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Re-Reading Stevie Smith and Literary Modernism

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Re-Reading Stevie Smith and Literary Modernism Notes 1 Introduction: between the lines; re-reading Stevie Smith and literary modernism 1. Muriel Spark, ‘Melancholy Humor’ (ISOSS 73); originally published in the Observer (3 November 1957): 16. Philip Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’ (ISOSS 79); origin- ally published as a review of Smith’s Selected Poems in the New Statesman in 1962, and later reprinted in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–82 (London: Faber, 1983). Seamus Heaney, ‘A Remarkable Voice’ (ISOSS 213); reprinted from Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber, 1980). 2. Philip Larkin, from his review for the New Statesman (see note 1). Spalding notes that this review was ‘the one that changed people’s attitudes towards Stevie’, dissuading them that hers was ‘dangerously close to light verse’ by suggesting that her work was serious and bore ‘the authority of sadness’ (257). Especially key for my point here is Spalding’s lovely recovery of Smith’s own response to the review: ‘I got the impression that P. Larkin, though placing us much in his debt, was uneasy, hence shifting around a bit and coming out with the old charge of fausse- naivete!’ (letter to John Guest, 3 October 1962; SS: AB 257; note 46, p. 317). 3. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, T.S. Eliot offers his famous image of trad- ition as a row of ‘existing monuments’ which ‘form an ideal order among themselves’ until the new work arrives to readjust it ‘ever so slightly’ – ‘and this is conformity between the old and the new’ (Selected Essays of T.S. Eliott, New York: Harcourt, 1950, p. 5). 4. Figures like H.D., Kathleen Raine, Denise Levertov and others have found genuinely inspirational connections in the work of classical figures beyond the fragmentary Sappho, but their work often rewrites such texts or merges their heroes and gods with powerful goddesses from the Hermetica and matriarchal lore. 5. Several important examples of such arguments: Arthur Rankin devotes his book- length study to describing Smith as a direct descendant of the Romantic spiritual visionaries, particularly Blake (The Poetry of Stevie Smith: ‘Little Girl Lostt’, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1985); Hermione Lee in her influential introduction to SS: AS writes that ‘Arnold’s Culture and Anarchyy loom[s] behind her’ and illuminates her political attitudes’; Sanford Sternlicht in SS asserts that Smith ‘was . as much a Tory as any stuffy club man’ (1); Frances Spalding in SS: AB writes that Smith was sympathetic to Orwellian politics (159), and to Eliot’s poetics of impersonality (197–98); Jan Montefiore discusses Smith’s ‘easy relation to trad- ition’ and subversive use of popular forms (43), and Laura Severin gives us Smith as a proto-poststructuralist feminist engaged in wholly ‘resistant antics’. 6.I refer here obliquely to Severin’s book. For a fuller critique of current methods used for reading Smith, see Huk (1999). 7. Implicitly important to the re-reading of Smith, and indeed to a good many branches of postmodernist theory, were Bakhtin’s visions of ‘the dialogic imagination’ (the title of a key collection of his essays; see Works Cited). In his work, which, very broadly speaking, interprets identity and social formation as interactive and con- structed through the medium of language, ‘dialogue’ occurs either between people 296 Notes 297 or internally and reflects the ‘relativisation’ of culture: its ‘awareness of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogised language is authoritative or absolute’ (427). Feminists have for almost twenty years been revising Bakhtinian models of social inter-animation by re-envisioning the nature of feminine input, which is disadvantaged along with other social ‘others’ in ways that Bakhtin’s largely class- oriented construct does not take into account (see Thomson for one early analysis of these revisions). 8. Review by Bernard Bergonzi entitled ‘Tones of Voice’ which appeared in the Guardian, 16 December 1966, p. 7; Barbera and McBrien report that his review ‘angered her’ (265). 9. Mark Storey, ‘Why Stevie Smith Matters’. Critical Quarterlyy 21: 2 (Summer 1979): 41–55; reprinted in Sternlicht, where the quote appears on p. 176. 10. See, for example, books like John L. Mahoney’s (1998), a collection of essays in which his own refers to Smith as ‘Stevie’, or the chapter focussing on her and R.S. Thomas in Neil Corcoran’s fine survey, in which Smith is consistently referred to as ‘Stevie Smith’ rather than simply by surname as is Thomas. 11. Chapter on ‘Jean Rhys’ by Coral Ann Howells, p. 376 in Bonnie Kime Scott (1990). 12. This extended quote from Light (1994) is an amalgamation from pp. 241–42, 244 and 246. 13. Light quotes from Rose’s line about poetry being ‘among other things, one of the places where what has not been lived can be explored’ from The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Virago, 1991) but without providing a page number. Were this to suggest an Adornoesque picture of ‘The Lyric and Society’, I might find it useful (see Works Cited). 14. The portmanteau image is from Spalding (SS: AB 175). The de-emphasis of Smith’s work as a novelist has been perpetuated by nearly all of her critics, although Catherine A. Civello, Laura Severin and Gill Plain have recently begun to turn things around by including substantial readings of the novels in their books on her work, and several very fine theoretical readings have been done in article- form by writers like Richard Nemesvari and Phyllis Lassner. Sanford Sternlicht, for example, in his own book-length study, calls her prose ‘plotless’, and notes that Smith will be remembered for her poems, not her novels (17, vii). 15. I refer especially to the extended treatments it has received in the book-length studies by Civello and Severin (as well as Plain, in the chapter she devotes to primarily Over the Frontierr). 16. For my own reading of this passage, see Chapter 3, p. 119. 17. My greatest difficulty with Plain’s reading is that binaries are created that are scantily analysed. Pompey undergoes a ‘loss of innocence’ (75) according to Plain, and finds within herself ‘the capacity for Fascism’ (76). Not only is Fascism left undefined as a historical phenomenon, equated with religion and treated as a meta- physical evil responsible for the full range of Pompey’s ills, but all of the other discursive phenomena that pollute Pompey’s monologue are left unconsidered. 18. ‘Family Affair’. Books of the Month 72: 3 (March 1957): 9; quoted in Severin (6). 19. See Symons, Chapter 6, ‘The Heart of a Dream’, pp. 48–62. 20. ‘Metacommentary’ is a term most notably used by Fredric Jameson to describe the ‘postmodern’ critical act, which ‘now takes in its own mental processes as well as the object of those processes’, recognising ‘in this heightened and self-conscious’ space one’s own struggles and limitations as interpreter (4). 21. SS: AB 54. Osbert Burdett’s quote comes from The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective (London: John Lane, 1925), pp. 267–68. 298 Notes 22. See Civello’s Chapters 6 and 7, which are devoted to a reading of the novels. 23. See Yeats (338–39). 24. Quote from Smith. See S 283 for Barbera and McBrien’s biographical explanation of this poem, in which they recall her suggestion that ‘The Donkey’ is a celebration of age, the end of being in the ‘shafts’ of employment. 25. See Easthope, ‘Donald Davie and the Failure of Englishness’ in Acheson and Huk (17–33). 26. See ‘Dear Karl’, CPP 125, in which Smith’s speaker exhorts her friend, with the gift of a selection of Whitman’s poetry, to ‘Fare out on a strange road’ for once, see beyond his own entrapped point of view. 27. SS: AB 260. Spalding tells us that when Selected Poems seemed to be selling poorly in the States, despite the efforts of their American publisher, Smith admitted that it was a very English mixture and possibly not right for an American audience. 28. Smith mistrusted what she called ‘international art’, asserting that writers must work from the materials at hand – which of course constitutes an implicit criticism of the transcendental perspective. It is also important to remember – and this will come to bear importantly on my readings of her first novel in Chapter 3 – that Smith came to consciousness in, and in some ways never grew beyond, a Great Britain that referred to itself synecdochically as ‘England’, and demonstrated all the attendant centrist thinking that we have since decried as ‘colonial’ in relation to the devolved ‘Kingdom’. 29. Roy Fuller, The London Magazine, 5 January 1958: 64. 30. See, for example, Betjeman. I find Betjeman’s reductive reading of Smith’s work particularly interesting as he is often categorised with her as a poet engaged in satirising suburban life (see Peter Childs 107). 31. Peter Marks, ‘Illusion and Reality: the Spectre of Socialist Realism in Thirties Litera- ture’ in Williams/Matthews, p. 29; the quote is drawn from the Writers’ Inter- national Statement issued in 1934 (p. 38). 32. The Poet’s Garden is the American title for Smith’s The Batsford Book of Children’s Verse (London: Batsford, 1970), reissued as Favourite Verse by the Chancellor Press in 1984. It is ambiguously identified no doubt because it seems to be an adult’s rather than a child’s selection as intended. 33. See Corcoran’s second chapter for a fine introductory discussion of MacNeice’s use of parable. There are several versions of the name I give here for the Auden generation; ‘MacSpaunday’ incorporates MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and C. Day Lewis. 34.
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