Smith, Stevie (1902–1971)

British novelist, book reviewer, short-story writer, and "poet of frozen anguish." Name variations: Florence Margaret Smith; Peggy Smith. Born Florence Margaret Smith in Hull, Yorkshire, England, on September20, 1902; died of a brain tumor in Ashburton, Devonshire, England, on March 7, 1971; second daughter of Charles Ward Smith and Ethel (Spear) Smith; never married; no children.

Father deserted family (1903); moved to London suburb of Palmers Green (1906); enrolled in private school, Palmers Green High School and Kindergarten (1907); enrolled in North London Collegiate School for Girls (1917); worked as secretary for London publishing firm (1923–53); began writing poetry (1924); had six poems published in New Statesman (1935); published Novel on Yellow Paper (1936); attempted suicide (1953); received the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry (1966); awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II (1969).

Selected writings:

Novel on Yellow Paper (London: Cape, 1936; NY: Morris, 1937); A Good Time Was Had By All (London & Toronto: Cape, 1937); Over the Frontier (London: Cape, 1938); Tender Only to One (London: Cape, 1938); Mother, What Is Man? (London & Toronto: Cape, 1942); The Holiday (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949); Harold's Leap (London: Chapman & Hall, 1950); Not Waving but Drowning (London: Deutsch, 1957); (illustrated by Smith) Some Are More Human Than Others: Sketchbook (London: Gaberbocchus, 1958); (illustrated and with an introduction by Smith) Cats in Colour (London: Batsford, 1959; NY: Viking, 1960); Selected Poems (London: Longmans, Green, 1962; Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1964); The Frog Prince and Other Poems (London: Longmans, Green, 1966); The Best Beast (NY: Knopf, 1969); (edited) The Poet's Garden (NY: Viking, 1970); (edited) The Batsford Book of Children's Verse (London: Batsford, 1970); Scorpion and Other Poems (London: Longman, 1972); The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (London: Allen Lane, 1975; NY: Oxford University Press, 1976); (edited by Jack Barbera and William McBrien) Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (London: Virago, 1981; NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982).

A few months before Stevie Smith tried to commit suicide, she wrote her famous poem about a dead man who says to a living acquaintance who stood on the shore while he drowned, "I was much too far out all my life/ And not waving but drowning." In these two poignant lines, Smith sums up her own condition, the unconventional Victorian, the prim and proper eccentric, the lonely woman who longed for public recognition yet resented any intrusion into her private commonplace life. She was an anomaly as a human being, a poet who achieved her lofty literary goal and a woman to whom "being alive is like being in enemy territory." In her world, Stevie Smith saw herself, too, as "not waving but drowning."

Stevie Smith has been described as "one of the most musical British poets of the century"; she has also been labeled "an airhead and an egghead" and a misanthrope. In the 1960s, Smith was a literary celebrity, a kind of cult figure among youthful radicals. Conservative, reclusive, and frugal, she endured loneliness and disappointment, labored at her boring job as a secretary for 30 years, and "suffered from her ambivalence toward [religious] faith." As "one of the most consistent and most elusive of poets," Stevie Smith is currently the most anthologized British female poet. If her private life was prosaic and regimented, her poetry allowed her to soar above the dour reality of her daily existence.

Florence Margaret Smith, then known as Peggy, was born in 1902 into a middle-class family in Hull, Yorkshire. Her mother Ethel Spear Smith was the daughter of a successful engineer, a "frail romantic," who married the handsome Charles Ward Smith, a man "with a taste for drink and wanderlust." He was employed by his family's coal-exporting business, but he longed for adventure, to go to sea. In 1906, when Smith was four years old, Charles abandoned his wife and two daughters and went to sea. Although he and Ethel never divorced, Charles rarely contacted his family and never provided them any financial support. Throughout her life, Stevie Smith resented his "defection" which made her wary of men and their sense of commitment. Ethel, her sister Margaret Spear , and the girls moved from Hull to London; with a small legacy from Ethel's father, they took up residence in the London suburb of Palmers Green. Stevie lived in the house at 1 Avondale Road—what she called "a house of female habitation"—for the rest of her life.

In London, Stevie and her sister Molly (born in 1901) attended private schools. At age five, Stevie contracted tubercular peritonitis and spent time in a convalescent home. She was an average student; she received a prize for literature in high school but no scholarship for a university education. Molly graduated from the university and became a teacher, while Stevie took a six-month secretarial course in London. Smith's lack of academic achievement was a source of shame which she tried to remedy by becoming a voracious reader. She devoured the classics and read D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf , and French criticism, but consciously avoided reading contemporary poetry: "one will get the lines crossed and begin writing their poems and they will begin writing one's own," she stated. Stevie would be a writer, a poet, and she would be original, uninfluenced by other modern poets. The demure female Smith household was religious, members of the Anglican Church. Smith eventually regarded herself as an "Anglican agnostic"; she was not certain God existed, but He "made humankind less lonely in the universe." And that included Stevie.

Ogden Nash">

Who and what is Stevie Smith?

Is she woman?

Is she myth?

—Ogden Nash

In February 1919, Ethel Smith died; Charles showed up at his wife's funeral, displaying uncharacteristic grief; the next year, he remarried. His second wife called him "Tootles" which elicited Smith to remark, "if he can inspire someone to call him Tootles, there must be things about him I don't see." Stevie never reconciled with her father and found she was just "too busy" to attend his funeral 30 years later. Stevie's Aunt Margaret became the center of her life, her greatest love on whom she could always depend. Molly was teaching in Suffolk, and when she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1928, Stevie was disturbed, but it made her give serious consideration to religion which is amply demonstrated in her writing.

While Molly had a university degree and a career, Stevie had to settle for work as a secretary; in 1923, she became private secretary to Sir Neville Pearson, chair of a publishing firm in London. During slack periods in her often undemanding, humdrum work, Smith began writing poems. Having read almost a book a day for years, she had broadened her horizons and her knowledge of literature and style. However, it would be 11 years before she had anything published, and it would be a novel, not poetry. In the meantime, she toiled at her "demeaning" job, lived with her maiden aunt in the dull London suburb, and dreamed of entering the exalted ranks of the British literary set.

Love and men did not figure prominently in Smith's personal life, but she did have two brief, unsatisfactory love affairs before rejecting the idea of marriage. On a trip to Germany in 1931, she met Karl Eckinger, a handsome Swiss-German graduate student whom she had known in London. He was a great admirer of all things German, but Stevie was not, and this led to their break up. In Berlin, she stayed with Jewish friends and was shaken when she saw a swastika painted on their doorpost. The Nazis were already a frightful presence, and Smith began to despise Germany, an attitude she held for the rest of her life. Stevie has been accused of being anti-Semitic because of remarks that appeared in her Novel on Yellow Paper. She did think Jews "weren't really English" and were "pushy," a view not uncommon in England at the time.

A year later, Smith met her second handsome lover, Eric Armitage, with whom she was physically, but not emotionally, compatible. They became informally engaged, but Eric expected to acquire a conventional wife, a role that a nascent poet could never accept. As Smith expressed it, "Marriage, I think/ For women/ Is the best of opiates./ It kills the thoughts" (from Me Again, 1981). She came to regard men in general as "tomcats" though she had several male friends during her lifetime. Moreover, she had a negative reaction to children: "Thank heaven they aren't mine." She had a similar attitude towards cats. Smith was not a modern feminist, but she was aware of and had experienced the consequences of a male-dominated world. She wanted men to be fair, kind, and supportive; however, in truth, she found them "generally inadequate, unfeeling, and destructive." Her irresponsible father and her lovers only served to reinforce her beliefs.

The first poems Smith submitted to a literary agent were rejected for their "dubious literary quality," their "ugliness" and "snobbishness." Her first success came in 1935, when David Garnett published six of her poems in the New Statesman. When she approached the firm of Chatto and Windus about publishing a book of verse, they suggested she first write a novel. She did; in six weeks, Smith completed Novel on Yellow Paper (typed on yellow office paper, hence the name). However, it was turned down as "too quixotic, not structured enough, and without commercial possibilities." Stevie persevered, and the manuscript was finally accepted by Jonathan Cape; it was widely reviewed and well received. The heroine of the novel, Pompey Casmilus, a fictional version of Stevie Smith, also appears in the sequel, Over the Frontier (1938). Pompey lived with a maiden aunt in a suburb of London, had a boring job and unsatisfactory relationships. Critics recognized the novels as autobiographical, and the same was true of her first book of poetry, A Good Time Was Had by All, published by Cape in 1938.

Stevie enthusiastically embraced her sudden fame and became a member of the London literary

scene. A curious change in her behavior at this time has been associated with her newly acknowledged talent; she began to dress like an adolescent schoolgirl (she was 36), to talk baby talk, and to act mischievously. In literary circles it was said she "wanted to be spoiled," to be "fawned over and doted upon like a precious child." This peculiar behavior became more pronounced with time; it would appear that this child-like persona permeates her writing, too. One critic noted that her work "has the air of an odd, only, lonely child."

It is not surprising that death was a recurring theme in Smith's writing. The rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and the coming of World War II in 1939, had a profound effect on her. She saw "war and aggression as immature male games," but instead of withdrawing into a safe protective shell during the war years, Stevie became an air-raid warden and fire watcher in London. After working all day, she went home to have dinner with her aunt, then back to London to report on fires from the intense German bombing which destroyed many parts of the city. It was dangerous, exhausting work, but despite the awful conditions she continued to write.

Though Stevie was "not a natural novelist," she began her last novel, The Holiday, which was published in 1949 after seven years of rewriting and revisions. Again, her heroine, Celia, is "a Stevie reincarnation," but the novel was not successful. Her only book of poetry to appear during the war years was Mother, What is Man? (1942) which, as usual, dealt with "her explorations of her fears of both death and life." Smith also joined PEN, the international writers' organization that was active in bringing writers and editors out of German-occupied areas of Europe.

Wartime inflation forced Stevie to supplement her regular salary. She began to review books and tried to obtain a position with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Her employer discouraged her from seeking work at the BBC, saying she didn't speak clearly and had a lisp; he most likely didn't want to lose a valuable employee who would be hard to replace due to the wartime labor shortage. Smith had hoped she might read her prose and poetry on the Overseas Program at the BBC which was run by the British novelist George Orwell, author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). It is believed that Smith and Orwell had an affair, although he was married at the time. They shared conservative, anti-Communist views, but Orwell did nothing to help Smith become a reader on the program. She was angry and exacted her revenge in her novel The Holiday, where Orwell is satirized in the character of Basil Tate with an intimation of homosexuality. After the war, Stevie's short stories similarly alienated friends who were objects of her cynical, sarcastic view of human relations. She also began to give public readings of her poetry in her distinctive sing-song voice, both for the money and the public acclaim it brought. By 1949, she was reading her work on BBC broadcasts.

In the 1950s, Stevie Smith was no longer fashionable. Harold's Leap (1950) sold poorly even for a book of verse. She wanted to quit her secretarial job and go into editing; it is indicative of the times that the publishing firm for which she worked did not think to offer this published writer an editorial position. In addition to working full-time and reviewing books, Stevie was caring for her Aunt Margaret who was almost immobile. Moreover, she could not get any of her writings published, she had a painful knee injury, and she had tax problems. In April 1953, Smith wrote "Not Waving but Drowning," a solemn, muted cry of desperation. Three months later, she slashed her wrists in an unsuccessful suicide attempt as she sat at her desk in her office. In another poem, "The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton," she writes of the lonely "dove of peace" who sits in its nest "Murmuring solitary/ Crying for pain, Crying most melancholy/ Again and again."

After Stevie retired from the publishing firm, she became a full-time writer, and with the publication of Not Waving but Drowning in 1957, she once again gained public recognition. Her work fit into the "French theater of the absurd" which was currently in vogue. Books of her drawings (Some Are More Human Than Others, 1958, and Cats in Colour, 1959) brought greater awareness of her creativity. Cats is uncharacteristically humorous: "Cats are like children," Stevie wrote, "more interesting when observed, and most adorable when they are someone else's." The BBC produced her radio play, A Turn Outside, in 1959, and she frequently appeared on radio programs which increased her audience.

The early 1960s were dominated by health problems, an operation on her knee and removal of a benign breast tumor. But the decade also brought Smith the critical acclaim she craved. Selected Poems (1962) and inclusion in Penguin Modern Poets 8 (1966) brought her an offer to undertake a poetry tour in the United States; she declined, citing her diminished energy. Her poems now appeared in leading American periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic Monthly, and were translated into French and German. When The Frog Prince and Other Poems appeared in 1966, Stevie was called "the most original poet writing in English today." The poems mainly deal with man's relationship to God and with death: "For those who suffer, death is freedom," she declared. And death was "a lover to be embraced most gladly." If God were dead, as many claimed in the postwar period, death was the only god there was. Sanford Sternlicht notes Smith "wanted to believe" in God, in Christianity: "She allowed God his maleness but feminized Him too. He could rule her universe, but it had better be through love." But Stevie did not accept the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell—"Hell is humanity," she decided (like Jean-Paul Sartre's "Hell is other people"). She rejected the idea of an afterlife and eternal damnation, the Biblical account of Creation, and that "scripture was divinely inspired." However, as she told her friend Kay Dick , she was "a backslider as a non-believer." Smith's ambivalence towards God is clearly stated in her poem "God the Eater": "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."

In 1966, Stevie Smith received the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, a recognition of her achievements by fellow writers. Two years later, The Best Beast was issued, and, in November 1969, Stevie was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Queen Elizabeth II personally made the formal presentation of the award during a private audience. For this momentous occasion, Smith bought a hat at a rummage sale at her church; at Buckingham Palace, she met with the queen for 20 minutes.

Aunt Margaret with whom Stevie had lived in the "house of female habitation" since 1906, did not live to see her niece receive the Gold Medal; she died in March 1968, at the age of 96. Smith continued to live, alone, in "the Victorian relic" that she called "her fortress and her cave." She would neither move nor renovate the house on Avondale Road. Stevie continued to give poetry readings, to write poetry, and to review books. In April 1970, she fell, cracked three ribs and injured her knee. That November, she went to stay with her sister Molly, who had had a stroke in 1969, in Devonshire. By early January 1970, Stevie was seriously ill; she was told that she had an inoperative malignant brain tumor. She died in Ashburton Hospital in March 1971, at age 68. As early as 1937, Stevie had envisioned an end to existence, to her own life; she had determined that "When I have had enough/ I will arise/ And go unto my Father/ And I will say to Him:/ Father, I have had enough."

According to Sternlicht, "Stevie Smith … was a wounded she-devil savaging male privilege, and a gay, witty woman enjoying her gender role in a patriarchal society while spoofing it." Her poetry continued to attract new readers for she spoke to human concerns in simple, basic, non-academic language. The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith was published in 1975, and a few years later Virago Press republished her novels. Stevie, a play about her life by Hugh Whitemore, was staged successfully in London in 1977, and the next year a film version was produced, starring Glenda Jackson who had met and liked Stevie and had read her poetry publicly.

Like Emily Dickinson , Stevie Smith "created her own circumscribed world, one whole and coherent, if slightly tilted." In this slightly skewed world of her construction, wrote Sternlicht, "animals are always good and people seldom … angels try to understand humans instead of vice versa … men are insufficient and women never learn the fact … and loneliness is the steady companion." In her three novels and nine volumes of poetry, she speaks intensely of human anxieties and fears, but her readers come to realize that "Stevie's not drowning but waving."

sources:

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 20: British Poets, 1914–1945. Edited by Donald E. Stanford. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1983.

In Search of Stevie Smith. Edited and with an introduction by Sanford Sternlicht. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

Sternlicht, Sanford. Stevie Smith. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

suggested reading:

Barbera, Jack, and William McBrien. Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith. London: Heinemann, 1985.

——, and Helen Bajan. Stevie Smith: A Bibliography. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1987.

Dick, Kay. Ivy and Stevie: Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith. London: Duckworth, 1971, Allison and Busby, 1983.

Rankin, Arthur. The Poetry of Stevie Smith: Little Girl Lost. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1985.

Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Biography. NY: W.W. Norton, 1989.

related media:

Stevie: A Play from the Life and Work of Stevie Smith by Hugh Whitemore, produced in London (1977).

Stevie (102 min. film), starring Glenda Jackson, Mona Washburne , Alec McCowen, and Trevor Howard, based on the play by Hugh Whitemore, produced in England by Bowen-First Artists, 1978.

Jeanne A. Ojala , Visiting Scholar, Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Professor Emerita, Department of History, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah