My Romance

Almost 30 years ago I went to work for my first daily, said to be the second-smallest in Ohio, with a staff of four – editor, city reporter (me), sports editor and society editor. The last was a woman about my age who when not chronicling chicken dinners wrote pseudonymous romance novels. At a publication party Elsa gave us copies of her latest paperback inscribed on the title page in gold ink. I remembered her novel on Saturday while scanning the fiction shelves in a used-book store.

My practice is to keep an eclectic mental list of writers – Henry Green, Eugenio Montale, A.J. Liebling, Samuel Johnson – whose work I always look for though I already own some of their books. After recently rereading Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) I added Stevie Smith to the list because I’ve never read her subsequent novels – Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949). And there they were, two slender mass-market paperbacks with broken spines – literally “pocket books,” as they used to be known. Both have pictures of Glenda Jackson in the title role from Stevie, the wonderful 1978 film about the poet. The color scheme is gold and forest green, like tacky Christmas cards. I can’t remember seeing a major writer treated to uglier book designs. After greeting me, the clerk – shaved head, hideous glasses, three days of beard – gave the novels and their attached 55-year-old male customer a double take. Presumably, Pinnacle Books hoped to cash in on the movie and entice the romance market. Over the Frontier, at 282 pages, was originally priced at $3.50; The Holiday, at 184 pages, was $2.75. I paid a buck apiece.

I started reading The Holiday in the park Sunday morning, hoping the other parents wouldn’t stare. Smith’s novel is a variation on Elsa’s romance genre, but grimmer, funnier and better written. Much of the narrative is carried by dialogue, much of which is witty and hip, at least by the standards of post-war England, and I suspect an American reader misses much. The narrator, Celia, is another version of Pompey Casmilus, the voice in Smith’s two earlier novels – in other words, a version of Smith (all live in a north London suburb with an elderly aunt, and hold clerical jobs). Celia works for the Ministry in the wake of World War II with her cousin, also named Casmilus but this time male. Only humor – Smith’s, most of the character’s – relieves their tedium and unhappiness. All of her people are talkers – they love stories, telling them and listening – and after 50 pages or so, it already seems like the cheeriest novel about unhappiness I’ve ever read. Here’s Celia talking to an English soldier returned from Asia:

“These travellers’ tales lift the dark mood, I love to hear the travellers’ tales and the tales of the soldiers who come home. I asked the soldier what had happened to the animals in the jungles of Burma, for this was a thing that I wished to know: Well, what happened to the jungle animals in all the fighting and scurrying of the armies, well, did the animals flee, did they clear out, the animals and reptiles, did they quit, did they move off to another jungle? `Oh, no,’ said the young soldier, `the animals stayed, they were another worry, just something more for us to have. The tigers used to bite our men and they used to eat the Japanese, and the crocs used to nab a chap every now and then, and the monkeys were very mischievous. But the tigers were the worst, they were the limit.’ My soldier from the wars returning said: `Crumbs, what with the Japs, the jungle, the animals and the Beds [from Bedfordshire] and Herts [Hertfordshire] (that was his regiment), crumbs, it was indeed a circus.’”

This gives a taste of Smith’s fluid gift for narrative and also suggests the veiled political theme of war’s end and the subsequent dissolution of the British Empire. There’s much talk of Palestine, Africa and India (little, it seems, has changed), but to call Smith a “political” writer, as some critics have argued, is ridiculous. Her voluble people contend with loneliness and the seeming impossibility of love. Their lives are quirky and small, not world-historical. In the words of an English contemporary of Smith’s, they are learning, in the wake of war, “to be at home in this commonplace world.”