The Holiday

Book 345: Virago Modern Classics

by Stevie Smith

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

Synopsis

Celia works at the Ministry in the post-war England of 1949 and lives in a London suburb with her beloved Aunt. Witty, fragile, quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love -- for her friends, her colleagues, her relations, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. Here they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love and hate -- moments of wild humour alternating with waves of melancholy as Celia ponders obsessively on the inevitable pain of love. In everything she wrote, Stevie Smith's poetic, special eye captured the paradox of pain in all human affections -- nowhere more so than in this wry, strongly autobiographical tale.

Release date: June 19, 2008

Publisher: Virago Press Ltd

Print pages: 208

Sample

During the early sixties there was a fashion for combined poetry and jazz evenings and I can’t remember the cause or even the reason for one such evening at the Aldwych Theatre in which I took part. However, there I was, standing in the wings waiting to rehearse my contribution when suddenly this stranger was standing before me, smiling from ear to ear. ‘I’m Stevie Smith,’ she said. The name meant nothing to me. The woman was remarkable, elderly, tiny, dressed in a dirndl skirt, white blouse with Peter Pan collar, topped by a plain black – I think jumper, very good piece of Victorian jewellery, lisle stockings plus ankle socks and sandals. Her hair was classic bob and fringe and you could warm your hands on the energy emanating from her. She stood without a single protective curve anywhere. Not guardsman straight, but open, direct, looking so clearly at you. Having exchanged names and pleasantries, she bounded onto the Aldwych stage and almost without pause, launched that extraordinary voice into Not Waving But Drowning. I’d never heard of her, read not a word she had written, but will always remember the impact of that performance and it was a performance enhanced by her sheer joy in being centre-stage. The next day I scoured bookshops, attempting to find a copy of her work with no success whatsoever, but my local library did eventually track down a copy of Novel on Yellow Paper.

It pleases me no end that I’ve been asked to write the introduction to Virago’s publication of The Holiday as part of their revamped Modern Classics series.

And Stevie was, of herself, a modern classic.

Many, many years later, after that encounter in the wings, Hugh Whitemore’s play Stevie was sent to me. It was a privilege to become so close to a woman who observed all the requirements and responsibilities of a maiden lady, sharing her home with the magnificent Lion Aunt, while exploring via her writing the incredible interior landscape that was her life.

When we made the film of Stevie, we shot outside her home in Parson’s Green. During a break in shooting, a resident asked me what the film was about. ‘Stevie Smith,’ I said. ‘Who was he?’ queried Stevie’s neighbour. I explained. ‘Oh,’ said the resident, ‘you mean Peggy.’ Stevie-Peggy was regrettably dead, as was the Lion Aunt, but her work lived and lives on, transforming, enlivening, imitating, shocking but overwhelmingly rewarding the reader.

Stevie would regard her inclusion in the Virago Modern Classics series as no more than her due, but I have no doubt that readers who come to her for the first time will thank Virago for introducing them to this remarkable woman. People like me welcome Virago’s publication of her work, because an easily accessible source is now available at all times. The joy of paperbacks!

Glenda Jackson

Stevie Smith was first and last a poet, not a novelist. She didn’t much like writing prose, and produced her first novel purely to get into print. The publisher to whom she submitted some poems in 1935 told her to ‘go away and write a novel’, and she went back to him in a matter of weeks with Novel On Yellow Paper: but this book, which brought her a sudden celebrity on its publication by Jonathan Cape in 1936, did not please her greatly. Many years later she told Kay Dick that there was a lot in it she disliked – ‘partly the manner. I don’t quite know where that manner comes from’ (Ivy and Stevie, 1971).

She much preferred The Holiday, her third novel; pronouncing it (again to Kay Dick) ‘beautiful: never brassy like Novel On Yellow Paper, but so richly melancholy like those hot summer days when it is so full of that calm before the autumn, it quite ravishes me. When I read it, the tears stream down my face because of what Matthew Arnold says, you know:

“But oh, the labour,

O Prince, what pain”.’

Not everyone was of the same opinion. It took Stevie Smith some years to find a publisher for this novel, which she wrote and set in the England of the Second World War. When it was finally published in 1949, she was obliged to alter all its references to the current war to a more topical phenomenon she called ‘the post-war’; and the book’s original typescript shows how, by a few changes in the wording, she gave political discussions like the ones on India a new validity for 1949.

For some readers The Holiday is even more idiosyncratic than its two prose companions. ‘A terribly difficult book to read,’ in the view of Stevie Smith’s last publisher; ‘a lot of it, Stevie, is really poems, you know.’ Certainly we find in this novel the same unique sensibility that informs her poetry: the sensibility that perceived the dreadful comicality of pain, and expressed it in what is her most famous and unforgettable image: the swimmer far out at sea, whose jolly-looking wave is really the flailing despair of a drowning man.

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

It is a sensibility that was for all its isolation dynamically at one with the spirit of her time.

Stevie Smith is at the centre of this novel, as of all her works. She was Pompey in Novel On Yellow Paper: she is Celia in The Holiday. Celia has an office life at ‘the Ministry’ and a home life shared with an old aunt in a London suburb; Stevie Smith worked for years in a publisher’s office in central London and lived with her old aunt in a house in Palmers Green that was her home from the age of three until her death at sixty-eight in 1971.

In The Holiday Celia leaves her Ministry and her home and takes a train to the north to stay with her clerical uncle Heber. She is accompanied by Casmilus, an adored cousin, and Tiny, a likeable colleague dogged by a brother whom everyone detests. They walk and ride and eat summer meals; wrangle, bicker, giggle; love and hate each other in waves of affection and frustration; talk and fall silent.

Celia is whimsical, fragile; she cries often (though her tears are many times deleted from the original typescript). In her anguish at the painfulness of living, she – like her creator – courts and craves for death. (One friend warned Stevie Smith crisply that she would probably not find him half the dish she imagined.) Yet Celia, like Stevie, is also dry and wry: irritated by the mournful Tiny, unmoved by his masochistic love. The melancholy of The Holiday, in which Stevie Smith took such retrospective pleasure, is leavened by wit; its prevailing unhappiness – ‘Why are we so sad: is it the war, is it the postwar?’ – transformed by humour and jokes.

Celia declares that she hates opinions – ‘the worst sort of conversation’ – yet the novel is patchworked with them. Here is chat about the middle classes and the public schools; conversation about the war and post-war; discussion of Africa, India, America, Africa. And stories. Stories that are Celia’s delight and her defence, against both her own and her friends’ unhappiness. Stories of cats and apes and eagles to distract and entertain; family stories that she knows backwards and loves to hear again over a leisurely breakfast or in the middle of a wakeful night. Stories from religion and history; stories (like ‘Over-dew’) she has written and failed to get published; stories of old secrets, fragrant with the dust of concealment.

There is a love story in The Holiday, too. Celia loves Casmilus, ‘my beloved wise cousin, my solemn friend. Why do I fret and cry because he can be nothing else than a friend?’ But cry she does. The novel is full of the pain of love. ‘Yes, everybody is hankering after it and whining,’ says Celia, to comfort the woebegone Tiny. ‘This hunger we have is a good thing, it is the long shin bone that shows the child will grow tall.’ (For all her own pain, she is a great cheerer-upper.)

Stevie Smith never married, and always insisted that her own best element was friendship, not love.

My spirit in confusion,

Long years I strove,

But now I know that never

Nearer I shall move,

Than a friend’s friend to friendship,

To love than a friend’s love.

One important friendship was with George Orwell, whose portrait has been recognised in the character of Basil in The Holiday. Literary gossip has linked their names in a love affair: but a mutual woman friend of them both insists that although ‘George was definitely one of Stevie’s chum’s, there was always a distance in Stevie’s chummy relationships, and she ‘would have felt nervous if it got too sexual’. Yet her feelings were intense, even fierce. The year before her death she told a friend that he must correct people’s mis-conception of her, that ‘because I never married I know nothing about the emotions. When I am dead you must put them right. I loved my aunt.’

The love in The Holiday is a strangled love; even the affection is restrained. The book is suffused with an overcast luminance, a subdued warmth. Celia rides close to her cousin on the old horse Noble. ‘We are silent … and I feel very strongly the friendship of my sad cousin, that is not usually sad but laughing, and the friendship of Tiny, and the friendship of the sweet mute Heber, and I wish it might always be so …’

Yet this tranquillity is not the lasting tone of this book, as it was not of its author. ‘I was always a troubled person,’ Stevie Smith once said. ‘I have never changed.’ From her friends we have accounts of the drastic extremes of her moods: one of them has described a typical lunch passed in ‘fits of laughter’, followed by agonised moments when Stevie dissolved in tears in the Ladies’ and spoke of suicide: only to waltz out again with renewed gaiety to try on silly hats in Fenwicks all afternoon.

So with Celia. The cosiness of wartime (or post-war) England does not warm her desolation. For her the cheerful routine of the office stops as short of real solace as a merry-go-round jerked abruptly to a halt. ‘When one pauses for a moment … what does it all add up to, and what is this work that is so bustling and so cosy?’ She runs from the amusingness of parties – which she expertly evokes – to rest her head against a marble doorpost. ‘This sadness cuts down again upon me, it is like death. The bright appearance of the friends at the parties makes it a terrible cut, like a deep sharp knife, that has cut deep, but not quite yet away.’

We relish Stevie Smith’s wit; we bask in her moments of quietness and calm. But we cannot forget her pain. At the end of ‘the best, the longest’ day of her holiday, she sits by the seaside with her loved cousin, and cries and screams: ‘such a pain in my heart’ makes her teacup fall from her hand, and ‘twisted my heart and muscles, so that I was bent backwards as though it was an overdose of strychnine’.

The sound of that scream echoes through this gentle book. Something in The Holiday’s original typescript gives it an even deeper resonance, and provides a still more polgnant glimpse into the strange, lonely spirit of this gifted writer.

Celia awakes from a bad dream, ‘so tired, and so sad’. What was it about?

There is the sea, and one wishes to get into it, but there are always so many things to do, and the end of the holiday comes, and still there is the sea, and still one has not got into it, one has forgotten to get into the sea, but that is what one has most wished to do, so strongly one has wished to do that, and now the holiday is over. So in my sleep I must have cried and struggled, for there are tears on my cheek, and I am quite exhausted…’

The passage is excised with a vigorous hand. The sort of hand that waves cheerfully from far out at sea? In the paradoxical world of Stevie Smith, a poet might drown, even without getting her feet wet.

Janet Watts, 1978

I WAS working over some figures with Tiny at the Ministry; it was a figure code. Tiny sighed and hummed under his breath.

Oh, Tiny, don’t hum.

Well, all right. Or I can go into the next room. Or you can.

We can’t very well do that. I leaned over Tiny and whispered in his ear. We can’t very well do that because Clem is there.

Oh Lord, I keep forgetting. Oh how I wish they hadn’t moved him into Section V. Oh dear, oh dear.

Well as long as we remember, we can think of something else. These cablegrams, for instance. I sighed. What do you make of number seven?

Yes, said Tiny, there’s something about figures.

Something like work, I said. Only don’t hum, Tiny, that spoils it, that we can do without.

I think our colleagues Eleanor and Constance are awfully nice women, said Tiny with such a generous beaming look.

Why, Tiny, you do look happy. It is the figures that make you feel that way about Eleanor and Constance. They always seem so occupied, those two, especially Eleanor seems so occupied.

We were born under a no-grip star, said Tiny.

Yes, that’s it, I said, we are lucky to be in this room together, that is something one might not have looked for.

When I see old Eleanor crashing about with that concentrated look on her face, you would think the whole of the post-war hung up on her. It is like the Saki lady who was in touch with all the Governments of Europe before breakfast….

Now, Tiny, I said, that is not quite in the mood.

What do you make of Number Seven? said Tiny.

I took it over to the window and began singing ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ to myself.

You’ve got the words mixed up, said Tiny crossly, I don’t see that that is very much better than my humming.

I sang the verse again more loudly:

From Greenland’s icy mountains

From India’s coral strand

Where Afric’s golden fountains

Roll down the something land

From many a lonely hamlet

Which hid by beech and pine

Like an eagle’s nest hangs on the crest

Of purple Apennine.

You see, said Tiny, it doesn’t even fit in very well. You have to joggle that last line but one a bit.

At this moment the door opened and my cousin Casmilus came into the room.

Hallo, Tiny. I say, Celia, I want to speak to you.

Oh all right, said Tiny, I’m going.

Just as he was starting off Clem put his head round the door.

I want you, Tiny, he said. Just popping round to the A.B.C., eh? Well, if you could spare me a few minutes first.

The two brothers went out together.

How crestfallen our poor Tiny looks, said Caz when they had gone.

Clem is a really horrible person, I said.

Tiny isn’t much better.

I find Tiny very sympathisch on the contrary.

Caz flicked the cigarette ash off his battle-dress trousers and came and stood over me. He said he was passing through London on his way to the-north.

Oh, what is it Caz, what is it you want to say? Oh Caz, I said, I am so cold.

We went and stood on the hearthrug by the empty fireplace. Caz put his head on my shoulder. It is cold outside to-day. I often feel quite at a loss, he said, and rubbed his nose close into my neck.

Some days, I said, are long and thin and there is nothing in them, and the peace goes badly, it goes very badly for us, and to-day there is a note to say that America … that Russia … England, I said, is stretched out and thin. I feel….

What do you feel? I suppose one does not kill oneself for Russia … for America. And so on. What do you feel?

I feel that I am frozen. It is cold inside too.

Caz rocked me gently backwards and forwards. I often feel quite lost, he said, quite lost.

Caz, I said, when I am with people, I do not feel so cold. I like to sit in the tube train to watch the people and be watched. The light and the warmth of the train brings the faces to life. They are alive alive-o, that before was wandering in a desert of night dreams with landscapes. Here on the underground train, I said (as we rocked more violently and the cold rainstorm beat from outside upon the window pane, rat-tat, rat-tat, as if it were hailstones, but it is a June shower) in the tube train, I said it is very different. We have left behind us the dreams and the scenery; we are together, we are good humoured, we have good manners we have the excellent unconscious good manners of off-hand civil London. We do not talk to each other—my word that could be a burden—but we smile, or perhaps a person may say something about the weather; that is nothing more than a smile. But first I said (hurrying a little) we must come on the escalator where there is the Notice the sharp Dean put in his journalism for a moral lesson, ‘Stand on the Ri. . .