I read this book as a rite of passage in my teens - a Canadian rite of passage. I'd forgotten what Smart's prose was like. Some time in the last 5 years I read Rosemary Sullivan's biography of Elizabeth Smart which I found fascinating: partly because of the details of her life in the earlier part of the last century but also because she has a nature so dissimilar to mine. Her decisions, her actions and the way she lived her life were so different from my life and my choices that it seems far more than 1/2 a century and several wars distant from my lifetime.
I just finished Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and it is interesting to compare the 2 books: Goethe from the male perspective in 18th century Germany and Smart's from the female perspective in North America. One somewhat fictional (though Goethe incorporated events from his own life as well as an acquaintance who committed suicide because of unrequited passion) and the other poetically autobiographical. Both writers passionate and literary people.
I enjoyed Smart's writing and imagery though my ever-rational side kept parsing the sentences for truth to anchor the poetry in fact and chronology. Of course she reminds me of Sylvia Plath, similar time period and both women in love with philandering poets and tolerating their comings and goings, waiting and suffering for their lover to return to spend some time with them. I also can't help thinking about Pat Lowther.
Like poetry, Smart's prose captures moments and vignettes with brief bursts of strong imagery. In one of my favourite sentences she captures whole [passionless] lifetimes in one sentence.
When I hurry down the street it is not any game I hold in my mind and play with the passers by, but the shyness which keeps seamstresses nervously peering out of their badly-lit rooms, half hidden behind the drab lace, preferring to dream over their gas-jets and mild tea than submit to the rude investigations of the world.
This is every Anita Brookner novel, distilled down to one sentence. Smart then goes on to write:
There are such, you know, and they treat their possessions gently, as if they were children or animals. But don't think they are overlooked. Thousands of angels yearn over them, are even now embroidering them skirts, and getting ready to teach them the rhumba. [Part 6]
Where Brookner seems to have some fellow feeling for her gentle, quiet, oh-so-correct women, Smart sees their lives with a twist of humour but humour arising from the contempt of the young and passionate for the aged and resigned. Later in Part 8 she is more explicit about her contempt for the degenerations of passionless old age, saying of the old:
Or does nature walk beside them, holding their flabby forearms and whispering medicinal lies? For memory deserts them and their eyes get dimmer as the past achieves perspective.
Who can say there is anything won at such a price?
[..] But her eyes were like medieval wild men in her head, clutching at her diminishing days that brought them no rest. [Part 6]
Smart, like Goethe/Werther, also has a strong relationship with nature. She writes "But what can the wood sorrel and the mourning dove, who deal only in eternals, know of the thorny sociabilities of human living?"
On passion/love:
The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy.
[..] I am possessed by love and have no options.
[Part 10] He kisses the circles on top of the water beneath which I lie drowned. Soft as a fish, the kiss glides down to me, it swims through me, trailing its bubbles of love.
Smart writes about "the hatred of the mediocre for all miracles."
[...] Not one of all those martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye. On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die.
Butter is up 10 cents. The human being is down.
When she and Barker are arrested at the California/Arizona state border, and charged with intending to cross state lines for the purposes of sexual communion, Smart writes at the end of their 2-day interrogation,
Who is for us if these are so fiercely against? All our wishes were private, we desired no more scope than ourselves. Could we corrupt the young by gazing into each other's eyes? Would they leave their offices? Would big business suffer?
Though the majority of the book takes place in America with references to England, I enjoyed the odd Canadian reference
But faint as hope, and definite as death, my possible phoenix of love is as bright as a totem-pole, in the morning, on the sky, breathing like a workman setting out on a job.
Asking no one's forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize, why do I cry then to be returning homeward through a land I love like a lover?
[...] how sympathetic the frozen Chaudiere Falls seem under the December sky, compared with these inflexible faces.
The passion burning through Smart's book, though it only covered a short period during her early 20s, is incandescent. And the fact that she spent her life in England raising 4 children she had with Barker, though they never married and he only visited intermittently, suggests the centrality of passion in her life persisted.
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