Beguiled

I discovered the poet Stevie Smith, as I suspect many others did, on 19 February 1980, when the film Stevie was first shown on British television – on BBC Two, at 21:00 to be precise. In my memory I hurried out to Whitstable’s Pirie & Cavender bookshop the following day and acquired a copy of her selected poems. It can’t have been exactly like that, but that’s how I choose to remember it. I have the book still, much worn, not least because I ended up writing my dissertation on Smith three years later when I studied English Literature at the University of Manchester. Stevie implanted Stevie in my brain.

Twas the voice of the Wanderer, I heard her exclaim
You have weaned me too soon, you must nurse me again
She taps as she passes at each window pane
Pray does she not know that she taps in vain?

‘The Wanderer’ [extract]

That name ‘Stevie’ is a bother. Smith’s sometimes playful, whimsical, unpretentious poetry, accompanied as it often was with her childlike drawings, has encouraged a cosy image in which it is too easy for some to address the memory of her by her first name. A collection of her writings was given the cute title Me Again because of the lines in the above stanza. It’s Stevie again, popping up to say hello. It’s an attitude that does not help Smith or her poetry. Away with it, let it go.

I will never leave you darling
To be eaten by the starling
For I love you more than ever
In the wet and stormy weather

‘The Starling’ [extract]

Smith’s poetry is sweet on the surface, colder beneath. Its recurrent themes are childhood, mankind, the natural world, religion and death. In style it ranges between ballad and conversation, nursery rhyme and the lyrical. The seeming artless of so much of it is there to trip you up, like a child that floors an unsuspecting adult with a piece of cutting wisdom. Indeed, its essential figure, the person from whose perspective we experience the poem, is the child that questions their existence. Never a one for coming up with new rhymes when repetition can be more effective, the word ‘child’ is frequently and tellingly matched by Smith with ‘mild’, ‘wild’ and ‘beguiled’. Summing up the comforts and the con-trick of childhood, ‘beguiled’ occurs again and again in her poetry. It is practically her keyword.

To be so cold and yet not old
Oh what can ail the changeling child?
She has an eye that is too bold
Upon the night. She is beguiled

‘Eulenspiegelei’ [extract]

Stevie the film is sweet on the surface, colder beneath. The film was made in 1978, directed by Robert Enders. It was an adaptation of the 1977 play on the same name by Hugh Leonard, which had been a great success at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, with Glenda Jackson as Smith and Mona Washbourne as her aunt. The film, which focusses on Smith’s life in suburban Palmers Green with her aging ‘Lion’ aunt, rarely leaves their house. There are some short romantic scenes with her 1930s lover Freddie (a peculiarly miscast Alec McCowen) and a commentary of sorts from ‘The Man’, played by Trevor Howard, who for the most part is seen in a park, addressing the camera, then joins the action as a long-suffering friend of Smith’s who gives her lifts in his car.

It is the antithesis of cinema, the model example of a successful stage play translated to the screen with minimal effort expended in adapting it to the new medium. For Stevie, however, this turns out to be the right thing to have done – technically and thematically. Any attempt to have expanded the drama to show the wider life in which Smith engaged, such as her three decades of work as a private secretary at Newnes Publishing, her attendances at literary parties, her famed poetry readings, her BBC broadcasts, or wider exploration of her rumoured romantic life (such as the remote possibility of an affair with George Orwell), would have made her ordinary. Paradoxically, what made her extraordinary was the constrained life where she felt secure, at 1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green. It is the film’s faithfulness to this denial of the dramatic life that makes Stevie a successful film. It is true to its subject.

Jackson and Washbourne’s performances, on stage and on film, were much acclaimed, and those who knew Smith acknowledged the remarkable way in which Jackson became her. But to my mind the film’s finest performer is Howard. A distinguishing feature of play and film is the way Smith’s poems are dropped into the dialogue, words half brought up in the conversation, half going on in the mind as the surface inaction continues. Howard speaks the verse with a chilly understanding, no more so than when he recites Smith’s most celebrated lines:

Nobody heard him, the dead man
But still he lay moaning
I was much further out that you thought
And not waving but drowning

‘Not Waving But Drowning’ [extract]

Howard is the film’s anchor, the one who sets the tone and maintains it. It’s a voice that reads the poet as well as the poetry. He may never have given a better performance.

Stevie Smith interviewed for BBC Monitor in 1965, including her reciting ‘Not Waving But Drowning’

There are several feature films about poets, but few good ones. Trying to depict the inspiration and its expression, while conforming to the kind of drama that cinema expects, is not an easy thing to achieve. A Quiet Passion (2016), Terence Davies’s subtle life of Emily Dickinson, understand the solitude necessary amid the pettiness of ordinary living, to the extent that one can see strong affinities between Dickinson and Smith as people and in their poetry. They share an artistic idiosyncracy. A Quiet Passion is, technically, the superior film. But Stevie feels truer, because its unaffected style stems from the poetry.

Donnez à manger aux affamées
It is a film star who passes this way
He is looking so nice the women would like
To have him on a tray
Donnez à manger aux affamées

‘The Film Star’

Stevie Smith seldom mentions films in her poetry (‘The Film Star’ is the only example I have found), though she went to the cinema. Her mention, in 1953, of a quotation from the 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform (as noted in Frances Spalding’s biography) suggests not only cine-literacy but that she probably went to the renowned Academy Cinema, subject of a recent post, where the film had its British premiere. One learns so much about a writer by what they leave out of their work, as much as what they include. Cinema was external, not necessary, not the subject of poetry.

The terrors of the scenery
The black rocks of the sliding mountain
Are hidden from the man of family
Who lives beneath the fountain
His name is Domesticity
He’s married to an ivy tree
And the little children laugh and scream
For they do not know what these things mean

‘The Sliding Mountain’

And yet the poetry is cinematic, as most twentieth-century poetry probably has to be. Film, once experienced, must change the attentive eye. It is there in the sheer dramatic verve and suggestion of a poem like ‘The Sliding Mountain’, which is symbolic but also works through visual metaphor and depth of scale. It is there in her telling imagery (“This Englishwoman is so refined / She has no bosom and no behind”). It is there in how such imagery blends with the poems’ regular questioning tone, inviting us to look and think.

Mother, among the dustbins and the manure
I feel the measure of my humanity, an allure
As of the presence of God, I am sure

In the dustbins, in the manure, in the cat at play,
Is the presence of God, in a sure way
He moves there. Mother, what do you say?

‘Mother, Among the Dustbins’ [extract]

It is there too in the child’s point of view. Cinema is the beguiling medium. It makes us sit down, look up, and puzzle our way through a world it expects us to take on trust. It is a world in which we lose ourselves. Seeking, like a parent, to lull us, instead it opens our eyes, makes us look around, makes us start asking questions. And cinema has no answers, only endings.

The wood grows darker every day
It’s not a bad place in a way
But I lost the way
Last Tuesday
Did I love father, mother, home?
Not very much; but now they’re gone
I think of them with kindly toleration
Bred inevitably of separation
Really if I could find some food
I should be happy enough in this wood
But darker days and hungrier I must spend
Till hunger and darkness make an end

‘Little Boy Lost’ [extract]

This is the eighth in an occasional series of posts on favourite poets of mine

Links:

• All above images from Stevie are taken from the Internet Movie Database entry for the film
• Stevie Smith’s Selected Poems, edited by James MacGibbon, is still in print, of course, and is the best place to start
• Sadly Stevie is one of those films that has fallen almost entirely out of public view, despite Glenda Jackson’s fame. It was released long ago on VHS but has never been on DVD, and cannot be found on any streaming platform that I know of. It was last shown on British television in 1981. For shame…