Novel On Yellow Paper

Book 343: Virago Modern Classics

by Stevie Smith

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

Stevie's alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.

Release date: April 2, 2015

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 147

Sample

Stevie Smith was the first poet I read. I can’t remember how I discovered her; all I know is that I asked for her Collected Poems one Christmas. If the elaborately careful signature on the inside jacket is anything to judge by, I must have been about fifteen at the time. I liked the fact that she was a swift read, her poems so wondrously succinct I sometimes wondered if they really counted as Literature. Far too many writers were, in my youthful opinion, far too prolix. But it was her tone that really delighted me. Her irony, her wit, that slight edge of malice: these things spoke to a moody teenager. Her voice was irresistible, bending the world into a shape that was disorientatingly odd, even as it was instantly recognisable.

Wanting more, I bought her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, and one grey Sunday – exactly the kind of dreary, slow-ticking afternoon she must often have endured in her Victorian villa, marooned in the outer reaches of suburban London – I sat down to read it. The shock was considerable. What’s this? I thought, a question that’s tricky to answer even now, for Stevie’s novels (she wrote three, after which she abandoned fiction for ever) are nothing if not singular. Her debts – to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to the Dorothys Parker and Richardson, and, above all, to Virginia Woolf* – might well be obvious, especially to those well-schooled in Modernism. Nevertheless, she remains her own writer, sui generis. A poem, she once told a friend, was a relatively light thing; it could be carried around ‘while you’re doing the housework’. A novel, though, was an altogether darker beast. She likened her fiction to the sea: on the surface bright and sunny, but seven miles down ‘black and cold’. Her stories had for an engine some ‘ghastly human confusion and chill’.

Pompey Casmilus, the narrator of both Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) and its sequel Over the Frontier (1938), is Stevie’s alter-ego: a more antic version of herself. The private secretary of Sir Phoebus Ullwater Bt, a magazine publisher, she weaves back and forth through her life, offering as she goes her opinions on such important matters as love, marriage, death and Racine versus Shakespeare – ‘for this is a talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale’. These people include ‘sweet boy Freddy’, her fiancée; Karl, a student whom she visits in Germany just as Nazism is beginning to rise; and the Lion Aunt, with whom Pompey lives. Pompey is prone to apologise for her loquaciousness – ‘And you, Reader, whom I have held by the wrist and forced to listen, I am full of regret for you…’ – but this is something of an act. For all that she wanders and digresses and seems sometimes to lose her thread, there is a certainty about Pompey; like her creator, she has the courage of her (somewhat weird) convictions. And she is never anything less than touchingly stoical, even when her tale grows ‘richly compostly loamishly sad’. Far from feeling weary on finishing the book, the reader closes Novel on Yellow Paper – and its more slippery sequel, in which Pompey becomes embroiled in foreign espionage – feeling that everyday speech, in all its repetitive clumsiness, has been brought magically close to poetry. Thanks to this, something has been crystallised. The thirties, certainly, for it’s all here: anti-Semitism, political self-delusion, ‘the nervous irritability that has in it the pulse of our time’. But also the moods of a young woman, alone in the world at a moment when to be such a thing felt daring, insecure, perilous, freakish. They shift, these moods, like clouds in a strong wind, and find their ultimate expression in Smith’s third and final novel, The Holiday (1949), in which another office-working, aunt-loving narrator, Celia Phoze, suffers from a ‘black-split heart’, experiences a nervous breakdown and contemplates suicide.

*

Stevie Smith was born Florence Margaret Smith in 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire, the second daughter of Charles Smith, a failed shipping agent, and his wife, Ethel. Her parents were, in her words, ‘ill-assorted’, and when she was only three, her father ran away to sea – an abandonment Stevie would feel for the rest of her life. His absence had a powerful effect on her character. While other girls of her class were brought up to bring Father his paper, and then to disappear into silence, Smith was a ‘wicked, selfish creature’ who mostly got to please herself, her eccentricity and determination (useful qualities in a poet) growing exponentially as a result. It was thanks to his sudden departure, too, that she grew up in a ‘house of female habitation’ in Palmer’s Green, north London. Stevie’s maternal aunt Madge Spear, aka ‘the Lion of Hull’, came to live with the family, and soon afterwards Ethel, Madge, Stevie and her sister, Molly, moved south, probably – as her biographer Frances Spalding has speculated – to escape gossip. Stevie and Aunt would live in the red-brick house in Avondale Road until 1968, when Aunt died at the age of ninety-six, and this was the single most important relationship of her life. As Celia says in The Holiday: ‘To have a darling aunt to come home to, that one admires, that is strong, happy, simple, shrewd, staunch, loving, upright and bossy…’ If her father’s sporadic postcards left her with a ‘powerful sense of transiency’, Aunt was an emotional standing stone, solid and immovable. She never loved anyone more.

Ethel died in 1919, an event Stevie would later evoke in Novel on Yellow Paper (‘But all the time you are remembering that she did suffer. Because if you cannot breathe you must suffer. And the last minute when you are dying, that may be a very long time indeed.’) In 1920, she and her sister left their school, North London Collegiate; Molly to take up a place at Birmingham University, Stevie to sign on at Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial Academy in Hyde Park (money being thin on the ground by now, she hoped for a career that would provide a regular income). Her first post on completing her training was at an engineering firm; her second was at the magazine publishers, C. Arthur Pearson, where she was appointed secretary to Sir Neville Pearson, the son of the firm’s founder. She would hold down this unremarkable job for the next thirty years, her employer a ‘lodestar in a disordered existence’. Pearson appears, a little idealised, as Sir Phoebus in her first two novels.

Life settled down. Her work was dull, but it did not capture her mind – ‘I did not want a job where I had to use up my whole energy’ – leaving her free to read, something she did omnivorously. She liked returning to Palmer’s Green in the evening, to its quietness and stillness. The house was old fashioned and over-furnished, crammed with fat armchairs and heavy sideboards, its garden made gloomy by a huge privet hedge. But its rhythms comforted her, and she was able to begin the process of becoming Stevie Smith (her nickname was acquired when, riding a hired horse on a London common, some boys yelled at her: ‘Come on, Steve!’, a reference to a popular jockey, Steve Donoghue). Those who knew her in this period were already struck by her zest, originality, quick-wittedness and disparate crowd of friends (she vastly preferred the idea of friendship to that of marriage and turned away from the latter forever in the mid-thirties, having broken off her brief engagement to an insurance broker called Eric Armitage). A colleague described her as ‘a busy little person’.

Little. This isn’t the right word, however affectionately used. It’s true that Stevie was birdlike, her mannerisms dainty and her looks gamine, and this was certainly something she chose to emphasise in later life when she began to wear self-consciously girlish clothes: shifts, pinafores, pretty brooches, Peter Pan collars. But in every other respect, she was far from little. Aunt wasn’t the only lion in Avondale Road. Behind the lively, darting facade, behind the nervousness, caprice and periodic depressions, there was steel. She was not a person to be put off. Nor, in creative terms, was she a person to compromise. In 1934, she submitted a collection of poems to the literary agent, Curtis Brown. They did not go down well, the company’s bewildered reader finding them neurotic. Stevie, however, was not discouraged, and a further bundle was soon dispatched to an editor at Chatto & Windus, who told her: ‘Go away and write a novel and we will then think about the poems.’ This she did, and in just ten weeks – one evening, she claimed, she wrote six thousand words at a stroke – only for Chatto to turn it down, too. Undaunted, Stevie now turned to Hamish Miles, a reader at Jonathan Cape whose eye had been caught by the poems she’d recently had published in the New Statesman. Bingo! Novel on Yellow Paper had found its publisher. Acclaimed by some critics and abhorred by others, it turned her overnight into the kind of writer who received fan letters. It also prepared the ground for the poetry. It wasn’t just that it was a throat-clearing kind of novel, one in which she could let off steam, the better that she might pare down future work. She now had an audience, one that relished her voice. Its publication was followed swiftly by that of her first collection of poetry, A Good Time Was Had By All. Starting as she meant to go on, she illustrated it with her own drawings, angular and spindly, just like her.

The career that followed had highs and lows. A Good Time Was Had By All, and her second novel, Over the Frontier, were well-received. But further volumes of poetry didn’t do so well, and the publication of The Frontier was delayed for several years. In the forties and fifties, she was unfashionable. Some of this must have been connected to her gender. The post-war literary world was irredeemably masculine; she wasn’t the only woman writer to be shut out. But it was also easy to underestimate Stevie’s work. Her outward simplicities could be taken at face value, the pain beneath ignored. It’s possible, too, that some men were wilfully deaf to the sound of themselves. Stevie was dissatisfied with their world, and she parodied it mercilessly, her ear wonderfully attuned to its absurdities, to what Seamus Heaney called ‘the longueurs and acerbities, the nuanced understatements and tactical intonations of educated middle-class speech’. She hit her targets smart on the nose, and perhaps this irritated them.

Though bolstered by her friendships – her circle now included Olivia Manning, Rosamond Lehmann and George Orwell – she grew increasingly fragile: spiky on the outside, easily bruised within. The title poem of Harold’s Leap, her fourth collection of poetry, describes a suicide (‘Harold, I remember your leap,/It may have killed you/But it was a brave thing to do.’) and thus foreshadows the events of 1953, when she cut one of her wrists in the office. It was decided after this that she would not return to her job. It wasn’t until 1957, and the publication of what is now her most famous collection of poetry, Not Waving but Drowning, that she re-emerged as a writer. The sixties came to her rescue. Poetry readings were popular, and Stevie unselfconsciously took her place alongside the Liverpool poets, her neat dresses and sensible shoes in polite contrast to their leather and denim. She had a gift for performance, her stylised recitations, half spoken and half sung, half cheerful and half desperate, unnerving her audiences with their sense of something – madness? rage? – kept only just at bay.

*

Stevie died in 1971 of a brain tumour (during her final illness, she wrapped her head in a pink turban; friends were amazed by how beautiful she looked). At the end, she was again lion-like. Frances Spalding has described how, in hospital awaiting a biopsy, she performed her last poem ‘Come Death’ (‘Come Death./Do not be Slow.’) from her bed, astonishing visitors and patients alike. Perhaps she was content, knowing there were books to live on after her – and sure enough, in the years that followed, her critical reputation bloomed. Her Collected Poems, published in 1975, felt reassuringly solid in the hand, its six hundred-page bulk physically underlining the substance concealed in her short, uncluttered lines. In 1977 Hugh Whitemore’s play, Stevie, was staged, starring Glenda Jackson, and while it bought wholesale into some terrible clichés – wasn’t she innocent? wasn’t she odd? – it greatly added to her legend. In 1980 Virago Modern Classics republished her three novels, and they were acclaimed all over again.

Stevie will always stand alone, at an angle to everyone else. She belongs to no group; she cannot easily be appropriated by any cause. Her verses are unlikely to appear in those carefully marketed volumes that hope to console us in certain states of mind (love, grief, melancholy). Her poems are too sly for that; their sophistication, extreme once you notice it, is elusive at first. The same is true of the novels. What confounding, idiosyncratic books they are, garrulous to a fault and yet somehow so keenly observant, so cold-eyed, so full of pity for all that is most melancholy. ‘We carry our own wilderness with us,’ says Pompey, in Over the Frontier – and isn’t this precisely it? As Stevie knew all too well, even the suburbs come with desolate expanses. Their avenues, parks and crescents have their fair share of exiles, restless and forever in search of home.

 

Rachel Cooke, 2014 

Casmilus, whose great name I steal,

Whose name a greater doth conceal,

Indulgence, pray,

And, if I may,

The winged tuft from either heel.

 

Beginning this book (not as they say ‘book’ in our trade – they mean magazine), beginning this book, I should like if I may, I should like, if I may (that is the way Sir Phoebus writes), I should like then to say: Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends.

And for why?

Read on, Reader, read on and work it out for yourself.

 

Here am I on a fine day in October riding along the Row with Leonie. Well, please do not think that I have a lot of money. But here I am all the same. And who is paying? Well, partly it is like this. You see, they run cheap rides in the Row. On cheap horses? Well no, not that either so much. Well, here goes my horse. He is better than that horse I had this year in Cornwall, that horse that was called Kismet. He was a great eater, was Kismet. No sooner pause than crop the verdure. He had a scythelike movement of his long head, of his long snakelike neck. Oh ho Kismet. He could crop a wall of its plant life soon as any horse I have ever seen. He was the great Horse that laid waste the Duchy of Cornwall. You should have seen Kismet get down to the growing corn. It grew no more after that this year. Well, Kismet, I hope the farmers looked at it that way, see?

But this horse I am on now, with Leonie looking chic and capable beside me, this horse is a good horse. He puts his ears back and dances sideways across the shadows. It is a hot sunny day and does not seem as if November was coming soon. It is a hot sunny day but the earth smells like it had a layer of frost on top, and the leaves are brittle and whisk up and under your nose and across the earth beds. That is how it is in October. I look at Leonie, she has very good hands but her kneegrip is not so-o-o good. Leonie is a Jewess, but slim, and has a sense of chic. She is looking very elegant. She has a yellow pullover and fawn jodhpurs and a fawn felt hat. And who cares.

Last week I was at a party at Leonie’s. Suddenly I looked round. I thought: I am the only goy. There was a newspaper man there and a musician and some plain business men. But the Jews. Well all to say about the Jews has been said, so I’ll leave it. But then I had a moment of elation at that party. I got shot right up. Hurrah to be a goy! A clever goy is cleverer than a clever Jew. And I am a clever goy that knows everything on earth and in heaven. This moment of elation I am telling you about: the only living person in that room, the cleverest person in that room; the cleverest living goy.

Do all goys among Jews get that way? Yes, perhaps. And the feeling you must pipe down and apologize for being so superior and clever: I can’t help it really my dear chap, you see I’m a goy. It just comes with the birth. It’s a world of unequal chances, not the way B. Franklin saw things. But perhaps he was piping down in public, and apologizing he was a goy. And there were Jews then too. So he put equality on paper and hoped it would do, and hoped nobody would tak. . .