervy Business . . .’, Evening Standard (24 November 1969), 5. F., V. H. ‘Reviews’, Country Life 85 (1 April 1939), 334 [review of Tender Only to One]. Feaver, Vicki. ‘Alarming Domesticities’, TLS (5 August 1983), 840 [review of Spalding’s biography]. —— ‘Castaway Poems’, Poetry News (Spring 2001), 8. Gale, John. ‘Death Is a Poem to Stevie Smith’. The Observer (9 November 1969), 21. Gordon, Giles. ‘A Singer of Songs’, The Scotsman (24 April 1965), 5. Grigson, Geoffrey. ‘So Glad and Serious’, The Guardian (7 August 1975), 9 [review of Collected Poems]. Hamilton, Ian. ‘Review of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems’, New Statesman (8 August 1975), 173 [review of Collected Poems]. Hayward, John. ‘London Letter’, New York Sun (29 September 1939), 8. Hirsch, Edward. ‘Stevie: The Movie’, American Poetry Review 29:4 (July/August 2000), 32–7 [review of the film Stevie]. Horder, John. ‘Hugging Humans’, The Listener (12 April 1979), 512. Horowitz, Michael. ‘Stevie Smith Revisited: Part One’, Literary Review (June 1981), 23–7. —— ‘Stevie Smith Revisited: Part Two’, Literary Review (July 1981), 24–7. —— ‘Leftward Ho!’, The Spectator (24 November 1984), 32–4. —— ‘A Laughing Butterfly’, Spectator (1 February 1986), 30–1 [review of Barbera and McBrien’s biography]. —— ‘Steve Smith’, The Independent (29 October 1988), 42 [review of Spalding’s biography]. James, R. A. Scott. ‘The Return of Stevie Smith’, Britain Today (October 1949), 46 [review of The Holiday]. Johnston, Albert H. ‘Books’, Publishers’ Weekly (10 January 1976), 89 [rev. of Collected Poems, American edn]. Larkin, Philip, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, New Statesman (28 September 1962), 416, rpt. in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London: Faber, 1983), 153–8 [rev. of Smith’s Selected Poems]. Laski, Marghanita, ‘Frankie and Johnny’, The Listener (21 October 1971), 548–9 [review of Dick’s Ivy and Stevie]. —— ‘Not So Far Out As You Thought’, Country Life (17 December 1981), 2207. Lee, Hermione. ‘Fits and Splinters’, New Statesman 97 (4 May 1979), 852–3 [review of The Holiday]. —— ‘Foot off the Ground’, The Observer (1 December 1985), 18 [review of Barbera and McBrien’s biography].

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Mair, Ian, ‘Selected Poems’, The Age (24 November 1962), 23 [review of Selected Poems]. May, Derwent. ‘Oh lor!’, The Listener (9 November 1977), 8 [review of the film Stevie]. Miller, Karl. ‘London Diary’, New Statesman 66 (26 July 1963), 102 [review of 1963 poetry reading]. Mitchison, Naomi. ‘Bouncing with Blake’, Now and Then (Winter 1937), 27. Motion, Andrew. ‘But Why So Sad?’ Spectator (3 November 1988), 28–9 [review of Spalding’s biography]. Palmer, Arnold. ‘Winter-Flowering Novelists’. Yorkshire Post (19 January 1938), 9 [review of Over the Frontier]. Parsons, Ian. ‘Novel on Yellow Paper’, Now and Then (Summer 1936), 38 [review of Novel on Yellow Paper]. Spurling, Hilary. ‘All about Stevie’, Daily Telegraph (5 November 1988), 10 [review of Barbera and McBrien’s biography]. Stanford, Derek. ‘Poetry Review’, Books and Bookmen (October 1983), 28 [review of Lee’s Stevie Smith: A Selection]. Stonier, George. ‘Five Poets, Five Worlds’, New Statesman and Nation (3 December 1938), 930 [review of Tender Only to One]. Thomas, Alan. ‘The Bystander Bookshelf ’, Bystander (26 January 1938), 16 [review of Over the Frontier]. Thomas, Yvonne. ‘A Polite Murder, Cookery, and Melancholy’, Evening Standard (3 December 1969), 22. Unsigned interview. ‘If You Sit Waiting –’, Books of To-day (July 1949), 3. Unsigned review. ‘Other new books’, TLS (8 May 1937), 365 [review of A Good Time Was Had By All ]. Unsigned review. ‘Poet of the Year’, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald (26 July 1963), 16 [review of poetry performance in Stratford-upon-Avon]. Unsigned review. ‘Waving and Drowning’, TLS (19 January 1967), 48 [review of The Frog Prince and Other Poems]. Warner, Marina. ‘A Skeleton in the Nursery’, The Sunday Times (25 November 1981), ‘Books’ supplement, 11 [rev. of Me Again]. Washington, Peter. ‘Poetry Review’, Spectator (6 September 1975), 314 [review of Collected Poems]. West, Douglas. ‘Thoughts at Random’, Daily Mail (17 September 1936), 16. Wyndham, Francis. ‘Personal View’, The Observer (7 January 1951), 7 [review of Harold’s Leap]. ii) Journal articles and book chapters Austin, Diana. ‘Over the Frontier and into the Darkness with Stevie Smith: War, Gender, and Identity’, in Stella Dean (ed.), Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914–45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 35–53.

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Barbera, Jack. ‘The Relevance of Stevie Smith’s Drawings’, Journal of Modern Literature 12(2) (July 1985), 221–36. Barfoot, C. C. In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). Bayley, Sally, and William May (eds). From Self to Shelf: The Artist under Construction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). Bluemel, Kristin. ‘The Dangers of Eccentricity: Stevie Smith’s Doodles and Poetry’, Mosaic 31(3) (1998), 111–32. —— ‘Not Waving or Drowning: Refusing Critical Opinion, Rewriting Literary History’, in Anthony Shuttleworth (ed.), And In Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 65–94. Civello, Catherine A. ‘Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning”’, Explicator 42(1) (1983), 58–9. Couzyn, Jeni. ‘But at Heart You Are Frightened’, in Poetry Dimension I: A Living Record of the Poetry Year (London: Robson Books, 1973), 83–6. Dean, Stella (ed.). Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914–45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Dentith, Simon. ‘Thirties Poetry and the Landscapes of Suburbia’, in Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (eds), Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (London: Longman, 1997), 108–23. Enright, D. J. ‘Did Nobody Teach You?’, in Man is an Onion: Reviews and Essays (London: Chatto, 1971), 137–48. Hotz-Davies, Ingrid. ‘ “My Name is Finis”: The Lonely Voice of Stevie Smith’, in C. C. Barfoot (ed.), InBlack and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 219–34. Huk, Romana. ‘Eccentric Cocentrism: Traditional Poetic Forms and Refracted Discourse in Stevie Smith’s Poetry’, Contemporary Literature 34(2) (1993), 240–65. —— ‘Poetic Subject and Voices as Sites of Struggle: Toward a “Postrevisionist” Reading of Stevie Smith’s Fairy-Tale Poems’, in Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (eds), Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics in Poetry (London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 147–65. —— ‘Misplacing Smith’, Contemporary Literature 40(3) (1999), 507–23. Lawson, Elizabeth. ‘Stevie Smith and the Metaphors of Disengagement’, Sydney Studies in English 9 (1983–4), 94–106. —— ‘Not Waving But Drowning: Stevie Smith and the Problem of Simplicity’, Meridian: La Trobe English Journal 5(1) (1986), 36–42. Light, Alison. ‘Outside History? Stevie Smith, Women Poets and the National Voice’, English 43(177) (1994), 237–59.

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May, William. ‘ “The Choosers”: Posthumous Collections of Stevie Smith’s Poetry’, The Library 6(3) (September 2005), 321–38. —— ‘ “I Enclose My Character”: Private Addresses and Public Correspondences in the Work of Stevie Smith’, Literary Criterion 40(3) (2005), 153–60. —— ‘ “Drawing in the Reader”: Looking at Books in the Illustrations of Stevie Smith’, Jubilat 12 (2006), 71–82. —— ‘An Eye for an I: Constructing the Visual in the Work of Stevie Smith’, in Sally Bayley and William May (eds), From Self to Shelf: The Artist under Construction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 76–85. Muldoon, Paul. ‘ “I remember” by Stevie Smith’, in The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Faber, 2006), 140–64. Nemesvari, Richard. ‘ “Work It Out for Yourself”: Language and Fictional Form in Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper’, Dalhousie Review 71(1) (1991), 26–37. Orr, Peter. ‘Stevie Smith’, in idem (ed.), The Poet Speaks (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1966), 225–31. Perry, Seamus. ‘Practical Criticism: Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning”’, English Review (September 1998), 14–16. Piette, Adam. ‘Travel Writing and the Imperial Subject in 1930s Prose: Waugh, Bowen, Smith, and Orwell’, in Kristi Siegel (ed.), Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle and Displacement (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 53–66. Prins, Yopie, and Maeera Shreiber (eds). Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics in Poetry (London: Cornell University Press, 1997). Pumphrey, Martin. ‘Play, Fantasy, and Strange Laughter: Stevie Smith’s Uncomfortable Poetry’, Critical Quarterly 28(3) (August 1986), 85–96. Rees-Jones, Deryn. ‘“Tirry-Lirry-Lirry All the Same”: The Poetry and Performance of Stevie Smith’, in Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), 70–92. Ricks, Christopher. ‘The Art of Sinking in Poetry’, in The Force of Poetry (London, Faber, 1992), 244–55. Siegel, Kristi (ed.). Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle and Displacement (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002). Simon, John. ‘The Poems of Stevie Smith’, Canto 1 (Spring 1977), 181–98. Stevenson, Sheryl. ‘Stevie Smith’s Voices’, Contemporary Literature 33(1) (Spring 1992), 24–45. Steward, Julie Sims. ‘Ceci n’est past un Hat: Stevie Smith and the Refashioning of Gender’, South Central Review 15(2) (Summer 1998), 16–33. Tatham, Michael. ‘That one must speak lightly’, in Sanford Sternlicht (ed.), In Search of Stevie Smith (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 132–46. Thaddeus, Janice. ‘Stevie Smith and the Gleeful Macabre’, Contemporary Poetry 3(4) (1978), 36–49.

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Thurschwell, Pamela. ‘Supple Minds and Automatic Hands: Secretarial Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Literature’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37(2) (2001), 155–68. Utell, Janine M. ‘Smith’s “Silence and Tears”’, The Explicator 61(2) (Winter 2003), 105–6. Williams, Jonathan. ‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’, Parnassus (Spring/Summer 1974), 105–24. Williams, Keith, and Steven Matthews (eds). Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (London: Longman, 1997). iii) Critical studies Civello, Catherine A. Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith (Columbia: Camden House, 1997). Dick, Kay. Ivy and Stevie (London: Duckworth, 1971). Huk, Romana. Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Rankin, Arthur C. The Poetry of Stevie Smith: ‘Little Girl Lost’ (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984). Severin, Laura. Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). Sternlicht, Sanford. Stevie Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1990). ——(ed.). In Search of Stevie Smith (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991). iv) Biographies Barbera, Jack, and McBrien, William. Stevie: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1985). Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Faber, 1988); rpt. Stevie Smith: A Biography (Stroud: Sutton, 2002). Whitemore, Hugh. Stevie: A Play by Hugh Whitemore (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1977). v) Reference works Barbera, Jack, William McBrien, and Helen Bajan. Stevie Smith: A Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987). vi) Literary surveys discussing Smith’s work Bluemel, Kristin. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004). Childs, Peter. The Twentieth Century in Poetry (London: Routledge, 1999). Corcoran, Neil. English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993). Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Day, Gary, and Brian Docherty (eds). British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

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Swain, John. The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (London: Noel Douglas, 1930). Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994). ——Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill (New York: Norton, 1999). Thirkell, Angela. Enter Sir Robert (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955). Thompson, Francis. The Works of Francis Thompson (London: Burns and Oates, 1913). ——Collected Poems (Sevenoaks: Fisher Press, 1992). Various authors, Balthus (London: Arts Council, 1968), catalogue for the exhibition Balthus at the Tate Gallery in London (4 October to 10 November 1968). Virgil. Aeneid, trans. Cecil Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Wells, H. G. ‘Miss Winchelsea’s Heart’, in Twelve Stories and a Dream (London: Macmillan, 1904). West, Rebecca. The Meaning of Treason (London: Gollancz, 1949). Williams-Ellis, Amabel. Noah’s Ark or the Love Story of a Respectable Young Couple (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925). Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938). —— ‘The Cinema’, in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 169–70. ——Jacob’s Room (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Wordsworth, William. The Works of William Wordsworth (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994). ——The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4 . L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y , R E A DE R - R E S P O N S E CRITICISM, AND VISUAL CULTURE Appleyard, J. A. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966). Bal, Mieke. ‘On Looking and Reading: Word and Image, Visual Poetics, and Comparative Arts’, Semiotica 76(3/4) (1989): 283–320. Barron, Stephanie (ed.). ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991). Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977). ——Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971). Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Task of the Translator’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London, 2000).

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Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Bollman, Stefan. Reading Women (London: Merrell, 2006). Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction (London: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Bradford, Robert. The Look of It: A Theory of Visual Form in English Poetry (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993). Burke, Sea´n. The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). Caws, Mary Ann. The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). Chartier, Roger. ‘Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the reader’, Diacritics 22(2) (1992): 49–61. Cohen, Michael. Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings (London: Associated University Presses, 1995). Crapanzano, Vincent. Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: on the Epistemology of Interpretation (London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Cruz, Jon, and Justin Lewis (eds). Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994). Culley, Margo. American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bess (London: Routledge, 1978). ——A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamut (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). ——Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Engler, Balz. Reading and Listening: The Modes of Communicating Poetry and Their Influences on the Texts (Bern: Francke Verlag Bern, 1982). Esrock, Ellen. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Fetterly, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (London: Indiana University Press, 1978). Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (London: Harvard University Press, 1980). Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). —— ‘Las Meninas’, in Julia Thomas (ed.), Reading Images (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 184–97.

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Foucault, Michael. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader (London: Routledge, 1987). Gandelman, Claude. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic, 2nd edn (London: Yale University Press, 2000). Golden, Catherine J. (ed.). Book Illustrated: Text, Image, and Culture 1770–1930 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000). Gossop, R. P. Book Illustration (London: London School of Printing, 1937). Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Harrison, Charles. Essays on Art and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Heusser, Martin. Word and Image Interactions (Basel: Wiese Verlay, 1993). Hirsch, E. D. The Aims of Interpretation (London: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). —— ‘Interaction between Text and Reader’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 106–19. ——Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2000). Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982). Jeish, Margaret M. The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002). Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious (London: MIT Press, 1993). Landow, George P. Images of Crisis—Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography, ed. John Paul Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1989). Lessing, Gotthold Ephrain. Laoco¨on: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Lewis, Beth Irwin. George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1971).

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Long, Elizabeth. ‘Textual Interpretation as Collective Action’, in Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis (eds), Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), 181–212. Lund, Hans. Text as Picture: Studies in the Literary Transformation of Pictures, trans. Kacke Go¨trick (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-sense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). ——Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2004). Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Miller, Nancy K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Iconology (London: University of Chicago, 1986). ——Picture Theory (London: University of Chicago, 1994). Pearce, Lynne. Feminism and the Politics of Reading (London: Arnold, 1997). Pucci, Joseph. The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (London: Yale University Press, 1998). Ricks, Christopher. Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Schneede, Uwe M. George Grosz: Life and Work, trans. Susanne Flatauer (London: Gordon Fraser, 1979). Slater, Maya. ‘The Narrator’s Comments on Phe`dre in Albertine disparue: A Character as Literary Critic’, Modern Languages Review 87(2) (April 1992), 300–6. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Female Autobiography (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1987). Sontag, Susan. On Photography (London: Penguin, 2002). Stanley, Liz. The Auto/Biographical ‘I’: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Steiner, Wendy. Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (London: Yale University Press, 1978). ——The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relationship between Modern Literature and Painting (London: University of Chicago, 1982). ——Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Stierle, Karlheinz. ‘The Reading of Fictional Texts’, trans. Inge Crosman and Thekla Zachrau, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 83–105. Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman (eds). The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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Thomas, Julia (ed.). Reading Images (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). Various authors. The International Surrealist Exhibition (London: New Burlington Galleries, 1936). Walker, Nancy A. The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition (Austin: University of Texas, 1995). Wallace, Diana. Sisters and Rivals in British Women’s Fiction, 1914–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Ward, Janet. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (London: University of California Press, 2001). 5. MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS AND ARTICLES CONSULTED Auden, W. H. Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1994). Beer, Patricia. Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988). Brown, Marshall. ‘The Logic of Fiction: A Hegelian approach’, PMLA 96(2) (1981), 224–41. Burton, Tim. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy (London: Faber, 1998). Fraistat, Neil (ed.). Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Hegel, Freidrich. On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy, ed. J. Glenn Gray (Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). Laquer, Walter. Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933 (London: Phoenix, 2000). McFadden, Margaret. ‘ “WARNING—Do Not Risk Federal Arrest by Looking Glum!”: Ballyhoo Magazine and the Cultural Politics of Early 1930s Humour’, Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 26(1) (March 2003), 124–33. Miller, Alice. The Drama of Being a Child: The Search for the True Self, trans. Ruth Ward (London: Virago, 1987). Spalding, Frances. Vanessa Bell (London: Phoenix, 1994). Stannard, Julian. ‘An Interview with Fleur Adcock’, Thumbscrew 17 (Winter 2000/1), 5–15. Tanselle, G.Thomas. Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). Thompson, Denys. ‘A Hundred Years of the Higher Journalism’, Scrutiny 4(1) (June 1935), 25–34. Woolf, Virginia. Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1980). ——Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton, 1985).

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Wordsworth, William, and Dorothy Wordsworth. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol II, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

6. REFERENCE WORKS The Holy Bible: King James Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Trumble, William R., and Angus Stevenson (eds). The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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Index

Adams, Henry 145–6 Adcock, Fleur 118, 208 Ainsworth, William Harrison 67 allusion 26–7, 33 n. 22 Alvarez, Al 207 Appleyard, J. A. 18, 58 Auden, W. H. 12, 176 Balthus 57 Barbera, Jack 92, 94, 97, 105, 120 Baring, Maurice 68 Barthes, Roland 181 Bate, Walter Jackson 25 Baudelaire, Charles 38, 75 Beardsley, Aubrey 166–7, 170 ‘Venus and Tannhauser’ 166–7 Beckett, Samuel 30 Beer, Patricia 125, 208–9 Bell, Martin 139 Belloc, Hilaire 71, 73, 151–2 Bentham, Jeremy 156 Bentley, Phyllis 130–2 Betjeman, John 138 Bishop, Elizabeth 27, 29 Blake, William 24, 31, 32, 42–4, 46, 170 ‘A Poison Tree’ 43 ‘Infant Sorrow’ 44 ‘The Little Girl Lost’ 46 ‘The Little Vagabond’ 44 Bloom, Harold 25 Bluemel, Kristin 183, 197, 209 Boethius 162–3 Booth, Wayne 145 Bronte¨, Charlotte 73, 151 Browne, Sir Thomas 72 Browning, Robert 16 n. 44, 40–2, 47 ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 47 Pauline 41–2 ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ 40–1 ‘The Italian in England’ 42 Brueghel, Pieter 170 Burton, Tim 96 Byron, Lord 24

Canaletto 175 Carey, John 120 Carlyle, Thomas 156 n. 33 Carroll, Lewis 59–61, 65, 112, 138, 164 Alice in Wonderland 59–61, 65, 164 Alice Through the Looking Glass 59–61 Cervantes, Miguel de 55 Chartier, Roger 18, 19, 98 Chaucer, Geoffrey 85 Christie, Agatha 80 Civello, Catherine A. 197, 209 Claudius, emperor of Rome 160–1 Clutton-Brock, Barbara 170 Cohen, Michael 57 Corcoran, Neil 207 Colette 82 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 143 Conrad, Joseph 151–2 Couzyn, Jeni 208–209 Cowper, William 26 Crapanzo, Vincent 209 cummings, e.e. 117 Curtis Brown 75–6 Dante, Alighieri 32, 149–50 Danton, Georges Jacques 153 Day-Lewis, Cecil 52 Defoe, Daniel 151, 152 Degenerate Art exhibition 174 Denham, John 36 De Quincey, Thomas 25 Descartes, Rene´ 175 Dick, Kay 119, 126 Dickinson, Emily 24, 27–8, 29 Dickinson, Patric 24, 28 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 150 Dowson, Jane 208–209 ecphrasis 176, 181 El Greco 170, 176 Eliot, T.S. 1, 14 n. 35, 45–6 ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ 45

240 Entwistle, Alice 208–209 Erasmus 30 Esrock, Ellen 17, 19 Euripides 25, 143 Fish, Stanley 144, 168 Forrest-Thompson, Veronica 208 Foucault, Michel 116–17, 156, 158 Fowler, Alistair 21 Fowler, Helen 55, 134 n. 88 Franklin, Benjamin 146 Frazer, Sir George James 74 Freud, Sigmund 12, 172 George V, king of England 178 Gibbon, Edward 80, 151 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 149 Goldman, Jane 207 Gore, Charles 64 Goya, Francisco de 170, 176, 190–7 ‘Bad Poets’ 193, 195 Disasters of War 192 ‘Don Andre´s del Peral’ 176 ‘It May Be That He Is Good’ 195–6 Los Caprichos 193 ‘Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’ 193–4 ‘What is All This Noise About?’ 192 Graves, Robert 160–1 Grimm Brothers 24, 31 Grosz, George 170, 184–90, 196 ‘Cafe´’ 186, 189 Guest, John 99, 109 Gunn, Thom 176 Hagstrum, Jean 9 n. 20 Hall, Radclyffe 70 Hardy, Thomas 27–8 Heine, Heinrich 52 Helen of Troy 48–9 Henry VIII, king of England 67 Herbert, George 24, 39 Hewitt, Douglas 78 Hill, Geoffrey 26 Hirsch, E. D. 144 Hood, Thomas 24, 27, 91, 112, 210 Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen 175 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 130 Horace 9 Horder, John 54, 55, 96–8, 138–40 Horowitz, Michael 92, 95 Hotz-Davies, Ingrid 143 Housman, A. E. 26

Index Huk, Romana 14, 15–16, 25, 127–9, 137, 183, 207 Huxley, Aldous 70–1 Inge, Dean 157 n. 37 Iser, Wolfgang 17, 19, 144 Isherwood, Christopher 171 Jackson, Glenda 114 James, Henry 161–2 Jameson, Fredric 61 Jauss, Hans Robert 18, 19, 114, 120–1, 206, 209–10 Johnson, Pamela Hansford 80 Johnson, Samuel 24 Jonathan Cape 115–16, 142 Joyce, James 1 Kahn, Leo 107 Keats, John 26, 27–8, 131 n. 179 Keller, Gottfried 149 Keogh, Theodora 79 Krauss, Rosalind 181 Krieger, Murray 169 Larkin, Philip 15, 16, 26, 27–8, 91, 124–5, 183 Laski, Marghanita 126–7 Laughlin, James 14, 132–3 Lawrence, D. H. 68–9, 72, 131 Apocalypse 68, 131 Kangaroo 69 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 72 ‘We Have Come Through’ 76 Lear, Edward 24, 25, 31, 112, 138, 183 Lee, Hermione 24–5, 90, 94–5 Leitch, Vincent B. 17 n. 46 Lejeune, Philippe 117 Lemprie`re, John 87–8 Lewis, Sinclair 68 Logan, John 35 Lord, Walter 27 Louy¨s, Pierre 74–5 Lund, Hans 7 Macaulay, Rose 78–9 MacGibbon, James 86–94 MacNeice, Louis 117 Maistre, Xavier de 151 Manning, Olivia 99, 117, 119 Manzoni, Alessandro 149 Maugham, W. Somerset 68

Index McBrien, William 92, 94, 97, 105, 120 Meinhold, William 149 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6 Meyerstein, E. H. W. 78 Millais, John Everett 170 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 48 Milton, John 68 n. 54 Mitchison, Naomi 70, 73, 80, 116, 123–4 Montefiore, Jan 48 Morgan, Charles 161 n. 147 Muldoon, Paul 12 n. 22, 26–9 Myers, Elizabeth 29 Nash, Ogden 14, 130 National Gallery 173–6 Nemesvari, Richard 128 O’Neill, Eugene 147, 149 Orwell, George 143–4 Ouida 162 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury 23, 28, 35 Paracelsus 148 Parker, Dorothy 96, 117 Pater, Walter 73, 145, 148, 149 Marius the Epicurean 73, 145 Perry, Seamus 197 Plath, Sylvia 104 Pope, Alexander 26, 32, 36 Porter, Peter 139 Potter, Stephen 77 Powys, John Cowper 80, 91, 134 n. 90 Powys, Littleton C. 29 Proust, Marcel 50–1 Pucci, Joseph 18, 26, 29 Racine, Jean 24, 32, 50–1, 53 reader-response theory 17–20, 144, 206 Rees-Jones, Deryn 105, 206 n. 3 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 170 Ribera, Jusepe de 176 Ricks, Christopher 16, 26, 30, 33 n. 22, 125 n. 52, 197 Rossetti, Christina 48 Santayana, George 131 Saunders, William 96–8 Schmidt, Michael 207 Scott, Sir Walter 35, 148 Severin, Laura 16, 108 n. 95, 127, 128, 183 Shakespeare, William 23, 64. 159 King Lear 23, 64 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 32, 131 n. 79

241

Shorthouse, Joseph Henry 147 Sickert, Walter 170 Sophocles 51 Smith, Molly (Ethel Mary Frances) 60–7, 212 Smith, Stevie: and allusion 25–51, 147, 160–3; and annotations 63–6, 213–15; and art galleries 154, 173–7; and attitudes to reading 54–82, 146–151, 166–9; and the Bible 24, 54, 64, 107, 110, 178, 179; and biography 62, 120, 132–4, 152–3; and blurbs 134–7; and cats 3–5, 78, 140; and classical literature 24, 32, 52, 48–52, 63 n. 31, 74–5, 6, 143; and direct addresses 71, 151–7; and editing 83–98, 99–105, 107, 112, 115; and fame 13, 82, 130, 15, 215–16; and feminist criticism 15–16, 48, 208–11; and George Grosz 183–90, 196; and Goya 176, 190–6; and illustrations 65–6, 76, 163, 164, 165, 172–3, 181–205, 211–16; and interviews 137–41, 182; and misreading 16, 80–1, 127–8, 147, 158, 172; and monikers 79, 88, 115–19, 131–3, 158; and myth 48–9; and performance 4–5, 62, 84, 99, 105, 109–10, 135, 191; and poetic form 21–4; and posthumous editions 86–98; and reception 14–16, 82, 118–32, 182–3, 206–10; and redrafting 105–6, 115, 142, 152, 171, 193, 198–203, 206; and relationship with sister 60–7, 71, 212; and reviewing practice 57 n. 12, 76–82, 116, 163; and self-quoting 77–8; and translations 52–3, 74–5, 165; and visual perception 6, 8–12, 72, 172 Works ‘Admire Cranmer!’ 22, 78 ‘A Dream of Nourishment’ 44 ‘Advice to Young Children’ 216 A Good Time Was Had By All 10, 117, 134, 155, 173, 215 ‘A King in Funeral Procession’ 178 ‘A Mother’s Hearse’ 32 ‘Analysand’ 155 ‘Angel Boley’ 180, 208

242

Index

Works (cont.) ‘Angel Face’ 106 ‘Art’ 173–6, 177, 184 ‘A Soldier Dear to Us’ 67 n. 48 ‘At School’ 58 ‘A Very Pleasant Evening’ 55 A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith 95–6 ‘Bandol (Var)’ 12 ‘Beside the Seaside: A Holiday with Children’ 216 n. 26 ‘Bog-Face’ 97 ‘Breughel’ 23 Cats in Colour 3 ‘Ceux qui luttent’ 186 ‘Childe Rolandine’ 42 Collected Poems 86–90, 103, 210 ‘Company’ 201 n. 74 ‘Conviction (iii)’ 5 ‘Croft’ 91 ‘Dear Karl’ 84–5, 90 ‘Deeply Morbid’ 177 ‘Dido’s Farewell to Aeneas’ 52 ‘Die Lorelei’ 52 ‘Do Not!’ 186, 188–90 ‘Do Take Muriel Out’ 106, 117 n. 19 ‘Drugs Made Pauline Vague’ 42 ‘Evangelie’ 13 ‘Feminine Charm’ 42 ‘Fish, Fish’ 106 ‘From the County Lunactic Asylum’ 77 ‘From the French (I)’ 201 ‘From the Italian’ 139 ‘Fuite d’Enfance’ 164–6, 216 n. 28 ‘Getting Rid of Sadie’ 134 ‘Gna¨diges Fra¨ulein’ 22 ‘Grave by a Holm-Oak’ 21 Harold’s Leap 88, 179 ‘Heber’ 12 ‘How Do You See?’ 21, 22, 107 ‘How Far Can You Press a Poet’ 98 ‘How Slowly Time Lengthens’ 22 ‘How to Read Books’ 59, 61, 67, 72 ‘I Do Not Speak’ 97 ‘I had a dream . . .’ 22, 48–9 ‘I’ll Have Your Heart’ 87 ‘Infant’ 155 ‘Infelice’ 53 ‘In the Park’ 139 ‘I Remember’ 27–9, 31 ‘I Rode with My Darling . . .’ 106 ‘Is There Life Beyond the Gravy?’ 157 ‘Lady of the Well Spring’ 55 n. 6

‘La Revenant’ 77 ‘La Speakerine de Putney’ 22–3 ‘Le Majeur Ydow’ 31 ‘Look!’ 21, 54 ‘Love Me!’ 12 n. 24 ‘Magnificent Words’ 179 Me Again 91, 94, 126, 177 ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot’ 203–5 ‘N’est-ce pas assez de ne me point haı¨r ?’ 33 Not Waving But Drowning 88, 124, 135, 139, 203 ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ 92–4, 98, 197–9 ‘Nor We of Her to Him’ 180 Novel on Yellow Paper 7, 8, 31, 62, 64, 72, 84, 98, 101, 114, 115, 121, 143, 144–8, 151–4, 155, 159–62, 166–8, 169, 170–1, 213–15 ‘Oblivion’ 199–200 ‘O Happy Dogs of England’ 111 ‘Oh Christianity, Christianity’ 54 ‘Old Ghosts’ 30 ‘One of Many’ 97 ‘On the Death of a German Philosopher’ 11–12 ‘O Pug!’ 21 ‘O Stubborn Race of Cadmus’ Seed . . .’ 52 Our Bog is Dood 96 Over the Frontier 6, 54, 62, 68, 84, 122, 133, 143, 144, 148–9, 154–5, 159, 168, 170–1, 177, 190 ‘Papa Love Baby’ 12, 31 ‘Pearl’ 103–6 ‘Phe`dre’ 50–1 ‘Pretty’ 179–80, 208 ‘Pretty Baby’ 100 ‘Private Means is Dead’ 169 n. 59 ‘Private Views’ 174 Scorpion 21, 24, 108, 112, 180, 199 Selected Poems 85, 86, 87, 88, 90–1, 136 ‘She said . . .’ 32 ‘Silence’ 177 ‘Si peu se´duisante’ 201–2, 204 Some Are More Human Than Others 89, 94, 178, 190 ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’ 10 n. 21 ‘Souvenir de Monsieur Poop’ 21 ‘Spanish School’ 176 ‘Statement on Criticism’ 76

Index Stevie: A Motley Selection of her Poems by John Horder and Chris Saunders 96–8 ‘Suburb’ 45–7 ‘Suicide’s Epitaph’ 155 ‘Sweet Baby’ 100 ‘Syler’s Green: A Return Journey’ 55 Tender Only to One 134, 155 ‘Tenuous and Precarious’ 97 ‘Thank You’ 33, 63 ‘The After-Thought’ 17 n. 45, 88 ‘The Ambassador’ 87 ‘The Bereaved Swan’ 37 ‘The Best Beast’ 22 ‘The Choosers’ 84 ‘The Crown of Gold’ 107 ‘The Donkey’ 21 ‘The Forlorn Sea’ 21, 22 ‘The Frog Prince’ 49 The Frog Prince and Other Poems 86, 90, 103, 136 ‘The Frozen Lake’ 17 ‘The Galloping Cat’ 21 The Holiday 3, 6, 7, 9–10, 24, 59, 62, 67, 100, 102, 107, 130–2, 134, 138, 149–51, 156–7, 160, 162–3, 169, 170, 171 ‘The Hound of Ulster’ 10 ‘The House of Over-Dew’ 21, 180 ‘The Jungle Husband’ 22 ‘The Listener’ 201 n. 74 ‘The Magic Morning’ 12 n.24 ‘The Murderer’ 40 ‘The Orphan Reformed’ 32–4, 61 ‘The Parklands’ 12 ‘The Persian’ 109 ‘The Photograph’ 22 ‘The Poet Hin’ 130 ‘The Queen and the Young Princess’ 44, 88 ‘The Sallow Bird’ 21 ‘The Songster’ 206 ‘The Sorrowful Girl’ 166 ‘The Story of a Story’ 15 ‘The Suburban Classes’ 152 n. 26 ‘The Wanderer’ 44 ‘The Weak Monk’ 22 ‘The Word’ 107, 180 ‘To Carry the Child’ 97, 180 ‘Too Tired For Words’ 92, 172 ‘To School!’ 21 Two in One 86

243

‘Under Wrong Trees, or Freeing the Colonial Peoples’ 53 ‘Valuable’ 111 ‘Voices About the Princess Anemone’ 179 ‘Was it Not Curious?’ 110–11 ‘What is She Writing? Perhaps It Will Be Good’ 1–5, 119, 163, 164, 190–7 ‘What Poems Are Made Of’ 172 ‘Yes I Know’ 212 Southey, Robert 60, 63 Spalding, Frances 6, 62, 97, 113–14 Spear, Madge 61 Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil 159 Spurling, Hilary 15 n. 43 Stanley, Liz 146 n. 11 Sterne, Laurence 151 Stevenson, Randall 207–8 Stevie (film) 120 Stierle, Karlheinz 54 Suckling, Sir John 39 Swain, John 168 Symonds, John 77 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 24, 26, 30, 31, 37–9, 131 n. 79, 159–60 ‘Mariana’ 159 ‘The Dying Swan’ 38–9 Thaddeus, Janice 197 Thirkell, Angela 77 Thomas, Edward 27 Thomas, R. S. 207 Thompson, Flora 69 Thompson, Francis 162 Thorpe, Rose Hartwick 63 Thurber, James 25, 183 Trodd, Anthea 15 n. 34 Turner, J. M. W. 170, 177 Utrillo, Maurice 170 Vermeer, Johannes 170 Virgil 24, 32, 52 The Aeneid 52 Wallis, Henry 212–13 Waugh, Evelyn 183 Wells, H. G. 144 Whistler, James 170 Whitemore, Hugh 62, 113–14, 120 Whitman, Walt 24, 84

244

Index

Williams, Jonathan 113–14, 140, 178, 183 Williams, William Carlos 176 Wirth, Gertrude 8 n. 18 Woolf, Virginia 71–2, 104, 117, 181, 208 ‘An Unwritten Novel’ 72 ‘How Should One Read A Book?’ 72 Jacob’s Room 71, 72 ‘The Cinema’ 181

‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ 72 The Waves 117 Wordsworth, William 26, 27, 33–7, 71, 66, 91, 134 n. 90, 170 ‘Alice Fell’ 33–4, 61 ‘Elegaic Stanza Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle’ 170 ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ 66 ‘Yarrow Revisited’ 36 ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ 35