Backlisted - The Holiday by Stevie Smith

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

Recorded live at the Durham Book Festival 2016, John and Andy are joined by Sally Bayley (author, The Private Life Of The Diary) to discuss Stevie Smith's third and final novel The Holiday.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)13.28 - The Holiday by Stevie Smith* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and the sponsor of Backlisted. Today we're coming to you from the Durham Book Festival, an annual event that first started in 1990, which means it's one of the oldest of the UK's book festivals. The events this year, there are many authors performing, David Baddiel, Michael Mulpergo, Pat Barker, Catherine Williams, and it was also last night was the Durham Book Festival is now the place where the Gordon Byrne Prize,

I think one of the most interesting of the UK's literary prizes, was launched, and last night it was the winner was announced. Andy. I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of the Year of Reading Dangerously and I am the reader in residence at the Durham Book Festival this year. The best thing about reader in residence is people keep saying to me what what is that? We're making up as we go along but basically I'm an ambassador for all the authors who either couldn't be here because they're dead or they weren't free this weekend.

One of those. That's quite a weight to have on your shoulders. Oh, it's fantastic. I'm found a publisher in residence as well, which is really nice. They've also got a vlogger in residence here. Have they? It's hard to know what they don't have in residence

at the Durham Book Festival, to be honest with you. And anyway, we are ensconced today, it says in my script. We are ensconced today with a very knowledgeable and good-looking audience. Again, a polite ripple of laughter there. In the bijou surroundings of Durham's Gala Theatre Studio, and we are delighted to welcome as our guests, a little round of applause applause please, Sally Bailey. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Dr Bailey is a teaching and research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford and lecturer in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She's also a filmmaker and the author of a number of books including most recently The

Private Life of the Diary, A History of the Di as art form. And in fact, you were just doing an event, Sally, weren't you, about this with John? We were talking about diary and the importance of a diary for the development of a sense of self, a place where particularly younger people can try out different selves and how, to some some degree that's under threat from the instant shareability of photographs

and tweets and although the book is as much a history of brilliant diarists Virginia Woolf, Samuel Pepys, even Alan Clark we talked about this morning. Even Alan. Alan Clark was a brilliant diarist if perhaps not a delightful man. A man of diary style.

We also spoke about the diary as a place where you store away your reading life as well. So Virginia Woolf was one of the heroes of my book, and in a sense a role model for anyone who wants to be a diarist. She used her diary as a storehouse for her reading. in a sense it's also her library now normally what we do on that listed uh is that john and i asked one another what we've been reading also i have to add today there is normally we'd normally be joined by the author and somnambulist matthew clayton but the last time we did one of these in front of an audience matthew lost his mind and stripped to the waist and dove into the audience at the end,

so he wasn't allowed to come to this one. He's been banned. So there won't be any tenuous links other than any we provide ourselves or we ask you for. So, again, be ready. But normally, John and I would ask one another about what we've been reading. We're not going to do that today, are we, John?

No, we're going to ask you what you've been reading. We're not going to do that today, are we, John? No, we're going to ask you what you've been reading. To what end, I'm not sure, but it'd be fascinating to know what people coming to the Durham Book Festival have been reading, and whether that chimes with any of the stuff that we've been looking at, which is

in Andy's case, more than is almost humanly possible, and in my case much more humanly possible. So we've got a mic. A roving mic. Roving mic. If you've been reading something that you feel you want to tell us about, please just put your hand up.

I've been reading, and I mention it because you mentioned the Gordon Byrne Prize last night, and I was reading the winning book, David Sollo's All That Man Is, and it's also on the Booker list, short list, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone here. It's made up of nine connected stories in some ways, connected in theme, about different men at different ages and the frailty and issues that we all have.

And I think it was said best by one of the judges that he recognised himself horribly in most of them, even though... Even one minute, the guy was 72, which was 20 years' time for the judge until he reached that age. But I thoroughly recommend it. Yes, it stood out, actually, and the themes that he was saying had but i thoroughly recommend it yes it was uh it stood

out actually that the and the themes that he was saying had kind of history had overtaken brexit and and migration crisis were not things that were perhaps current when he started writing the book but it's become it's become more relevant uh and poignant as time has gone on which is which is fascinating it was i mean it's that it's impossibly, just on the Gordon Byrne Prize, it seems to me of all the prize shortlists I can think of, it's the one that is almost impossible to imagine how you can come up with a winner, because the range of experience that's encompassed by it

just seems so remarkable. The thing that Anthony of Anthony and the Johnsons said when he won the Mercury, he said, this is like choosing a prize between a peach and a table and a car and an apple. Yeah. Or something like that.

I did think while we were sitting there listening to some amazing readings last night. Incredible, yeah. It's very difficult. I tell you what, with the... Is it Sazley? Shaloy. Shaloy, I think.

Do you ever have that thing of that? When the book A long list came out a few months ago several people recommended that one to me and i didn't read it quickly and now it's on the short list and it's won this prize i'm already thinking i can't yeah which is unfair i'm not so i don't say that proudly but i know how wanting to read something works and sometimes you either you miss a moment like you if you get it like i read the we were talking about the sellout by paul beatty yeah which is also which is also on the book a short list yeah i i read that a couple of months ago almost as an unknown quantity

and the fact that it wasn't you talked about it on the podcast yeah yeah it was interesting because i had a bit of one of those should i or shouldn't I uh and then I thought you'd said you'd used a word well you used two words which was that you'd said it was quite hard going and uh and you said it was great but it was it is and I took a perhaps the an easier option which I'm not going to talk about because I want to talk about is a book which I guarantee will be become a prize winner and a classic which is The Underground Railway by Colson Whitehead. Underground Rail Road. Sorry, Underground Rail Road. We're going to talk

about it on the next podcast aren't we because we've both read that. Yeah, has anybody else been reading anything? Yes! Do say your name. That was David Roach the last question question I can happily Hello I'm Ben Myers

I'd like to recommend a book called The Glue Ponies by a writer called Chris Wilson I've just read it, it's come out on Tangerine Press they're a small publisher based in Tooting, South London run by a chap called Michael Curran who's actually a carpenter,

and he's become a bookmaker, literally makes the books as a craft. He's published James Kellman recently, Billy Childish. He makes beautiful books, which sell out straight away, sometimes £50, £7,500 an edition. But yeah, The Glue Ponies is a collection of stories

by a guy from Newcastle, Chris Wilson, who moved to America when he was young and got a terrible heroin habit and went into a life of petty crime and ended up in San Quentin Prison for years. You're just looking at me like... No, I'm just looking at you. Where's the funny bit?

It's the feel-good hit of the year bit. Yeah, this is the feel... Yeah, yeah. real uplifting read but no there's a lot of short stories basically he came out of San Quentin prison

moved back to England went to Chelsea Art School got a first in art and is now a painter but he's also a brilliant writer and the really dark hard hitting

short story great title the glue paint I've written it on the back of my hand well it's actually I can't see what's on your hand from here and the really dark, hard-hitting short story. Great, great title. The Gloopate. I've written it on the back of my hand. Well, it's actually, I can't see what's on your hand from here, but it's ponies, P-O-N-Y-S, instead of I-E-S.

Just pedantic. That's wrong, I've got that wrong now. I've written something wrong on the back of my hand. But yeah, it's a very short story. It's very hard-hitting, very bleak. The standout story, and I won't get into it, but it involves a sort of very large black transsexual

and a white Aryan Nazi and an encounter in a hotel room with a lot of methamphetamine. I am crazy for that genre. I love that genre. I know, well, we had a drink last night in Durham, didn't we? And I saw how it went. So I know that's your thing so yeah the glue ponies by Chris Wilson

Do you think Tangerine Press have got any copies left? Yeah I think so and Chris Wilson's doing readings and events at the moment he's a really interesting engaging guy with a hybrid accent that's part Geordie part San Quentin prison I'm so there

he lives in South London. So, Ben, you've passed the audition. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Has anybody else been reading anything they'd like to tell us about? Yes. Hello. I'm one of your listeners.

Hello. Hello. Thanks for coming. listeners hello hello thanks for coming and um a book that i've been reading was inspired by the tweets coming from you and andrew male about virago press and the kind of um early 1980s editions and i went into a bookshop in Pickering and they had hundreds of them on a shelf and I didn't know which one to pick so I just randomly picked one out by Gisela Elsner and it's called Offside

and it's set in Munich and it's about suburbia and she's a kind of stifled character taking tranquilizers all day and she ends up having risky sex, and it's a carry-on. A wonderful book in many ways. It's very German in the style,

so there are virtually no paragraph breaks. Is it translated from the German? Yes. And when does it date from? I think it's 1982. Have you heard of it? Have either of you heard of it? No.

At my event that I just did here at Durham, I was talking a bit about Hotel Dulac by Anita Bruckner, and I was saying that Hotel Dulac by Anita Bruckner beat J.G. Ballard's The Empire of the Sun to the Booker Prize. And last week I read The Empire of the Sun for the first time. It was all right. But Hotel du Lac was much better. And a man in the audience jeered and disagreed.

And I said to him, should we take this outside UKIP style so we can brawl over who was better, Anita Bruckner or J.G. Ballard? But I can brawl over who was better, Anita Bruckner or J.G. Ballard. But I can understand that I believe that when Anita Bruckner won for Hotel Dulac, that there was a lot of ill feeling because people felt Ballard had written his most important book and should be acknowledged for it. If I'm not mistaken, it was 87, wasn't it?

84. It's 84. It's 84, right. It's the time of the miners' strike, isn't it, in England? Yes, that's right. It's a very quiet book, though. I mean, it's so quiet, and I think people sometimes have a problem with quiet books,

and it's a book about a writer having a crisis and going to Europe in order to sort it out. As listeners to this podcast will know, basically, we're changing the name of this podcast, Bruckner Listed, and it will be a non-stopping... It's true, it's true. to this podcast will know basically we're changing the name of this podcast brookner listed and it will be a non-stopping game yeah well the perfection of you know somebody was saying when she writes the same book every time and i say well surely that's kind of like bark variations i mean it's it may be it they may be similar but they're so they're so exquisite and perfect.

It's like a tiny, tiny drop of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, which is also about going to the mountains and recomposing yourself. It's a modest touch at that, and I think she pulls it off. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. We're here to talk about Stevie Smith and her third and final novel, The Holiday.

Before we talk about the novel and before we talk to Sally about it, we did think it was probably worth having Stevie with us here in some capacity because she was so extraordinary and so wonderful. And a brilliant performer. Really amazing performer.

We have a few recordings of her reading her poetry which we're going to play at various points. We're a few recordings of her reading her poetry, which we're going to play at various points. And so we're going to start with her most famous poem, Not Waving, But Drowning. 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.

far out all my life and not waving but drowning It's remarkable isn't it? What is that accent? Is it sort of London? I think it's London helium

She's definitely on helium or something isn't she? It's incredible. She's on gin and helium. Gin and helium, yes. Perfect combination. So we're going to talk about The Holiday, which is Stevie Smith's third novel. Sally, can you tell us a bit about...

I will do what we do on Backlisted. We're going to do the blurb. Let's do the blurb first. We normally read the blurb of the books on Backlisted. We all just agreed before we started doing this that the holiday is one of the most challenging books that we've done on the podcast and therefore it's probably good to tell you the plot or at least the basis of what there is of the plot there is no plot now so i'm just going to read uh my i have an early 90s virago edition here

we've got lots of virago and we've got lots of virago editions here um it has a quote from stevie smith describing the book to start with where she said i won't do the voice because she does it much better beautiful richly melancholy like those hot summer days when it is so full of that calm before the autumn it quite ravishes me when i read it the tears stream down my face that's her blurbing her own book that's pretty good best known for her poetry stevie smith wrote only three novels of which novel on yellow paper is perhaps the most famous but the holiday as she testifies above, was her favourite. Celia works at the Ministry in the post-war England of 1949 and lives in a London suburb with her beloved aunt.

Witty, fragile, quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love for her friends, her colleagues, her relations, and especially for her adored cousin, Casimilius, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. Here they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love and hate, moments of wild humour alternating with waves of melancholy as Celia ponders obsessively on the inevitable pain of love. In everything she wrote, Stevie Smith's poetic special eye captured the paradox of pain in all human affections, nowhere more so than in this wry, strongly autobiographical tale.

I think that's a good blurb. It's a very good blurb. It's a very good blurb. I mean, it is just, again, I had not read any Stevie Smith. I'd read some poems that had been anthologised. So I had a very... What we try and do with the podcast is I always try and be the guinea pig and go into a book

with as few preconceptions. I tend not to read the introductions, tend not to read any of the stuff around it, and just try and encounter the text. And it is as disorienting, I think, as maybe first picking up Light in august by william faulkner i mean this is not a book that immediately gives it gives itself away it's very very um it's very intense it takes you a while to get used to the the fact that she doesn't use any her punk

she punctuates in a very in a very loose way i mean mean, you just have to... The flow of the voice is there. The reported dialogue, you have to concentrate quite hard to... But when you sort of settle into the rhythm of the book, it is really remarkable. I mean, and so, again, for a book that was written in... I mean, it had a difficult publishing history, didn't it? Yeah, it's written during the Second World War, but it's not published until nearly five years after it was out.

Until 1949, I think. Sally, where did you first encounter this book? So I first encountered this as a late teenager, in fact, sixth form college, where I had a teacher who was having a big rash on Stevie Smith. And so the poetry first and then the novels. So as a teenager, and I think as a first reader of Smith, and he's quite right, this is a difficult novel

because it doesn't have a plot. But what it does invite you into is a series of swimming conversations. You swim around these conversations as though you were in a kind of eddy or whirlpool. You're not quite sure where you're going next it invites you into quite a closed world of cousins her cousins right um and of classical friendship and you're trying to work out where the lines of affection are between one person and another so you're radically and wildly and unsettlingly anxious about who you are with and who they are in relation to you.

Yeah, who's going out with who. Who fancies who or who likes who. And I think it captures wonderfully. Getting off with, she uses that. Getting off with. Getting off with, yeah. That sort of playground fear of who's my friend and who hates me and who likes me and who loves me. And I think she's brilliant on that instinctive fear of affection and then lack of affection.

I think Celia in the book is an unreliable narrator, but not in the terms that we would normally understand that phrase. I think she's telling the truth. I think she's compelled to tell the truth. But she's unreliable because of how her mood swings. And she's totally true to whatever mood might be passing through her at the moment in the moment of telling you about it as well absolutely really kind of um fearless and reckless yeah you know it's i i know that um another author we talked about on Backlisted quite often,

but Novel on Yellow Paper was a great favourite of Jean Rees's. And indeed, it has that same kind of willingness to throw yourself onto the tracks emotionally and artistically and seeing what happens. It's that extraordinary ability to go within a single paragraph, and we'll read some bits out, but from what seems like artless, almost faux naivety, to really profound insights into psychology and history.

I mean, the book is full of references to... There's an early period that some of the cousins have shared in India together. So the question of the future of India is endlessly debated. The ennui of the post-war years, they're all working as cryptographers and secretaries in government ministries. It has a connection in some ways emotionally to that sort of sense that you had in the Bolchin novel, Darkness Falls from Air. There's a definite sense of it being very located in a specific moment. But as we'll go on to discuss, I think it also becomes

remarkably prescient and relevant to where we find ourselves today. Sally, have you got a bit that you could... Yes, absolutely. Do you want to be bold enough to read? I am definitely bold enough to read. As I confessed earlier in my talk, I was the school narrator. Never Joseph or Mary. Nor an angel, nor a donkey, nor a palm tree.

Never Joseph or Mary. Nor an angel, nor a donkey, nor a palm tree. And just to pick up on the contemporaneousness of this novel, it is difficult because in some sense it's not a novel at all. It's a series of swirling ideas. It's a series of conversations. It's very classical. It's a symposium. But there is this fixation with the mood of England and with an English kind of melancholy and sadness

England that gives up on itself ringing any bells yeah England that gives up on itself and and the the idea of Englishness is then attached to family history and as I've already said to lines of affection England's relationship to Germany Germany is being written during the Second World War, but actually isn't published until 49. So there's a strange relationship between pre-war, middle of war, and post-war. We're never quite sure where we are. So history is very slippery and unknown. English relations to Germany is one of the key international national relationships of the book. And I want to read a little bit from the beginning, where Celia is in conversation with her cousin Kaz, via the English and Germans.

Kaz went on to say that the Germans, in their careful way, had always made a great study of the English, and might almost be said to graduate in it. But sure enough, though they might say the English race was biological, and how that the English sat in front of their damned smoky fires, just staring into them and not doing a thing about the draft under the door, just lounging and suffering. Like you, Celia, were bound to trip up as with the fake prisoner of war letters they shot down over England with the bombs

so that number four, Acacia Grove, a Bermondsey, might be laid flat. But floating down upon the owner, maybe fathomed deep in rubble would be this fake letter from Harry boy to say how fine the Germans were being to him in his star log and what decent chaps they were and how much they loved the English etc only of course they couldn't know they got it wrong the poor Germans couldn't know. They got it wrong. The poor Germans couldn't know, for they all read his letters. That boy Harry never said darling to his mum and had never so much as mentioned the Germans one way or the other, not during the whole long years he was in camp

and how he always said in every letter, least said, soonest mended. So all the way from dear mum and dad to all the best harry there was nothing in harry's letters the most college-raised chap in deutschland not by industry nor cunning could lay his hand to for a true twist propaganda pill. Amazing. You've got the gig. That was brilliant, actually. What's so interesting is the difference between Stevie Smith's poetry, which is remarkably tight in terms of its use of words, and the fiction in terms of how it uses speech in particular. I found this lovely thing that Rachel Cook,

our former guest on the podcast, Rachel Cook, said about the voice that Stevie Smith uses in this book and in all her novels. She says it has irony, wit, a slight edge of malice, and the feeling that everyday speech, in all its repetitive clumsiness, has been brought magically close to poetry. But also that Stevie manages to put poetry into very odd places

and very strange speech. I think it was one of the people at Chapman Hall, or editor at Chapman Hall, complained that the book was mostly poetry. I mean, there is a lot of poetry in it, but it's, I think it's more... Poetry clippings. Yeah, it's also full of quite a lot of Latin, quite a bit of German and French. I mean, there is a sort of stream of consciousness, sort of feel to the whole thing. But I mean, I think the relationship with Germany is interesting. There's also a thinly veiled portrait of Orwell in there, the character of Basil, who she was close to Orwell, Stevie Smith.

There were rumours that they had an affair, but I don't think they were ever a bit like the rumours of her lesbian affair. None of these things are very clear. I mean, it is a very biographical novel, but I like the bit also, the beginning, the coming sense of America and consumerism that is beginning to sort of affect. There's this, I think, wonderful passage from Basil. He said that America would be the ruin of the moral order.

He said that the more gadgets women had and the more they thought about their faces and their figures, the less they wanted to have children. He said that he happened to see an article in an American woman's magazine about scanty panties. He said women who thought about scanty panties never had a comfortable fire burning in the fireplace or a baby in the house or a dog or a cat or a parrot or a canary, I said. Or a canary, went on Basil. It's a very good, you get a very good sense from that of going from this, you know, kind of oratorial kind of high oratory, and then suddenly she brings it down with a joke. I just want to say something.

Sally, you were saying how you found this book as a teenager. Yes. It's moody, right? Like a teenager. It's a very moody book. Yes. I read Novel on Yellow Paper for the first time a year ago. And I just want to read the opening paragraph of Novel on Yellow Paper. Because I think the opening paragraph of Novel on Yellow Paper,

because I think the opening paragraph of Novel on Yellow Paper... And this is a book where she wanted to get her poems published, and the publisher, as they still do, said, go and write a novel. So she did, in six weeks. I'm going to read you the beginning, but before I read you the beginning, I just want to tell you the context in which I read it. I just completed a month

long reading of infinite jest by david foster wallace and i had found reading infinite jest by david foster wallace to be often enjoyable often frustrating very male very maximalist, no thought unexpressed for 1,129 pages or something. But I completed it, I finished reading it, and then I was visiting a friend of mine called Neil, who is here today. Hello, Neil. And we went to a bookshop, and spontaneously I saw a lovely little Penguin Modern Classics copy of Novel on Yellow Paper. I opened it up and I read these words. And I thought, I felt like a great David Foster Wallace-shaped weight lifted from my shoulders. Here we go. This is the beginning of Novel on Yellow Paper. Beginning this book, not as they say book in our trade, they mean magazine,

beginning this book, I should like to say, if I may, I should like, if I may, that is the way Sophibus writes, I should like then to say goodbye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends, and for why, read on, reader, read on and work it out for yourself i i think that is the best opening to a novel that i've read for many many years and what i think is so now i know a bit more about stevie so you can probably tell us about this is that isn't a pose that she's taking there. It's a message. She actually shed many friends as a result of publishing this book.

She was estranged from many people in her life, some of them permanently, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And may I just pick up on... Thank you very much, Andy, for reading that. In terms of friends and then fans, in 1962, Stevie Smith receives a letter from the august poet sylvia plath who is in her heyday her young heyday she's uh 30 31 and she writes she writes to stevie smith

as a fan um and before i read the letter to you which is devastatingly crushing from smith's side anyway to the young Sylvia. I want to mention a couple of young people who I've been honoured to know who have actually taught me about Stevie Smith and they are my students. One of them is now not a student. He's now a world expert on Stevie Smith. His name is Will May

and he was the recent editor for the New Faber edition. An extraordinary achievement. That is a wonderful book. It's an amazing book. Extraordinary new edition of Stevie Smith's poetry and prose and... Drawings. Drawings. Much of which comes from the Tulsa University Library, which none of us really have easy access

to. So thank you, Will. Thank you, Will May. He also wrote an extraordinary book about Stevie, which brought her, Stevie Smith, which brought her back into the limelight a few years ago and then the second student I want to mention who is also a world expert on Stevie Smith is Noreen Masood and if any of you want to have easy access to Smith

she has this most extraordinary blog called Parrots Ate Them All Parrots Ate Them All and it's from that blog that I'm reading to you now, the letter that Plath wrote to Smith, and then Smith's reply. It's Smith's reply I want to read to you now. Dear Sylvia Plath, thank you so much for your letter. I was glad to hear from you and glad you enjoyed the Harvard

record. I'm afraid I really don't know where you would find a copy of novel on YP now. It did go into a Penguin's in 1950, I think it was, but that sold out and they did not reprint. When I go downstairs, I camp upstairs most of the time with my aged aunt. She is 90. But when I go upstairs, or is it downstairs, I will look out the address of a man who sometimes manages to track down books for me.

He lives in this neighbourhood, oddly enough, but is very shy. Just sends the book and the AC, which, after all, is all that one wants. I do hope your novel goes well, and I do hope the move in the new year goes well too,

if only, as you suggest, so that we can meet sometime. I feel awfully lazy most of the time. Even the idea of writing a novel makes me feel rather faint. And as for poetry, I'm a real humbug. Just write it. Sometimes, but practically never read a word. That makes me feel pretty mean-spirited when poets like you write such nice letters yours ever stevie smith oh it's amazing i you know um i have to say this so sylvia plath was a great admirer of Stevie Smith. So, of course, was Morrissey.

Of course! And indeed, it's speculated that the name The Smiths partly comes from his love of Stevie Smith. And her name Stevie came from a jockey. Yeah. She was named after a jockey. But he says in his autobiography, autobiography. Penguin

classics. Yeah. My senses sharpen at the words of Stevie Smith. She appeared to live like a never opened window. That's not bad. That's pretty good. That's not bad. When Novel on Yellow Paper was published,

it was a sensation, was it not? It was a bestseller, published in 1936. It made her a celebrity overnight. Somebody wrote to Virginia Woolf saying, you are Stevie Smith and I claim my five pounds, or words to that effect, that it was believed that Stevie Smith was a pseudonym and that it was a lighter version of what Virginia Woolf was trying to do

in terms of the revolutionary use of speech and stream of consciousness. And yet at the same time, the more you read about Stevie Smith, you realise she has this very strange aesthetic that is made up of depression uh suburbia death as a a deliverance death is always an option for escape from yeah and And death is kind of a leisure option almost. It's like we're on holiday, we could do some death. Maybe let's. And there's an extraordinary part of the holiday

where she describes... I'm going to say I'm not even sure about this, so I'm looking at you quizzically as I say it, where she describes a suicide attempt. It is a suicide attempt, right? But it's delivered... She'll give you two paragraphs about parrots. Very deadpan. Or apes.

Or apes, and then say in passing and I feel tired and I decide to lie down in the water. And she's saved from drowning, isn't she? I mean, it's remarkable because she's just carried away by the stream and is rescued, but there's no struggle.

I mean, she's just lying, drifting downstream. And I suppose what she's doing, I mean, she's drawing us into a dream state. Smith is a great fan of the reverie, right? The idea that you can look at a fire, you watch the crackling fire, and you transport yourself somewhere else. So in a sense, this book comes out of a dream state. It comes out of transportation, being moved somewhere else, having gone somewhere else, hence the holiday.

The holiday, in a sense, is a metaphor for that dream state. It's very Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland is very dark, but the menace here is of real things. It's death in a fairy tale sense, and the book ends in a fairy tale trance, doesn't it? But it's also death caused by war, death caused by empire, death caused by politics, bad politics. It's a very political book as well. And John and I were discussing this before we came in, the way in which it takes on England's relationship to Europe and then to the globe, which is strikingly relevant to our current state of affairs.

Absolutely. So I really want to challenge us to think about ways in which this book could be read as a comment on England now. as a comment on England now. Yeah. There's a really kind of, there's a passage which strikes me about England, which is, I think it's Cass, who tends to be even more,

the cousin in the book, who tends to be even more cynical than her. He says, we are not a sophistical people and are saved the dangers that run with sophism. And our education has not yet succeeded in taking away from us the weapons of our strength, insularity, pride, xenophobia and good humour.

That could pretty much be a UKIP slogan. Shall I just say a bit of biographical stuff about Stevie? Because I feel we need to do that. So she's born in 1902 and she dies in 1971. Florence Margaret Smith, called Peggy by her family, and as John said,

picks up the nickname of Stevie because some boys shout out that she's like a jockey called Steve. Is that right? Yes, that's right. I think so, yeah. So her father was a shipping agent. He leaves home when she's three.

Off to sea. He goes off to sea. Off to Valparaiso, love daddy. And she moves to a suburban house in Avondale Road, Palmer's Green, where she lives for most of the rest of her life with her Aunt Madge, played in the film Stevie

by the incredible Mona Washbourne. Oh, yes. Who is nothing like Aunt Madge in real life. I was reading much to my amusement. Aunt Madge was formidable. And Stevie's played by Glenda Jackson. Glenda Jackson. The play was revived last year with

So You Want to Make Her, isn't it? Absolutely. And so she called her aunt the Lion Aunt. And when she was five she developed TB and she's sent to a sanatorium near Broadstairs for three years her mother was often ill her mother dies when she's 16 and it's these elements death women suburbia that provide inspiration for many of her poems death as a deliverer from depression or illness.

She works at Noon's Publishing for 30 years as a secretary to Sir Neville Pearson, and she published seven volumes of poetry in her lifetime, the most famous of which was Not Waving But Drowning in 1957, three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper, Over the Frontier, 1938, and this one, The Holiday. And we were talking last night sally she fell out

of fashion yes she was very successful in the 1930s she fell out of fashion in the 1940s and 50s and came to dislike these novels because she felt they had fixed her as a as a 1930s fad rather than as an author but then in the 1960s and i think we have another poem that we could play of a live recording from 1965 in the 1960s stevie smith becomes a celebrity all over again as a live performer she she manages to get onto the 60s poetry gig circuit and become one of its one of its mascots almost almost in a sort of i was thinking she reminds me of ivy cutler in a way she has that brilliant english eccentric although he was scottish of course uh thing going on do we have uh one of those poems now

here is a happy love poem i wrote. It is called I Remember. It was my bridal night, I remember, an old man of 73. I lay with my young bride in my arms, a girl with TB. 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.

What a pro. Wait for the laugh, wait for the laugh, wait for the applause. Brilliant. I think just to pick up on what you were saying about her circuit, her fame on the circuit, she's so attached, I think, to the Victorian music hall tradition as well. She's interested in snatches of words, words that float through the air, that are sing-song, nursery rhymes and sing-song, language that's breaking out into something else altogether a hum or a tune yes and i think that's why it's so difficult to read and as i was reading that passage my diaphragm was contracting and expanding nervously because i felt as though i ought to be breaking out into a song and doing a bit of tra la la ring around the edge and in fact she has got these star lags and the

way that she's sort of playing with the the ridges between german and french and italian this kind of school girlish relationship to knowing languages um i don't know if anyone else have i have days when i suddenly speak really bad french because i was sent away when i was young to switzerland and there's something about that early relationship with language and it's a schoolgirl understanding of European languages. And she runs that through nursery rhyme and then the music hall tradition of song, which, of course, is rude and crude and colloquial.

And it's to do with rumour and gossip and hearsay. Have you got another little bit? You could read us there for the holiday. Yes, absolutely. And then I have a question to ask. Yes, I have. To my other panel members. So, Sally, go.

And I'm afraid I'm staying with the idea of the English, if that's all right. We can take a bit more of the English without getting too turned off. So they're talking. Most of the book is a series of conversations. She's still with her cousin Kaz, who she's in love with. The whiskey's now out.

So we're in the whiskey scene. That's the spirit, said Kaz. Pass the whiskey. The English law is above the world, I said. It is not to be bought. It is strong, flexible, and impartial. Kaz began to sing. The law is the embodiment of everything that's excellent.

It has no kind of spot or flaw. And I, my lords, embody the law. And this new whipping law, this emergency whipping act, they have passed for India. It is this inflammable student material, I said, wringing my hands, for indeed I felt it to be a shameful thing. It was a horrible necessity, I said, pleading with Kaz. Surely, for instance, it is better than shoot the boys. Oh yes, much better, said Kaz, because you can do it several times. It is always such fun. I remember how I used to enjoy it so much at school. We always had this

clean, wholesome fun. We derive great pleasure from it, huh, Tiny? Tiny looked away. I think there's a great deal of nonsense talked about this flogging business at public schools, he said. After all, what is it? Nothing. You did not used to think so, said Kaz. That's the spirit, I said. Pass the whiskey. The British will always eventually pass flogging laws, because the governing classes are flogged themselves so much through the public schools.

I was flogged twice through homer said kaz with another malicious look in my direction i agree with tiny i said in a desperate manner too much is made of it some men writers make so much of it as some women writers will always be making of the stress and strain of childbirth well that, that cannot be so easily removed. That's wonderful. So my question to Sally and to you, John, is I think these are utterly wonderful novels. I am so pleased to have read them in the last year or so.

I think they are. I hope people listening to this, they're all in print at the moment you can get them, you don't have to get them on eBay like some of the books we talk about sometimes on Batlisted, you could stop listening to us now, go and get one of these books, The Holiday

or Novel on Yellow Paper they're wonderful novels was she a wonderful novelist um so what a really interesting uh distinction to make i'd say she's an anti-novelist actually i think she's an anti-novelist like herman melville's moby dick which is a wailing manual actually in its basic form it's a wailing manual um and i don't know how we each of us felt reading this but I was a school girl again looking up words and looking up things so like so the part that I didn't just read which carries on

we have the battle of Thermopylae which is one of the wars the big Persian Spartan war in the 5th century BC but there I was I know this but I was looking it up just in case I get it wrong and there's something about this book and knowledge and um the way in which she brings us into snippets of and snippets and fragments of knowledge which which are running around inside the pages of this novel as obviously they were running around inside her head um and you can't really read a paragraph without having to look something up because it's full of illusion, isn't it?

And it's full of remnants of learning. It's a really good question, and I think it is exactly that. There's a very snooty essay of T.S. Eliot, who did a good line in snooty essays, about William Blake. And he basically patronises Blake by saying, you know, he kind of makes rather interesting furniture out of the odd bits and pieces of...

He basically accuses Blake of not having proper classical learning, which is, as it turns out not true but there is a sense in which Stevie Smith is an English writer in the way that Blake is an English writer she stands outside any obvious tradition she has made this incredibly deceptively I think she had a, as you can hear from the voice, of being somebody who was kind of amusing and a bit eccentric and a bit mad and high-low. But the novels are so...

I mean, there's so much in The Holiday. I mean, there's so much compacted in there, so much thinking and talking, and it kind of hangs together. But you can't say that she's like like i say you know maybe someone as as as kind of i mean she's it's you know you can't really say she's like virginia wolf i don't think she's definitely not like for me i found that i the little thing i was reading from the beginning of novel on yellow paper read on reader read on and work it out for yourself that for me is what I loved about reading these books.

I think they're incredibly... The sense of freedom within them and that they are incredibly freeing to read because they are drawing on certain traditions, but they are not the traditions or the aesthetic of a novelist, of a trading novelist they are someone who is attempting to get down on paper what's in their

head in a hierarchy of meaning for them which allows you to wander around it. Can I read one really quick passage this is Kaz again and this is the relationship between Kaz and Celia the way she I mean Kaz is. And this is the relationship between Kaz and Celia.

The way she, I mean, Kaz is kind of, this is very Seneca. You know, this is Greek philosophy. Life is like a railway station, said Kaz. The train of birth brings us in. The train of death will carry us away. And meanwhile, we're cooling our heels upon the platform and waiting for the connection and cooling our heels upon the platform and waiting for the connection and stamping up and down the platform and passing the time of day with the

other people who are also waiting which is quite good but this is what she does yes that is how it is of course for everybody it is not like this for firmer types it is different For firmer types, it is different. For firmer types. You know that's how the play and the film of Stevie by Hugh Wymore, that's how it starts. With that exact train image.

And as the train is now pulling out of the station, Matt informs me. So we have to wind up. Well, I think that's all we have time for. Thanks to Sally, to our producer Matt Hall, to our sponsors Unbound, but thanks most of all to our audience here

at the Gala Theatre Studio at the Durham Book Festival. Thank you. Thanks very much, everyone. I think Stevie Smith would have been appalled by what's happened there today. My singing, everyone. I think Stevie Smith would have been appalled by what's happened there today. I'm sure she would.

So you can get in touch with us on at BacklistedPod on Twitter, Facebook, BacklistedPod, our page on Unbound's site, which is unbound.co.uk, forward slash Backlisted. Thank you for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Good night from me. Good night from me. Good night from Stevie. Thank you for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Good night from me. Good night from me.

Good night from Stevie. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.