Over The Frontier

Book 344: Virago Modern Classics

by Stevie Smith

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Historical Fiction; World War II; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

It is 1936. Pompey Casmilus (the heroine of Smith's debut, Novel on Yellow Paper) lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug which confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy. Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy; six months of rest and recuperation are prescribed and Pompey goes to Schloss Tilssen on the northern German border, only to fall in with a strange band of conspirators: the plum-coloured Mrs Pouncer, the absent-minded Colonel Peck and the dashing Major Tom Satterthwaite, whom Pompey comes to love. How Pompey gets into uniform and becomes a spy is only one of the astounding events in this extraordinary novel which, on a serious level, is also about a powerful investigation of power and cruelty in a world preparing for war.

Release date: April 2, 2015

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 165

Sample

This is a novel about war. It comes from a surprising hand. Its author was an idiosyncratic woman and a highly original poet, but – as she was the first to admit – no soldier. Pompey very very bad soldier,’ she mused, as her jovial doctor injected her arm. ‘There I knew it, and never had it occurred to me in reason that I should at any time be a soldier either good or bad’, she wrote in this book published a year before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Stevie Smith lived all her life in the same tranquil London suburb; she worked for thirty years in a publishers office unshattered by shells. The nearest she got to the theatres of battle was in the holidays she enjoyed some years before their European locations came under the pressure of war. (She took what she called the ‘first last train’ out of Berlin after one such sojourn in 1931.)

Yet in this book the unmistakably Stevie-centred Pompey Casmilus, whom we have already met in its predecessor Novel on Yellow Paper, finds herself thrust into a tough and terrifying life of military espionage: nocturnal reconnaissance rides on horseback; daring acrobatics for eavesdropping and observation; homicide in the course of duty; and the achievement of a position of massive human responsibility in the confidence of certain unpleasant characters who are stage-managing a European war.

This extraordinary adventure story succeeds the novel’s first half, whose subject-matter is as dear and familiar as home to lovers of Stevie Smith’s poetry and earlier prose. It is the continued saga of Pompey Casmilus’s life and mind: Pompey at home with her beloved aunt in Bottle Green; Pompey in the last agonies of rupture in her friendship with Freddy; Pompey in London art galleries, peculiar parties, office longeurs; at gossipy lunches and in country weekends.

Pompey, in delicate health and vulnerable post-Freddy tristesse, takes off on a recuperative holiday with her friend Josephine to a Schloss somewhere on the Baltic coast. Under its therapeutic and nanny-strict régime she sails, swims, converses, and gets bored to death. Whereupon the inner and outward ramblings of this familiar Pompey suddenly flow into the dramatic excursions of a new one, in an adventure story that has something of the quality of a dream. Perhaps it really is a dream. We know that Pompey is a great and vivid dreamer. ‘Often when I am dreaming asleep I look at myself in a mirror, and I think. Why I might be real it’s so good it’s just like you could touch it.’ (Novel on Yellow Paper). And the dreamlike happenings of this book’s second half indeed fulfil a real dream in the first.

Still safe in her dull, irritating, ordinary world on the day she arrives at the Schloss, Pompey dreams that she is with Freddy, her lover whom she does not love, and she is in uniform. He notices it, she denies it: she shouts and swears by Christ’s blood and cross that she is not in uniform, she has no commission, she is under no orders. But some weeks later, the dream returns, and soon after that, it becomes reality.

On a night ride desperate with troubled thoughts, Pompey breaks the mask of stupidity of Tom Satterthwaite, the British intelligence officer; some days later she crosses with him the frontier that divides the worlds of peace and war. ‘Oh war war is all my thought. And suddenly I am very alert and not dreaming now asleep at all.’ Pompey dresses reluctantly to make that journey, and sees in the firelight the mirrored reflection of clothes that are not her riding habit. ‘The flames on the hearth shoot up and their savage wild light is reflected at my collar, is held reflected and thrown back with a light that is more savage, but completely savage, with the flick of a savage quick laughter the light is tossed back again from the stars upon my collar and the buckle at my waist.

‘I am in uniform.’

The stunning image is at the heart of this book. It curiously recurs in another book published in this year by another woman whose gently bred but ruthlessly investigative mind penetrated deeper into the mysteries of war than many a bemedalled general’s. Within the delicately-wrought polemic of Three Guineas Virginia Woolf revealed ‘the figure of a man.…

‘His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword … And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies – men, women and children.’

And now Pompey is in uniform: the gentle, humane, remorselessly analytical Pompey. Pompey, that strong spirit on the other side of the frontier from the rising mania of Germany, has in all her awareness been drawn across it. ‘I grind my teeth to think of Germany and her infection of arrogance and weakness and cruelty that … has set on foot this abominable war, has brought us all to this pass, and me to a hatred that is not without guilt, is not, is not a pure flame of altruism; ah, hatred is never this, is always rather to make use of this grand altruistic feeling, to bring to a head in ourselves all that there is in us of hatred and fury.…’

Pompey-Stevie was ever remarkable in self-knowledge, in admitting her community with ignoble humanity. She put it in a poem –

Do not despair of man, and do not scold him.

Who are you that you should so lightly hold him?

Are you not also a man, and in your heart

Are there not warlike thoughts and fear and smart?

Are you not also afraid and in fear cruel …

In prose, Pompey has always monitored the blackest specks in her soul. In Novel on Yellow Paper there was something – not antisemitism, no – but something that felt elation at a Jewish party – ‘Hurrah to be a goy!’ – and that later felt the tweak of a link between that and the horrors in Germany, ‘as if that thought alone might swell the mass of cruelty working up against them’. Now in the Schloss Tom Satterthwaite craftily touches Pompey on the same nerve over the tinkling teacups, and casts her into ‘despair for the racial hatred that is running in me in a sudden swift current, in a swift tide of hatred … Do we not always hate the persecuted?’

Pompey is us: we are Pompey. And Pompey is in uniform. Not just when she crosses over the frontier, but throughout this book, she explores and experiences the world of war. Long before she leaves her sideline, she ‘frets at every bit … longing to be off’: full of that ‘nervous irritability that has in it the pulse of our time. For we have in us the pulse of history and our times have been upon the rack of war. And are, and are …’

Stevie Smith lived all her life on the safe side of the frontier. Yet with that extraordinarily unlimited consciousness that vitalises all her writing, she was also the victim, prophet and antenna of everything that happened in the world beyond it. The gentle and non-combatant Stevie was also Pompey, her pride and ambition, fury and hatred, ‘rising like a high wind’ as she gallops into the war, fatigue forgotten in its excitement. ‘I laugh and laugh with delight … and thank the God of War to be rid of the tea-cups and tattle …’ She knows, and shows, what the pacifist Vera Brittain recognised as ‘this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict’ (Testament of Youth).

Yet at the last Pompey is herself still: nobody’s fool. Not the war god’s; not even her own. ‘How apt I was for this deceit, how splendid a material, that recognising the deceit must take commission under it … I may say I was shanghaied into this adventure, forced into a uniform I intuitively hated. But if there had been nothing of me in it … should I not now be playing, in perhaps some boredom, but safely and sanely enough, with those who seem to me now beyond the frontier of a separate life?’

The sideline observer who becomes the committed warrior cannot escape a final, cold, and certain awareness of the truth beyond the deceptions on both sides of the frontier. Pompey saw the cruelty and the ‘dotty idealismus’ that ‘upon this side of the frontier marches with the enemy’; against it her hatred and fury rose, and she believed ‘we shall win … we are right’. But at the peak of her military career she discovers a more appalling reality. Finally, coldly, and certainly, she perceives the identity of the warring spirits, the ineluctable baseness of all power and privilege, personal and national, on either side of the frontier. ‘I have been mistaken.’ The heart and the knowledge of Pompey-Stevie were indeed no soldier’s.

Janet Watts, 1979

He certainly is the funny man; why he certainly has a funny angle on life, why certainly there is this very cynical and malicious laughter that goes echoing round this elegant picture-gallery. Among all the picture-galleries of London this picture-gallery has all of the laughter that is not just simple happy fun, why not that at all, no, in this elegant gallery in the best part of the picture-gallery parts of London, why for instance there is Ballyhoo and the Cahiers d’Art and Aristotle opposite to this gallery and is not this all very high-class and slap-up?

And by-and-by if you go round the corner there is that flight of stairs which has Venus at the top of it, and once there was a man that had got funny in his head with drinking a lot of Schnaps, and by-and-by he got up those steps and was stroking this Venus in a very deep-going and affectionate manner, he certainly had a strong natural affection for Venus and what more like than he should go to stroking this classical plasteret to show how he was feeling this very deep-going affection that was so right and natural and at the same time so simply free and outpouring? But by-and-by the man that stood there in uniform, he was a very formal character, very hardened in the emotional arteries, well, see if he must not go and give him a great push that sent him falling falling down that flight of stairs where at bottom he fell a victim to a horrible whore.

This is the truth of Jack’s tale, that I told you before, that he told me a few days ago, and thinking quietly of this tale I came through the portals of this elegant picture-gallery. My mind was full of art and I had a nostalgie to be looking at these high-up and elevating canvases and there was especially the one that is called ‘Haute École’.

Now this one I will tell you about. So. There is this very classical animal, this horse, that has a vivid plastique tail and his front leg is raised up to do the high step. His colour is a light and beautiful brown colour that hardly serves to cover the canvas, so ethereal and noble is this animal and his nostrils are spread wide. Very elegant indeed and high-born is this horse with his wide open eyes his wide-spread nostrils his sleek coat and his wide wide eyes that have that look in them that is a warning to the people that know about horses like me. But oh how splendid is this high and elegant horse that has in him and in his limpid and ferocious eye all the sense of that ‘Hohe Schule’ and all of the centuries of traditional comportment. On this horse’s back sits a man that is perhaps not so entirely classique as this noble animal, because I am thinking now there is something about this man that is a little fin de siècle, for instance he is long and slim but though this is how the long lines of his body lie there is also at the same time about him that feeling of plumpness that is a little feminine and his face is so plump as the faces of some of the slim full faced pouting degenerate people that you have in the drawings of Beardsley. So. He has no hair on his head at all he is absolutely bald and his head has a pink plump covering of soft flesh and his lips are pursed and pouting and his eyes beneath puffed eyelids are looking downwards. Very sly very supercilious are the lineaments of this man’s face. His long slim body is clad in black, it is a sort of ‘smoking’ he is wearing. He has no hat and there is no hat in the picture, so if he falls if he falls well shall I say that he will not fall a victim to a horrible whore, but if that malicious and indignant horse if he prances sideways and makes suddenly to shy then off will come the man, pitching forward on to the hard floor of the riding school and with nothing between his plump pink hairless head and the hard hard floor it will go hard with him I guess it will be all up with that hatless rider.

Oh the colour in this canvas how lovely it is how beautiful how lightly touched in with what skill and what wisdom so to leave the canvas bare with such precision with such significance to express so much to be so entirely necessary inevitable so never to be thought of until it is done and then how else could it ever have been thought of for one moment to be done.

Oh there is a very great genius in this picture and oh now how greatly I am wishing to possess it. So I say to the man who is in this elegant picture-gallery, he is a little short of breath, I ask him to tell me how much is this beautiful picture for which I have so great a tendre and this acquisitive feeling that possess it I must. Oh it is nothing says the short-of-breath man it is nothing just forty guineas that is what it is and is. O heart of pain and empty purse how come to forty guineas that is so much of what I have not got. So he says: Very witty this painter is he not? Oh yes, he certainly is the funny man. But oh I have a tendre for this horse and rider so I must look at the other pictures and forget and forget. I know this artist very well I know his black-and-white work, but never before have I seen his paintings and never before should I have thought for one moment that he could have projected this thought of this ferocious and captive animal and his degenerate rider. Oh hush now hush and remember to be reasonable and to look here and there, and to judge and to discriminate and not to make a fuss-up about this ha-ha horse that never can be yours. So. There are a lot of still lifes, no they are not anything so good, no I will say now that I am not partial to Mr. Grosz’s still lifes. Very often have they been painted by painters before to be hung in galleries, they are, this is what I should say, the still lifes of to-day in the current mood, that is to say there is that seashell Gefühl about them and the superficial incongruity of selection that is not contributing anything that is fresh but is only just superficially incongruous like I mean like a bad Bernard Shaw. So. But then there are some very cynical and malicious black-and-whites and colour-washes that take me right off again right off my heart of pride to say No he is not so good. But there is quickly now I will tell you there is ‘The Assignation’, that is certainly very funny: the girlie is rather fat and has on those funny 1928 clothes very short in the skirt and very high in the hat and so looking like a bolster that has short fat legs that go bulging over the cheap thin shoes. There is a sugar daddy that is looking at the girlie he is thinking he is thinking Well is she worth it, chaps, is she worth this famous RM 20 note that is at the present moment safe in my elegant pigskin pochette? And on the whole you guess the answer will be, I will knock her down to RM 10. I said I’ll knock her down to RM 10. I said RM 10 is my limit. I said. There is also number 79 that is called ‘Girl Guides’ that I think will certainly not have at all a great appeal for Lady Baden-Powell. There are these girl guides, there are these two girls sitting on the ground and the curve of their plump thighs comes out of the too tight elastic band of their directoire knickers. So. One is playing a mouth-organ, very arch is the look in the eyes of this one, and the other sits and sings and sings with her mouth wide open and her little teeth, too small too small for the English taste, so very much too small too sharp and too white. There is something vicious about these sharp small white teeth that is offensive to the English taste that has always a fundamental but often unarticulated and even unrecognized preference for teeth that are long and strong and looking rather yellow. No. 77 is ‘On the Beach’. This made me laugh and there I stood laughing and laughing, with the man who is perhaps only rather short of breath standing beside me. ‘On the Beach’ goes like this. There is a beachbasket like they have at Swinemünde and all along the flat coastline of the Ost-See bathing resorts. In this beachbasket is sitting an old girl who is really so extremely ugly and so extremely amorous that it is something to give you a good laugh. Three cheers for the old girl in the beachbasket that is peering round the corner of the beachbasket that is looking this way. She has a sharp pointed nose and little eager pig eyes and a hat raked on her head that has wisps of hay-hair rioting out from underneath this so-smart toque. And what is she looking at what is she looking at oh? Well, chaps, she is sitting looking at a fine nordic specimen that is full to the brim with masculine buck and that has such a cast in his eye that. Oh Strandkorb shield me from the strange man with the cast in his eye. But no, she must have her love and affection and also he is holding a camera. Oh scintillating vanity of unsatisfied desire, oh what a pity it is that the beach is so jam full of girls and boys and bathing attendants and ice-cream vendors that never for one moment can they be alone, oh certainly it is punk for those two that never can they be alone to obtain eine seelische Entlassung and a nice holiday snap to set on the mantelshelf beside the artificial roses. And looking and laughing and thinking of all this my thoughts turn again to a darker memorial I have of Georg Grosz that is this dark m. . .