`Pills to Purge Melancholy'

“What she really knew about was books.”

Lucky woman. That would seem the perfect prerequisite for a poet. That, and really knowing about her fellow human beings, which she did. The subject here is Stevie Smith; her critic, Clive James, reviewing a biography of Smith in The New Yorker in 1987. James acknowledges her difficult personality but never mistakes Smith’s faux-naïve persona, the little-school-girl routine or the way she toyed with nursery rhymes and fairy tales for bumbling or slumming:

“She strove industriously to make it look as if she didn’t quite know what she was doing. She knew exactly. Her poetry has the vivid appeal of the Douanier Roussau’s pictures or Mussorgsky’s music, but where they lacked schooling she only pretended to lack it. Closer analogies would be with Picasso painting clowns or Stravinsky writing ballets. She knew everything about how poetry had sounded in the past, and could assemble echoes with the assurance of any other modern artist.”

Yes, she knew about books. Rereading her Collected Poems, I often hear her “assemble echoes” – from pastiche to unannounced quotation – of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Blake and Eliot. Smith, though autodidactically learned, had a horror of pedantry, stuffiness and showing off. Somewhere Jonathan Williams declares his love for two misunderstood, undervalued poets – Smith (whom he befriended and photographed) and J.V. Cunningham – who between them define the possibilities of allusive, accessible verse. Here’s Smith, in one of her many variations on the theme of death:

“Why do I think of Death as a friend?
It is because he is a scatterer
He scatters the human frame
The nerviness and the great pain
Throws it on the fresh fresh air
And now it is nowhere
Only sweet Death does this
Sweet Death, Kind Death,
Of all the gods you are best.”

I hear Keats -- “Ode to a Nightingale,” of course -- but also the sonnet that begins “Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell”:

“Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser -- Death is Life's high meed.”

Now we’re in Beckett country. I’ve finished rereading Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper and realize again why I love fiction in which the artifice of a particular voice predominates, as in Sterne and Beckett – all, oddly, death-haunted writers and all very funny. James writes of Smith:

“Her poems, if they were pills to purge melancholy, did not work for her. The best of them, however, work like charms for everyone else.”

For instance:

“Some are born to peace and joy
And some are born to sorrow
But only for a day as we
Shall not be here tomorrow.”

James concludes, beautifully, that “when she is in form she can deconstruct literature in the only way that counts – by constructing something that feels as if it had just flown together, except you can’t take it apart.”