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Junto à Grand Central Station sentei-me e chorei
First published in 1945, Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is an enigmatic and nearly indescribable book, a small classic of poetic prose whose author has been compared with Anaïs Nin and Djuna Barnes. In lushly evocative language, Smart recounts her love affair with the poet George Barker with an operatic grandeur that takes in the tragedy of her passion; the suffering of Barker's wife; the children the lovers conceived. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.
121 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
About the author
Elizabeth Smart
15 books110 followersLibrarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile is for Elizabeth^^Smart.
Elizabeth Smart (December 27, 1913 – March 4, 1986) was a Canadian poet and novelist. Her book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, detailed her romance with the poet George Barker. She is the subject of the 1991 biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart a Life, by Rosemary Sullivan, and a film, Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels, produced by Maya Gallus.
Elizabeth Smart (December 27, 1913 – March 4, 1986) was a Canadian poet and novelist. Her book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, detailed her romance with the poet George Barker. She is the subject of the 1991 biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart a Life, by Rosemary Sullivan, and a film, Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels, produced by Maya Gallus.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,514 reviews
April 20, 2015
Girl, he's not worth it.
March 31, 2011
i disagree with greg.
when i was thirteen, i had a journal. and i would lie on my tummy and kick my feet in the air and record my tiny thoughts.
when i was fifteen, i had a journal. and i would smoke a joint and lie on my tummy and record my huge earthshattering thoughts.
when i was nineteen, i had a journal. and - well, let's save something for the biopic, shall we?
i don't have a journal anymore. and you know why?
because i write huge purple monsters of sentences and only end up making myself small and shy when i come across them years later.
this book suffers from many of these sentences.
i should have known from the first page:
I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire.
ugh. i can feel raymond carver hurling an empty bottle of booze at this sentence in disgust, and for once, i am with him.
there is a way to be evocative and complicated and beautiful all at once, "the smile on your face was the deadest thing alive enough to have the strength to die," anyone??
this?? this ain't that. and as an opening sentence it just stuck in my craw and tainted the rest of the book.
i like crisp prose, clean lines, smart phrasings. this seemed too self-indulgent - too emotionally bloated.too much "why use one word when you can use ten and still say nothing??" going on.
Not God, but bats and a spider who is weaving my guilt, keep the rendezvous with me, and shame copulates with every September housefly. My room echoes with the screams she never uttered, and under my floor the vines of remorse get ready to push up through the damp. The cricket drips remembrance unceasingly into my ear, lest I mislay any items of cruelty's fiendish inventory.
oh, yeah?? is that what shame does?? it copulates with houseflies, does it?? gosh, i hope the maggot gets shame's eyes...i have no patience for this sort of thing.
Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.
i say no thank you.
brigid brophy's introduction is excellent. i read it last, of course, and it made me appreciate the book so much more in retrospect, and it also reminded me of the several parts i did enjoy. but i have to give it two stars, because i really didn't enjoy reading it. there were moments of great beauty, but too many parts where i was just gagging on her prose. i am all for pain and howling emotions,but isn't it the responsibility of the writer to marry the vulnerable raw nerves with craft?? it is true there were many moments where i was totally on-board with her writing, but when it was bad, it was very very bad.
and, oh, what's this??
someone has come to interrupt my ravings...it's me - a week later!
okay, so i have been really sad for a couple of days now. and i have reread great swathes of this book under the influence of my own ragged emotions.and i am ashamed to admit that i like it more now. i have to keep the two-stars for that is how i felt when i really read it, but might i suggest reading this when you are in the throes of some sort of emotional tidal wave?? it was not meant for happy eyes. although there still isn't any shame copulating with any houseflies here at my place.
come to my blog!
when i was thirteen, i had a journal. and i would lie on my tummy and kick my feet in the air and record my tiny thoughts.
when i was fifteen, i had a journal. and i would smoke a joint and lie on my tummy and record my huge earthshattering thoughts.
when i was nineteen, i had a journal. and - well, let's save something for the biopic, shall we?
i don't have a journal anymore. and you know why?
because i write huge purple monsters of sentences and only end up making myself small and shy when i come across them years later.
this book suffers from many of these sentences.
i should have known from the first page:
I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire.
ugh. i can feel raymond carver hurling an empty bottle of booze at this sentence in disgust, and for once, i am with him.
there is a way to be evocative and complicated and beautiful all at once, "the smile on your face was the deadest thing alive enough to have the strength to die," anyone??
this?? this ain't that. and as an opening sentence it just stuck in my craw and tainted the rest of the book.
i like crisp prose, clean lines, smart phrasings. this seemed too self-indulgent - too emotionally bloated.too much "why use one word when you can use ten and still say nothing??" going on.
Not God, but bats and a spider who is weaving my guilt, keep the rendezvous with me, and shame copulates with every September housefly. My room echoes with the screams she never uttered, and under my floor the vines of remorse get ready to push up through the damp. The cricket drips remembrance unceasingly into my ear, lest I mislay any items of cruelty's fiendish inventory.
oh, yeah?? is that what shame does?? it copulates with houseflies, does it?? gosh, i hope the maggot gets shame's eyes...i have no patience for this sort of thing.
Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.
i say no thank you.
brigid brophy's introduction is excellent. i read it last, of course, and it made me appreciate the book so much more in retrospect, and it also reminded me of the several parts i did enjoy. but i have to give it two stars, because i really didn't enjoy reading it. there were moments of great beauty, but too many parts where i was just gagging on her prose. i am all for pain and howling emotions,but isn't it the responsibility of the writer to marry the vulnerable raw nerves with craft?? it is true there were many moments where i was totally on-board with her writing, but when it was bad, it was very very bad.
and, oh, what's this??
someone has come to interrupt my ravings...it's me - a week later!
okay, so i have been really sad for a couple of days now. and i have reread great swathes of this book under the influence of my own ragged emotions.and i am ashamed to admit that i like it more now. i have to keep the two-stars for that is how i felt when i really read it, but might i suggest reading this when you are in the throes of some sort of emotional tidal wave?? it was not meant for happy eyes. although there still isn't any shame copulating with any houseflies here at my place.
come to my blog!
Read
May 31, 2019What hand of fate placed this book in my path after I'd finished a long series of Muriel Spark books I do not know.
All I know is that I found myself taking this book home and loving it all evening, and all through the next day, and when I reached the end, I started loving it all over again from the beginning, this time reveling in the difference between Elizabeth Smart's and Muriel Spark's writing. Where Spark is all concision, Smart is all excess, where Spark is firm and trim, Smart is soft and yielding. I didn't know I needed this excess of words, this soft pulpy innerness, but I did. I see now that I was thirsty for writing that had feelings and heart instead of control and cleverness. I just didn't know it.
When I picked this book up in the shop, I was looking for books by Stevie Smith, a contemporary of Muriel Spark's, because I'd found a reference that linked the two women. But Stevie Smith wasn't in my bookshop. Instead, waiting for me like a lover, was Elizabeth Smart's first line, I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire...
All I know is that I found myself taking this book home and loving it all evening, and all through the next day, and when I reached the end, I started loving it all over again from the beginning, this time reveling in the difference between Elizabeth Smart's and Muriel Spark's writing. Where Spark is all concision, Smart is all excess, where Spark is firm and trim, Smart is soft and yielding. I didn't know I needed this excess of words, this soft pulpy innerness, but I did. I see now that I was thirsty for writing that had feelings and heart instead of control and cleverness. I just didn't know it.
When I picked this book up in the shop, I was looking for books by Stevie Smith, a contemporary of Muriel Spark's, because I'd found a reference that linked the two women. But Stevie Smith wasn't in my bookshop. Instead, waiting for me like a lover, was Elizabeth Smart's first line, I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire...
March 22, 2018
Quedé muy sorprendido con esta novela y, por ende, conmigo mismo: tan encantado estaba por su lectura. No leo poesía, no consigo disfrutarla, y sin embargo no es otra cosa esta personal e impúdica novela de Elizabeth Smart.
Porque impúdica es la desnudez sentimental con la que se nos presenta Smart en la novela, la absoluta falta de contención al dar rienda suelta a su desgarro, al dolor que siente por la devastadora, tiránica y totalizadora pasión que la domina y que antepone a todo, a su familia, a sus hijos, a ella misma.
Aun sin tener la cultura necesaria para exprimir todo el sentido a las múltiples referencias, relaciones y citas que incluye, la obra puede disfrutarse como lo que es, una dramática y lírica plegaria por un amor complicado. Un libro carente de línea argumental, a veces caótico, siempre exigente y extraordinario, y sí, por momentos, oscuro e inescrutable (¡Ay esa parte siete!). Pero no es necesario entender cada frase, cada párrafo para captar y aprehender y saborear la fuerza del sentimiento que trasmite, la tragedia que retrata. El libro es el alma de su autora. De lo exterior, de los hechos, solo podemos hacernos una nebulosa idea: suficiente.
Y pese a tanto sufrimiento, Smart expone claramente su preferencia por esta destructora cara del amor si la alternativa es la mera indiferencia. Pues no querría yo sentir una pasión tan desgarradora, ni que la sintieran por mí, no querría ser yo, no soy, esta yonqui del sentimiento que rehúsa cualquier método de desintoxicación y capaz de decir:
Porque impúdica es la desnudez sentimental con la que se nos presenta Smart en la novela, la absoluta falta de contención al dar rienda suelta a su desgarro, al dolor que siente por la devastadora, tiránica y totalizadora pasión que la domina y que antepone a todo, a su familia, a sus hijos, a ella misma.
"Todo lo inunda el agua del amor: de todo lo que ve el ojo, no hay nada que el agua del amor no cubra. No existe un solo ángulo en el mundo que el amor en mis ojos no pueda convertir en símbolo de amor. Incluso la precisa geometría de su mano, cuando la contemplo, me disuelve en agua, y la corriente del amor me arrastra… El amor me posee, y no tengo alternativa. Cuando el Ford traquetea hasta la puerta, con cinco minutos (cinco años) de retraso, y él cruza el césped bajo los pimenteros, permanezco de pie detrás de las cortinas de gasa, incapaz de moverme para ir a su encuentro, o de hablar: estoy convirtiéndome en líquido para invadir cada uno de sus orificios en cuanto abra la puerta. Tenaz como un pájaro recién nacido, todo boca con su único deseo, cierro los ojos y tiemblo, esperando el paraíso: va a tocarme.”
Aun sin tener la cultura necesaria para exprimir todo el sentido a las múltiples referencias, relaciones y citas que incluye, la obra puede disfrutarse como lo que es, una dramática y lírica plegaria por un amor complicado. Un libro carente de línea argumental, a veces caótico, siempre exigente y extraordinario, y sí, por momentos, oscuro e inescrutable (¡Ay esa parte siete!). Pero no es necesario entender cada frase, cada párrafo para captar y aprehender y saborear la fuerza del sentimiento que trasmite, la tragedia que retrata. El libro es el alma de su autora. De lo exterior, de los hechos, solo podemos hacernos una nebulosa idea: suficiente.
Y pese a tanto sufrimiento, Smart expone claramente su preferencia por esta destructora cara del amor si la alternativa es la mera indiferencia. Pues no querría yo sentir una pasión tan desgarradora, ni que la sintieran por mí, no querría ser yo, no soy, esta yonqui del sentimiento que rehúsa cualquier método de desintoxicación y capaz de decir:
“Hiéreme, traicióname, pero dame una sola cosa, la certeza del amor.”
January 11, 2016
This self-indulgent twaddle should have stayed in Smart's journal where it belongs. Convoluted sentences, with layer upon layer of metaphor, make the book a struggle to read, and surely even in a 'prose poem' it should be possible to work out what (if anything) is going on? It made a little more sense when I had read up on Smart's life and her relationship with Barker, but I reckon a book should stand up on its own without expecting the reader to do research. In Part Ten – nearly at the end! Hurrah! – Smart writes: "No morbid adolescent ever clutched toward melodramatic conclusion so wildly." Well, lady, you said it.
February 18, 2024
The most heart wrenching, raw, eloquent and poignant depiction of love I have ever read
December 2, 2014
This book is written in poetic prose and is condidered by some critics to be a masterprice in the genre. I can safely say I have never read anything quite like it before. The book trailer uses the word indescribable and I certainly agree. This book won't be for everyone; you can read the varying reviews and see that. I don't think you can just pick the book up and understand what it's about without some background information. I read as much as I could about the relationship of Elizabeth Smart and George Barker beforehand, and it enhanced my understanding and appreciation of the book.
In the 1930's, Elizabeth Smart was browsing a London bookstore on Charring Cross Road, when she came across a book of poetry written by British poet George Barker, and instantly fell in love with the man, never having met him, and declaring him the love of her life. This epiphany would eventually bring them together, and even though he was married, they would begin a love affair that would last for years, produce four children, and cause untold grief and heartache for everyone involved. When you keep that in mind while you are reading, you can see the beauty of what she is saying, and the genius in the writing of it.
It was originally published in 1945 and reissued in 1966, when Angela Carter writing in the Guardian said, "It's like Madame Bovary blasted by lighting". It's hard for me to find anything to compare it to, but it struck the perfect note with me and I loved it.
5 stars
Revised Sept. 2016
In the 1930's, Elizabeth Smart was browsing a London bookstore on Charring Cross Road, when she came across a book of poetry written by British poet George Barker, and instantly fell in love with the man, never having met him, and declaring him the love of her life. This epiphany would eventually bring them together, and even though he was married, they would begin a love affair that would last for years, produce four children, and cause untold grief and heartache for everyone involved. When you keep that in mind while you are reading, you can see the beauty of what she is saying, and the genius in the writing of it.
It was originally published in 1945 and reissued in 1966, when Angela Carter writing in the Guardian said, "It's like Madame Bovary blasted by lighting". It's hard for me to find anything to compare it to, but it struck the perfect note with me and I loved it.
5 stars
Revised Sept. 2016
January 29, 2016
I passionately love the title of this book! I passionately hate everything else about this book. This isn't love Elizabeth, this is self serving nonsense! It's so introspective! She talks about how much she loves this man and yet you have no sense of why? She doesn't talk about him! She just talks about herself! It felt so long! I felt like I was endlessly reading the same paragraph! And some of the images were beautiful but some of the images were ludicrous- "my lover has Doves eyes" what in the name of God!!!!!!! Your lover has the dull, unblinking eyes of a pigeon!!!!! HIDEOUS!!!!
December 11, 2009
I had a joke I was going to start off with, but I can't remember exactly what it was. I promised Karen I'd put it in here though. Karen bought this book for me in Portland at Powell's, I don't know why this book was on my to-get list, but the title would have definitely been enough for me to want the book. I think it might have been a favorite of Morrissey. I'd added a few books a while back because Morrissey liked them. Anyway, Karen bought this for me, and Elizabeth was interested in the book when she saw it (I think, I wasn't there) and she was interested to see what I thought of it. When I was reading this book I don't know if Karen reminded me that Elizabeth wanted me to write a review, or I just had the book with me and I pointed at the cover and said Elizabeth wants to read this book because (here I did a very funny voice, it's nothing like Elizabeth's real voice, it's my token I'm imitating someone voice) "My name is Elizabeth, and I'm Smart. Look at the book, it says so right here, Elizabeth Smart, that's me, I'm smart!" It probably wasn't much funnier in person.
Right from the start this book falls in to the win category with the title.
If the book was only the hundred page lyrical / prose / poem / novella (I don't really buy the introduction's effort to classify this as a poem but it can be a poem. For the sake of this idea, this review is a poem) it would have five stars. Yep, five stars. It is angry and bitter and beautiful and captures the best parts of love and pain and heartbreak. All things good. I thought that I had underlined some passages I really liked, and I was going to share those here, but apparently I only marked one. It is:
Wherever we went, though, whatever we did, we had always to return like cornered foxes to the hotel room. And always the wallpaper dispersed with its heavy writing any optimism we might have gathered. There were no solutions in the writing on the wall. It urged us to despair. It is criminally responsible for all histories.
For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action.
I'm awful at praising things I really like. "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" captures doomed and terminal love that will never fully die in a wonderful / painful manner.
The first novella is so perfect that the second one feels unnecessary. It's sort of the sequel, the and then this stuff happened, but it feels unwanted in the book. The first novella had everything and I thought this will be awesome, it will be more of the greatness. But it's not as good. It's not that "The Assumption of Rogues & Rascals" is bad, it's quite good actually, but it's not of the same caliber as the first piece.
The first piece in this book is an autobiographical-ish story of the authors love for the poet George Barker. She totally falls in love with him before even meeting him and sets him up to move from England to America and they fall in love and they have a bunch of kids together. There only hitch in this storybook romance is that George Barker is married to another woman, whom he stays married too. I don't know what his wife knew, what the arrangements were, but this wasn't a Henry & June kind of arrangement. This was a woman totally in love with this poet and basically giving her life to him and only getting to be the second most important woman in his life. The first piece is about the feelings of being in love with someone attainable but not fully attainable. The second piece is about living without the person, in a foreign country, during a war with a few kids by the person. The second piece takes a while to get going, it's not until after the scene is set of life during and immediately after wartime that Smart finds her stride and really gets going. The voice of the first half of the book was varied. Now it is tired. It is bitter. It doesn't see the world through the eyes of a romantic poem, even a tragic one but sees the ugliness now. In the first part she wouldn't have seen a rose and say:
I picked these roses because they looked so disgusting, just waiting there for the bees to come and fuck them.
By the end of the second novella there is something captivating about the way she goes about telling the second half of her story. The problem is putting the two halves together in one book. They are too similar but just different enough that they are jarring to each other. They don't complement each other but stand almost as fun house mirrors distorting the other. May I suggest if you read this book that you read the first novella, and then read a few other books and then return to the world of Elizabeth Smart. I think you will find the book more agreeable that way.
Right from the start this book falls in to the win category with the title.
If the book was only the hundred page lyrical / prose / poem / novella (I don't really buy the introduction's effort to classify this as a poem but it can be a poem. For the sake of this idea, this review is a poem) it would have five stars. Yep, five stars. It is angry and bitter and beautiful and captures the best parts of love and pain and heartbreak. All things good. I thought that I had underlined some passages I really liked, and I was going to share those here, but apparently I only marked one. It is:
Wherever we went, though, whatever we did, we had always to return like cornered foxes to the hotel room. And always the wallpaper dispersed with its heavy writing any optimism we might have gathered. There were no solutions in the writing on the wall. It urged us to despair. It is criminally responsible for all histories.
For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action.
I'm awful at praising things I really like. "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" captures doomed and terminal love that will never fully die in a wonderful / painful manner.
The first novella is so perfect that the second one feels unnecessary. It's sort of the sequel, the and then this stuff happened, but it feels unwanted in the book. The first novella had everything and I thought this will be awesome, it will be more of the greatness. But it's not as good. It's not that "The Assumption of Rogues & Rascals" is bad, it's quite good actually, but it's not of the same caliber as the first piece.
The first piece in this book is an autobiographical-ish story of the authors love for the poet George Barker. She totally falls in love with him before even meeting him and sets him up to move from England to America and they fall in love and they have a bunch of kids together. There only hitch in this storybook romance is that George Barker is married to another woman, whom he stays married too. I don't know what his wife knew, what the arrangements were, but this wasn't a Henry & June kind of arrangement. This was a woman totally in love with this poet and basically giving her life to him and only getting to be the second most important woman in his life. The first piece is about the feelings of being in love with someone attainable but not fully attainable. The second piece is about living without the person, in a foreign country, during a war with a few kids by the person. The second piece takes a while to get going, it's not until after the scene is set of life during and immediately after wartime that Smart finds her stride and really gets going. The voice of the first half of the book was varied. Now it is tired. It is bitter. It doesn't see the world through the eyes of a romantic poem, even a tragic one but sees the ugliness now. In the first part she wouldn't have seen a rose and say:
I picked these roses because they looked so disgusting, just waiting there for the bees to come and fuck them.
By the end of the second novella there is something captivating about the way she goes about telling the second half of her story. The problem is putting the two halves together in one book. They are too similar but just different enough that they are jarring to each other. They don't complement each other but stand almost as fun house mirrors distorting the other. May I suggest if you read this book that you read the first novella, and then read a few other books and then return to the world of Elizabeth Smart. I think you will find the book more agreeable that way.
August 31, 2014
I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world of sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.See a woman who is part of an unending love triangle, feel the music of her "love language" through this prose poem, follow the staccato of her thoughts, know that this is about love and its melancholy. Unrequited love? No. Unappreciated love, I would say. Love that is not true. But who I am to judge the confounding love the author shares with her married, unavailable, and narcissistic lover?
My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
No, I won't judge the love, I'll judge the content and how it makes me feel.
I will mention the references to the Songs of Solomon, how the depth of their nuance add to the lyrical movement of this classic piece; how I was pleasantly surprised to see these familiar words presented in this book :
The king hath brought me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love.I will discuss how the deliberate secrecy of this piece perhaps adds to its stylistic mastery, and this could be why most poetry students or readers are encouraged to read it. (Although, it is important to note that secrecy was most likely a necessary choice, given the times, especially since there is a scene in the book, when the author is stopped at the Arizona state border and interrogated, because she is an unmarried woman attempting to cross state lines with a married man).
Injure me, betray me, but only make me sure of the love, for all day and night, away from him and with him, everywhere and always, that is my gravity, and the apples (which ben ripe in my gardayne) fall only towards that.
What I really liked about this piece, is the serene melancholy written with precious meticulousness:
The knife stuck in my flesh leaves only the hole that proves I am dead.
This is about love, desperation, and mental disparity (contemplated suicide also plays a role here). It is beautiful and disjointed; somber, yet hopeful; trenchant, yet gracious, and articulate, but at times, also reticent.
But my eyes, like the bloody setting sun, peer through the veils and mists which rise from sorrow, towards that meeting which I must have or die.
Love, or obsession?
This is based on a true story. Elizabeth Smart saw a volume of George Baker's poetry, fell in love with him, and then concocted a tale that included flying he and his wife from Japan to the United States. There, she began her plan to have him: "I cannot be a female saint. I want the one I want. He is the one I picked out from the world. I picked him out in cold deliberation." If this doesn't add drama to a book, I don't know what does.
Not surprisingly, this book, which was first published in 1945, ends up in a lament--with mythical and biblical interpretations. It is the kind of book someone gives a 3-star rating, and the other, a 5-star rating. If you're a lover of the prose poem, chances are, you will love this. If poetry moves you, if you are patient with the line-by-line completion in poetry because you read it with the understanding that you will grasp its meaning only per its line and not its full body, then you will appreciate this piece. However, if you are not a lover of poetry, chances are, you will hate this prose poem, for you will expect scenes and plot and definition; you will expect a narrative thread, instead, you will find a thread of mood and imagery. I'm somewhere in the middle (as is evident by my rating), but this is one of those books that adheres to the definition of a classic because after reading it, I placed it on my shelf with the thought that I must revisit it in a year or two.
3.5 stars
June 6, 2026
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and... Bored the Reader to Tears
The real-life backstory behind Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has all the ingredients for a gripping, thought-provoking novel. A scandalous, all-consuming affair with the married British poet George Barker, pregnancy, international border crossings, bureaucratic intervention, and intense social ostracization—it is a goldmine of raw human drama.
Unfortunately, instead of transforming that compelling reality into a structured narrative, Ms. Smart opted for a different artistic direction. She decided to just sit down and weep. For a hundred pages.
The literary world frequently fawns over this book, shielding it from criticism by labeling it a masterpiece of "prose-poetry." But what does beautiful prose matter if the book beneath it lacks a solid foundation? Without the historical context of the Smart-Barker affair, the narrative risks losing its shape entirely. It relies heavily on the reader's external knowledge of the gossip to generate its emotional stakes.
Structurally, the book feels entirely undetermined. Smart essentially throws a giant bucket of classical myths and literary references onto the floor—shuffling through Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, and the Song of Solomon—and yet, every single comparison is used for the exact same purpose: to express an overwhelming sense of self-pity.
There is an exhausting level of repetition that suffocates whatever genuine grief might have been there. If she had channeled that agony into a structured narrative with an actual plot, she could have taken a memorable, permanent revenge through art. Instead, she just wept.
If someone like Delmore Schwartz had taken this material, we might have received a psychological masterpiece. Instead, we got a classic case of an author substituting a thesaurus and a box of tissues for a coherent synopsis and a mature outline. If you love poetry for the sake of poetry, you might find something to admire in the rhythm of the sentences. But if you value substantive, grounded literature with structural discipline, Ms. Smart’s hyper-ventilating diary entries will likely leave your patience entirely exhausted.
The real-life backstory behind Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has all the ingredients for a gripping, thought-provoking novel. A scandalous, all-consuming affair with the married British poet George Barker, pregnancy, international border crossings, bureaucratic intervention, and intense social ostracization—it is a goldmine of raw human drama.
Unfortunately, instead of transforming that compelling reality into a structured narrative, Ms. Smart opted for a different artistic direction. She decided to just sit down and weep. For a hundred pages.
The literary world frequently fawns over this book, shielding it from criticism by labeling it a masterpiece of "prose-poetry." But what does beautiful prose matter if the book beneath it lacks a solid foundation? Without the historical context of the Smart-Barker affair, the narrative risks losing its shape entirely. It relies heavily on the reader's external knowledge of the gossip to generate its emotional stakes.
Structurally, the book feels entirely undetermined. Smart essentially throws a giant bucket of classical myths and literary references onto the floor—shuffling through Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, and the Song of Solomon—and yet, every single comparison is used for the exact same purpose: to express an overwhelming sense of self-pity.
There is an exhausting level of repetition that suffocates whatever genuine grief might have been there. If she had channeled that agony into a structured narrative with an actual plot, she could have taken a memorable, permanent revenge through art. Instead, she just wept.
If someone like Delmore Schwartz had taken this material, we might have received a psychological masterpiece. Instead, we got a classic case of an author substituting a thesaurus and a box of tissues for a coherent synopsis and a mature outline. If you love poetry for the sake of poetry, you might find something to admire in the rhythm of the sentences. But if you value substantive, grounded literature with structural discipline, Ms. Smart’s hyper-ventilating diary entries will likely leave your patience entirely exhausted.
June 1, 2011
Elizabeth Smart was in a longterm relationship with the poet George Barker, even having four children with him. During that time he was married. So her life did not go the way she really wanted it to, and her longing for him permeates this book. Published in 1945, it is one of the earlier examples of "poetic prose," and the mention on the back cover that it is like Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes makes me want to read both of them; in my reading experience it is closest to Jeannette Winterson, one of the authors I love and adore.
That said, I don't think this would be for everyone. It is FLOWERY and DRAMATIC and would almost feel like teenaged angst except the metaphors and allusions are very literary and almost over my head at times. I have a hard time picturing armpits like chalices, and in moments like this, she does lose me a bit.
But I was in a reading slump, and it was so different from what I was slogging through, that I enjoyed immersing into her emotions. This is considered a novel (or novella, as it is only 98 pages) because while her emotions are probably the same, the person who is the narrator in the book only has the one child.
I understand that a later book, which actually occupies the second half of this printing, The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals, tells a much less emotional tale of raising four children alone. I might read it after rereading this one.
That said, I don't think this would be for everyone. It is FLOWERY and DRAMATIC and would almost feel like teenaged angst except the metaphors and allusions are very literary and almost over my head at times. I have a hard time picturing armpits like chalices, and in moments like this, she does lose me a bit.
But I was in a reading slump, and it was so different from what I was slogging through, that I enjoyed immersing into her emotions. This is considered a novel (or novella, as it is only 98 pages) because while her emotions are probably the same, the person who is the narrator in the book only has the one child.
I understand that a later book, which actually occupies the second half of this printing, The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals, tells a much less emotional tale of raising four children alone. I might read it after rereading this one.
January 11, 2014
Very divided about this book, hence the 3 stars. On the one hand, gorgeous gorgeous prose: there were many sentences I read over and over. And the subject matter--obsessive love--is conveyed with the sort of honesty that's humbling ("honesty" actually feels pretty pallid when applied to Elizabeth Smart, but I can't think of a word that means "beyond honesty").
On the other hand (and I realize this sort of criticism is like being confronted with a particular type of animal--say a horse--and whining that I wish it were a cat), I found the book's almost entirely internal focus, its total lack of description of Smart's lover, maddening. I wanted to believe in her love for him... and yet the two or three things the reader's able to discern about him make him sound not only not loveable, but not even particularly likeable. Which makes the obsessiveness of Smart's feelings for him hard to get behind. I was torn between feeling tremendous empathy for her, and wanting to reach into the book and shake her.
On the other hand (and I realize this sort of criticism is like being confronted with a particular type of animal--say a horse--and whining that I wish it were a cat), I found the book's almost entirely internal focus, its total lack of description of Smart's lover, maddening. I wanted to believe in her love for him... and yet the two or three things the reader's able to discern about him make him sound not only not loveable, but not even particularly likeable. Which makes the obsessiveness of Smart's feelings for him hard to get behind. I was torn between feeling tremendous empathy for her, and wanting to reach into the book and shake her.
April 3, 2025
O the water of love that floods everything over, so that there is nothing the eye sees that is not covered in. There is no angle the world can assume which the love in my eye cannot make into a symbol of love. Even the precise geometry of his hand, when I gaze at it, dissolves into water and I flow away in a flood of love.
This book is the very definition of excess: in the outflow and outcry of the language to the subject matter of an obsessive love affair with a married man. The female narrator self-wills her fanatical, almost neurotic love as we can see in the quotation above: 'no angle the world can assume which the love in my eye cannot make into a symbol of love... the precise geometry of his hand, when I gaze at it... I flow away in a flood of love'. This is all about her subjectivity which narrows the world down to her feelings about this excessive love that crowds out anything other than a mere sketching in of the outside world.
In this sense, we understand nothing about who the man is (drawn on Smart's own relationship with the poet George Barker), or his wife or even anything substantive about the narrator herself or external events other than what pertains to her inner ecstasy and agony. There are few exterior markers and what there are are sublimated to the impetus of desire and loss, grief and triumph. The title, for example, moves from the urban modernity of Grand Central station to the psalmic banks of the river of Babylon, and the captivity of the Israelites yearning for Jerusalem.
Throughout, the text makes these connections between modern culture, the biblical or religious and classical myth, sometimes over-reaching ('Jupiter has been with Leda, I thought, and now nothing can avert the Trojan Wars', for the love triangle in which the narrator is embroiled), or becoming almost jarringly incoherent with rapt self-absorption: 'but who will have any pride in the wedding red, seeping up between the thighs of love which rise like a colossus, but whose issue is only the cold semen of grief?' - strictly speaking, we can parse this but it strikes me as almost comically fevered however much it binds together imagery of sex and loss, even the evocation of Shakespeare's Cleopatra describing Marc Antony as a 'colossus'.
For me, this is an interesting experiment in writing female subjectivity through a mythic lens that is trying to aggrandize what might be read as a grubby affair that takes place in the presence of the man's wife. It's not any kind of moral judgment that had me struggling with this book - it's that the operatic grandeur that is being aimed for is so top-heavy, so extreme and unbalanced that there's barely a moment as a reader where we can catch our breath. This is like reading a roller-coaster where we're constantly teetering at the top, and it's a heady, if unsatisfying, place to stay.
November 17, 2014
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept nearly did me in. It's the story of a woman in love with a married man, and what I've found is that it's just very, very difficult to convey the feeling of "forbidden love and overwhelming lust" without seeming like you're about to give yourself a stroke. I just wanted this woman to calm down already! It was too much, way too much, and I needed a break before I could pick it up again. Fortunately for me, By Grand Central Station is a novella of only 100 pages, followed in this volume by a sequel (also around 100 pages) called The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. In The Assumption, our easily excitable heroine is now on her own, figuring how to move forward with a broken heart and, most interestingly, how to write about it. I related to this section much more than I was expecting, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Cooler heads prevailed and my reading experience was rescued. I can see why this book has stayed in print all these years—its portrait of a woman of heart and mind is unique and quite obviously groundbreaking. Respect.
March 6, 2016
This was, for me, an intensely frustrating book. The Canadian author decided as a teenager she would 'fall in love with a poet'. She grew up (somewhat) and fell in love with literary also-ran George Barker, whose main claim to fame is that TS Eliot once thought he was good. They had a protracted and dreary relationship and four children, despite his marriage and complete lack of commitment to her or anyone else.
It's a prose poem that sings in places, but mostly whines; a consequence of the poet choosing a manchild as her muse. Cyril Connolly quipped about the 'pram in the hall' being the enemy of good art. It's worse for women, whose art is often stymied by the pram in the head.
The frustration, for me, was wishing she had used her evident talent and insight on something more substantial than love, especially the banal, self-indulgent 'I love him with my whole being' kind that is only ever a mirror and never a window.
It's a prose poem that sings in places, but mostly whines; a consequence of the poet choosing a manchild as her muse. Cyril Connolly quipped about the 'pram in the hall' being the enemy of good art. It's worse for women, whose art is often stymied by the pram in the head.
The frustration, for me, was wishing she had used her evident talent and insight on something more substantial than love, especially the banal, self-indulgent 'I love him with my whole being' kind that is only ever a mirror and never a window.
October 6, 2024
Prose poetry. A genre I’ve just experienced for the first time. And one that I hope I don’t accidentally stumble upon again.
If I can’t visualise what’s going on, it means nothing to me. Metaphor galore. It felt like a philosopher went mad in the rain and thought their brainwaves meant something and had to tell the world. I have no idea what happened. The notes on the author explain it at the end, but even still, I felt unconvinced that’s what happened.
I was lured in by the title. I had hoped for pure heartbreak scenes in a relatable way. Instead, I felt like I was invited to a party and I was the only one there who didn’t speak the language. Zzzzz.
If I can’t visualise what’s going on, it means nothing to me. Metaphor galore. It felt like a philosopher went mad in the rain and thought their brainwaves meant something and had to tell the world. I have no idea what happened. The notes on the author explain it at the end, but even still, I felt unconvinced that’s what happened.
I was lured in by the title. I had hoped for pure heartbreak scenes in a relatable way. Instead, I felt like I was invited to a party and I was the only one there who didn’t speak the language. Zzzzz.
November 17, 2009
Cuando empiezas a estudiar literatura en la universidad siempre hay un profe que te cuenta que las fronteras entre géneros literarios son muy difusas, que a veces no se puede distinguir tan claramente a qué género pertenece una obra. Luego también te encuentras otro profe (o puede que sea el mismo) que te cuenta que las mujeres tienen una forma de escribir diferente a la de los hombres. Y no te presentan ninguna prueba, pero tú eres joven e idealista y no te cuesta ningún esfuerzo hacer el acto de fe que representa asumir estas teorías como verdaderas. Y el tiempo pasa y lees más y te vuelves más cínica y te empiezas a preguntar si muchas de las cosas que te han contado y has creído no son en realidad una falacia (otra bonita palabra que también aprendiste en la universidad). Pero tampoco es que te importe mucho y sigues leyendo y por fin aprendes a leer de una forma nueva, a medio camino entre la lectura evasiva (que practicabas antes de la universidad) y la lectura tomando notas en vistas de escribir un tedioso trabajo (que practicabas en la universidad). Y sigues leyendo. Y un día encuentras un libro que te hace ver que lo que te contaron puede que no sea siempre cierto, pero a veces puede ser cierto.
'En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré' de Elizabeth Smart es un libro escrito en prosa poética y en un estilo delicado y sensual que ningún hombre podría imitar aunque lo intentara (un estilo que me recuerda terriblemente al de Jeanette Winterson, pero también un poco al de Janet Frame, o Jean Rhys, o A.S. Byatt). Elizabeth Smart es una escritora canadiense que se trasladó a Londres para estudiar música. Allí, un día, como por azar, entró en una librería y compró un libro de poesía de George Barker, y se enamoró no sólo de los poemas sino también del escritor. Pasó un tiempo, por fin lo conoció y, a pesar de que él ya estaba casado, empezaron una relación tempestuosa de la que nacieron cuatro hijos. La relación se terminó, pero ella no dejó de amarlo. 'En Grand Central Station' se basa en esta relación. Es una obra en la que los hechos externos nos son dados en cuentagotas. Más que narrar hechos, describe sentimientos, prescindiendo de prácticamente todo lo externo. Así la narradora describe por los estadios que pasa en su relación amorosa: esperanza, sentimiento de culpa, alegría, plenitud, duda, decepción, miedo, alejamiento, rabia, tristeza, vacío, etc.
Es una obra desgarradora, que te hace creer en que la literatura no tiene límites, ni la belleza, ni la vida, ni el amor. Es de una belleza abrumadora, que a algunos puede llegar a agotar y que a otros puede provocar incluso hilaridad. Es un libro totalmente desanclado de la época en el que fue escrito, sus influencias se remontan a la poesía medieval, con tópicos literarios que van desde el "yo soy la más grande amadora que jamás ha existido" hasta el "los que nos rodean son unos materialistas que no pueden entender el amor y tienen envidia de nosotros". Es una obra hiperbólica y excesiva, pero también sincera y valiente. Leerla es sentir que alguien te ha hecho el maravilloso y precioso regalo de compartir contigo una parte tan íntima que crees no merecer. Es intensa hasta el paroxismo. Pero lo que es su mayor virtud, el hecho de ser tan intensa, tan particular, tan personal, es también el único "pero" que puedo encontrar, porque es tan "tan" que una no deja de tener la sensación que se está perdiendo mucho. Pero es una auténtica joya, una joya frágil que todo lector tiene que manipular con cuidado, porque es una joya con ángulos afilados y una se puede fácilmente cortar con ella.
'En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré' de Elizabeth Smart es un libro escrito en prosa poética y en un estilo delicado y sensual que ningún hombre podría imitar aunque lo intentara (un estilo que me recuerda terriblemente al de Jeanette Winterson, pero también un poco al de Janet Frame, o Jean Rhys, o A.S. Byatt). Elizabeth Smart es una escritora canadiense que se trasladó a Londres para estudiar música. Allí, un día, como por azar, entró en una librería y compró un libro de poesía de George Barker, y se enamoró no sólo de los poemas sino también del escritor. Pasó un tiempo, por fin lo conoció y, a pesar de que él ya estaba casado, empezaron una relación tempestuosa de la que nacieron cuatro hijos. La relación se terminó, pero ella no dejó de amarlo. 'En Grand Central Station' se basa en esta relación. Es una obra en la que los hechos externos nos son dados en cuentagotas. Más que narrar hechos, describe sentimientos, prescindiendo de prácticamente todo lo externo. Así la narradora describe por los estadios que pasa en su relación amorosa: esperanza, sentimiento de culpa, alegría, plenitud, duda, decepción, miedo, alejamiento, rabia, tristeza, vacío, etc.
Es una obra desgarradora, que te hace creer en que la literatura no tiene límites, ni la belleza, ni la vida, ni el amor. Es de una belleza abrumadora, que a algunos puede llegar a agotar y que a otros puede provocar incluso hilaridad. Es un libro totalmente desanclado de la época en el que fue escrito, sus influencias se remontan a la poesía medieval, con tópicos literarios que van desde el "yo soy la más grande amadora que jamás ha existido" hasta el "los que nos rodean son unos materialistas que no pueden entender el amor y tienen envidia de nosotros". Es una obra hiperbólica y excesiva, pero también sincera y valiente. Leerla es sentir que alguien te ha hecho el maravilloso y precioso regalo de compartir contigo una parte tan íntima que crees no merecer. Es intensa hasta el paroxismo. Pero lo que es su mayor virtud, el hecho de ser tan intensa, tan particular, tan personal, es también el único "pero" que puedo encontrar, porque es tan "tan" que una no deja de tener la sensación que se está perdiendo mucho. Pero es una auténtica joya, una joya frágil que todo lector tiene que manipular con cuidado, porque es una joya con ángulos afilados y una se puede fácilmente cortar con ella.
February 22, 2020
I so wish I could tell this book wasn't a disappointment, but unfortunately it was. I was so looking forward to reading it and I'm sorry to say that I found this work of poetic prose to be quite slow, especially in the first parts. Then it picked itself up, but it didn't really give me what I was hoping it would. There were only some beautifully written sentences here and there.
Read
July 9, 2021DNF
Nem a excelente introdução de Helena Barbas me motiva o suficiente para continuar com a leitura desta obra descabida.
Nem a excelente introdução de Helena Barbas me motiva o suficiente para continuar com a leitura desta obra descabida.
May 27, 2019
No es tanto.
June 17, 2014
Feb 2015.
Prose poems about how bloody exhausting it is to be in love.
For some of the people / some of the times, I mean (being old enough to know those who have made it into something sustainable).
This has survived as a cult book largely thanks to Morrissey. Grand Central Station has over a hundred times more readers on here than the memoir of the affair by Smart's lover George Barker. You've won, Liz... Though - as they remained, tempestuously and non-exclusively, involved until her demise - she'd no doubt think he was woefully underappreciated now. From the little I've read elsewhere, it sounds like his former fame had much to do with personal charisma, which meant it waned after his death in old age.)
Brigid Brophy's intro celebrates Smart's juxtaposition of high-flown dramatic romance and the mundane, whereby a person can be a middle class housewife and Isolde at the same time: “it is tomorrow's breakfast rather than the future's blood that dictates fatal forbearance”. A concept which is very Moz. (I thought of Pulp first: to me this concept is quintessentially theirs, though also generally a 90s / Britpop phenom, and it has another parallel history in camp. And I realised – I suspect I have before and then forgotten – that it must be my very particular preference about voices that meant I never liked Smiths/Moz quite as much as many friends do, and why I like Pulp better.) The British lyricists improved on Smart's juxtapositions by taking them further, by making that 'housewife' working class, perhaps with a drugdey part time job and sticky-fingered kids ('Acrylic Afternoons'). The 'Grand Central Station' of the title is still too grand a replacement for the river of Babylon. Whereas Wigan Wallgate, say, would be sufficiently opposite to cause a smile if one knew the reference – and would also bring out the misery and ignominy of the weeping that could be hidden by a more obvious glamour.
Brophy compares Grand Central Station to Jean Genet – I had picked this up on a whim instead of reading the Genet I'd already started. I've had a few of these odd coincidences recently, some which are evidently due to something I'd read before and not consciously remembered: e.g. starting Orfeo and going over to The Book of Disquiet whose author was involved with a magazine called Orfeu - but I only got this a few months ago and hadn't read the intro...perhaps it's background to the intention of reading music memoirs (Morrissey & Patti Smith), but this was chosen just because it was in a stack of very short books; I'd got it after reading Smart's story in a biography of Jeffrey Bernard; she was part of the same Soho scene in the 50s and 60s.
For me, these prose poems are too full of imagery that doesn't grab like the song words it helped inspire; classical mythology, and redwoods and so forth, but perhaps more special to those who love those landscapes.
Nevertheless he first three chapters could overwhelm with the volume of the chords they struck (I gave in to underlining, very rare, weakened by reading a successsion of 5 ebooks just prior.) It's high drama of a sort that will inevitably irritate some. e.g. But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of blood springing to attention. (Love the queerness of this too.) The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart; the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done. It is written. Nothing can escape. There was less later, though still some. Things I'd forgotten: even to recline reminds me of the stances of love, and I am unable to bear the pain of so much remembering (especially when something had never before been anyone else's favourite as it was mine). But if you do me the wrong of thinking … I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me. Though she, likewise, survived independently without significant mishap, no doubt feeling she was like a dead siamese twin being dragged around by life - but also by some autopilot hoovering and shaving between all the howling. This following made me feel so sorry for her: There is never anywhere to cry. The walls are always too thin and the sobs so loud that they echo down the street and across salt water bays. Can't even let go and be sad at home.
Sentences like those above were like some drug of addiction, and in chapters without (many) I found myself bratty and chair-kickingly bored from withdrawal, and had to consciously adjust to paying more attention to the world and difference to see the peculiarities of her experience. When she comes up against what Brophy more succinctly calls that extraordinary American law against crossing a state boundary with sexual purposes. Her parents getting involved – at her age (but this was the 1930s and 40s). Pregnant and miserable during the London Blitz. In the early chapters there were still things I didn't 'get' as much as the above paragraph, I half-lost them in the emotional melee (that she'd be jealous of him pulling a boy; possibly carrying on in front of his wife, who was definitely not agreeable to it – biographical details are hazy on that, and this is poetry, not straight autobio after all).
Thanks to Wikipedia, my opinion of Angela Carter yoyos yet again:
When the book was reissued in the late 1960s, novelist Angela Carter praised the novel in a Guardian review as “like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning” but later wrote privately to her friend, critic Lorna Sage, that one of her motivations for founding the feminist press Virago was "the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept [sic], exquisite prose though it might contain. (By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls would be more like it, I should hope.)
Er, yes, because the potential to access political power and publishing obviously stopped the overblown passions of Alfred de Musset, and Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the young Goethe. Nope, not the right variable, though parenting may have been one of the factors. Smart was already well-educated and had a job in which she was able to support herself. Still, I would be embarrassed and worried if some hypothetical child of mine acted like such a groupie (we can say groupie only because it turned out he fancied her...) as to decide to have a relationship with someone after reading their book and then went to track them down; one would hope they knew that the chances of this working, unless perhaps they are already an established artist in their own right who moves in the same circles, are 99.99% against, and much higher are those of being an annoying nuisance or even criminal.
Oh, but nonetheless this book has some exqusite(ly stomach-churning) moments, and fascinating vignettes of its time, and led to some great, great lyrics. Another similarity with Genet (so far, not having finished that) - over all, preferring the works and artists it inspired to the thing itself.
Prose poems about how bloody exhausting it is to be in love.
For some of the people / some of the times, I mean (being old enough to know those who have made it into something sustainable).
This has survived as a cult book largely thanks to Morrissey. Grand Central Station has over a hundred times more readers on here than the memoir of the affair by Smart's lover George Barker. You've won, Liz... Though - as they remained, tempestuously and non-exclusively, involved until her demise - she'd no doubt think he was woefully underappreciated now. From the little I've read elsewhere, it sounds like his former fame had much to do with personal charisma, which meant it waned after his death in old age.)
Brigid Brophy's intro celebrates Smart's juxtaposition of high-flown dramatic romance and the mundane, whereby a person can be a middle class housewife and Isolde at the same time: “it is tomorrow's breakfast rather than the future's blood that dictates fatal forbearance”. A concept which is very Moz. (I thought of Pulp first: to me this concept is quintessentially theirs, though also generally a 90s / Britpop phenom, and it has another parallel history in camp. And I realised – I suspect I have before and then forgotten – that it must be my very particular preference about voices that meant I never liked Smiths/Moz quite as much as many friends do, and why I like Pulp better.) The British lyricists improved on Smart's juxtapositions by taking them further, by making that 'housewife' working class, perhaps with a drugdey part time job and sticky-fingered kids ('Acrylic Afternoons'). The 'Grand Central Station' of the title is still too grand a replacement for the river of Babylon. Whereas Wigan Wallgate, say, would be sufficiently opposite to cause a smile if one knew the reference – and would also bring out the misery and ignominy of the weeping that could be hidden by a more obvious glamour.
Brophy compares Grand Central Station to Jean Genet – I had picked this up on a whim instead of reading the Genet I'd already started. I've had a few of these odd coincidences recently, some which are evidently due to something I'd read before and not consciously remembered: e.g. starting Orfeo and going over to The Book of Disquiet whose author was involved with a magazine called Orfeu - but I only got this a few months ago and hadn't read the intro...perhaps it's background to the intention of reading music memoirs (Morrissey & Patti Smith), but this was chosen just because it was in a stack of very short books; I'd got it after reading Smart's story in a biography of Jeffrey Bernard; she was part of the same Soho scene in the 50s and 60s.
For me, these prose poems are too full of imagery that doesn't grab like the song words it helped inspire; classical mythology, and redwoods and so forth, but perhaps more special to those who love those landscapes.
Nevertheless he first three chapters could overwhelm with the volume of the chords they struck (I gave in to underlining, very rare, weakened by reading a successsion of 5 ebooks just prior.) It's high drama of a sort that will inevitably irritate some. e.g. But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of blood springing to attention. (Love the queerness of this too.) The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart; the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done. It is written. Nothing can escape. There was less later, though still some. Things I'd forgotten: even to recline reminds me of the stances of love, and I am unable to bear the pain of so much remembering (especially when something had never before been anyone else's favourite as it was mine). But if you do me the wrong of thinking … I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me. Though she, likewise, survived independently without significant mishap, no doubt feeling she was like a dead siamese twin being dragged around by life - but also by some autopilot hoovering and shaving between all the howling. This following made me feel so sorry for her: There is never anywhere to cry. The walls are always too thin and the sobs so loud that they echo down the street and across salt water bays. Can't even let go and be sad at home.
Sentences like those above were like some drug of addiction, and in chapters without (many) I found myself bratty and chair-kickingly bored from withdrawal, and had to consciously adjust to paying more attention to the world and difference to see the peculiarities of her experience. When she comes up against what Brophy more succinctly calls that extraordinary American law against crossing a state boundary with sexual purposes. Her parents getting involved – at her age (but this was the 1930s and 40s). Pregnant and miserable during the London Blitz. In the early chapters there were still things I didn't 'get' as much as the above paragraph, I half-lost them in the emotional melee (that she'd be jealous of him pulling a boy; possibly carrying on in front of his wife, who was definitely not agreeable to it – biographical details are hazy on that, and this is poetry, not straight autobio after all).
Thanks to Wikipedia, my opinion of Angela Carter yoyos yet again:
When the book was reissued in the late 1960s, novelist Angela Carter praised the novel in a Guardian review as “like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning” but later wrote privately to her friend, critic Lorna Sage, that one of her motivations for founding the feminist press Virago was "the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept [sic], exquisite prose though it might contain. (By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls would be more like it, I should hope.)
Er, yes, because the potential to access political power and publishing obviously stopped the overblown passions of Alfred de Musset, and Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the young Goethe. Nope, not the right variable, though parenting may have been one of the factors. Smart was already well-educated and had a job in which she was able to support herself. Still, I would be embarrassed and worried if some hypothetical child of mine acted like such a groupie (we can say groupie only because it turned out he fancied her...) as to decide to have a relationship with someone after reading their book and then went to track them down; one would hope they knew that the chances of this working, unless perhaps they are already an established artist in their own right who moves in the same circles, are 99.99% against, and much higher are those of being an annoying nuisance or even criminal.
Oh, but nonetheless this book has some exqusite(ly stomach-churning) moments, and fascinating vignettes of its time, and led to some great, great lyrics. Another similarity with Genet (so far, not having finished that) - over all, preferring the works and artists it inspired to the thing itself.
January 24, 2022
Review to come.
August 2, 2014
Being 'prose poetry', a concept I admit I am uncertain about - where is the line drawn between lyrical prose and prose poetry? - Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, acknowledged everywhere as 'a classic of the genre', is dense and florid. Too often I felt like I was looking at a Magic Eye picture, struggling to make out the actual story and meaning in the confusion of language. This was all the more frustrating because having read a bit about the background of this story, Smart's correspondence, affair and ensuing relationship with the (initially married) poet George Baker, I was keen to know more. Nevertheless there are some - many - beautiful lines, a few of which immediately jumped out at me as being recognisable from Smiths songs, especially those used in 'What She Said' (a song particularly close to my heart because, as I may have mentioned before, for part of my A Level English coursework I wrote a dramatic monologue based on it. The monologue was from the point of view of a woman who has murdered her husband's lover. What a weird and coincidental closing of the circle!) This is undoubtedly a beautifully written book, and as much of the praise of it points out, it feels very timeless. However, I struggled to appreciate the raw honesty and passion it's famous for because I just found it too abstruse, too mired in wordplay, metaphor and reference to be truly moving.
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July 12, 2024এতো ভালোবাসা কই থেইকা আসে রে ভাই?!
October 11, 2015
Poetry in prose. Very emotional telling of a forbidden relationship. It is said to be a classic in this genre.
Written by Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986), this tells her passionate love affair with a married man, poet George Baker (1913-1991). Their relationship lasted for 18 years and resulted to four children. The book barely describes Baker but it is able to impart the variety of emotions that a woman-in-love with a married man feels. There is the intensity of love no matter if it is forbidden but at the same time she has to content herself with having stolen moments from the family of the subject of that love. It is sad. Falling in love can be sad, we all know that. However, you can't help be mesmerized by Smart's poetic prose as you will keep on wondering if you have to be that in love to be able to write a brilliant work of art like this.
My little complaint is that I felt unprepared for a prose poetry like this. It's a bit too much to read an emotional poetry about how a woman feels in full 128 pages. If I was a woman and in my 20's or 30's, I might have felt differently about this book especially if I got into an illicit affair. Hah, but no. Oh no.
I am glad to have read the pioneer book in the prose poetry genre. Thank you, Elizabeth Smart of writing this classic.
Written by Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986), this tells her passionate love affair with a married man, poet George Baker (1913-1991). Their relationship lasted for 18 years and resulted to four children. The book barely describes Baker but it is able to impart the variety of emotions that a woman-in-love with a married man feels. There is the intensity of love no matter if it is forbidden but at the same time she has to content herself with having stolen moments from the family of the subject of that love. It is sad. Falling in love can be sad, we all know that. However, you can't help be mesmerized by Smart's poetic prose as you will keep on wondering if you have to be that in love to be able to write a brilliant work of art like this.
My little complaint is that I felt unprepared for a prose poetry like this. It's a bit too much to read an emotional poetry about how a woman feels in full 128 pages. If I was a woman and in my 20's or 30's, I might have felt differently about this book especially if I got into an illicit affair. Hah, but no. Oh no.
I am glad to have read the pioneer book in the prose poetry genre. Thank you, Elizabeth Smart of writing this classic.
November 5, 2019
This contained moments of sweeping, all-encompassing truth and beauty interspersed with shallow angst and stunted, introspective thinking. I also failed to properly understand all of the mythological influences, which is the fault of the reader rather than of Smart's creation, yet it did impact my enjoyment. My overall understanding remained intact and I garnered much about both Smart's personal history, including her affair with married George Barker, and her insight to 1940's America.
July 12, 2016
My goodness, this slim little book makes me feel curmudgeonly. Look at the cover, the praise showered on it for being true and real and a masterpiece, and really, all I felt was irritated. I wasn't convinced this was a great love story, any more than Wuthering Heights is. And at least with Wuthering Heights, I'm not convinced we're supposed to think it is romantic.
Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
May 11, 2015
Way back in the early '90s, I came across Ashley Hutchings' album "By Gloucester Docks I sat down and wept", an intensely personal folk rock concept album telling the story of a doomed relationship. This book is referenced not just by the title, but because a few lines of it are quoted at a key point in the story. Hutchings' sleeve note says "those who have not read it are recommended to as soon as possible". It took me more than 20 years, but when I saw the book, I was curious enough to buy it.
Elizabeth Smart's novella is an impressionistic "prose poem" short of conventional plot but full of striking language - a book more about feeling than action, but something of a gem nonetheless.
Elizabeth Smart's novella is an impressionistic "prose poem" short of conventional plot but full of striking language - a book more about feeling than action, but something of a gem nonetheless.
July 12, 2017
Abro una página al azar. Abra por donde abra cualquier frase es pura poesía. Aunque no coincido con esa forma tan absorbente de ver el amor, que anula y destruye (me ha recordado a algunos versos e ideas de Sylvia Plath) lo cierto es que sus imágenes, sus metáforas, sus planteamientos, son tan bellos y de una calidad tan excelente que puedo decir que he encontrado un nuevo libro de cabecera.
Si os apetece, podéis leer mi reseña completa en http://elmomentoderaquel.blogspot.com...
Si os apetece, podéis leer mi reseña completa en http://elmomentoderaquel.blogspot.com...
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