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COPYRIGHT 2004 Southern Illinois University
Among the edgy, innovative, and fashionable young poets drawing crowds at popular 1960s poetry festivals was a unique attraction: Stevie Smith, over sixty years old, atonally singing her poetry while wearing clothing suggestive of a schoolgirl's uniform, complete with white stockings. Occasionally, between poems, she chattered in a form of baby talk (Sternlicht, "Introduction" 11). Her sartorial and linguistic imitation of youth suggests a current of obsessive remembering, a single-minded thirst for an imagined youth that is at once dissonant and enthralling. Although she may have startled her audiences with such displays, both her wardrobe and her chatter were entirely consistent with her poetry, for in her verse she displays the same unsettling nostalgia. Those familiar with the basic story of Smith's childhood--a saga of illness, abandonment, confinement, and death--might wonder why she invariably returns to the child-like. But the very fact of repeated injury led Smith to imagine incessantly what she did not have. Enacting a poetic spin on Freud's recently born "talking cure" in order to address a number of mental illnesses she carried with her, including obsessive neurosis and severe bouts of depression, Smith repeatedly writes through her childhood, especially in the early works A Good Time Was Had by All (1937) and Tender Only to One (1938). A pioneer in her own history, Smith adapts and sometimes abandons traditional forms in order to explore new territory. Infused with the sorrow of loss, she employs the sing-song rhythms of nursery rhymes and the haphazard violence of fairy tales to tackle the difficulties of an unwelcome adulthood. Using elusive and varied poetic voices, her poetry obsesses about an idyllic childhood even as it mourns the absence of it.
Although Smith hesitated in interviews to characterize her childhood as traumatic, she did acknowledge that her early years were punctuated with harsh interruptions and painful losses. Florence Margaret Smith was born in Hull on September 20, 1902. Called Peggy by her family, she did not acquire her preferred nickname Stevie until the 1920s. (1) Smith was a fragile child, born so ill that she had to be baptized at home rather than risk the voyage to the church where her older sister, Molly, had been christened (Spalding 3). Smith's parents, Ethel Spear Smith and Charles Ward Smith, may have been in love once, but those feelings apparently had faded by the time Stevie was born, perhaps due to Charles's incessant longing to be elsewhere. As a young man, he had planned to go to sea with the Navy, but when his brother drowned pursuing the same career, his family forbade it (Spalding 6). (2) He later wanted to join the British forces in the Boer War; by that time, however, Ethel was pregnant with Molly (Sternlicht, Stevie 2). He subsequently went into business with his father, a shipping agent. He managed to travel quite a bit, thereby satisfying one of his goals, but he mishandled the financial aspects of the business so badly that he found himself deeply in debt by the time Stevie was a toddler (Spalding 7). In 1906, Charles Ward Smith ran off to sea to work on the commercial White Star Line, leaving behind his sickly wife and two daughters (Barbera and McBrien 9). Stevie's anger at this abandonment could hardly be disguised when, decades later, she spoke of this event: "I didn't like him very much... This was just after I'd been born, and poor Daddy took one look at me and rushed away to sea" (qtd. in Dick 38-39). Together with Ethel's unmarried sister, Margaret Annie Spear, the women of the Smith family moved to 1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green, London. Anxious for a sense of permanence and stability, Stevie Smith would remain in that home until her death, some seventy years later.
Surely it is not coincidental that around the time of her father's departure, Stevie Smith began suffering from episodes that can only be described as fits. As biographer Frances Spalding describes it, she "had the habit of suddenly turning cold and stiff" (15). This behavior, never explained in medical terms, quite alarmed her family and likely resulted in an outpouring of attention--attention that could soothe but not eliminate Smith's pain at being abandoned by her father. Within two years, Smith's health had deteriorated to the point that she was diagnosed with tubercular peritonitis, a disease affecting the digestive system. At the age of five, she was sent away to a convalescent home called Broadstairs, where she lived for most of the next three years. Although she enjoyed the individual attention at first, Smith soon longed to return home. Initially, it seems, Smith was allowed to leave Broadstairs during holidays. Doctors, however, soon barred these visitations on the grounds that the child's distress upon having to leave her family negatively affected her progress (Barbera and McBrien 14).
Smith's separation from her family was complex, functioning on emotional and physical planes. Neither parent was dependable. Smith's mother was only intermittently available to her daughters due to her own health problems. Postcards from the absent Charles Ward Smith revealed that Ethel had been hospitalized at least once (Barbera and McBrien 13). Even while at home, her health took its toll on her ability to participate in the family. History has left scholars no reliable indication of whether Ethel's illnesses were physical or psychological. Regardless, after Charles Ward Smith's departure, her health seemed to deteriorate slowly but steadily. That seafaring father, meanwhile, visited his family irregularly, dropping off token gifts before leaving again (Spalding 20). During these crucial and formative developmental years, Smith's family threatened to unravel and disperse.
Smith's concern for her mother, unresolved emotions regarding her father's departure, and intense homesickness combined to result in a mental crisis. Only eight years old, Smith considered suicide, thereby embarking on a lifelong dance with Thanatos. Smith arrived at an unexpected conclusion during her critical moment, choosing to see suicide as an empowering rather than alarming vision: "The thought cheered me up wonderfully and quite saved my life. For if one can remove oneself at anytime from the world, why particularly now?" (qtd. in Spalding 17). One must pause at the thought of an eight-year-old sufficiently sophisticated--and obsessively melancholy--to theorize in such a way. Later, in a conversation with Kay Dick, Smith elaborated on this thought and, in so doing, brought to light the powerful paradoxes at the core of her philosophy of life and death:
I love life. I adore it, but only because I keep myself well on the edge. I wouldn't commit myself to anything. I can always get out if I want to. I think this is a terribly cowardly attitude to life. I'm very ashamed of it, but there it is, dear. I love death, I think it's the most exciting thing ... What pulls one up from these terrible depressions--it's the thought that it's in your own hands, that you can if you want to, make an end of it ... because being alive is like being in enemy territory. (43)
Looking at such quotations, one may assume that Smith is testing ideas even as she utters them, vacillating between extremes. In fact, her paradoxical positioning was far from impulsive. From that pivotal moment at the age of eight until her death, she steadfastly embraced her impossible love/hate of life/death.
Freed by the realization that she could control her exit from the world--even if she had no control over how others, including her father, exited her life--Smith's health improved enough to allow her to leave Broadstairs and return to 1 Avondale Road, some three years after she had first been admitted. Her preadolescence and adolescence were defined by a search for stability at home and a striking detachment from her educational environment. She enrolled in school, catching up quickly even though she had been educated only irregularly until that time. In spite of her natural talents, she displayed little passion for the fundamentals of education. Her moments of true enthusiasm came during songs, when she would belt out whichever melody appealed to her, regardless of what other girls were singing. Accordingly, she later noted, "I was asked not to sing, politely, because I put the other little girls off" (Dick 45). Hence, perhaps, her later insistence on singing to the captive audiences at her poetry readings.
Although she continued to attend school, in spirit Smith was focused on building a family she could depend on. Smith and her sister, Molly, were quite close in age, but the two found that they had little in common. Molly loved their father dearly and possibly resented Stevie's sometimes-visible disappointment in him. The two sisters, as Barbera and McBrien write, "were never openly hostile, and indeed they showed more concern for one another than many sisters do. None the less they could be highly critical, and kept up a kind of skirmishing" (43). While Smith herself was never considered a strict adherent of her Anglican faith, Molly's later conversion to Roman Catholicism drove them further apart (Sternlicht, Stevie 3). With her father gone, her mother ill, and her sister unresponsive, Smith turned her affections to her aunt Margaret, whom she lovingly referred to as the "Lion." Margaret Spear was not terribly...
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