'Art Is Wild As a Cat'

Nige tells me he attended a reading at Cambridge given by Stevie Smith not long before her death in 1971. “I remember [her],” he writes, “more for her extraordinary presence and her eccentric, but very effective way of reading her work. . . . [A]t the time I was a young anti-formalist idiot, who didn't at all approve of work like hers. More fool me. Even so, of all the readings I attended at that time, hers is the only one that really made an impression – a good impression, that is.” 

I envy Nige his memories. Smith is a poet I’m still surprised I admire and enjoy. I’m leery of most work in any form that feels like willful eccentricity, an adolescent grab after unearned attention. It’s a cheat and makes me more aware of the poet than the poem. Reading and rereading Smith’s poems and novels over the decades has made me forgiving of her idiosyncrasies. Long ago I accepted that she writes the way she does for the same reason I write in English, which is the only language I know. Kay Ryan explains:

 

“The reader of Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget that she is looking through the cock eyes of Stevie Smith. Everything that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained; we can examine them as if they were toys although they are not.”

 

Consider a poem from Not Waving But Drowning (1957), “The New Age,” in which she writes:

 

“. . . the state of Art itself presages decline

As if Art has anything or ever had

To do with civilization whether good or bad.

Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilization

But that is another matter that is not now under consideration.”

 

Smith may not be gratuitously eccentric but she enjoys being contrary. That her art is “wild as a cat” is inarguable, though “wild” need not imply savage or incoherent. But art is certainly not “separate from civilization.” It’s the most civilized thing we do. In a note to the poem in All the Poems (New Directions, 2016), editor Will May tells us Smith informally dedicated the poem to Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer who developed the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars. Smith is not apocalyptic. She suggests we humans are both a blessing and a curse:

 

“Why should Man be at an end? he is hardly beginning.

This New Age will slip in under cover of their cries

And be upon them before they have opened their eyes.

Well, say geological time is a one-foot rule

Then Man’s only been here about half an inch to play the fool

Or be wise if he likes, as he has often been

Oh heavens how these crying people spoil the beautiful geological scene.”