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
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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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 reward-
ing, 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, proto-
postmodernist experiments, or imperial critiques offer revealing com-
mentaries 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 sup-
port 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 commis-
sioning 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 proofread-
ing 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 Ham-
ish 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.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Illustrations x
Introduction 1
1. Reforming a Literary Orphan:
Stevie Smith’s Poetry in Context 21
2. ‘A Poet Reading’ 55
3. Brought to Book: The Publishing History of Stevie Smith 83
4. Towards a Constructive Criticism of Stevie Smith 113
5. ‘Observation, Discipline, and Company’:
The Overlooked Reader 142
6. ‘Beyond Words’: Stevie Smith as a Visual Artist 170
Conclusion 206
Bibliography 217
Index 239
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). 3
2. Stevie Smith, ‘Fuite d’Enfance’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith,
Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978). 165
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. 167
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. 185
5. George Grosz, untitled sketch (1926). Published in George Grosz,
# DACS 2009. 187
6. Stevie Smith, ‘Ceux qui luttent’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith,
7. George Grosz, ‘Café’ (1927). Published in George Grosz,
# DACS 2009. 189
8. Stevie Smith, ‘Do Not !’ (1951). Published in Stevie Smith,
9. What is this hubbub?, plate 65 of ‘The Disasters of War’,
1810–14, pub. 1863 (etching), Francisco José de Goya y
Lucientes (1746–1828)/Private Collection/Index/Bridgeman
Art Library. 192
10. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), The Sleep of
Reason Produces Monsters, from ‘Los Caprichos’ (engraving)
(b/w photo)/Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman
Art Library. 194
1
The dates given here refer to first date of publication, or, if previously unpublished,
the probable date of composition.
List of Illustrations xi
11. Francisco de Goya, ‘Bad Poets’ (c.1818–24). Published in
José López-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of
Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956). 195
12. Francisco de Goya, ‘It may be that he is good’ (c.1818–24).
Published in José López-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the
Expression of Truth and Liberty (Faber: London, 1956). 196
13. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (1957). Published
in Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon
(London: Penguin, 1978). 197
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. 198
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. 200
16. Stevie Smith, ‘Oblivion’ (1972). Published in Stevie Smith,
17. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu séduisante’ (undated draft illustration, c.1966).
From a typed proof of the poem. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70.
Collections and University Archives, University of Tulsa. 202
18. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu séduisante’ (1966). Published in Stevie
Smith, Collected Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London:
Penguin, 1978). 204
19. Stevie Smith, untitled illustration. Stevie Smith papers, 1927–70.
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. 211
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. 213
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/7/2010, SPi
xii 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. 214
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. 215
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/7/2010, SPi
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 multiplic-
ity 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 pro-
found. 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’ drama-
tizes 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.
2 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.
Introduction 3
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
4 Introduction
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.
Introduction 5
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 wrong-
footing 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 corres-
pond to the earlier 1988 Faber edition, unless stated.
6 Introduction
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 commen-
ted 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 appear-
ance. 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.
13
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.
Introduction 7
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 descrip-
tive passages but rather through its prompts or gestures towards fram-
ing. 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 Götrick (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).
8 Introduction
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 experi-
entially 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 correspon-
dence, 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 letter-
writing 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.’
Introduction 9
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).
10 Introduction
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 ambi-
guity 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 sugges-
tive, 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.
Introduction 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 pur-
pose 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 descrip-
tion 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)
12 Introduction
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 see-
ing 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 à 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).
Introduction 13
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 commit-
tees, 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 tech-
niques 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).
14 Introduction
‘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 eccen-
tric’,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-naı̈veity,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 defen-
sive’.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.
16 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 ideolog-
ical 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 interpreta-
tional bias, distorted our perception of Smith’s work. In this formula-
tion, 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
41
Larkin, ‘Frivolous and Vulnerable’, 153–8.
42
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).
Introduction 17
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, an-
thologizer, 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 concomi-
tant 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 phenom-
enological processes taking place within the reader as they experience
the text.47 Ellen Esrock has more recently argued that any phenomeno-
logical description of the reader cannot ignore the importance of visual
45
This double meaning of ‘overlook’ is suggested by Smith’s poem ‘The After-
thought’ (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.
18 Introduction
imagery in their interpretative processes.48 For Roger Chartier, a study of
reading must take account of literature’s ‘material production’ and ‘dis-
tribution 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 re-
ception 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).
Introduction 19
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 experi-
ence 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 Introduction
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 instrumen-
tal 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 mono-
logues (‘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).
22 Reforming a Literary Orphan
These unanswered generic signals are always difficult to translate, com-
ing in the form of blessings which seem close to admonitions (‘Admire
Cranmer!’, CP 398), otherwise perfect tercets that always leave one half-
rhyme out in the cold (‘The Photograph’, CP 145; ‘Gnädiges Fräulein’,
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 accom-
panying 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 transforma-
tion, it cannot make sense of its web of possibilities. Its form is over-
whelmed 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 neces-
sary 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.’
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 seven-
teenth- 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, idiosyn-
cratic, 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 contem-
porary 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 tem-
plates, 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.
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 danger-
ous 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 qualify-
ing 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).
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? Mul-
doon’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 examin-
ing 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 demon-
strated 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.
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 unpromis-
ing 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 contem-
porary 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.
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 Remem-
ber 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 con-
textual examination promising scholarly rigour. There is further sup-
porting 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 evi-
dence 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.
inspiration for ‘I Remember’, Smith confessed it was ‘practically a
transcript from Llewellyn Powys’ autobiography’.13 Her misremem-
bered 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 interpreta-
tive 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 note-
books 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
As quoted by Derek Parker in a letter to William McBrien, 19. September 1979, UT.
14
Littleton C. Powys, Still the Joy of It (London: Macdonald, 1956), 34.
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 influ-
ence 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 whole-
sale. 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
Ricks, ‘The Art of Sinking’, 246.
17
Ibid. 250.
18
Ibid. 247.
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 ghost-
written 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.
(‘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 ‘full-
knowing 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
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’, ‘rebel-
lion’, and ‘opinion’ is the closest Smith’s subject gets to a homecom-
ing, 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 loyal-
ties—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 adver-
tise 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 haı̈r?’, 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.
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 Words-
worth 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 Words-
worth’s tetrameters, but seems suspicious of their traditional comforts,
just as she implies her subject should be. Both poems find their prota-
gonists 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 legiti-
macy 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.
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 be-
comes 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, re-
mains 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,
24
William Wordsworth, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, in The Major Works, 290.
Wading and warbling in its beds
Of grass decked out with daisy heads,
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,
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 expres-
sion 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 crypti-
cally 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.
‘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 Words-
worth’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 encoun-
ter 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)
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 deteri-
orates 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 extin-
guished. 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 Baude-
laire’s ‘La cygne’, another literary swan on the water’s edge here, he is
‘Comme les exiles, ridicule et sublime j Et rongé d’un désir sans trêve!’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.
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.
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.
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 mourn-
ing, 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 conversa-
tional 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 rewrit-
ing 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 inti-
mation crosses the line into imitation),31 many of her most disquieting
and inscrutable scenarios come from her teleporting of a poetic charac-
ter into a landscape unfamiliar to them, suggested by several other
Browning echoes. The eponymous Pauline of Browning’s early narra-
tive poem washes up in Smith as a valium-addled aristocrat, and must
31
See ‘Intimation of Immortality’ (CP 33).
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 unre-
markable 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.
33
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).
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.
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 proven-
ance is not borne out by this brief exploration of her allusions. With very
deliberate gestures, she revisits Wordsworth’s unvisited Yarrow, she mur-
ders 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.
37
Ibid. 28.
38
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).
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 disin-
herited 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 ever-
nomadic 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 influ-
ence 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 flâneur:
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.
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 impa-
tient 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.
Yet if her collage of two competing traditions and inheritances seems to
signal the triumph of the visionary over the shell-shocked, her wan-
derer’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, Brown-
ing’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 gen-
erates 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 remem-
bering’ / ‘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 tem-
porary 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 simulta-
neously with template, refuge, argument, and unrecognizable disguise.
41
Browning, Works, 31.
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 emer-
gence 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 transla-
tions 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 common-
place 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.
—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 rela-
tionship 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 high-
lights humour as another strategy offered by the revisioning poet, and
here the speaker herself attempts to make Cassandra laugh a ‘blasphe-
mous’ 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); Cathe-
rine A. Civello, Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith (Colum-
bia: Camden House, 1997); and Laura Severin, Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
There is an implicit oxymoron in a moment being ‘eternal’ and ‘omi-
nous’, 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 up-
bringing and inheritance. Although Smith’s poem on Racine’s
Phèdre 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 Phèdre
Depuis que sur ces bords les dieux ont envoyé
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé 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 changé de face
Depuis que sur ces bords les dieux ont envoyé
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé. (I.i. ll. 34–6)45
These words are spoken by Hippolyte, Phèdre’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 ‘envoyé/Pasiphaé’
rhyme and their hints at Phèdre’s doomed legacy. She is descended
from Pasiphaé, 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 Pasiphaé.’ See Jean Racine, Phèdre, trans. Margaret Rawlings (London:
Penguin, 1992), 4.
social taboos of family inheritance. The line is a signal to Racine’s
audience that whilst Phèdre is deviating from society’s rules, she is
following those of her family.46
However, for Proust’s narrator in the sixth volume of À la recherche
du temps perdu, Phèdre 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 repre-
sentations 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 Phèdre’s ‘Jansenist scruples’
and the ‘thought of her own fame’.48 Smith, by drawing attention to
both Phèdre’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 Pasiphaé’). Far from liberating her
protagonist here, Smith reinstates her incarceration, lessening her indi-
viduality by stressing her lineage. Her bathetic hobbling of the French
rhyme substitutes envoyé/Pasiphaé for envoyé/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 Phèdre 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 proto-
type 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: Har-
court, 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 Phèdre in Albertine disparue: A Character as Literary Critic’,
Modern Language Review 87(2) (1992), 300–6, which notes that Proust’s narrator views
Phèdre 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.
debt of honour to the state.49 Like the summation of Phèdre as ‘La fille de
Minos et de Pasiphaé ’, 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, conversa-
tional 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 Märchen 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.
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 excava-
tion 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
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 disinher-
iting 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 an-
swered. 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 obses-
sive 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 relation-
ship 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
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.
56 ‘A Poet Reading’
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
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.
‘A Poet Reading’ 57
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 audi-
ence. 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 Small-
wood’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).
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.
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 naı̈ve 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 alto-
gether. 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 experien-
tially into the text. The confusion as to where Alice ends and Smith
begins mirrors the protagonist’s later distress as she descends the rabbit-
hole 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
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 picture-
scenes 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 experi-
ences. 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
made on 18 March 1961, UT. Here Smith refers to a passage in The Annotated Alice, 71.
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 con-
firmed 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-in-
itself. 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 impli-
cations 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.
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 semi-
autobiographical fiction,26 points to a much stronger connection be-
tween 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 unbear-
able, 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: Heine-
mann, 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.
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 à 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.
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. Per-
haps 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 ‘con-
verted’ 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 conver-
sion, 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.
34
Stevie Smith to Ladislav Horat, 20 April 1961, UT.
35
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.
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 trans-
parent when they confront the fact that other readers find different things when they read
the same text’.
42
Smith, ‘At School’, 120.
her own reading practice with a series of disembodied faces. Her draw-
ings 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
Poèmes (lyriques) de la Langue Française, Molly and Smith’s marks
almost become a collaborative enterprise, Molly’s underlining of perti-
nent 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 Poèmes (Lyriques) de la Langue
Française 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.
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 pri-
marily 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 corrobo-
rated 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
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’.
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 conflic-
ting 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.
50
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 ‘post-
Maugham naturalistic style’, suggesting a reference point for the plot of Over the Frontier.
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 rela-
tionship 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.
53
Ibid. 62.
54
See D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity 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 ‘thrice-
great 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 Westmin-
ster’ 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)).
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 criti-
cism 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 auth-
orial ‘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
56
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.
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 embarrass-
ment 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 naı̈ve 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 them-
selves 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.
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, encour-
aged Smith to self-consciously mimic her own practice.62 The overlook-
ing 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.
62
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.
that finds ‘no room for a Brontë or an Eliot’ suggests half the autodidact
and half the anarchic reader. Smith becomes at once the dutiful inter-
preter 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 habit-
ual 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 künstlerroman, 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 conceal-
ment, 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).
65
See ‘Who Shot Eugenie?’ (CP 291).
66
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’.
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 illumi-
nating comments.’ Here Smith confesses to her unknown future audi-
ence 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 misdi-
rection. Her resistance to her sister Molly’s scholarly approach has made
her own literary responses as anarchic or as indifferent as the disembo-
died 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 Louÿs’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 Louÿs’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 Louÿs,
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’.
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 Louÿs, 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 intro-
duction 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 frère!’ (trans. ‘hypocrite
reader, my double, my brother!’).70 Smith transforms Baudelaire’s hypo-
critical reader into her hypothetical reader, and pointedly substitutes
‘undersized’ and ‘gentle’ for ‘semblable’ and ‘frère’, 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 preoccupa-
tion 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.
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 sugges-
tion 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 profes-
sional 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 com-
monplace 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.
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 prob-
lem 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 pream-
ble—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.
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 re-
sponse 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.
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
82
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 unfortu-
nately 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.
novel depicting a defiant and anarchic schoolgirl whose comic portrai-
ture 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 fiction-
alizes its own creator, Smith reveals an ambivalence about her own self-
created 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 delight-
ed in constructing herself as the whimsical reader. Her letter to a BBC
accountant in which she declares, ‘if there is a possible way of misread-
ing 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).
87
Stevie Smith, ‘New Novels’, World Review (July 1952), 68–72, 72.
88
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.
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 reminis-
cence 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 à 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
Stevie Smith, ‘If You Sit Waiting –’, Books of To-day (July 1949), 3.
94
Stevie Smith, ‘Pleasures of Old Age’, The Observer (7 July 1963), 23.
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 con-
fesses 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 main-
tain 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 naı̈ve 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 reputa-
tion. 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 objec-
tion 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
84 Brought to Book
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 perfor-
mances 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 them-
selves 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.
Brought to Book 85
pomposity is apparently deflated and critiqued. In Over the Frontier,
Smith conflates the figure of Karl and his hatred of ‘excerpts, antholo-
gies 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 unchart-
ed road, (l. 22)
We are encouraged to read the text receptively, to treat the idiosyn-
crasies 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 Decem-
ber 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.
86 Brought to Book
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.
Brought to Book 87
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 make-
up [ . . . ] 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 period-
icals)’.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 Lemprière (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.
88 Brought to Book
. . . known also among the Phoenicians as Casmilus18
MacGibbon possibly found the explanation of the poem’s ambassa-
dor 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 pub-
lished 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 nu-
anced 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.
Brought to Book 89
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 undis-
covered 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.
90 Brought to Book
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 out-
of-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 draw-
ings. 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 disap-
pointed 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 corres-
pondence between the poems chosen by MacGibbon and, say, Her-
mione 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.
Brought to Book 91
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-naı̈ve 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 oppor-
tunity to judge these problematic works, MacGibbon performs a well-
intentioned 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 sug-
gests 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 impor-
tant 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
92 Brought to Book
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 introduc-
tion’.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 produc-
tion of an authorized biography: as both the preface and the introduc-
tion 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 compet-
ing ‘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 return-
ing 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 Drown-
ing’ as it appears in the 1957 collection:
34
Barbera and McBrien (eds), Me Again, 1.
35
Ibid. x.
36
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.
Brought to Book 93
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 sub-
stantive 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
Stevie Smith, ‘Too Tired for Words’, Medical World 85 (December 1956), 588–96,
591.
94 Brought to Book
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 alterna-
tive 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 schol-
arly 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.
Brought to Book 95
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 ham-
pered by explanatory notes which appear to target an ‘ill-read, semi-
literate 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 mock-
heroically 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.
96 Brought to Book
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 interven-
tion 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).
Brought to Book 97
Horder attacks the ‘immaculate biographer’ Frances Spalding and the
‘psychologically pig ignorant American duo, Tweedledum and Twee-
dledum’ (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 psy-
chologist 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.
98 Brought to Book
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) trans-
figured 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 pub-
lished 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’, Diacri-
tics 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 ‘illus-
trations reveal the central contrast between the teleological wholeness of the text and the
mere additive structure of its material vehicle, the book’ (143).
Brought to Book 99
the tension between ‘sort of ’ and ‘definite’ enacts Smith’s own conflict-
ed 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 permis-
sion fees and reprinting rights is a constant throughout her correspon-
dence; 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.
100 Brought to Book
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 publi-
cation, enabling them to sell ‘twice over—to say nothing of the an-
thologies’.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 over-
rode, 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.
63
‘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).
Brought to Book 101
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 bio-
graphies and the play based on her life, casts her as a subservient subject
to the publishers’ whim.69 Yet the novel produced under these condi-
tions 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 pub-
lishers’ 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 emphasiz-
ing 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 Neuchâtel, 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.
102 Brought to Book
publishers, their own commercial anxieties making them useful scape-
goats (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 ambiva-
lent 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-in-
distress. 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 pres-
ence 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).
73
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.
Brought to Book 103
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.
104 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 interpreta-
tions 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 con-
scious 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).
80
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).
Brought to Book 105
Over a series of subsequent drafts appearing at intervals throughout the
same notebook, Smith reworks the title to shift the poem from self-
portrait 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 occasion-
al 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.
106 Brought to Book
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 through-
out 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 hav-
ing 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 edit-
orial pen delighting in changes that will barely register with typesetters
83
‘Pearl’ introduction draft, UT.
84
Poem draft of ‘Do Take Muriel Out’, UT.
85
Poem draft of ‘Fish, Fish’, UT.
86
Poem drafts of ‘Angel Face’, UT.
87
Poem draft of ‘I Rode With My Darling . . . ’, UT.
Brought to Book 107
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 compro-
mised 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 expla-
nation 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 publish-
ing 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.
89
See poem draft of ‘The Crown of Gold’, UT.
90
‘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.
108 Brought to Book
Yet by the poem’s publication in Scorpion, the epigraph has been
removed, and ‘joy’ is substituted for praise.91 Printed with an illustra-
tion 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 admis-
sion 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 con-
cludes 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 imagi-
nary personages’.93 Consequently, the printed text is coded and mis-
translated 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 be-
guiled 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.
92
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).
Brought to Book 109
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 biographi-
cal 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 perfor-
mances, 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
Stevie Smith to John Guest, 15 May 1969, from a photocopy, UT.
97
Introduction note for ‘“The Persian”’, UT.
98
Introduction note and text for ‘“The Persian”’ dated 1970, UT.
110 Brought to Book
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 Aúgustin/children/
thing to propel the poem forward, the final stanza reveals their appar-
ently expedient phonics have been in vain:
Was it not curious of Gregory
Rather more than of Aúgustin?
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.’
Brought to Book 111
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 already-
written 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 ‘politi-
cal 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.
112 Brought to Book
discrepancies and interpretative contradictions of her posthumous pub-
lishing history are then perhaps best understood as a vindication of her
own authorial strategy. The recent attempts to sell her work as every-
thing 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,
naı̈ve, 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 down-
playing 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
Stevie Smith, Scorpion and Other Poems (London: Longmans, 1972), 6.
108
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 biogra-
phy, 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.
114 Towards a Constructive Criticism of Stevie Smith
Whitemore’s evocation of the bookstall in Cambridge Circus has a
casual authenticity of its own. Williams even name-checks the book-
seller 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 read-
ers, writers, and critics. The reader who falls upon the writer anony-
mously, 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).
Towards a Constructive Criticism of Stevie Smith 115
critics and subsequent well-intentioned correctives.7 It is just this assump-
tion 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 publi-
cation 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 specula-
tion 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 (Lon-
don: 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).
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.
12
John Hayward, ‘London Letter’, New York Sun (29 September 1939), 8.
13
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.
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-con-
struction 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.
By All (1937), were unproblematically transplanted onto an Ameri-
can 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 uncov-
er a male poet underneath. He insists Smith is as English as ‘his’
surname only to overlook that she is less androgynous than her fore-
name. 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 nation-
ality, 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 inher-
ent 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!’.
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, return-
ing 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 reincar-
nated 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.
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 ‘naı̈ve
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 under-
lining 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 journal-
ists 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 Mac-
Gibbon’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 naı̈veté’ (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
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 interpre-
tative ‘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 achieve-
ment, allowing the reviewers to measure, by contrast, their own interpre-
tative 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 in-
structed’.39 His review questions its impact on subsequent readers
even as it ‘instructs’ them, highlighting the difficulty of recording
36
Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 23.
37
Douglas West, ‘Thoughts at Random’, Daily Mail (17 September 1936), 16.
38
Kenneth Clark to Stevie Smith, undated, UT.
39
Ian Parsons, ‘Novel on Yellow Paper’, Now and Then (Summer 1936), 39–40, 39.
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 intentional-
ity 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 domes-
tic 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 perfor-
mance 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.
41
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.
demands. Consequently, reviewing the novel becomes a metatextual
description of the reader’s interpretative processes, an exercise in quali-
fying 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 internation-
ally 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 previ-
ous 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.
46
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).
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 unidenti-
fied 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 over-
ture 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.
49
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.
daring her work becomes, the more orthodox and banal are the re-
sponses 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 bizarre-
rie’ or as ‘fausse-näive’ 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 be-
comes 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 bewilder-
ment 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, de-
bates, 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 ideo-
logical impositions. Yet her posthumous construction for literary and
academic study merely reruns previous debates. These new partici-
pants 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-näive’ 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.
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 cau-
tioning 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
Marghanita Laski, ‘Frankie and Johnny’, The Listener (21 October 1971), 548–9,
548.
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).
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 posthu-
mous 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.
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 un-
covering 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 misread-
ing, 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 ‘naı̈ve’,
‘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
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
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).
misjudgements with those of previous critics—‘I too’, ‘I also’—offers
up Huk as a qualified Smith interpreter precisely through her ac-
knowledgement 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 ‘re-
reading’ 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 assess-
ments 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.
67
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
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.
Throughout her career, Smith adopted a range of paratextual strat-
egies 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 self-
portrait, ‘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.
72
‘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.
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 busi-
nesslike 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 under-
mining 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).
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 lion-
unicorn 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.
81
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.
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 construc-
tion 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 bio-
graphical 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).
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 protago-
nist’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 autobi-
ography.89 As Smith understood it, the bare facts of her life were not
manacles which enslaved interpretation but rather tools for reposition-
ing 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 re-
sponse 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 bitter-
sweet unorthodoxy which is the special savour of all that Stevie Smith writes;
87
Stevie Smith to ‘Miss Jebb’, 16 January 1956, UT.
88
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).
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 unortho-
doxy’ 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 at-
tention to the necessary job of the paratextual blurb whilst inviting new
readers to join the unanimously converted audience of her last pub-
lished 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).
92
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).
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 ‘feather-
weight 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 con-
structs herself using the perpetual decoy of the reader’s interpretation.
The need for careful attention to Smith’s dissembling texts is empha-
sized 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 re-
read, 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).
95
Dust-jacket blurb for The Frog Prince and Other Poems (London: Longmans,
1966).
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 self-
written 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.
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 third-
person 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.
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 incomprehen-
sion 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 inter-
viewer, confessing ignorance as to the popular response to her work
before descending into whimsy to avoid further questioning. By sub-
stituting 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 interac-
tion 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 abso-
lutely 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).
107
As quoted in Derwent May, ‘Oh lor!’, review of the film Stevie in The Listener
(9 November 1977), 8.
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 authen-
ticity 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.
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 expedi-
ent 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 self-
construction 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 read-
ings 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 Hart-
Davis to William McBrien, 5 November 1980, while the latter began work on Smith’s
biography, UT.
‘Observation, Discipline, and Company’ 143
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 pro-
jected 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).
144 ‘Observation, Discipline, and Company’
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 self-
confessed 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 posi-
tions 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 destina-
tion’,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.
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 consti-
tute 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 develop-
ment of these figures from the reader-as-emerging-writer to the reader-
as-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 them-
selves through reading. The references in the novel to Henry Adams’
intellectual autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1918), par-
ticularly 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.
9
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 35.
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 reader-
as-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 enslave-
ment. 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 interpreta-
tion 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.
11
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 self-
confident traversing of conventional boundaries between different genres of writing’ (225).
12
Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 7.
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 depic-
tion 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 pre-
emptive 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).
reading behind her, a way of differentiating her own reading pro-
gramme 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.
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 Gio-
conda 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).
‘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 sugges-
tion of a newly independent authorial voice seems uncertain and waver-
ing: 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 posses-
sions, 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, con-
demned’ (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).
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 con-
sequently be partly erased or dismembered for the relationship between
the writer and their reading public to begin. Celia’s symbolic destruc-
tion 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 plural-
ity 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 Brontë, her mocking entreaties
to her ‘gentle reader’ recalling the moral prompts of the nineteenth-
century novel.23 Yet all these traditions, by no means discrete in them-
selves, 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 Ob-
served! on Smith’s authorial voice. Huk has also identified Smith’s autho-
rial 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 Brontë’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.
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 genuine-
ness momentarily recalling the style of a Defoe heroine, Pompey con-
fesses 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.
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 identi-
fied as Smith’s fiancé, 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 autobio-
graphical honesty. Unlike Moll Flanders, Pompey’s testimony is pain-
fully 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 concom-
itant 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 empha-
sizing certain aspects of the narrative thus far in order to coerce her
sceptical audience. Ever aware that her text must find a ‘good circula-
tion’ (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 under-
mined 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
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 author-
ial 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).
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 publica-
tion 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 incon-
gruous, 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.’
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 consid-
ered 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).
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 interpo-
lation 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 Häusermann, Smith mentioned
the ‘dreadful fear that pursues always, and that has no form or sub-
stance’.36 This formless and ominous presence, the actual reader, ap-
pears even as Smith refuses it entrance to her texts. The Holiday is full of
wariness about intruders and onlookers, from Tiny’s frequent ‘unneces-
sary 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 Häusermann, 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).
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 “author-
function” 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.
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 narra-
tors. 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 short-
hand to symbolize a particular discrete model of England’s past.
Yet the fixity of Tennyson as a symbol is then immediately under-
mined:
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.
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 para-
meters 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 Janus-
faced 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:
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
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 supernat-
ural 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 Cath-
olic 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.
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 ‘self-
establishment’ (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 manu-
script 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 Univer-
sity Press, 1940), Smith altering the spelling of the author’s surname as if to nominally
fictionalize her.
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 illustra-
tion, 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 Wonder-
land 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 appar-
ently 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.
53
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.
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 arrière-
pensée, his pretensions to omniscience subverted by the speaker’s ventri-
loquizing 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 them-
selves 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
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 divina-
tion 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 out-
manoeuvre 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’.
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
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 trans-
formed 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 code-
breaker, sends out further warnings to the recidivist reader. The narra-
tive 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 Commu-
nities (London: Harvard University Press, 1980), 50.
58
John Swain, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (London: Noel Douglas, 1930), 9.
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 disfig-
ured 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 sug-
gest the monitoring and limiting of our own interpretative power.
Our textual search for the ‘fons et origo’61 of Smith’s künstlerroman 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 illustra-
tions 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.
‘Beyond Words’ 171
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.’
172 ‘Beyond Words’
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 con-
tinues: ‘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 descrip-
tion of the creative process within a subconscious and pre-verbal state.
9
David Wright to Stevie Smith, undated letter (c.1960), UT.
10
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).
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.
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 draw-
ings 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 old-
fashioned’.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.
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 uncommit-
ted 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
Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, 129.
23
Smith, ‘Art’, 153, 156.
24
Ibid. 160.
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 Péral
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 Andrés del Peral (c.1798).
Goya has managed to frame Péral’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.
26
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).
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 exhibi-
tion hall before the story can continue.30 The Turner painting offers an
energizing tension between unbridled subjectivity and a curator’s stul-
tifying 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.
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.
Several poems in her later collections explore new ways of combining
word and image, as if frustrated by the inherent conflict of the illus-
trated 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 descrip-
tion 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 sub-
jected 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
Häusermann, 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.
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 liberat-
ing 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 pub-
lished 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 Häusermann, 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.
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 histori-
cally 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, Laocöon: 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.
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 hierar-
chical 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.
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 com-
ments 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 Wiscon-
sin 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.
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 tran-
scribe 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 exhibi-
tion 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 consid-
ered 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
cafés of the Kufürstendamm, Grosz lived in an attic in Südende, 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 des-
cribed throughout his life as an Anglophile. He dressed ‘l’anglaise with a
53
See Smith’s reading notebooks, UT.
54
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.
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.
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, com-
panionship, 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 emi-
gration 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 café in a
Parisian suburb (Figure 7) again finds his human figures caricatured and
critiqued. In this café scene the men are porcine grotesques, the women
merely items for display and sexual gratification. Soldier, doctor, musi-
cian, 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 café 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:
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.
Figure 6. Stevie Smith, ‘Ceux qui luttent’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith,
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
Figure 7. George Grosz, ‘Café’ (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).
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.
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 expla-
nation 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 deter-
mination 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 illustra-
tions 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 José López-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
José López-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings: the Expression of Truth and Liberty
(Faber: London, 1956), 15.
Figure 9. What is this hubbub?, plate 65 of ‘The Disasters of War’, 1810–14,

pub. 1863 (etching), Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)/Private
Collection/Index/Bridgeman Art Library.
and collate their work.65 Yet Smith’s curation, with ‘excessive inat-
tention’, 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.
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 preoc-
cupation with her own audience.
Another source that seems to infiltrate the final poem and its accom-
panying 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 uncon-
scious 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 illus-
tration is revealed as another poet. Here, both similarly condemned by
Goya, the two writers struggle for the viewer’s attention. Their con-
sciousness 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.
Figure 10. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), The Sleep of

Reason Produces Monsters, from ‘Los Caprichos’ (engraving) (b/w photo)/
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library.
Figure 11. Francisco de Goya, ‘Bad Poets’ (c.1818–24). Published in José

López-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
López-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
López-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings, 80.
Figure 12. Francisco de Goya, ‘It may be that he is good’ (c.1818–24).

Published in José López-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 subse-
quently 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
López-Rey, A Cycle of Goya’s Drawings, 80.
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 perspec-
tive. 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’.
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 illustra-
tion 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.
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, half-
jocund, 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 Perfor-
mance 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).
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, Collect-
ed Poems, ed. James MacGibbon (London: Penguin, 1978).
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 séduisante’, where Smith shifts from
English to French and back again to produce a coded description of a
young girl.
Il était une petite fille de dix ans,
Si peu séduisante,
Qui entra dans le wagon-restaurant
Pour retrouver ses parents.
Elle portait son school uniform,
And a perfectly frightful little pair of shoes,
Mais ses yeux, malgré des lunettes hideuses,
Etaient si pleins de bonté et de franchise
Que tout autre aspect of this little schoolgirl,
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.
Figure 17. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu séduisante’ (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.
The drawing, as in many of her early drafts, emphasizes the authen-
ticity 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 séduisante’
(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.
Figure 18. Stevie Smith, ‘Si peu séduisante’ (1966). Published in Stevie Smith,
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
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 draw-
ings’ 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 hover-
ing between oversight and insight. Her use of different versions of her
poetry in her essays, reviews, and novels constantly reworks and restruc-
tures 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 uncompre-
hending 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 understand-
ing 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 contem-
porary 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.
2
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, ‘“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,
70.
Conclusion 207
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 inclu-
sion, but finds her work equally ‘bright, wise, and silly’.6 With Smith’s
absorption into many of these histories being either nominal or prob-
lematic, the rogue element that disrupts the otherwise neat chronology
of literary themes and trends, two more recent efforts to fix the appar-
ently eccentric Smith into the traditional literary survey suggest alterna-
tive 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 litera-
ture 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 opposi-
tion 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: Macmil-
lan, 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 Macmil-
lan, 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).
208 Conclusion
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 liter-
ary 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.
11
Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6.
Conclusion 209
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 uncon-
scious, 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.
210 Conclusion
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 anthol-
ogised. 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 hodier-
nal 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
16
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
17
See ‘To An American Publisher’ (CP 270).
18
Stevie Smith to Marjorie Boulton, 1 June 1951, UT.
Conclusion 211
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 disrup-
tion and division, an intractable object whose contents become an interpre-
tative 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.
212 Conclusion
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 un-
known 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).
Conclusion 213
Figure 20. Stevie Smith, untitled illustration from a collection of draft draw-
ings. 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 possi-
bility 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.
214 Conclusion
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 predeces-

sors 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.
Conclusion 215
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.
216 Conclusion
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 disap-
point 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 under-
mining 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 introduc-
tion 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.
218 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
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
1981), 83–9.
‘Too Tired for Words’, Medical World 85 (December 1956), 588–96, rpt. in
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.
Bibliography 219
‘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 Rosa-
mond 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.
220 Bibliography
‘Shorter Notices’, Tribune (1 December 1944), 18 [review of the magazine
Bristol Packet (Bristol: Bristol Writers’ Association, 1944)].
‘Books’, Modern Woman (March 1947), 83 [capsule reviews of thirteen books
including Mara Meulen and Francis Wyndham (eds), The New Savoy
(London: New Savoy Press, 1946)].
‘Mr. and Mrs. Browning’, Tribune (28 November 1947), 20–1 [review
of Clifford Bax (ed.), The Poetry of the Brownings: An Anthology (London:
F. Muller, 1947)].
‘The Converted Poet’, Tribune (23 January 1948), 18–19 [review of Eleanor
Ruggles, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (London: John Lane, 1948)].
‘Book Notes’, Modern Woman (February 1948), 111–13 [capsule reviews of
nineteen books including Kay Dick (ed.), At Close of Eve: an Anthology of
Curious New Stories (London: Jarrolds, 1947)].
‘New Novels’, World Review (June 1951), 78–80 [review of five novels includ-
ing Theodora Keogh’s Meg (London: Peter Davis, 1951)].
‘New Novels’, World Review (November 1951), 78–80 [review of four novels
including E. H. W. Meyerstein, Robin Wastraw (London: Gollancz, 1951)].
‘New Novels’, World Review (December 1951), 78–80 [review of four novels
including Julia Strachey, The Man on the Pier: A Novel (London: John
Lehmann, 1951)].
‘New Novels’, World Review (March 1952), 78–80 [review of five novels
including Pamela Hansford Johnson, Catherine Carter (London: Macmillan,
1952), and Walter van Tilburg Clark, Tim Hazard (London: William
Kimber, 1951)].
‘New Novels’, World Review (July 1952), 68–72 [review of six novels including
Naomi Mitchison, Lobsters on the Agenda (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952)].
‘Nursery Books’, Britain Today (December 1952), 48 [capsule reviews of
twenty-two books including C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
(London: G. Bles, 1952)].
‘Victorian Mirror’, John O’ London’s Weekly 72 (5 June 1953), 108 [review of
Graham Reynolds, Painters of the Victorian Scene (London: Batsford, 1953)].
‘New Novels’, Spectator (22 January 1954), 108 [rev. of five novels including
Douglas Hewitt, The Returning Waters (London: Heinemann, 1954)].
‘Mr Cary and Others’, The Observer (24 April 1955), 12 [review of seven books
including Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1955)].
‘Goodbye to Novels’, The Observer (1 January 1956), 7 [capsule reviews of
seventeen books published from 1954 to 1956].
‘A Child of Provincial France’, The Observer (13 October 1957), 14 [review of
André Chamson’s A Time to Keep (London: Faber, 1957)].
Bibliography 221
‘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).
222 Bibliography
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
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.
Bibliography 223
Dunn, Douglas. ‘The Voice of Genteel Decay’, TLS (14 July 1973), 820
[review of Scorpion].
Entwistle, Frank. ‘Such as Nervy Business . . .’, Evening Standard (24 Novem-
ber 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 Spald-
ing’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 (Lon-
don: 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].
224 Bibliography
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.
Bibliography 225
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 Simplici-
ty’, 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.
226 Bibliography
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 Drown-
ing”’, 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 Un-
comfortable Poetry’, Critical Quarterly 28(3) (August 1986), 85–96.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. ‘“Tirry-Lirry-Lirry All the Same”: The Poetry and Perfor-
mance 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.
Bibliography 227
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 Macmil-
lan, 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 Wiscon-
sin 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: Heine-
mann, 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: Mac-
millan, 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1988).
Day, Gary, and Brian Docherty (eds). British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s:
Politics and Art (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
228 Bibliography
Dinnage, Rosemary. Alone! Alone!: Lives of Some Outsider Women (New York:
New York Review of Books, 2004).
Dowson, Jane. Women, Modernism and British Poetry 1910–1939 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2002).
——and Alice Entwistle. A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Draper, R. P. An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (London:
Macmillan, 1999).
Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2004).
Lassner, Phyllis. British Women Writers of the Second World War (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1998).
Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between
the Wars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
MacNeice, Louis. Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938).
Malamud, Randy. Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003).
Montefiore, Jan. Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s
Writing 3rd edn. (London: Routledge, 2004).
——Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (London: Routledge, 1996).
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets
(Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2005).
Sceats, Sarah, and Gail Cunningham (eds). Image and Power: Women in Fiction
in the Twentieth Century (Harlow: Longman, 1996).
Schmidt, Michael. Lives of the Poets (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998).
Severin, Laura. Poetry off the Page: Twentieth-Century British Women Poets in
Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Shaffer, Brian W. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
Stevenson, Randall. Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: 1960–2000: The
Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Stonebridge, Lyndsey. The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Mod-
ernism (London: Macmillan, 1998).
Thwaite, Anthony. Poetry Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry 1960–1984
(London: Longman, 1985).
Trodd, Anthea. Women’s Writing in English: Britain 1900–1945 (Harlow:
Longman, 1998).
Wheeler, Katherine. ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art (New York:
New York University Press, 1994).
Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
vii) Websites
Stevie Smith website: available at http://strange-attractor.co.uk/stevie.htm,
accessed 1 May 2010.
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3 . W O R K S R E V I E W E D , O W NE D B Y , O R I NF L U E N C I N G
STEVIE SMITH
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Cambridge University Press, 1940).
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Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1997).
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——Robert Browning, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997).
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Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Oxford:
University of California, 1993).
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Cervantes, Miguel de. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote
(London: Harrison, 1782).
——Don Quixote, told to the children by John Lang (London: T. C. and E. C.
Jack, 1906).
Chamson, André. A Time to Keep, trans. Erik de Maury (London: Faber, 1957).
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barry Windeatt (London: Long-
man, 1984).
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1916).
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Graves, Robert. The Claudius Novels (London: Penguin, 2000).
Grosz, George. A Post-War Museum (London: Faber, 1931).
Greening, E. A. Lambourn. Poetic Values: A Guide to the Appreciation of
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1928).
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1928).
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(London: Neville Spearman, 1959).
——Robin Wastraw (London: Gollancz, 1951).
Milton, John. Comus and Some Shorter Poems of Milton, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard
(London: Harrap, 1952).
Mitchison, Naomi. Black Sparta: Greek Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928).
——Lobsters on the Agenda (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952).
Morgan, Charles. Sparkenbroke (London: Macmillan, 1936).
Murray, Gilbert (ed.). The Plays of Euripides (London: George Allen, 1911).
O’Neill, Eugene. Ah, Wilderness! and Days without End: Two Plays by Eugene
O’Neill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934).
Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (London: Penguin, 1962).
Palgrave, Francis Turner (ed.). Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
——Marius the Epicurean (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
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Cape, 1937).
Powys, Littleton C. Still the Joy of It (London: Macdonald, 1956).
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, vol XI: The Sweet Cheat Gone,
trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).
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Ruskin, John. Frondes Agrestes (London: G. Allen, 1904).
Santayana, George. Soliloquies in England: and Later Soliloquies (London:
Constable, 1922).
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Tradition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958).
Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley
Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).
Shorthouse, Joseph Henry. John Inglesant: A Romance (New York: Macmillan,
1987).
Sophocles. Antigone, trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal (Oxford:
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Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy (New York: Yale University Press, 1996).
Strachey, Julia. The Man on the Pier: A Novel (London: John Lehmann, 1951).
Strachey, Lytton. Books and Characters: French and English (London: Harcourt,
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232 Bibliography
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 Novem-
ber 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 Cali-
fornia 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).
Bibliography 233
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
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, Seán. The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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 Epistemol-
ogy 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.
234 Bibliography
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
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. Laocöon: 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).
Bibliography 235
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 Götrick (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1978).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-sense (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
——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 Phèdre 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 Uni-
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 Portrai-
ture of Gertrude Stein (London: Yale University Press, 1978).
——The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relationship between Modern Liter-
ature 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).
236 Bibliography
Thomas, Julia (ed.). Reading Images (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
Various authors. The International Surrealist Exhibition (London: New Bur-
lington 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 Look-
ing 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: Universi-
ty 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).
Bibliography 237
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 Canaletto 175

Adcock, Fleur 118, 208 Carey, John 120
Ainsworth, William Harrison 67 Carlyle, Thomas 156 n. 33
allusion 26–7, 33 n. 22 Carroll, Lewis 59–61, 65, 112, 138, 164
Alvarez, Al 207 Alice in Wonderland 59–61, 65, 164
Appleyard, J. A. 18, 58 Alice Through the Looking Glass
Auden, W. H. 12, 176 59–61
Cervantes, Miguel de 55
Balthus 57 Chartier, Roger 18, 19, 98
Barbera, Jack 92, 94, 97, 105, 120 Chaucer, Geoffrey 85
Baring, Maurice 68 Christie, Agatha 80
Barthes, Roland 181 Civello, Catherine A. 197, 209
Bate, Walter Jackson 25 Claudius, emperor of Rome 160–1
Baudelaire, Charles 38, 75 Clutton-Brock, Barbara 170
Beardsley, Aubrey 166–7, 170 Cohen, Michael 57
‘Venus and Tannhauser’ 166–7 Corcoran, Neil 207
Beckett, Samuel 30 Colette 82
Beer, Patricia 125, 208–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 143
Bell, Martin 139 Conrad, Joseph 151–2
Belloc, Hilaire 71, 73, 151–2 Couzyn, Jeni 208–209
Bentham, Jeremy 156 Cowper, William 26
Bentley, Phyllis 130–2 Crapanzo, Vincent 209
Betjeman, John 138 cummings, e.e. 117
Bishop, Elizabeth 27, 29 Curtis Brown 75–6
Blake, William 24, 31, 32, 42–4, 46, 170
‘A Poison Tree’ 43 Dante, Alighieri 32, 149–50
‘Infant Sorrow’ 44 Danton, Georges Jacques 153
‘The Little Girl Lost’ 46 Day-Lewis, Cecil 52
‘The Little Vagabond’ 44 Defoe, Daniel 151, 152
Bloom, Harold 25 Degenerate Art exhibition 174
Bluemel, Kristin 183, 197, 209 Denham, John 36
Boethius 162–3 De Quincey, Thomas 25
Booth, Wayne 145 Descartes, René 175
Brontë, Charlotte 73, 151 Dick, Kay 119, 126
Browne, Sir Thomas 72 Dickinson, Emily 24, 27–8, 29
Browning, Robert 16 n. 44, 40–2, 47 Dickinson, Patric 24, 28
‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 47 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 150
Pauline 41–2 Dowson, Jane 208–209
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ 40–1
‘The Italian in England’ 42 ecphrasis 176, 181
Brueghel, Pieter 170 El Greco 170, 176
Burton, Tim 96 Eliot, T.S. 1, 14 n. 35, 45–6
Byron, Lord 24 ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ 45
240 Index
Entwistle, Alice 208–209 Huk, Romana 14, 15–16, 25, 127–9,
Erasmus 30 137, 183, 207
Esrock, Ellen 17, 19 Huxley, Aldous 70–1
Euripides 25, 143
Inge, Dean 157 n. 37
Fish, Stanley 144, 168 Iser, Wolfgang 17, 19, 144
Forrest-Thompson, Veronica 208 Isherwood, Christopher 171
Foucault, Michel 116–17, 156, 158
Fowler, Alistair 21 Jackson, Glenda 114
Fowler, Helen 55, 134 n. 88 James, Henry 161–2
Franklin, Benjamin 146 Jameson, Fredric 61
Frazer, Sir George James 74 Jauss, Hans Robert 18, 19, 114, 120–1,
Freud, Sigmund 12, 172 206, 209–10
Johnson, Pamela Hansford 80
George V, king of England 178 Johnson, Samuel 24
Gibbon, Edward 80, 151 Jonathan Cape 115–16, 142
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 149 Joyce, James 1
Goldman, Jane 207
Gore, Charles 64 Kahn, Leo 107
Goya, Francisco de 170, 176, 190–7 Keats, John 26, 27–8, 131 n. 179
‘Bad Poets’ 193, 195 Keller, Gottfried 149
Disasters of War 192 Keogh, Theodora 79
‘Don Andrés del Peral’ 176 Krauss, Rosalind 181
‘It May Be That He Is Good’ 195–6 Krieger, Murray 169
Los Caprichos 193
‘Sleep of Reason Produces Larkin, Philip 15, 16, 26, 27–8, 91,
Monsters’ 193–4 124–5, 183
‘What is All This Noise About?’ 192 Laski, Marghanita 126–7
Graves, Robert 160–1 Laughlin, James 14, 132–3
Grimm Brothers 24, 31 Lawrence, D. H. 68–9, 72, 131
Grosz, George 170, 184–90, 196 Apocalypse 68, 131
‘Café’ 186, 189 Kangaroo 69
Guest, John 99, 109 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 72
Gunn, Thom 176 ‘We Have Come Through’ 76
Lear, Edward 24, 25, 31, 112,
Hagstrum, Jean 9 n. 20 138, 183
Hall, Radclyffe 70 Lee, Hermione 24–5, 90, 94–5
Hardy, Thomas 27–8 Leitch, Vincent B. 17 n. 46
Heine, Heinrich 52 Lejeune, Philippe 117
Helen of Troy 48–9 Lemprière, John 87–8
Henry VIII, king of England 67 Lewis, Sinclair 68
Herbert, George 24, 39 Logan, John 35
Hewitt, Douglas 78 Lord, Walter 27
Hill, Geoffrey 26 Louÿs, Pierre 74–5
Hirsch, E. D. 144 Lund, Hans 7
Hood, Thomas 24, 27, 91, 112, 210
Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen 175 Macaulay, Rose 78–9
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 130 MacGibbon, James 86–94
Horace 9 MacNeice, Louis 117
Horder, John 54, 55, 96–8, 138–40 Maistre, Xavier de 151
Horowitz, Michael 92, 95 Manning, Olivia 99, 117, 119
Hotz-Davies, Ingrid 143 Manzoni, Alessandro 149
Housman, A. E. 26 Maugham, W. Somerset 68
Index 241
McBrien, William 92, 94, 97, 105, 120 Shorthouse, Joseph Henry 147
Meinhold, William 149 Sickert, Walter 170
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6 Sophocles 51
Meyerstein, E. H. W. 78 Smith, Molly (Ethel Mary Frances) 60–7,
Millais, John Everett 170 212
Millay, Edna St. Vincent 48 Smith, Stevie: and allusion 25–51, 147,
Milton, John 68 n. 54 160–3; and annotations 63–6,
Mitchison, Naomi 70, 73, 80, 116, 123–4 213–15; and art galleries 154,
Montefiore, Jan 48 173–7; and attitudes to
Morgan, Charles 161 n. 147 reading 54–82, 146–151, 166–9;
Muldoon, Paul 12 n. 22, 26–9 and the Bible 24, 54, 64, 107, 110,
Myers, Elizabeth 29 178, 179; and biography 62, 120,
132–4, 152–3; and blurbs 134–7;
Nash, Ogden 14, 130 and cats 3–5, 78, 140; and classical
National Gallery 173–6 literature 24, 32, 52, 48–52,
Nemesvari, Richard 128 63 n. 31, 74–5, 6, 143; and
direct addresses 71, 151–7;
O’Neill, Eugene 147, 149 and editing 83–98, 99–105, 107,
Orwell, George 143–4 112, 115; and fame 13, 82, 130,
Ouida 162 15, 215–16; and feminist
criticism 15–16, 48, 208–11; and
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury 23, 28, 35 George Grosz 183–90, 196;
Paracelsus 148 and Goya 176, 190–6; and
Parker, Dorothy 96, 117 illustrations 65–6, 76, 163, 164,
Pater, Walter 73, 145, 148, 149 165, 172–3, 181–205, 211–16;
Marius the Epicurean 73, 145 and interviews 137–41, 182; and
Perry, Seamus 197 misreading 16, 80–1, 127–8, 147,
Plath, Sylvia 104 158, 172; and monikers 79,
Pope, Alexander 26, 32, 36 88, 115–19, 131–3, 158; and
Porter, Peter 139 myth 48–9; and performance 4–5,
Potter, Stephen 77 62, 84, 99, 105, 109–10, 135,
Powys, John Cowper 80, 91, 134 n. 90 191; and poetic form 21–4; and
Powys, Littleton C. 29 posthumous editions 86–98;
Proust, Marcel 50–1 and reception 14–16, 82, 118–32,
Pucci, Joseph 18, 26, 29 182–3, 206–10; and redrafting
105–6, 115, 142, 152, 171, 193,
Racine, Jean 24, 32, 50–1, 53 198–203, 206; and relationship
reader-response theory 17–20, 144, 206 with sister 60–7, 71, 212; and
Rees-Jones, Deryn 105, 206 n. 3 reviewing practice 57 n. 12, 76–82,
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 170 116, 163; and self-quoting 77–8;
Ribera, Jusepe de 176 and translations 52–3, 74–5, 165;
Ricks, Christopher 16, 26, 30, 33 n. 22, and visual perception 6, 8–12,
125 n. 52, 197 72, 172
Rossetti, Christina 48 Works
‘Admire Cranmer!’ 22, 78
Santayana, George 131 ‘A Dream of Nourishment’ 44
Saunders, William 96–8 ‘Advice to Young Children’ 216
Schmidt, Michael 207 A Good Time Was Had By All 10, 117,
Scott, Sir Walter 35, 148 134, 155, 173, 215
Severin, Laura 16, 108 n. 95, 127, 128, 183 ‘A King in Funeral Procession’ 178
Shakespeare, William 23, 64. 159 ‘A Mother’s Hearse’ 32
King Lear 23, 64 ‘Analysand’ 155
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 32, 131 n. 79 ‘Angel Boley’ 180, 208
242 Index
Works (cont.) ‘La Revenant’ 77
‘Angel Face’ 106 ‘La Speakerine de Putney’ 22–3
‘Art’ 173–6, 177, 184 ‘Le Majeur Ydow’ 31
‘A Soldier Dear to Us’ 67 n. 48 ‘Look!’ 21, 54
‘At School’ 58 ‘Love Me!’ 12 n. 24
‘A Very Pleasant Evening’ 55 ‘Magnificent Words’ 179
A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Me Again 91, 94, 126, 177
Smith 95–6 ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot’ 203–5
‘Bandol (Var)’ 12 ‘N’est-ce pas assez de ne me point
‘Beside the Seaside: A Holiday with haı̈r ?’ 33
Children’ 216 n. 26 Not Waving But Drowning 88, 124,
‘Bog-Face’ 97 135, 139, 203
‘Breughel’ 23 ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ 92–4,
Cats in Colour 3 98, 197–9
‘Ceux qui luttent’ 186 ‘Nor We of Her to Him’ 180
‘Childe Rolandine’ 42 Novel on Yellow Paper 7, 8, 31, 62,
Collected Poems 86–90, 103, 210 64, 72, 84, 98, 101, 114, 115, 121,
‘Company’ 201 n. 74 143, 144–8, 151–4, 155, 159–62,
‘Conviction (iii)’ 5 166–8, 169, 170–1, 213–15
‘Croft’ 91 ‘Oblivion’ 199–200
‘Dear Karl’ 84–5, 90 ‘O Happy Dogs of England’ 111
‘Deeply Morbid’ 177 ‘Oh Christianity, Christianity’ 54
‘Dido’s Farewell to Aeneas’ 52 ‘Old Ghosts’ 30
‘Die Lorelei’ 52 ‘One of Many’ 97
‘Do Not!’ 186, 188–90 ‘On the Death of a German
‘Do Take Muriel Out’ 106, 117 n. 19 Philosopher’ 11–12
‘Drugs Made Pauline Vague’ 42 ‘O Pug!’ 21
‘Evangelie’ 13 ‘O Stubborn Race of Cadmus’
‘Feminine Charm’ 42 Seed . . .’ 52
‘Fish, Fish’ 106 Our Bog is Dood 96
‘From the County Lunactic Asylum’ 77 Over the Frontier 6, 54, 62, 68, 84,
‘From the French (I)’ 201 122, 133, 143, 144, 148–9, 154–5,
‘From the Italian’ 139 159, 168, 170–1, 177, 190
‘Fuite d’Enfance’ 164–6, 216 n. 28 ‘Papa Love Baby’ 12, 31
‘Getting Rid of Sadie’ 134 ‘Pearl’ 103–6
‘Gnädiges Fräulein’ 22 ‘Phèdre’ 50–1
‘Grave by a Holm-Oak’ 21 ‘Pretty’ 179–80, 208
Harold’s Leap 88, 179 ‘Pretty Baby’ 100
‘Heber’ 12 ‘Private Means is Dead’ 169 n. 59
‘How Do You See?’ 21, 22, 107 ‘Private Views’ 174
‘How Far Can You Press a Poet’ 98 Scorpion 21, 24, 108, 112, 180, 199
‘How Slowly Time Lengthens’ 22 Selected Poems 85, 86, 87, 88,
‘How to Read Books’ 59, 61, 67, 72 90–1, 136
‘I Do Not Speak’ 97 ‘She said . . .’ 32
‘I had a dream . . .’ 22, 48–9 ‘Silence’ 177
‘I’ll Have Your Heart’ 87 ‘Si peu séduisante’ 201–2, 204
‘Infant’ 155 Some Are More Human Than
‘Infelice’ 53 Others 89, 94, 178, 190
‘In the Park’ 139 ‘Some Impediments to Christian
‘I Remember’ 27–9, 31 Commitment’ 10 n. 21
‘I Rode with My Darling . . .’ 106 ‘Souvenir de Monsieur Poop’ 21
‘Is There Life Beyond the Gravy?’ 157 ‘Spanish School’ 176
‘Lady of the Well Spring’ 55 n. 6 ‘Statement on Criticism’ 76
Index 243
Stevie: A Motley Selection of her Poems ‘Under Wrong Trees, or Freeing the
by John Horder and Chris Colonial Peoples’ 53
Saunders 96–8 ‘Valuable’ 111
‘Suburb’ 45–7 ‘Voices About the Princess
‘Suicide’s Epitaph’ 155 Anemone’ 179
‘Sweet Baby’ 100 ‘Was it Not Curious?’ 110–11
‘Syler’s Green: A Return Journey’ 55 ‘What is She Writing? Perhaps It
Tender Only to One 134, 155 Will Be Good’ 1–5, 119, 163,
‘Tenuous and Precarious’ 97 164, 190–7
‘Thank You’ 33, 63 ‘What Poems Are Made Of’ 172
‘The After-Thought’ 17 n. 45, 88 ‘Yes I Know’ 212
‘The Ambassador’ 87 Southey, Robert 60, 63
‘The Bereaved Swan’ 37 Spalding, Frances 6, 62, 97, 113–14
‘The Best Beast’ 22 Spear, Madge 61
‘The Choosers’ 84 Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil 159
‘The Crown of Gold’ 107 Spurling, Hilary 15 n. 43
‘The Donkey’ 21 Stanley, Liz 146 n. 11
‘The Forlorn Sea’ 21, 22 Sterne, Laurence 151
‘The Frog Prince’ 49 Stevenson, Randall 207–8
The Frog Prince and Other Poems 86, Stevie (film) 120
90, 103, 136 Stierle, Karlheinz 54
‘The Frozen Lake’ 17 Suckling, Sir John 39
‘The Galloping Cat’ 21 Swain, John 168
The Holiday 3, 6, 7, 9–10, 24, 59, 62, Symonds, John 77
67, 100, 102, 107, 130–2, 134, 138,
149–51, 156–7, 160, 162–3, 169, Tennyson, Alfred Lord 24, 26, 30, 31,
170, 171 37–9, 131 n. 79, 159–60
‘The Hound of Ulster’ 10 ‘Mariana’ 159
‘The House of Over-Dew’ 21, 180 ‘The Dying Swan’ 38–9
‘The Jungle Husband’ 22 Thaddeus, Janice 197
‘The Listener’ 201 n. 74 Thirkell, Angela 77
‘The Magic Morning’ 12 n.24 Thomas, Edward 27
‘The Murderer’ 40 Thomas, R. S. 207
‘The Orphan Reformed’ 32–4, 61 Thompson, Flora 69
‘The Parklands’ 12 Thompson, Francis 162
‘The Persian’ 109 Thorpe, Rose Hartwick 63
‘The Photograph’ 22 Thurber, James 25, 183
‘The Poet Hin’ 130 Trodd, Anthea 15 n. 34
‘The Queen and the Young Turner, J. M. W. 170, 177
Princess’ 44, 88
‘The Sallow Bird’ 21 Utrillo, Maurice 170
‘The Songster’ 206
‘The Sorrowful Girl’ 166 Vermeer, Johannes 170
‘The Story of a Story’ 15 Virgil 24, 32, 52
‘The Suburban Classes’ 152 n. 26 The Aeneid 52
‘The Wanderer’ 44
‘The Weak Monk’ 22 Wallis, Henry 212–13
‘The Word’ 107, 180 Waugh, Evelyn 183
‘To Carry the Child’ 97, 180 Wells, H. G. 144
‘Too Tired For Words’ 92, 172 Whistler, James 170
‘To School!’ 21 Whitemore, Hugh 62, 113–14, 120
Two in One 86 Whitman, Walt 24, 84
244 Index
Williams, Jonathan 113–14, 140, ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ 72
178, 183 The Waves 117
Williams, William Carlos 176 Wordsworth, William 26, 27, 33–7, 71,
Wirth, Gertrude 8 n. 18 66, 91, 134 n. 90, 170
Woolf, Virginia 71–2, 104, 117, ‘Alice Fell’ 33–4, 61
181, 208 ‘Elegaic Stanza Suggested by a Picture
‘An Unwritten Novel’ 72 of Peele Castle’ 170
‘How Should One Read A Book?’ 72 ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ 66
Jacob’s Room 71, 72 ‘Yarrow Revisited’ 36
‘The Cinema’ 181 ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ 35

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STEVIE SMITH AND AUTHORSHIP

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS

Few twentieth-century British writers are both as inviting and as hostile

1. Stevie Smith, ‘What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good’

xii List of Illustrations

Her appearance manifested [ . . . ] ambiguity. The old-fashioned strap shoes and

Reading Smith’s poetry is often an exercise in bafflement. Her genres

I was angry with my friend;

In a manuscript notebook from 1955, Smith transcribed a passage from

When I was a student in the late 1950s, I picked up a second-hand

Figure 2. Stevie Smith, ‘Fuite d’Enfance’ (1938). Published in Stevie Smith,

Figure 3. Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), Frontispiece for ‘Venus and Tannhauser’,

Ah! Then, if mine had been the Painter’s hand,

This quotation, highlighted by Smith in her copy of Wordsworth’s

Figure 5. George Grosz, untitled sketch (1926). Published in George Grosz,

Do not despair of man, and do not scold him,

Figure 9. What is this hubbub?, plate 65 of ‘The Disasters of War’, 1810–14,

Figure 10. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), The Sleep of

Figure 11. Francisco de Goya, ‘Bad Poets’ (c.1818–24). Published in José

Figure 12. Francisco de Goya, ‘It may be that he is good’ (c.1818–24).

telling shift Smith makes is from reading to writing. Although a pen

It is lovely quickly to write a poem and then quickly it is finished,

It is difficult to attempt to ‘close the book’ on an author who seems

mother, beaming in reflected glory (Figure 21). If her poetic predeces-

1. WORKS BY STEVIE SMITH

2. CRITICISM ON STEVIE SMITH

5. MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS AND

Adams, Henry 145–6 Canaletto 175

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