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Durham Research Online Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 02 July 2021 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Masud, Noreen (2021) 'Flat Stevie Smith.', Twentieth Century Literature, 67 (2). pp. 215-234. Further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-9084354 Publisher's copyright statement: c 2021 Hofstra University Additional information: Primary quotations from Stevie Smith have been redacted as they remain under copyright from the Smith estate. 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Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Flat Stevie Smith Noreen Masud [12.17.20] In “Scorpion” (1972), by the poet and novelist Stevie Smith (1902-71), the speaker fastidiously curates the flatness and emptiness of the heavenly space to which she would like God to call her: [quotation redacted for reasons of copyright] (CPD 593) Scorpion fussily arranges everything to her own satisfaction. She empties all animals and buildings meticulously out of paradise, leaving only the flat, “quite empty” spaces of sea and grass. Stripping away the agents of narrative and event, this view now yields nothing. And this failure to offer a result is compelling, precisely because that flatness involved so much labor to produce. Effort and meticulous styling produce nothing, in the end, to look at. It is that contradiction that holds the eye, that makes the space heavenly. Throughout Smith’s writing, flat empty spaces fascinate her characters, and are offered up to readers. Her critics, in turn, lean on the word “flat” as an interpretative lever for her challenging work. Applied to Smith’s poetry, “flat” may invoke her lack of stylistic ornamentation, or else her ambiguous tone.1 All these meanings, distinct but connected, indicate an emotional and communicative parsimony. Smith’s work is “flat,” variously, because it seems to afford little interpretative traction. Dwelling on a flat expanse, like many of her poems, “Scorpion” unsettles critical toolkits, coupling nursery rhyme cadences and childlike diction (the speaker’s italics are as stroppy as a teenager’s) with a dense literary and emotional ambiguity. Smith’s poetry seems too complex to overlook, but too simple to interpret. She sits uneasily against a modernist context that tends to privilege complexity and obscurity, between the positions of major and minor twentieth- century writer. The reflexive critical response is to designate her work “fausse- naive" (Larkin 1983: 153), or “deceptively simple” (Sternlicht 1991: 26), redeemable through a revelation of secret depth.2 But this search for “richness”— the most valuable currency of the humanities, as Heather Love (2010: 371) notes— does not always yield coherent results for a writer whose diverse and often internally contradictory texts evade overarching interpretations, even as they invite them.3 In short, Stevie Smith structures her writing to promise a depth that ultimately escapes articulation. The landscape looks tempting, but we struggle to dig down far below the surface. What was offered freely, on the flat exterior, seems to be all that there is to find. NoreenThis Masud essay proposes that the language of the “flat,” in all its senses, offers a route into Stevie Smith’s puzzling and unsettling prose and poetry. It unpacks the idea of the “flat”—a word that claims implicitly that there is nothing to unpack—to foreground the diversity of flatness’s associated emotions, as well as its capacity to draw and retain sight. Smith’s interest in these qualities hints, I argue, that we cannot read her poetry cohesively unless we draw out the breadth of the aesthetic and interpretative connotations that flatness holds for her. Doing so, I suggest, offers a critical language with which to approach other twentieth century writers as well, such as D. H. Lawrence, whose writing, like Smith’s, eludes interpretative paradigms that privilege concealment, precisely because of its repetitive insistence that it has already made everything necessary abundantly available to the reader’s eye. Beginning with an examination of how feeling flat involves, for Smith, a set of emotions more diverse and complex than just depression, this essay moves into outlining how flat landscapes offer Smith a mode of lingering habitation that is appealing precisely because it provides nothing to hold the viewer’s attention. Playing these ideas off the recent model of “surface reading,” the essay makes a case for dwelling on flat surfaces even in those of Smith’s poems that do not emphasize them in their narratives or descriptions. It closes with a consideration of how a study of flatness might contribute to larger discussions around modernist writing. Feeling Flat Developing a tradition of topographical poetry that began with John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (1642), the eighteenth century established mountains firmly as the site of the poetic event, of the emotional surges that tradition would foreground and value. Height itself offered Edmund Burke (1998: 66) a key to the sublime in 1757, especially if that perpendicular was “rugged and broken” like a cliff. William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799-1850) pays rapt attention to the crags around Windermere, the Alps, and finally Snowdon: the “lonely Mountain” (1991: 315) that becomes the site for divine and poetic meditation in the thirteenth book, an analogue for the mind itself. In “Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802), Coleridge’s speaker addresses Mont Blanc: I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: (2000: 118) Later, facing the same mountain “piercing the infinite sky” (1989: 545) in Shelley’s poem of 1816, to his speaker “all seems eternal now” (546). And that focus on mountains as the appropriate site for literary attention has lasted into the twentieth century, both in literature itself as in, for example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain [1924]), and in studies of the cultural production of the period. Robert Macfarlane (2003: 160), for instance, positions mountains as a site where flat, unhappy moods can be remedied, and Christopher Morris (2012) explores the German cult of mountains in art music and cinema. 2 Flat Stevie Smith Other kinds of spaces have seemed, in contrast, less rewarding. Where flat expanses appear, they’re often nightmarish, as in Coleridge’s (2000: 52) purgatorial “painted ocean” in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or W. H. Auden’s “Plains” (1955): “I cannot see a plain without a shudder: / “O God, please, please, don’t ever make me live there!” (1976: 432 ). Yet Auden does “live” there, for the duration of the text, in the rooms of nine stanzas. Something about the plains keeps his speaker in place: perhaps the “shudder[ing]” terror of the landscape itself, like a snake’s glance paralyzing its prey. This power is reflected in a growing range of critical texts on flatness. Steven Connor’s “Flat Life” (2001) contends that the modern world “depends upon a flat apprehension,” for instance, and B. W. Higman’s Flatness (2017) investigates level landscapes in the sciences and social sciences, centering its analysis on the double public view of such landscapes as “highly desired yet frequently disparaged” (9). Earlier, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) associates flatness with secrets. Used as an organizing principle, they suggest, secrets become thinner and more ubiquitous until form and content dissolve into each other, and nothing is left to hide. And in J. Hillis Miller’s essay, “Derrida’s Topographies” (1994: 18), even as the surface seems to hide nothing, it maintains a similar opacity: “To say the secret is all on the surface is to say that it generates the illusion of hiding a secret at some fathomless depth.” For Deleuze and Guattari, and for Miller via Derrida, flatness becomes associated not with a lack of value or content but with a particular kind of content whose profoundly evasive interest inheres in that open revelation. This ambivalence of flatness—fascinatingly dull, emptily full— certainly appeals to Stevie Smith, whose descriptions of flat topographies merge seamlessly into flat affects. In a stanza she tellingly repeats in two poems, “The Frozen Lake” (1962) and “Angel Face” (1966), she writes: [quotation redacted for reasons of copyright] (CPD 455, 563) Circling mesmerized around this unyielding space, Smith couples “flat” and “vacant” to make the landscape invoke a recurrent set of emotional and narrative paralyses: failure, emotional withdrawal, loss of interest, loss of energy, loss of hope. Flatness happens when things are finished, as with the deathly line on a heart monitor. In “Will Man Ever Face Fact and Not Feel Flat?” (1957), Christianity appears as nothing but a fairy tale—but beyond that fairy tale lies only flatness: the disappointment of a bleak, godless world. Carrying an expectedly gloomy weight, flatness here signals depression and fatigue of a sort that pervade Smith’s life and writing. At the same time, Smith’s introduction to “Will Man Ever Face Fact and Not Feel Flat?” in her essay “The Necessity of Not Believing” complicates this portrayal of flatness.
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