| 00:08 |
Hannah McGregor: |
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. One of the main goals of the Spoken Web podcast is to tell the stories behind a big research project in a different kind of way. Usually all you get to see of research is what comes out at the end, an impenetrable monograph or a series of densely cited articles. And those can leave the impression that scholarly work is birthed whole like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. Or if you’re like most people, they’ll leave no impression at all because you’re probably not reading them. So we started this project with a question. What kind of stories will podcasting let us tell? This month’s episode is telling a different kind of story than what we’ve heard so far. The story of one particular writer and the enduring impact of her work on generations of women. Over the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which tells the story of an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover is based on Elizabeth’s real life relationship with the poet George Barker, but its enduring impact, lies in its lyricism and passionate intensity. After publishing By Grand Central Station smart lapsed into a 30-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single parented four children. In this poetic reflection episode producer, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station, and the obstacles that prevented Smart from recreating its brilliance. Here is Myra Bloom with episode four: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart. |
| 02:35 |
Audio Recording: |
I thought, if it’s agreeable to you that I’d read a chapter book I wrote called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. And this is about a couple of people, in case you haven’t read it well they fall in love they’re dancing away across America as in love. |
| 03:18 |
Myra Bloom: |
I first encountered the writer Elizabeth Smart in a time of great passion. I was 19 and reading her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for an undergraduate class. Her description of a transcendent, debilitating obsession captured what I was going through at the time. The beautiful harrowing torment of first love. By Grand Central Station details a love affair that comes to an end as hyperbolically as it began. As the title implies, it ends with the narrator pregnant, bereft, and crying out to her lover, who by this point has returned to his wife. I would soon come to relate to these darker feelings too, as my own relationship combusted, albeit under less salacious circumstances. I’m pretty sure there’s a direct line between my feelings about this novel and my decision to teach literature for a living. I wanted to talk to other women who had been similarly affected by the novel. I sought out writers and filmmakers who had written or made films about Elizabeth or were planning to do so to ask them what drew them to her. I expected that their stories would sound similar to mine, that they would tell me tales of great loves, loved and lost. I was planning an anthropological study of female passion, but those weren’t the stories they told me. |
| 04:51 |
Sina Queyras: |
There was only Vancouver Island when I was living in the rainforest and they had a cabin and I could see through the wall and it would just rain and rain and rain and rain. |
| 04:59 |
Myra Bloom: |
This is poet and professor Sina Queyras |
| 05:03 |
Sina Queyras: |
And I was sitting there reading this, somebody sent it to me, my friend Rita whos a fellow from creative writing, sent me this book and that had been, I mean the reason she sent it to me was I loved Marguerite Duras’ A Lover and they’re sister books, right? They’re totally sister books. But the surprising thing about the Smart, it was that like there’s just no Canadian voice that’s anywhere near the depth of feeling and just the intellectual precariousness like she’s so present but also vulnerable and self propelled. There’s just nothing. I mean, I guess Margaret Lawrence, but that’s not ecstatic like By Grand Central Station is just so ecstatic. So I know that going forward it was like, it’s like Sappho, it’s like Sappho wrote a novel. |
| 06:20 |
Kim Echlin: |
My name is Kim Echlin. I’m the author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fuge Essay on Women and Creativity, and I was drawn to Elizabeth Smart first because of her great passionate love affair with George Barker. But then that quickly led me down to a much more complex story and it is the story of her as exile in England, as writer, as mother and as a single woman earning a living. Romantic love is by definition irrational. It means sexual passion, the love of beauty, the potential for destruction, the taste of immortality. It is obsessive. Sometimes it flickers briefly, deliciously. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Its destructiveness evident even to the lovers themselves. Yet, lovers are loath to give up romantic love. Lovers believe they are most alive and it’s embrace. With strange pleasure we watch ill-matched lovers devour each other. They believe that their love is their very life force. I think about passionate, romantic love when I consider Bluebeard’s castle or some of John Donne’s poetry or Wagner Tristan und Isolde or such novels as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera. I think of a different kind of love, one that still has no name. When I think of some of Samuel Beckett’s characters and of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Rosalind ironically and wittily says to the object of her desire, “love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as mad man do, and the reason why there are not so punished and cured is the lunacy is so ordinary that the wipers are in love too.” Elizabeth wrote this ordinary lunacy in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but her telling is extraordinary. Just as Rosalind tells love in a fresh way from a woman’s point of view disguised as a boy, the narrator of By Grand Central Station tells love in a fresh way from the point of view of an unmarried pregnant woman, but before Elizabeth wrote it, she had to live it. |
| 08:39 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical emotion of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow, but I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone: it leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces: everyone compromises. They say, as we grow older, we embrace resignation, but oh, they talked her into it blind and unprotesting and from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there’s no redemption. It’s the sin of damnation. What except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tiger shark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every impossible side. The senses deliver the unbearable into sleep. And it ceases, except that it appears gruesomely at the edges of my dreams making ghastly sigils, which wear away peace, but which I can’t understand. The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end, it had operatic grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station, like a Judgment Day. It was more iron muscle than Samson in his moment of revelation, it might’ve shown me all Dante’s dream, but there was no way to endure. |
| 10:15 |
Myra Bloom: |
And what did it mean for you, for Elizabeth smart to be the subject of your first film? Is that important to you? |
| 10:22 |
Maya Gallus: |
It was important to me. My mother was an artist and I saw her struggle as an artist and a mother, also a single parent. |
| 10:31 |
Myra Bloom: |
Documentary filmmaker, Maya Gallus. |
| 10:35 |
Maya Gallus: |
So I think that Elizabeth represented some of those elements for me as well because I was trying to figure out how to be a woman and an artist in the world. And it seemed to me that women of my mother’s generation and previously of Elizabeth’s generation really had this conflict and dilemma about being able to stake their claim in what is largely a male-dominated world. And also then the additional challenges of being a mother. So I was kind of figuring all of that out and Elizabeth’s writings really spoke to me because she really went into the nub of that in a lot of her work and her poems, you know, a poem like The Muse: His and Hers, I still find is very relevant in many ways. I mean, we still are living in a male-dominated world and people are speaking about it a little more openly now than before. And perhaps people are more willing to listen to what women have to say and recognize that actually women have something important to say about life and art and love. |
| 11:54 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
No, I would like to read you a little poem that most amazingly I wrote last week. It just sort of popped out and lo and behold, it’s a feminist poem. I hope this won’t give any offense. Right? Anyhow, it’s called The Muse: His and Hers. His pampered Muse / Knew no veto. / Hers lived / In a female ghetto. / When his Muse cried / He replied / Loud and clear / Yes! Yes! I’m waiting here. / Her Muse screamed / But children louder. / Then which strength / Made her prouder? / Neither. Either / Pushed and shoved / With the strength of the loved / and the, unloved, / Clashed rebuked. / All was wrong. / (Can you put opposites / into the song?) / Kettles boiling! /Cobwebs coiling! / Doorbells ringing! / Needs haranguing! / Her Muse called / In her crowded ear / She heard but had / Her dirty house to clear. / Guilt drove him on. / Guilt held her down. / (She hadn’t a wife / to lean upon.) The dichotomy was killing me. She said till old age came to assuage. Now Muse, now you can have your way. No, what was it I want him to say? And used, abused and not amused. The mind’s gone blank. Is it life you have to thank? Stevie, the Emily’s, Mrs. Woolf bypass the womb and kept the self, but she said, try and see if it’s true and without cheating. My muse can do. Can women do. Can women make when the womb rests animus awake. Pale at my space starved and thin like hibernating bear too weak to begin to roar with authority. Poems in the spring so late in the autumn of their suffering. Those gaps. It’s decades of lying low earthquakes, deep frozen mind askew is it too late at 68? Oh fragile, fresh reanimate, oh flabby teetering body concentrate. Astute, true woman, any late profligacy squandered on the loving of people and other irrelevancy useful in the dark in articulacy. But drop it like poison now if you want poetry. Let the doorbell ring, let the fireman put out the fire or light it up again. Sheepish and shamefaced at 9:00 AM till the Muse commands her ritual hymn. See lucky man, get off his knee. And hear now his roar of authority. This test case woman could also be just in time for a small cacophony, a meaningful screen between folded womb and grave. A brief respite from the enclave. |
| 15:31 |
Rosemary Sullivan: |
I remember one wonderful moment when Elizabeth and I went to this reading. |
| 15:39 |
Myra Bloom: |
This is Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth Smart’s biographer. |
| 15:43 |
Rosemary Sullivan: |
And it was by Mavis Gallant, who of course one admires deeply and it was amusing to see how jealous Elizabeth was because, you know, she’d written a great book when she was in her late twenties, and then she didn’t write again for 30 years. She used to say, when asked her who she was, she’d say, I’m my son, Sebastian, the poet’s mother. And when we talked about this in detail, she did say, and this is quote that she felt that the Maestro of the masculine was sitting on her shoulder telling her she could never be good enough. So she had sought out George Barker because he wrote the kind of poetry she wanted to write. And then George, being a poet of his era in the tradition of not TS Eliot, but Dylan Thomas, you know, kind of knocked her down and she said that she needed to be knocked down because she came from this wonderfully arrogant position of a debutante in Ottawa put forward by her mother, hobnobbing with the prime minister’s set and so on. She said “I needed to be knocked down a little bit, but not nearly as much as George knocked me down.” And of course you ask her, well, why did you keep, what was it about George that was so seductive? And she said, “Oh God, he had such a sense of humor.” So I did meet George. |
| 17:18 |
Myra Bloom: |
What was he like? |
| 17:18 |
Rosemary Sullivan: |
Exactly what she said. He was with his last wife, Elspeth you know, that he had – this could not happen now – he had five wives, two of them legal, 15 children, and then they all adored him, because the creative male was given a kind of permission that can’t be given today. But here I was at Elspeth’s and she was lovely, there was a point at which she had tried to get Elizabeth to take George back, she was so fed up with him, but it didn’t work. And she was teaching, she was a Latin teacher, even though she had at one point aspired to be a poet. But again, that was part of the time, if you wanted to be creative, you were creative vicariously through a man. Right? |
| 18:06 |
Rosemary Sullivan: |
Yes, you in another of your poems, you talk about, this is the trying to write one, that you had last night. You talk about it being unfeminine to write. |
| 18:21 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Yes. Yes. And somebody asked me last night, too, about why I said that love was parallel. You see, I do feel very, I’ve always been thinking about that, that you really have to be ruthless to write, and it isn’t, so it isn’t a loving thing. And of course we all want to be good perhaps, but they do conflict: if you’re good, you’re not ruthless, you always take it from somebody else. They want to come in and tell you about their troubles, you’re writing, you don’t say “No, off, I’m busy.” You say “Come in!” And listen to them. |
| 18:54 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
This is called Trying To Write. Why am I so frightened / To say I’m me / And publicly acknowledge / My small mastery? / Waited for sixty years / Till the people take out the horses / And draw me to the theatre/ With triumphant voices? / I know this won’t happen / Until it’s too late / And the deed done (or not done) / So I prevaricate, / Egging them on, and keeping / Roads open (just in case) / Go on! Go on and do / It in my place! / Giving love to get it / (The only way to behave). / But hated and naked / Could I stand up and say / Fuck off! or, be my slave? / To be in a very unfeminine / Very unloving state / Is the desperate need / Of anyone trying to write. |
| 19:54 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
And so in fact, goodness and art are parallel and can never meet. That was my theory. |
| 20:02 |
Roberta Buchanan: |
That it is egocentric to write. |
| 20:04 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Yeah. You really have to have a large ego. I felt the mind had been rather squashed so that, I feel I had to get it back a bit. |
| 20:12 |
Roberta Buchanan: |
And do you think this, this is a particularly female problem? That it is a problem when women write–, |
| 20:16 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Well I do, because whenever people say, I do think that women are, perhaps it’s a training, I don’t know, but they do want to be more loving and kind and helpful don’t we? Maybe that’s because they’re in that position. |
| 20:32 |
Anne Hart: |
When you speak about it is necessary for a writer to be ruthless, I mean, it does remind me of Virginia Woolf and her, her essay on the the angel of the house, that a woman to write successfully had to kill the angel of the house. |
| 20:47 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Well that’s it, that’s the same thing. |
| 20:48 |
Anne Hart: |
She couldn’t, she could no longer be, if she was going to write, she couldn’t be responsible in this way, recognized for her family and her house, or else she would never find time to write. |
| 20:57 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
And then was with children and a house, I mean, you’re always, you’re fragmented, your mind, you think, “Oh dear, we’re out of them” You know, “The soap flakes are down” you know, so these are the things that are in your mind and you’ve got to remember to go and get this. While the men really, they are doing it more now, but there was never any question they wouldn’t notice if you’d run out lavatory paper or something. In fact George would just tear out a sheet of a book. Yeah. No respect for literature. Yes, his own ones! He wouldn’t care to. |
| 21:35 |
Anne Hart: |
And yet, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I know you’ve written so much more recently and that is all sort of new developments and further thoughts and you may be tired at times of hearing people harp back to the book you wrote many years ago, |
| 21:51 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Oh no, i’m delighted to have a little attention. |
| 21:53 |
Anne Hart: |
Yes, yes. Well, so many people particularly I think women do identify with it. It is a love story, which must’ve been very unique. Still is unique when it was published in 1945, a very moving, very explicit, very passionate description of a love affair. And I think at that time it must’ve been thought, well, this is a bizarre thing. I mean, I think it’d be men that had been writing about this sort of thing. I mean, did you get that sort of reaction? |
| 22:29 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Well, yes. I think I mentioned last night that they said a trivial subject. This women’s feelings are a trivial subject and nobody’s sort of said how shocking to say ‘trivial subject’ they just took that, right? |
| 22:43 |
Roberta Buchanan: |
Does it make you angry when they said that? |
| 22:46 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
I don’t know, one just thinks that’s the way things are. I don’t really make any judgment. |
| 22:56 |
Myra Bloom: |
Do you really feel that Elizabeth’s writer’s block was attributable to the fact that she felt overshadowed by George? You don’t necessarily attribute it to the material circumstances of having to raise four children. |
| 23:10 |
Rosemary Sullivan: |
You know, I know people who’ve raised four children and continued to write, Judith Thompson is one. So in fact, what’s so interesting is when you look at Elizabeth’s work, she was writing Grand Central before she met George, so he was simply the embodiment of it. After that I do think that she lost her ego as a writer and it’s easy to- writing is such a fragile activity, you know, I mean, I haven’t written poems for quite a while because I think I need that vertical sledgehammer into the end of time before I can write. Everything’s going horizontally. There’s every reason not to write. And so, it became a habit, not writing, but also Elizabeth would, she had her youngest daughter Rose in a private school, so those children were off during the week and sometimes on the weekend they’d have these crazy so-called uncles taking care of them. So in fact it was, she had a professional life, but some people had managed a professional life with writing at night. But I think Elizabeth lost her nerve. |
| 24:34 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
A warning. This old woman waddles toward love, becomes human, but the Muse does not approve. This going flesh is loved and is forgiven by the generous. But how is it the demon? Hello, my dear sit down. I’ll soothe your pain. I’ve known what you’ve known, but won’t again. Though [inaudible] not gone. Merely contracted into a last ditch weapon. A deed, not dead. A mine unexploded and not safe to have near the playground of innocent life. Keep clear of this frail old, harmless person. 50 years fuel of aimed frustration could shatter the calm and scald the soul. and love fall like napalm, over the school. |
| 25:36 |
Maya Gallus: |
Oh, I think, I think Elizabeth Smart should always be read. I think she brings an enormous amount of wisdom and life experience to the later work and an enormous amount of passion and literary innovation to the early work. And, also, some of her poems are really powerful as well. Her poem, A Bonus is one that I always think of whenever I finish writing something because she captures so beautifully that feeling of being in a bubble. And as she says, feeling dirty and roughly dressed and getting through this difficult thing of finishing something, and then that beautiful feeling of completion. |
| 26:29 |
Myra Bloom: |
A Bonus. That day I finished / A small piece / For an obscure magazine / I popped it in the box / snd such a starry elation / Came over me / That I got whistled at in the street / For the first time in a long time. / I was dirty and roughly dressed / And had circles under my eyes / And far far from flirtation / But so full of completion / Of a deed duly done / An act of consummation / That the freedom and force it engendered / Shone and spun / Out of my old raincoat. / It must’ve looked like love / Or a fabulous free holiday / To the young men sauntering / Down Berwick Street / I still think this is most mysterious / For while I was writing it / It was gritty it felt like self-abuse / Constipation, desperately unsocial. / But done done done / Everything in the world / Flowed back / Like a huge bonus. |
| 27:42 |
Maya Gallus: |
I can’t think of another poem that captures that moment and that feeling as beautifully as that does. So I think Elizabeth is relevant now and will continue to be relevant for continuing generations. |
| 27:59 |
Myra Bloom: |
I hope so. Okay, thank you. |
| 28:01 |
Maya Gallus: |
You’re welcome. |
| 28:08 |
Elizabeth Smart: |
Good morning boss. A cup of coffee and two Fried eggs. Look at the idiot boy that got the fat knife. Here’s all the world that is left. He has American better than love. He is civilization’s heir or you mob whose actions brought him into bed. He is happier than you, sweetheart. But will he do to fill in these coming thousand years, well, it’s too late now to complain, my honeydove. Yes. It’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are. That’s all. You have to learn to be adaptable. I myself prefer Boulder Dam to Chartes Cathedral. I prefer dogs to children. I before in corncobs to the genitals of the male, everything’s hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything’s OK. It’s in the bag. It can’t miss. My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep? |
| 29:08 |
Hannah McGregor: |
Spoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using the Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Myra Bloom from York University and our podcast project manager is Stacy Copeland. Thanks to Sina Queyras, Maya Gallus, Kim Echlin and Rosemary Sullivan for their candid discussions presented here. This podcast also features archival audio of Elizabeth Smart in conversation at Memorial University in 1983 and reading at Warwick University in England in 1982. Special thanks to Vinita Patel, Donna Downey of MUN Archives, and the Glendon Media Lab. Myra Bloom is currently writing Evasive Maneuvers, a book all about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart. You can keep up with Myra’s work and watch for more info on Evasive Maneuvers at myrabloom.com that’s M Y R A B L O O M .com. To find out more about Spoken Web visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the Spoken Web podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. |
