A Memorable Voice

Stevie Smith1

Always inclined to the brisk definition, W. H. Auden once declared that poetry was memorable speech. The Collected Poems of the late Stevie Smith prompt one to revise that: poetry is memorable voice. The unknown quantity in my response to the book was the memory of the poet’s own performance of her verse, her voice pitching between querulousness and keening, her quizzical presence at once inviting the audience to yield her their affection and keeping them at bay with a quick irony. She seemed to combine elements of Gretel and of the witch, to be vulnerable and capable, a kind of Home Counties sean bhean bhocht, with a hag’s wisdom and a girl’s wide-eyed curiosity. She chanted her poems artfully off-key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that suggested two kinds of auditory experience: an embarrassed party-piece by a child half-way between tears and giggles, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso.

This raises the whole question of poetry for the eye versus poetry for the ear. Perhaps the versus is an overstatement, yet there are poets whose work is enhanced and amplified in its power to move once we know the characteristic tone and rhythm and texture of the poet’s physical voice. The grave inward melodies of Wallace Stevens become more available if we happen to have heard that Caedmon recording of him reading ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. Similarly, Robert Frost’s words are enlivened by any memory of his switchback pacing, the hard and fluent contours of his accent. And I am sure that Coleridge’s excitement on first hearing Wordsworth read was as much a matter of how the poem sounded as of what it intended.

But in the case of Stevie Smith, it is not simply a matter of extra gratification from the poems on the page if we happen to have heard her. It is the whole question of the relationship between a speaking voice, a literary voice (or style) and a style of speech shared by and typical of a certain social and cultural grouping. In other words, it is essential to bring to the appreciation of these poems an ear aware of the longueurs and acerbities, the nuanced understatements and tactical intonations of educated middle-class English speech. The element this work survives in is a disenchanted gentility, and while I can imagine, for example, the Reverend Ian Paisley making a fine job of Yeats’s ‘Under Ben Bulben’, I cannot imagine Stevie Smith’s idiosyncratic rhythms and metres surviving the hammer-and-tongue of that vigorous North Antrim emphasis.

One is tempted to use words like ‘fey’, ‘arch’ and ‘dotty’ when faced with these five hundred and seventy pages and yet such adjectives sell Stevie Smith’s work short. These odd syncopated melancholy poems are haunted by the primitive and compelling music of ballad and nursery rhyme, but it has been transposed by a sophisticated and slightly cosseted poetic ear into a still, sad, drawing-room music of humanity:

He said no word of her to us

Nor we of her to him,

But oh it saddened us to see

How wan he grew and thin.

We said: She eats him day and night

And draws the blood from him,

We did not know but said we thought

This was why he grew thin.

There is variety and inventiveness, much humour and understanding, and a constant poignancy. Her gift was to create a peculiar emotional weather between the words, a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled, as in the much anthologized ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, or in this one, taken almost at random:

I always remember your beautiful flowers

And the beautiful kimono you wore

When you sat on the couch

With that tigerish crouch

And told me you loved me no more.

What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind

All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.

Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad

The years have taken from me,

    Softly I go now, pad pad.

Stevie Smith reminds you of two Lears: the old king come to knowledge and gentleness through suffering, and the old comic poet Edward veering off into nonsense. I suppose in the end the adjective has to be ‘eccentric’. She looks at the world with a mental squint, there is a disconcerting wobble in the mirror she holds up to nature.

Death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the innocent, the trusting—her concerns were central ones, her compassion genuine and her vision almost tragic. Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre recognitions, the wounded joie de vivre, the marooned spirit we sense they were destined to express. There is a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A. A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily Dickinson.

The genetic relations which the forms of these poems often bear to the clerihew and the caricature prevent them from attaining the kind of large orchestration that they are always tempting us to listen for. And if they are the real thing when measured by Auden’s definition, they miss the absolute intensity required by Emily Dickinson’s definition: when you read them, you don’t feel that the top of your head has been taken off. Rather, you have been persuaded to keep your head at all costs.

Irish Times, 1976