In Our Time - Stevie Smith

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

In 1957 Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving But Drowning – and its title poem gave us a phrase which has entered the language. Its success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary. Her poems, printed with her pen and ink sketches, can seem simple and comical, but often beneath the surface lurk themes of melancholy, loneliness, love and death. With Jeremy Noel-Tod Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia Noreen Masud Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol and Will May Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of SouthamptonThe photograph above shows Stevie Smith recording her story Sunday at Home, a finalist in the BBC Third Programme Short Story competition in 1949.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 1957, Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving, but Drowning. And its title poem gave us a phrase which has entered the language.

Its success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary. Her poems printed with her pen and ink sketches can appear deceptively simple, but often beneath the surface there are themes of melancholy, loneliness, love and especially death. With me to discuss Stevie Smith are Jeremy Noel Todd, Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Nareen Massoud, lecturer in 20th century literature at the University of University of Bristol and Will May, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University

of Southampton. Jeremy, Jeremy, Noel Todd, she had a very unsettled childhood, to put it mildly. Can you just fill the listeners in about that? Stevie Smith was born in 1902 in Hull, in Yorkshire. She was baptised Florence Margaret and was actually known at home as Peggy, so she had different names. She seems possibly to have been premature. She was certainly very ill when she was born and was baptised at home, but she survived that, and then when she was three, her father left the family to go away to sea. And this left her mother in a difficult position, so with her aunt... And you didn't come back? Well, he did come back, but only, as it were, on shore leave to say hello and then disappear again. He effectively abandoned the family, although her mother sort of kept

up appearances and they remained married. Smith wrote a poem about this where she said, I sat upright in my baby carriage and wished my mama had not made such a foolish marriage. So the difficulty that this left the family in meant that they decided to move to London, her mother and her aunt, and they settled in Palmer's Green in the north of London. That was where she lived for the rest of her life. What was the household like in which she lived? It was her mother who was called Ethel Spear and her aunt, who was called Magspir, and there was also a great aunt who lived with them.

And there was also Stevie Smith's sister who was a couple of years older than her. Much later in life, she wrote a poem which began. It was a house of female habitation. And she evokes this place as being somewhere that keeps fear out, although he knocked a place of protection. And although she says perhaps its faults were sternness and reserve, she also felt it was a house of warmth and love.

So they'd moved to London, settled in this new place, but then when she was five, she was diagnosed with TB, probably got it from drinking un-pasteurized milk, and she sent away to a sanatorium in Kent to be by the sea, because that was the prescribed treatment at the time, and she stays there for most of three years. She's allowed to go on family holidays, her mother sometimes visits, although this also causes her distress.

So she spends a very lonely period in her early childhood there. And then they come back to Palmer's Green, and then what? So her family remain in Palmer's Green the whole time. She returned at the age of eight, and that's around the time. And then she begins her formal schooling. She goes to Palmer's Green High School, and then she goes on to North London Collegiate School. But when she leaves school as a teenager, she doesn't go on to further education. She goes on secretarial school.

Thank you very much, Noreen. So you go from Yorkshire to Palmer's Green. I don't suppose you remember a great deal of that, then the TBA. But then she went to. to some very high-powered schools. Well, she hated school. She was very bad at it. She said that she was tired all the time.

And to do well at that school, you had to sort of drive yourself on, and she just couldn't be bothered with it, really. It was quite an old-fashioned school. The main thing that she talks about in her interviews is how whenever they did something wrong, they were given a passage of Catullus to learn by heart. And that sort of thing makes its way into her later poetry.

We have a couple of Catullus, not translations exactly, but kind of pastiche, where she plays with it. So school had its consolations, even though by and large, she didn't do very well. And her sister went on to university, but she didn't. Was there any particular reason? Was she just not good at passing exams, or did she make the decision not to go? The main reason she gave is that she was just always very tired.

She was a tired person. This is something that Smith comes back to over and over again during her life, just how tired she is, and what an effort she finds life. There's a wonderful anecdote where she describes a painting, with all the animals flocking to the ark but there's one animal who's going the wrong way and Smith says the animal has looked at the ark and decided not to go and she said I'm that animal

you know I take a look at life and I think no it's not for me and that started very young that started at school she's called Florence how does she come to be called Stevie so it was when she was about 19 or 20 and she was riding on one of the London Commons with a friend Arnold and she'd hired a horse for that and she was of struggling with her hired horse and not getting on very well with it

and a couple of little boys shouted out, come on, Steve, and that was a reference to the jockey, Steve Donahue. And the friend laughed and said, oh, I like that, I'm going to call you Steve. And that sort of caught on among her friends, and Steve became Stevie over time. And by the mid-1930s, Smith was pretty much exclusively going by Stevie. She was known as Stevie. But what's interesting, I think, is her aunt always called her Peggy, or Peggy in her Hull accent. And in the suburb at home, in Palmer's Green, she was also known as Peggy.

So she was sort of stevie at work or in her kind of literary life And then when she went back to the suburb She went back to being Peggy So even in her name It gave her a sort of way of living a double life Having two identities But we can call it a fairly Fairly nondescript life

Fairly normal lower middle class Chantile life out in Parliament At that time It provided her somewhere where she could sort of watch and eavesdrop People who lived a very different life from hers There was a big park she wandered around There was the end

and it was much more sort of jungly than it is now. It was much more sort of countrysidey at that time. Because she lived in this house of female habitation, which was all these very magnificent women, she got to watch through the suburb more sort of, in inverted commas, normal lives. She got an insight into the lives of women who chose a different path from her, who married and had children. And Smith was fascinated by these.

She describes herself as always on the edge, and that gives her a vantage point to kind of watch and listen normal lives. and eavesdrop on the wonderful kind of cliches and tags that she hears an everyday conversation, and they make their way into her poems and her essays. Will, Will May, she claimed to come from a unliterary background. Is that true? Well, yes and no. Her biographer Francis Baldwin says that facts about Stevie Smith's life take on a fictional air,

and that's really the case. So she has three sort of quasi-semi-autographical novels and returns to her life quite a lot in her poems. And that can make the story of her life seem quite settled. So we have the normal ordinary suburb and the unliterary aunt. The suburb might have more going for it in terms of literature than we expect. So Stevie Smith's mother took her and her sister to weekly meetings of the Literary Society. Which was the Society of Palmer's Green?

So they would have kind of talks there. and her sister's presence is quite significant too. So although she talks... Older or younger? Older. And I think she talks a lot about her aunt, but you can actually read her three novels and almost forget she has a sister,

which is very strange, given that her sister goes on to read English at the University of Birmingham. She becomes an English teacher and after 20 years of teaching becomes a drama officer for the County of Buckinghamshire. So a very literary person, very excited about Shakespeare, etc.

And I think perhaps deliberately Stevie Smith refashions her story to make it sound a little bit less literary than it is. And similarly, in her novel, over the frontier, she talks about her school days and says, I was more than cross, I outherited them all. But actually, the English teachers did inspire her. They introduced her to the Golden Treasury,

to reciting poetry as well, yes. And she would often learn and recite poetry. And that feeling for poetry's recitation is really important for the poem she will. Did you regret not going to university? I'm not sure that she did, actually. I think in the 1920s, if you're a woman and you're doing a humanities degree,

the most likely route is into teaching. And school was not a place Stevie necessarily enjoyed with its rules and discipline, and it wasn't really a place she wanted to return to. She has a wonderful poem actually where she rewrites Dante's purgatory. She has Paolo and Francesca, but instead of being in the seventh circle of hell,

they're in what seems like public boarding school and the radiators are always turned up too high. So school is a quite terrifying place for her. I think as well, her not going to university gave her a very different kind of set of opportunities and possibilities. So she goes to Mrs. Hosta's secretarial college. She trains there for six months and she learns, first of all, how to address a bishop, how to address royalty that you shouldn't look at your boss's face when you're taking dictation and just look at his shoes. Can I switch across to Jeremy now?

Jeremy, I'll talk. So what is this place that she, which she sought and was given her first workplace? So this place is a magazine publisher called Nunes and she works for the boss who's called Neville Pearson.

And she gets this job. What sort of magazine is it? Well, it publishes various magazines, but they tend to be sort of women's magazines. I mean, at one point she characterises the kind of articles they run and something like how to turn a top hat into a knitting bag.

Homely advice. It's very much not really a literary market, although she does do some writing for them, but it puts her on the edge of a kind of literary world because it's a publishing world. It's an editorial world. And also it gives her time to read because it doesn't seem as though

this job that she gets as a secretary is especially demanding. So what's she reading? Wow, I mean, she's reading all sorts. You know, she reads the classics. She takes German and French lessons. She reads a lot of modern fiction. She reads Proust and Joyce and Wolf and D.H. Lawrence.

That's big reading. Yeah. She keeps a reading diary in the early 20s, which is great evidence for effectively this English literature degree education that she gave herself. Yeah. And meanwhile, gone on with the job? Well, yeah, to the best of her abilities.

I think I read somewhere that she was a one-finger typist. I'm not sure how rigorous the secretarial school was. But she seems to have developed a sort of easy, mutual understanding with her boss that they would kind of leave each other alone that neither of them were especially keen on being too sort of busy in the workplace. Did they do much work?

It sounds she didn't have much time for it. Well, no. And this is why she calls her first book novel on yellow paper, because it's the yellow paper she keeps in the office for unofficial business. Blue paper is for letters. It was rather idiosyncratic the way she arrived at writing that, wasn't it?

Yeah. So that is an interesting story because the first time you can read Stevie Smith's poems in book form is in her novel, which is called Novel on Yellow Paper or subtitle, Work It Out for Yourself, which gives you a sort of sense of the rather confrontational attitude she takes towards the reader in it. And she's been writing poems seriously for about 10 years from around 1924. How old was she at 24? 1924, and she was 22 at that point. So she's been writing poems for 10 years. and in 1934 she sends them to a publisher, this mass of poems, and she gets a reader's report, and the reader says,

this is extraordinarily mixed stuff. We're not going to publish it. So she takes them to another publisher. They're quite interested, but the publisher says to her, go away and write a novel. And she thinks this is a challenge that he doesn't think she's going to take up. So she goes and writes novel on yellow paper in about 10 weeks and returns with it, and he likes it.

But actually he can't get the rest of the company to approve it. little bit too out there. So she takes it to a third publisher, which is Jonathan Cape. They take it, publish it, is a success, and then she publishes the poems. But in the novel, she quotes several of the poems and says to the reader, you get first look in. That's smart, isn't it? Was this a strategy from the very beginning? If they won't publish my poems, I'll make them publish my poems inside something they will publish.

I think there was a real attitude of defiance in writing this book. It comes out of nowhere because people sort of think, who is this Stevie's myth we'd never heard of. She hasn't published anything in a magazine. Somebody thinks it's Virginia Woolf, writing under a pseudonym, thinks it's her best novel, writes a fan letter to her, saying, I think this is your best thing yet. It's not me. The whole question of the status of these poems is if I'm clear, have they just been made up for the purposes of giving the narrator of the novel a poetic side? And it's only a year later when they appear in book form, that it's clear that she is actually serious about them. Excellent. Noreen, she's in the

household, she's working and she's launched on a career. Let's assume we're at the stage where this novel, the level of yellow paper, has been published. But the major figure in her household seems to have been her aunt, is that right? Yes. Certainly that's how Smith

talked about her. Yes. So what was strong about her aunt that attracted her? Smith describes the aunt as having a very fierce, very upright, very dignified character. She called her the lion aunt in her letters and in her novels. And as seems to be have been a great deal of love between the two of them.

She was accused of never being in love and she said I was once with my aunt. Absolutely, yeah, with Neville Braybrook. She said that to Neville Braybrook, people think that because I never married, I know nothing about the emotions. When I am dead, you must put them right. I loved my aunt. And it's such a beautiful line because what that relationship with the aunt did was model for Stevie Smith, the way of living differently, I think.

Well, certainly in her last novel The Holiday, she writes that because she grew up with her aunt, as the aunt were the most important figure in her life. She never got used to the idea of a house hierarchically organized around a man's needs. And so marriage didn't make any sense to her. It didn't make any sense to her to be the wife. And the aunt absolutely babied her, and quite late in the aunt's life, until she grew ill, the aunt did all the cooking and things. And then the aunt became ill and the roles reversed.

And Stevie Smith took up the cooking with quite a good grace. She said, cooking's a wonderful way of getting rid of aggression and talked about how she loved to hold a nice young parsnip in her hands. Eventually the aunt was confined to upstairs. Smith sort of camped out upstairs with her, and the aunt died in 1968, and Stevie Smith actually died just three years after that. So they lived most of their lives together,

and Smith's auntless life was very short. Another thing, though, that's interesting about that relationship with the aunt, is that the aunt knew almost nothing about what she was doing in the literary world. And Smith tells the story a few times, with hilarity, of the aunt calling one of her early poems unnecessary. And she says things like,

oh, you know, that's all very good, dear, but, no, I don't know anything about it. And I think Smith really valued being able to come home to this figure to whom her literary life was irrelevant, to whom she was just Peggy. Do you think that infiltrated into the way she wrote poetry? Because the way she writes poetry is often, I'm writing poetry over the sort that most people don't write poetry. I'm dismissing the way people normally write poetry,

and I'm doing it this way. Does that make any sense? The way that she writes is absolutely, I think, in conversation with this idea of dismissal. There's something about her poetry, I think, that it's so odd, that it's quite hard to almost hear, quite hard to get a grasp on, because it's taking... Have you got any examples? Oh, well, one that I always think of is the bereaved swan,

which begins, one swan on the lake, like a cake of soap. Why is the swan one on the lake, he has abandoned hope? So he stars in this really comic space where the swan is like a cake of soap floating on a bath. But then we end up in this place of despair when the swan dies, wrapped in a mantle of death, the swan is dead. So we move really quite abruptly from the kind of comic into the tragic.

And because of this, we don't really know how to get a handle on this poem. And I think Smith really lent into this sense of being someone you couldn't get a handle on. So another poem, which I've been thinking of recently, is Croft. It goes a loft in the loft sits croft. He is soft. And what do you do with that? I don't know. You do something.

I only found... It's just right. It's just right. It's just the off-bride. Well, this is interesting. I only found out recently that this is actually a take on a northern English saying the name's Croft Not Soft, which is as much to say as, you know, I'm not an idiot, you can't take me for a ride. And it was in this way that Smith would sort of take these little overhead snatches of conversation or these sayings,

which had this wonderful weight as far as she was concerned. They were cliched, but she'd look into them and see something in them that other people hadn't noticed, and she'd give them prominence. Is any of them extend into poems longer than half a line? Oh, so many of her poems are only. sort of two lines long. Well, can you give us at least two lines? Can we rise to fall?

I could give you a poem. It's a funny one. It's about a dog called Jumbo. Jumbo, Jumbo, Jumbo, Jumbo, Jumbo, come to mother. But Jumbo, wouldn't? He was the sort of dog who simply wouldn't bother. An ugly beast he was with drooping guts and filthy skin.

It really was quite wonderful how mother loved the ugly thing. Good. Over to you. My favourite Stevie Smith poem is Scorpion, which starts off, apparently. in the outpatients department, and it starts with a line, this night shall thy soul be required of thee. Then it switched, my soul is never required of me.

It always has to be somebody else, of course. Will my soul be required of me tonight, perhaps? I often wonder what it would be like to have one's soul required of one, but all I can think of is the outpatients department. Are you Mrs. Briggs, dear? No, I am Scorpion. That's about as much as I have. But it's just such a magnificent poem,

and I have a great sense when I read it, of an angry woman, sort of full of this sense of her own grandeur, who was massively underestimated by the people around her and has a sense of the things she could achieve if people only took her, you know, took her seriously. And I think that Scorpion poem comes from her last book, which is published posthumously, and it doesn't have the rhymes that characterise her early work.

There is a sense that the rhymes, perhaps, or something like a defence mechanism in the early work, you know, because they seem to be funny. And another one that makes me think of is the poem, Mr. Over, and that clearly begins as a joke. that poem. It goes, Mr. Rove is dead. He died fighting and true, and on his gravestone they wrote

Over to you. And that's a joke, right? The poem is entirely written for that joke. And then it limps on for another sort of four or five verses and turns into a kind of consideration about mankind and death. But yeah, absolutely. Smith always starts with a joke and goes on from there. Can we turn to the how she came to publish her first

book, go back to that first poetry collection in 1937. Well, it was called A Good Time was Had by All. Now she did nothing that had any significance. So what's the significance of that? The title sort of picks up on the last sentence that you might get if you're summarising a parish town hall meeting, A Good Time Was Had By All.

The good joke is that really probably nothing happened at this meeting of merit. But euphemism is really important to her, and idiom is really important to her as well. Her first collection is full of dramatic monologues or character sketches where the person has been slightly short-changed. So there's a poem called The Actress, and the first line is, I can't say I enjoyed it, but the pay was good. And similarly, we've heard from the bereaved swan,

which Noreen's already quoted, and it almost seems like an update of Tennyson's poem, The Dying Swan. And of course, at least if you're dying and you're a swan, you get this beautiful melody and this moment where the reeds gather around you, whereas if you're the bereaved swan, you can't sing at all. So you have this really stubby monosyllabic language. Similarly, there's

a poem called Miss Simpkins about a woman who becomes very interested in spiritualism and tells her husband how exciting it is that there's an afterlife and things change. And he's so excited about that that he goes and kills himself and she's then forced to scrub the floors of Westminster County Hall. So there's lots of kind of just desserts of people who are trying to get on with life, but actually euphemism kind of breaks down a little bit. It makes me think right back to later poems like The Frog Prince. And again, another great example of how she's so good at fashioning idiom and euphemism into new poetic language. So in her retelling of the classic Frog Prince fairy tale, the frog is there thinking about how he can't wait to kiss the girl.

He can't wait to get back to the palace. It will be heavenly when those things happen. But of course, as he thinks about that word heavenly, which has a very sort of 1930s, the 40s resonance from kind of magazine columns, he realizes, alas, that only disenchanted people can be heavenly. So that sense of leaning into a particular idiom and making kind of poetic magic of it, the final thing which really strikes me coming back to that first collection, is how incredible Smith is at ventriloquism. I would say in English poetry, she is absolutely the best. We've heard so much about the different types of reading she would be doing,

romantic poetry, biblical quotations. She's able to fuse them together in a quite incredible way, often by not really trying to join the cracks together. So we're suddenly kind of jarringly moved from one register into another. And lots of her contemporaries. So, for example, moments where she might take newspaper review of a recent translation of the Bible and use it as a starting point to write a poem in admiration of Thomas Cranmer, the earlier translator. Or similarly, she might use the jangle. of words or quotations from the magazines that are being published by Nunes. What were our biggest influences, do you think?

Well, it does seem that reading Blake around 1924, William Blake, was particularly important to her, and there is something very Blake here about how she sees human life as this constant war, really, between innocence and experience, and she even writes poems with Blake titles, like Little Boy Lost. So that's very important, but actually she absorbs an enormous amount of influences. Strangely, she says that one of the most important influences on her work was Gibbon, not a poet, a historian. And she often quotes a line from Gibbon about how the early Christians were not desirous of being either useful or agreeable in this earthly life. The resonance of that phrase, useful and agreeable, that's the kind of precarious rhythm that makes its way into titles like tenuous and precarious.

I often think when I read Smith of a table with one leg too short and you lean on it and go much further over than you meant to, Gibbon really captures that kind of rhythm. Another poet who's really important is Coleridge. One of not as well known as not waving but drowning, but still quite well known, is her poem thoughts about the person from Porlock. It's Smith's poem riffing on Coleridge. It takes on the story that Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan in an opium haze

and then was interrupted by the person from Porlock and forgot the rest. And Smith says in the poem, well, I think Coleridge has already stuck with Kubla Khan and he used the person from Porlock as an excuse, not to finish the poem. And then the poem goes on into a longer consideration of the desire to be interrupted,

the longing for someone to come and save you from your own company, whether that's death or a person from Paul Locke. There's a tendency of critics, notably male critics, to say she's a complete original, and that's only true in the sense that she has a completely original combination

of enormous number of other things that she's read. She seems to have been a practising Anglican all her life. Is that true? And if so, where did it take her? I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, in a social sense, as Green, perhaps you didn't sort of ostentatiously not always go to church. And she lived in a household where her aunt maintained the surpluses and cassocks of the choir boys at the local church.

So there was a, you know, she was within the social world of the Angling Church. But I think she lost her faith in her early 20s. I mean, one of the things that... Any particular occasion? I'm not aware of a particular occasion. I mean, she becomes very interested in reading about theology and church history. One of the things the readers report about her first poem says is that it has several blasphemous digs at Christ.

And there's an early poem, which for me is a sort of classic of her religious poems, which is called Mother Among the Dustbins. And she says it's a dialogue which her religious poems often are, two voices. One is a child who doesn't believe in religion but thinks it's a good thing that it exists because it maintains social order, which I feel was probably her position early on. And the mother who's sweeping up the dust is a romantic revolutionary and an oppressive state of mind. So the mother has this religious fervour. And the child says, no, it's just a.

good enough that religion exists. And the child has the last word. She says, who are you to question the folly of man in the invention of God? Who are you? Later on, when she records it, sort of decades later, she says, who are you to question the wisdom of man in the creation of God? But I think either way it's the same thing. She sees religion as something people have made up. Even though she thinks it might be quite a good thing. Another poem, she says, a God is man's doll, you ass. He makes him up on purpose. But then the other voice says, he might have made him up worse. I always think when I think about Smith's relationship with God, of her poem, God the Eater, which sums up a kind of contradiction at the heart of her relationship at Anglicanism.

There is a God in whom I do not believe, yet to this God my love stretches. This God whom I do not believe in is my whole life, my life and I am his. So that really interesting doubleness, the way that you might not believe in something, and yet every part of you, in every posture you occupy, could be directed to a kind of devoutness, to a kind of posture of worship. To me it's almost as though God died in Smith when she was young, and yet her whole character was shaped around

the idea of there being a God there, and she never quite got beyond that. I think it's an interesting dilemma that people, a lot of people hold even now, that you are fascinated by it and drawn to it, but you don't, the word belief is difficult to utter. Yes. But then later in life, in the 60s,

she writes this very long poem, which is published in The Observer, and she actually confronts this and says, isn't there a danger in being the sort of person who doesn't want to criticise religion because you think it does good? And she actually ends up saying, I think with all this dishonesty, armed as we are now, meaning nuclear war,

we shall kill everybody, which is a pretty fierce way of putting it. And the next week, the letters page is full of responses to this poem. So later on, I think she's much more daring in the way that she says this isn't really true for me. And anything that includes, death, attracts her very strongly. Death for her, she has this vision of death. which seems to imply some kind of belief in an afterlife,

but not a Christian afterlife. She has this vision of death as death when she was very, very ill. Yeah. On that time, she said she thought a lot about death, taking her own life when she was on her own with... Yeah, so this was when she was eight years old. Yes, absolutely. But still, you can be eight years old,

you can have thoughts like that when you're eight years old. Yeah, she said childhood thoughts cut deep. Yes, clearly she did. Noreen, can we talk, or can you talk, please? That she was, she had a, could be called a preoccupation with death, the last four or five words of her published poetry about death come quickly. So what do you make of that? Her relationship with death, she dates it back to her time in the sanatorium,

and she puts herself at eight there. This is her account in novel on yellow paper, her fictionalised account of that time. She describes wrissing her mother a lot, crying a lot, wishing she was dead. And then she has a kind of epiphany, she says. She says, I sat up and said, death has got to come when I call. So in other words, I don't need to do. yet because it is always in my power whether or not I kill myself.

And that thought comforted her. And she returns to it over and over again through her life and in other poems, the idea that she's in charge of when she dies. And that comforted her enough that she got through her whole life without killing herself and died at the age of 68 of natural causes. I think that kind of finding the cheerfulness in death, and I suppose another way, the deathliness and cheerfulness, the idea that death could be a consolation and actually keep you alive.

It manifests in the relationship she had with her friends. Her friends describe her puddle jumping between joy and grief. One minute she's at lunch, crying and saying she wishes she was dead. The next minute she's laughing and trying on hats and having a lovely time. Must have been a difficult company. I think she was very difficult company. She also needed a lot of lifts home to Palmer's Green, which I think was a bit of a pain for her friends.

But she is self-aware. She has moments of self-awareness in this melodrama about death. So in her last novel, The Holiday, her cousin, Kaz, in that novel, says, You are romantic about death. The train of death that you are waiting for is an excursion train. In other words, you don't want to go away forever. You just want to go on a little holiday. You want to have a bit of a break from this overwhelming, exhausting life.

And in one of her last poems, she, Black March, Death comes as an old friend, and he says he will bring her a breath of fresh air, a change for you. So again, it's that same idea of just going away for a rescue, and then maybe you get to come back. Well, there are these drawings. Did they give much to her poems? I think a great deal.

She began drawing in school when she was working as a secretary. They were all gathered together in boxes and then when she was actually writing her poetry and gathering them together for a collection, that would spark off another drawing which would start off another poem. It's true that critics have been rather unsettled by them.

So I think Philip Larkin, when he was writing at length, reviewing her selected poems, thinks they should have ended up more or less in the fire. I think that's perhaps... He ended up as a great fan of hers, didn't he? He did, yes.

I mean, his review from the 60s is probably the first long, serious piece of criticism which says, let's look at this poet and let's take them seriously. Perhaps because of the sense of her being eccentric, he also helps himself to a couple of words or lines from hers. But I think he's also quite dismissive, so talks about the fact that because she writes about cats all the time and because she doodles, she shouldn't be taken seriously.

I mean, I think that actually one of the great things about Stevie Smith is she takes poetry seriously enough to risk not being taken seriously as a poet, which I think is quite rare, actually. And the drawings... Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense, actually, yes. She says in... She has this little statement called My Muse,

and she says the poet is not an important person, which I think is a true... She rouse herself as a sort of conduit. Yeah, which I think fits with her ventriloquism. She's there in the poems, but she's hiding behind all these other voices and characters. Yeah. You know, she says about her novel,

that she can't get away from the self. She can't get away from the first person. It's in the poems that she can create this world. Yeah, and I think the drawings help with that, actually. So they might begin as illustrations in early collections. You know, there's a poem about a cemetery, and we see a drawing illustrating it of people gathered round a tomb. But as we move towards later collections,

they're often more animal faces, human faces. There's a really interesting match, actually, with the very earliest drawings we have from Smith. So she inherited her sister's library, full of scholarly books, and her sister writes all over them. She does scholarly annotations, as if she's going to study university,

and Smith reads them, and all we have are these funny girls' faces that she draws the side of the books, so we can tell that she's looked at the pages, but we have absolutely no idea which she thought about them. And that's sort of a little bit what's happening in the drawings. Yeah, so the drawings are sometimes almost like a kind of comment on the poem, but they're not necessarily illustrations.

I mean, that little poem about Croft, sitting a loft in the loft being soft, It's illustrated, well, is it illustrated by a picture of a figure wearing a dress sitting in an attic? And so the male pronoun is kind of queried by the little portrait next to it. James, if I go through this poem without not waving but drowning, I think we'll be sued. Okay. So, away you go. So sure we have it?

Nobody heard him the dead man, but still he lay moaning. I was much farther 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. Now, why did that catch on? Has it caught on? So, has it got such a grip on anthologies and people's knowledge of her through that one time? I think its repetition is very attractive. It just sums up this idea of, you know, the cliche would be the tears. The

of a clown. It's very simple to memorize. I think a lot of people can easily get it by heart. It expresses a sort of a very British scene, doesn't it? Man dies on holiday going out when the sea's too cold. Do you want to come in? Both of you want to come in. One of her reviewers, Rodney

Ackland, said that if he was somehow made amnesiac by some terrible catastrophe, the only line that remained in his mind after that would be the line not waving but drowning, sort of circling his head repetitiously forever. There's something about the kind of parallelism in that phrase, as Jeremy said, the repetition that makes it utterly memorable, and it's crept into kind of headlines and ever since, even by people who might not have

ever heard of Stevie Smith. This is what Larkin liked in her, that she had this proverbial quality, and it was the collection that that poem appeared in, that Larkin really latched onto. Well, it sort of begins as a newspaper story, which is interesting. So she reads a story in a newspaper which has the opposite account. That's the interesting thing. Yeah. We tell the listeners right away that actually what happened, what really has, and was the opposite of what she said happened. Absolutely. It's a good sort of example, really,

of how Smith turns what she sees around her on its head, and then, of course, it finds its way back into newspapers via the headlines as well. I think it's also the turn in the third standard is really important, too, that we move from this kind of drama of the event of this drowning man to a much more terrifying and horrendous thing, which is daily experience, the fact that we might be too far out all our lives,

and also that sense of miscommunication and misapprehension being so central to what it is to be human and so many of Smith's poems and the power of her novels too is about the kind of very small minor tragedy of daily miscommunication misunderstandings and that sort of shows it very well I think in that poem and the drawing that accompanies that poem is strange

because it is definitely a female figure or it appears to be a figure with long hair rising from the sea almost in resurrection and I think maybe in the last stanza I hope I quoted it right but it changes from the dead man to the dead one almost as though it's a poem about sort of moving out of one's earthly body, which I think is something Smith found fascinating,

the idea that you might sort of be transformed at death. In the background of this conversation so far has been this lonely woman in Palmer's Green and Zion, but actually when public poetry got going and when you sit up on stage and did your poetry, she really got cracking, didn't she? She was a good performer, made people laugh, crowds came, she became popular.

What can you tell us about that? Yeah, well, I think of her career as having this U-shaped because she begins very high novel on yellow paper as a success, her poems are at success, and then basically it dips through the 40s, and she's at a real low point, which is when she writes, not waving but drowning.

But then it starts to come up in the 50s, and she catches this wave of younger poets putting on public readings. You know, poetry reading in public isn't really a thing before the war, and they take her up as this, you know, sort of person from a previous generation, but she's a performer.

I mean, if you hear readings of Smith before an audience, she has them in the palm of her hand, they're laughing, you know, she's obviously pulling faces and gesturing at them. She also sings, so she seems actually... Are you going to imitate at this point? Okay, I will give you the last stanza of one of her poems about death. You will sing it or give it? I will give it in a musical fashion.

She does a sort of play chant. So this is a poem about a woman called Muriel who has lost her friends in high society. She's rather lonely. And the last answer goes, do take Muriel out, although your name is death. She will not complain When you dance her over the blasted heath

Right And the audience then break into applause Of course they did And what else could they do So we have these performances Towards the end She becomes in that sense On that circuit quite famous

And the aura of loneliness Seems to have diminished or disappeared Well in some ways She has a very sociable 60s And this is the point where her aunt is declining in health and suddenly she's travelling the country going to readings from Eaton College to the Royal Albert Hall and that's also the first time that she really takes the stage with other poets she perhaps defiantly says she would normally cross the road rather

than hear a poem and all the way through her life after she leaves noon's in 1953 she's doing lots of book reviewing but she will never really review a book of poetry but once we get to her on stage she's taking the stage with Lowell Robert Lowell with Michael Horowitz and poets who were looking at her in new ways. There's also the sense of kind of costume and performance which comes out in her readings as well. So she would normally wear a Victorian pinafore dress, almost making a feature of the fact that she was much older than everyone else on the stage and from a different generation and from a different time.

She once said to interview her, The times don't want to accommodate me, the times are just going to have to expand to make room for me. And what's really joyful to see over her career, it doesn't track the normal kind of pattern of a poetry career and actually the Times do make room for in the 1960s and suddenly she finds her audience. And she gets the gold medal for poetry

and lacking in Serbia Plath, as it were, admire her and let their admiration be known. So that's pretty good. Yeah, and the connection is interesting too because another sort of poet might make the most of those things. And Sylvia Plath famously writes to her when she moves to London after the end of her marriage, hoping to make some sort of connection.

and she calls herself a desperate Smith addict and really wants to make her connection. And Smith just sort of says, well, it's so nice when poets write to me because I don't really read very much poetry and it's a very sort of dismissive, kind of quite flat response. There's kind of admiration there,

but she wants to be singular throughout. I think she's very important to Plath, though. The most recent biography of Plath notes that when she's writing her poems in autumn 1962, which are the poems that go into Ariel, and she's writing this sort of fabulously inspired poems day after day, she has a smith poem pinned above her desk. Did we do that poem?

Yeah, well, it has a line, it has a couplet in it, which is something like, and I walk rather queerly and comb my long hair, and people say, don't bother about her. And I think you can hear in that a rhythm and a cadence that comes through in those aerial poems. You know, Lady Lazarus by Plath ends, and I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air. She takes to Smith as this defiant female poet. I think it's important when she writes that fan letter. She says, I've been listening to your recordings all weekend. She's hearing this voice, and it's not like anything else she's heard before.

Can each of you sum up what you think her legacy is? Starting with Munary. Smith is one of those poets, I think, that is found by people who need her. So just to kind of take one example at random, I read a poetry collection recently from 2020 by Charlotte Gann called The Girl Who Cryed, and it's deeply embedded in Smith's rhythms. It's also illustrated with little pen and ink drawings. it's engages a lot of the same themes

around kind of despair and death and emotions you can't justify. So what I think is so interesting about Smith is her capacity to kind of vanish from the poetic mainstream for long sort of periods of time, I mean her influences, and then they'll pop up again.

I think as a writer who gives us the option to get the first look in, everybody who reads Smith feels like they're rediscovering her or reading her for the first time. And so she has fans as varied as Ali Smith or Morrissey or Jeanette Winterson. I think her legacy also can be seen in a much more expansive way in terms of a poem being anywhere. So she could make a poem happen in a review or in a novel.

And lots of her works are actually sort of prose poems. And in contemporary writing, this is something which is much more possible. I think perhaps another thing to think about is the idea that anything could be a subject for a poem. That's one thing's Larkin really admires about her. She can take a pot shot at anything, the most ordinary thing, and make it into a poem. And I think we're much more comfortable now with the idea that anyone could be a poet, anything could be a poem and I think that's really Smith's work.

Finally. Yeah, I think to pick up on that, the idea I think anything can be in a poem, I think people respond strongly to the way in which Smith is a poet of love, but unconventional love, love for other things. You know, love for the aunt, love for animals, she writes about wonderfully,

just love for something that is not a human relationship. I mean, there's a great poem called Lady Rogue Singleton begins with a man proposing marriage and she says, I cannot make you happy, darling, or give you the babies you want, I would always very much rather, dear, live in a tent. And basically her love is safari.

I cannot feel for you what I feel for the elephants and the miasmas and the general view. I think it's a good ending there, Jeremy. Thank you very much. Jeremy L. Todd, Will May and Irene Massoud, and our studio engineer Emma Haarth. Next week, the genius of Paul Airdosh, who invented whole new branches of mathematics.

Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So, what did you not say you'd like to have said? What did we say? We didn't want to have said. The first one first. Smith and Friendship. She thinks about getting married early on, but for her, the rhythm of friendship is coming and going. She likes to get on with people, but not for too long.

And I was thinking, you know, these days she would be the sort of friend that you didn't hear from from ages and then suddenly you'd get lots of texts. And I think that living on the edge that Norin's talked about is how she liked to maintain her relationship. But what sort of edge was it? What sort of edge? Where are you saying living on the edges? Does that mean she's

she feels she's in peril? What do you mean about the edge? She said she felt as though life was enemy territory and I think perhaps there's a sense that she, in Palmer's Green she was living on the edge of it and maybe beyond, you know, it was the edge of the world that you would fall off. But London was

also very exciting to her too for her literary life. So she liked to be able to go in but she liked to be able to come away again. Just to come on that idea of a friendship as well, it's often not those ordinary relations which are much heralded in poetry and prose. So actually just thinking about the acute pains and kind of difficulties of friendship that comes

through quite a bit in her work. I think as well, as a lyric poet, she's very interested because of going forwards and backwards in time in thinking about things recollected a long time ago. So she has a wonderful set of lyrics where she's kind of, I suppose, thinking about thoughts recollected in anxiety, where she has this kind of elderly man thinking about a former lover and saying, I took fright,

I suppose, when you're unkind. And all I know now is, if you should say that now, I should not mind. The capacity to feel angry, exaggerated and sad, the years have taken from me, softly I go, no, pad, pad. So the sense of how through time and space and through our lives, we really, we accommodate our sense of the world is there as well. Yes, I think she does that very well. And that's a poem where her rhythms really mark that movement in time because the first part of the poem, you just quoted the end there, Will, it's almost like a limerick.

I remember your beautiful flowers and the beautiful kimono you wore when you sat on your couch with a tigrish crouch and told me you love me no more. And then there's the second half of the poem which falls almost into prose. It's very flattened and disillusioned. I think rhyme is a really key thing as well, which we've sort of talked about by the side, but it's one of her great things along with those metrical tricks, so things like rhyming, I don't know, orthodox and shut in a box,

or hippopotamus and lost in the fuss. And they're kind of rhymes that most poets wouldn't dare do because they seem almost kind of quite learish or carol-like. Or over simple. Or over simple, yeah, absolutely, yeah, or Ogden Nash. And of course, Ogden Nash had his own rhyme about Smith as well. We haven't talked much about the novels, really. So where you go?

Yeah. At a time in the world. Yeah. And the novels are. Smith has this reputation of being kind of frivolous and childlike, but the novels are really incredibly, and I think unnervingly for some people, embedded in their political context. The first two, a novel on Yellow Paper published in 1936,

and over the frontier, which comes out in 1938, they're both really concerned with the kind of the rites of Nazism in Germany. But more interestingly beyond that, they're interested in the kind of culpability and susceptibility to rhetoric of British people in the face of that. I think we have now quite a comforting, nostalgic narrative about how British people responded in the face of Nazism. But the way that Smith presents herself in those novels is as somebody who's very anti-Semitic, who has a lot of Jewish friends,

but also feels sort of fundamentally superior to them. It's very acute and over the frontier when somebody mentions the Jews and she says, I am in despair for the racial hatred that is running in me in a sudden swift current. So it's, again, that's not quite self-aware. She lives to regret that. Oh, but very much. What I think, you know, absolutely. I think what's so interesting there, though, is that honesty about the fact that intellectually you can have,

you know, she had certain kind of commitments to anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, and yet her susceptibility, I suppose, to the structural racism of the time, the kind of, yeah, the contemporary currents of anti-Semitism. She's quite, rather than pretending that she isn't susceptible to that rhetoric, she kind of centres it and talks about it, rather than denying it. One of the main plot twist in novel with Yellow, paper, novel on yellow paper, is that it begins with this very casual

expression of anti-Semitism. And then about halfway through. Can you remember very... Well, she says, you know, sort of, I feel like an intelligent goy among all these Jewish people I'm at a party with, and she just sort of expresses her casual feeling of superiority. Hurrah to be a gau. Yeah.

But then she goes to Germany, as Smith actually did, and she sees, it's Vimar Germany, but she sees the rise of Nazism, and she says, I felt real wicked about the thoughts I'd had about Jewish people halfway through the novel. It doesn't stop her losing Jewish friends though because she puts

these thoughts into print and they read them. And even later in the 1940s in her short story beside the seaside, she's got characters expressing really horrible anti-Semitic views. Yeah, that loses her friends as well. What effect did that have on her readers? Well, she certainly, I think it was Betty Miller who stopped speaking to her after

after she published that short story. The first paragraph of her first novel ends with goodbye to all my beautiful friends because of liable the sense in which they might be finding their way into stories and ways they've been uncomfortable with. The third novel seems to me really extraordinary attempt, The Holiday, which appears in 1949, but she writes it during the war and then can't find a publisher.

And oddly, when it does appear, all the references to the war are changed to the post-war, so it exists in this sort of limbo time where they're obviously doing war work, but the war is over. But it seems to me the thing she's really grappling with theirs, as she's grappling with Nazi Germany in the 30s novels, is the end of empire, and particularly the end of the British Raj. And the central chapter is a debate about this, the rights and wrongs of it,

and she gives her narrator an Indian childhood, which she didn't have. So she actually invents these memories. And again, she just allows different points of view to be expressed. She doesn't really know what she feels about it. She can see the emotional attachments and the rational arguments. But what's weird about it is that it appears in 1949, doesn't make any reference to partition. It seems to exist almost in this dream English world

where the empire both still is something that everybody's concerned with and is something that is passing. And so you get wonderful lines in the holiday, like how long, because she just changed, as you say, references to war into post-war. You have wonderful lines like, how long will the post-war last?

Shall we win the post-war? And it's, as you say, a dream-like atmosphere with the kind of intensity and interminableness of war itself. The holiday is very dreamlike, and it bears an interesting relationship to a short story that she published, I think in 1947,

where the same characters are repurposed, but over the course of the novel, they kind of turn into children and disclose at the end that they've been dead for ages. And then again, in the radio play, 10 years later, you have the same kind of parts

of the novel turn up again in a different form. Did she, in her lifetime, get the applause that, I suppose, she thought she married it? all writers expect that they merit enormous applause, don't they?

I think in the 60s she did, and she enjoyed it. And, you know, I think it's wonderful that we have these recordings. As I say, after she's read a poem or two and the audience have sort of got the measure and she kind of warms them up with a couple of funny ones, then they're, you know, they're clapping wildly after each poem. I suspect not every poet, you know, got that reception. I do feel, though, that her last book, Scorpion and other poems,

which appears posthumously, it has been slightly overlooked as a masterpiece. I just think it's such a wonderful collection of poems and she does things in that book which are actually pushing at her style. She writes these long poems. She writes this poem called Angel Bowley which is a response to the Moors murders

and it's this very intense unrhyming fairy tale about whether it's right in certain circumstances to kill in order to see justice done. She has that long poem about Christianity that I mentioned as a collection I feel it should really be valued in itself and it tends to get rather lost into the selected poems that have been made available.

When you get a collected poem, you're surprised at how many there are, aren't you really? Because I think there's a simple enough it should be a simple, slim collection, it isn't? John Bailey writes wonderfully about this. He says it's a good thing there are so many poems in which we addicts can immerse ourselves. And again, I think of the 1934 reader E.B.

for Curtis Brown, who writes in italics in the report, are so many. And it always makes me think of, you know, Jude the obscure, you know, I've done this because we are so many. There were just too many poems in this kind of deathly flood. But she loves that bit in Thomas Hardy. She's really fascinated by Old Father Time, who's the child who kills all the other children. Yeah, she thinks of her poems in her key. Do you remember how he spells many? M-E-N-N-N-Y. Yeah, she often relied on editors as well to help her select which poems are going into the book.

So it really also has the sense of here are some poems in a box, here are some drawings, let's gather them together. And she has this really ambivalent relationship with the drawings where, you know, not waving but drowning the book, the publisher wants to do it without the drawings, and she agrees. And then she says, no, I'd rather withdraw the book than see it appear without the drawings. She threatens to give her royalty check back, which if you've not been published for a long time and suddenly Dan Et Hill is, you know, promising to publish your work, that's a very brave thing to do.

It was almost compulsive. She describes it as a kind of compulsive relationship she has to producing the drawings. She describes in one letter, I got really excited and I did loads more drawings and now my room is covered, my office looks like a paper chase. It was as though she couldn't help producing these drawings. Then she kept them in the biscuit tin, didn't she? Yeah, she does them on scraps of paper. A publisher once offered to give her good quality drawing paper, and she says she wouldn't be able to draw on that.

It has to be these sort of things in the margins. Good. Well, that's very good. I think we've got as much as we need. The producer will come and tell us that. We've got as much as we need. I love a cup of tea. I'd love a cup of tea, thank you.

Yes, please. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Introducing gaslight. I think there's something peculiar about this house. A new drama from BBC Radio 4. The gas lights over there above the fireplace. Yes. I wonder if mummy might be trying to get in touch.

Is the light playing tricks on you? Or is it just your mind? What if we both sold this place and you got a job in one of those little colleges that would be pleased to have you. You don't really believe that, do you? I'm trying to be kind. Like you were with the dog. How much do you really know about the person we love?

Is there something I should know about, Jack? No. I didn't put a foot wrong. And how much can we rely? Quite a bit younger than you appear to be on screen. On the kindness of strangers. And you look like you've been crying. Gaslight.

You can't talk to me like that. I don't even know who you are. Available on BBC Sounds.