'Or Not Untrue and Not Unkind'

“. . . we should

Not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good.”

Stevie Smith’s faith was a wavering thing. She paid her religion the highest compliment by thinking about it often, agonizing and vacillating from faith, to doubt, to bleak unbelief and back. The lines above are from “I Was so Full . . .” (Selected Poems, 1962).  The poem’s first two stanzas parody God’s summoning commands in the first chapter of Genesis:

“I was so full of love and joy

There was not enough people to love,

So I said: Let there be God,

Then there was God above.

“I was so full of anger and hate

To be hated was not enough people,

So I said: Let there be a Devil to hate,

Then down below was the Devil.

“These persons have worked very much in my mind

And by being not true, have made me unkind,

So now I say: Away with them, away; we should

Not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good.

“Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.”

Smith’s narrator blasphemes, ridiculously. God and the Devil are “persons” but are not “true.” Her closing lines apply acutely to politics and ethics. If our values are nonsense, our judgment is already compromised. Behavior rooted in “fairy stories” is unlikely to accomplish much of value. Can one be “good” when holding patently ridiculous beliefs? On occasion, probably. Over the long haul, probably not. In Philip Larkin’s 1962 review of Selected Poems (Required Writing, 1984), he characterized Smith’s voice as “fausse-naïve,” called her an “almost unclassifiable writer” and famously concluded: “Her poems speak with the authority of sadness.” Clearly, Larkin hears Smith and responds sympathetically. He sees through her silliness to something more essential. Two years later he published The Whitsun Weddings, including “Talking in Bed”:

“Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest

Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.”

Smith writes:

“These persons have worked very much in my mind

And by being not true, have made me unkind.”

Larkin writes:

“It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.”

Smith was born on this date, Sept. 20, in 1902, and died on March 7, 1971 at age sixty-eight.