'A Very Deadly Sort of Slave Feeling'

Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidity, like a low-budget horror movie. There’s a theory going around, probably rooted in Freudian quackery, that all artistic creation is about death or its denial. Yet, somehow – often formally, with her nursery rhymes and rhythms – Smith charms and amuses us. Death is impertinent. “Up and Down” appeared in her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937: 

“Up and down the street they go

Tapping tapping to and fro

What they see I do not know

 

“Up and down the streets they hurry

Push and rush and jerk and worry

Full of ineffectual flurry

 

Up and down the street they run

From morning to the set of sun

I shall be glad when they have done

 

I shall be glad when there’s an end

Of all the noise that doth offend

My soul. Still Night, don cloak, descend.”

 

The pair of spondees in the middle of the final line fall like clods of earth on a coffin lid. Smith’s work is subversive, not of politics or morals but of literary expectations. A diminutive woman, she knowingly donned a girlish costume (in life, in work) that was eccentric in an acceptably British manner. How liberating that must have been, setting her free to be a seriously silly poet. Pompey, the heroine of the first and best of her three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), recalls her understanding of suicide as a little girl. She urges parents to discuss the subject with their children:

 

“So I think every sensitive young child should early learn this. It is a great source of strength and comfort. It is so possible that things may become more than we can bear, is it not? That is not my thought at all. But rather, it is so possible that we may be afraid that things will become more than we can bear. There is a very deadly sort of slave feeling in this thought. For if we think this and become undone by our fear, we may too anxiously placate our fellow-beings, who appear to us to be in more authoritative positions and to have more of power than we over the things that oppress us. But with death as our immediate ally, such thoughts vanish.”

 

I’m not advocating suicide and neither is Smith. I’m not sure it’s even possible to posthumously diagnose Smith (dead at age sixty-eight in 1971) as a depressive. Rather, I think she is forthright and brave and reminds me of the seventeenth-century English prose writers – Sir Thomas Browne, in particular. To put it simply, she understands death as a part of life, as least as important a part as having children. I remember the deaths by suicide of two classmates when I was in grade school. That early exposure to self-destruction has been useful. It never frightened or depressed me.