This month’s Book Club choice is Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. You may think this an odd choice being a book written at the end of the Second World War by a Canadian woman who at the time had no connection with East Anglia but I’m glad I made it. To be perfectly honest this month I really wanted to choose something by the poet George Barker who is the father of Raffaella Barker author of December’s Book Club choice A Perfect Life. It seemed fated as earlier this year I came across George Barker’s biography (The Chameleon Poet by Robert Fraser) in a second-hand book shop in Norwich next to an illustrated copy of his evocative poem At Thurgarton Church. Not long after this I heard an interview with George Barker’s widow Elspeth about living in the house at Itteringham which she shared with the poet from 1968 until his death in 1991. Unfortunately George Barker’s poetry is quite difficult to get hold of with the most recently published collections apparently out of print.
Sixty odd years ago Elizabeth Smart had no such problems. At the age of eighteen while studying piano at King’s College, University of London she came across a volume of George Barkers poems in a bookshop and fell passionately in love with him through his poetry. Eventually she made contact with Barker and his wife Jessica who were in Japan where George was teaching and paid for the impecunious couple to join her in the United States. This was the start of an extraordinarily passionate love affair between Smart and Barker which led to Smart giving birth to a daughter, Georgina in 1941 and to a son Christopher in 1943. She bore George four children and the very beginning of their relationship provided the inspiration for By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept which was published in 1945.
The book is not long, less than 80 pages of print in the most recent Flamingo imprint. There is a longish foreword by Brigid Brophy written on the occasion of the books first reissue in 1966. I read the foreword before reading the book and immediately regretted it finding Brophy’s complex literary comments clouding the immediacy of Smart’s poetic prose. On the other hand I was glad that I knew quite a lot about the relationship between Barker and Smart from Frasers book, this gave me a context for the writing which helped my understanding. Would this help you or not? Answers please (!) and any comments on the book on this message board.
Jeff Taylor
Reading ‘By Grand Central Station’ I was reminded of comments that Sylvia Plath made during a radio broadcast in 1962 only a few months before her death. She was comparing the work of the novelist to her own experience of being a poet. She envied the novelist having ‘all the time in the world’ while she could ’take about a minute’. Elizabeth Smart’s book seems to fall distinctly between these two elements of time. I do know that Grand Central and it’s ‘sequel’ The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals made great use of the journals Smart wrote sporadically during her life to the point of copying large chunks from one to the other. Her journals were her glimpses of life which Plath describes as ‘a door opens, a door shuts’. Glimpses which most people have as thoughts and don’t feel the need to write down although they may, if they are lucky, have someone they can tell them to. In ‘The Assumption’ Smart writes ‘Something Happened today. The wet paving stones…..presented themselves pathetically, pleading that they last much longer than life. They greeted me as if we were all dust together at last.’ Taken out of context what is this glimpse of life but poetry. Plath compared a poem to a closed fist and a novel to an open hand. Smarts writing, prose poetry if you want to use that awful term, lies somewhere between the two, welcoming but able to stun
Kate
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