Folio Books: Review of Stevie Smith, Collected Poems and Novel on Yellow Paper

Collected Poems

by Stevie Smith

published by New Directions

Novel on Yellow Paper

by Stevie Smith

published by New Directions

Stevie Smith does not seem to have achieved the kind of reputation her poetry deserves. In 1969 she was given the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; soon after her death in 1971 her Collected Poems were published and her four novels brought back into print; a play based on her life was produced successfully in London. Eminent critics have praised her; John Carey even wrote once that hers was 'the most original and interesting poetic voice (barring only Auden) to emerge from the thirties.' But a quarter century after her death she is not nearly as widely known as one might expect, considering the accessibility and humour of her poems.

Stevie (it seems quite proper to refer to her by her first name alone) was born in 1903 in Hull but moved as a young child to Palmers Green in unfashionable north London, where she remained for the rest of her life.

It was not a particularly eventful life. She worked as a private secretary to a pair of magazine publishers; she lived throughout her adulthood with her beloved elderly aunt (the 'Lion'). She was, by all accounts, a fascinatingly eccentric individual. And she wrote poems.

Her Collected Poems are published in Britain by Penguin and in the US by New Directions and this book is the best way to get to know the inimitable Miss Stevie Smith. Her poems are odd, quirky, frequently hilarious and occasionally disturbing. They are for the most part fairly short, but she was a prolific writer and the Collected Poems is over 570 pages long. Half the page space, though, is taken up by the curious little drawings of men, women and animals in every conceivable attitude, circumstance and mode of dress which she doodled throughout her life and always published together with the poems. The drawings provide half the fun. (I admit that, as an inveterate doodler myself, I have a special fondness for these.)

But the reader should not make the mistake of supposing that, because the poems often seem not to take themselves too seriously, he should do the same. Beneath the lighthearted and sometimes ridiculous wit on the surface lurk intimations of something dark and perhaps sinister. Stevie's characters may have silly names like Jolie Bear and Joey Porteous, Mr Puff and Mr Over, but their lives are full of loneliness, boredom and occasionally tragedy. Stevie had a pronounced morbid streak and in many of the poems death is a tangible presence. Death may even be her most important theme, but for her death is not always to be dreaded. Occasionally it is a comfort and a solace.

But the pleasure of Stevie Smith is in her gift for the bizarre and the absurd, in lines like 'Duty was my Lobster, my Lobster was she,' and 'I am Miles, I did not die / I only turned, as on shut eye.' Her voice is completely original and quite unmistakable.

Her poem 'My Muse,' brief enough to quote in full, gives a hint of what her attitude to her poetry was:

My Muse sits forlorn
She wishes she had not been born
She sits in the cold
No word she says is ever told.

Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.

It is also worth mentioning that Stevie's Novel on Yellow Paper remains in print. The edition I own, in the Virago Modern Classics, describes this this as 'one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.' This praise is undoubtedly inflated, but if you have a taste for literary curiosities, as I do, you may enjoy this novel, Stevie's first. It is narrated by a Stevie Smith alter ego named Pompey Casmilus, and takes the form of an account of everything going through her head as she sits in her office typing on yellow paper (to avoid confusing her novel with her employer's correspondence, typed on blue paper). It was written in 1935, but its 'stream of consciousness' technique owes more to Laurence Sterne than to James Joyce.

It is tempting to read Novel on Yellow Paper as a sort of grand joke (though not as grand as Ulysses). It was written early in her career because a publisher to whom she showed her poems suggested she write a novel instead. I can easily imagine Stevie going off in a huff determined to show just what sort of novel she would write.

Even so, Novel on Yellow Paper faces up to some serious matters: love, death (as always), religion, sex -- and (for these are the threatening thirties) anti-Semitism and fascism. Much of the detail seems semi-autobiographical and in the end the book is probably most valuable as an idiosyncratic and occasionally very funny record of Stevie's personality. And there are some miraculous sentences scattered throughout, almost as miraculous as some of her poems.

In the grand literary scheme of things Stevie is yet accounted only a minor poet; she has her place in the poetic history of our century, though I think so far not as high a place as she deserves. But the history of poetry is subtly revised almost every time we read a new poem, or read an old poem as though it were new. If we read Stevie Smith with the care and patience she deserves we will appreciate her gift: her ability to tackle the frustrations, anxieties and despairs of human life with fresh, unexpected, and entirely individual precision.

N.L., 10 January, 1998

To order from Amazon.com click on a title below:

Collected Poems by Stevie Smith, published by New Directions

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith, published by New Directions