Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 24

ELIZABETH SMART DIED IN 1986. Her extraordinary novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, first published in 1945, had already been resurrected a couple of times by then. Now it is republished again, along with its companion piece, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. Together these two slim and surreal volumes constitute her fictional oeuvre; and yet she has a better chance of being read in a century’s time than many of her more solid, conventional contemporaries. She keeps being rediscovered, and each time the vividness and panache of the writing are more striking.

Weirdly enough, she anticipated fate – reached out to posterity, rather than her contemporaries. Being jilted by it is her theme. By Grand Central Station is the story of her love affair with the high style, and with the poet George Barker, which came to a sticky end in low-mimetic prose, and babies. As the blurbs used to put it: ‘They never married but Elizabeth bore George four children’, and then worked in advertising and journalism to support them. Necessary Secrets, made up of excerpts from her journals from 1933 to 1941, covers her pre-Barker twenties and shows how she transformed herself from a rather bored Canadian deb into the passionate and intransigent Bohemian of the books.

It makes fascinating reading. The journals more than confirm the novels’ picture of Smart as plotting her grand passion before she even met Barker, ‘when he, when he was only a word’. First she buys a Barker manuscript; then she dreams greedily about him (‘If Barker should appear now I would eat him up with eagerness’); finally, she organises a ‘rescue’ package to help him and his wife leave Japan (this is 1940) and come to California, where she plays hostess Lady Macbeth-fashion, conspiring relentlessly to break up his marriage.

The resulting mess is what she made over into a shapely, poetical agony. Brigid Brophy, prefacing the first Smart reissue in 1966, said that ‘the entire book is like a wound’, and she’s been echoed by many commentators since. It’s a misleading description, though, unless you remember that Brophy (like Smart) is a shameless formalist. ‘Every scar’, says Smart’s narrator, ‘will have a satin covering and be new glitter to attack his heart’ – which pretty well describes the erotic artifice she goes in for. One reason she published so little is that she wouldn’t write the kind of modest prose you can fit in round the edges of domestic life. It was all or nothing for her: eloquent moments of blazing intensity (pain or pleasure, either would do), otherwise silence:

I cannot write a novel – the form needs padding, the form needs to be filled up with air – for no truth can last so long or be so boringly consistent. I want each word to be essence …

In the event, she produces her own eccentric form. In the journals she uses metaphors of sex and birth continuously: ‘Each word must rip up virgin ground. No past effort must ease the new birth.’ (Male writers had talked like this for centuries, of course, but they didn’t proceed to get literally pregnant by their Muse.)

Editor Alice Van Wart says that this edition represents less than a third of the journals. She seems to have done a good job of selecting the material that illuminates Smart the writer, as she pillages seventeenth-century metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert) and contemporary sex-mongers (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) to concoct her own heady style. Smart isn’t a good travel writer (she went round the world, improbably, with a matron who was addressing Women’s Institutes); what’s interesting is her egocentric habit of making everything grist to her mill. ‘Sculpture. Mummies. Jewellery. Shoes’ all serve her purpose. Wars and atrocities turn to imagery – ‘I will not be taken like Abyssinia.’

This arrogant ingestion of the world is her great strength. She takes things impossibly personally, as sensation on her skin, ‘something only the body’s language can say, oiled by the tides of mysterious passion’. No wonder one of her favourite quotations was Donne’s line from ‘The Canonisation’, about lovers epitomising the world. The journals, at least in this selection, show her mythologising herself even in private.