Reading the 20th Century discussion

This is our thread for our buddy read of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart:

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. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.

We're reading this after someone pointed out that Elspeth Barker who wrote O Caledonia, a February buddy, was the wife in Smart's book and the third side of the love triangle.

We're reading this in April but feel free to comment at any time.

I think the wife was someone else (?Jessica) and that the much younger Elspeth Barker came later and was introduced to George by Elizabeth. Elspeth does marry him eventually after Jessica dies. But I could be wrong!

SueLucie wrote: "I think the wife was someone else (?Jessica) and that the much younger Elspeth Barker came later and was introduced to George by Elizabeth. Elspeth does marry him eventually after Jessica dies. But..."

Yes you are right, my mistake. George Barker was a bit of a philanderer.

Haha, oh well, I'm not going to update my opening post even if it's incorrect! I somehow don't see a George as a philanderer which is very silly but it just makes me think of baggy beige cardigans and slippers...

Guardian article about Barker.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

He must have been quite something, despite his name. I’d never heard of him before or his poetry.

So, having nearly finished this, should I conclude that I don't know what true love is?

Ben wrote: "So, having nearly finished this, should I conclude that I don't know what true love is?"

😆 From what I recall (not much!) this was more about the writing for me than telling me what love is.

Compare with Proust's: 'I would reflect sadly that the love one feels, insofar as it is love for a particular person, may not be a very real thing'.

Did you not like this? I haven't started yet.

It's one of those works that I enjoy on the sentence-by-sentence level, but many of the images don't work for me, and the total abandonment to passion and emotion is not exactly my style. ;).

It reminds me of another book of that era, Under the Volcano, in style, not subject matter, whose excesses tend to wash over me but leave me unmoved in the end. But due to the length of this book it's far more digestible and I will finish it.

And in smallish doses I can enter into the extremity of feeling.

That's an intriguing comparison - I had to read Under the Volcano as an undergrad on a modern literature course and hated it, pretty sure I never finished it. But it made me think of Graham Greene, all those alcoholic-spiritual men - urgh!

Ben wrote: "It's one of those works that I enjoy on the sentence-by-sentence level, but many of the images don't work for me, and the total abandonment to passion and emotion is not exactly my style. ;)"

I looked out my copy and flicking through my annotations, was reminded of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea in terms of the evocation of ecstasy that is so close to despair and agony.

All that excess feels a little performative to me and the writing is definitely operatic which encompasses a slight feel of artificiality.

I think the melding of different systems of metaphor is interesting though which is already flagged in the title as we move from the modern day urban of Grand Central Station to the 'I sat down and wept' of the biblical river of Babylon. There is a huge amount of religious imagery: just in the opening pages we have 'madonna', 'miracle', 'faith', 'sainthood', offset by the mundane of the man 'fumbling' with the tickets and luggage. And the opening line straddles the dichotomy of 'terror' to 'desire'.

It's interesting too to see classical myth: Daphne, Syrinx. And a striking image that pulls all these tones together:

'Then she leans over in the pool and her damp dark hair falls like sorrow, like mercy, like the mourning-weeds of pity' (p.23 in my paperback edition) - this recalls the story of Narcissus as retold in Ovid's Metamorphoses only with the gender changed. And that same image is re-used by Milton in his Paradise Lost when Eve is alone and first catches sight of herself in the pool and becomes fascinated with her own reflection. It has been adopted by psychologists who use it to identify the stage when an individual sees him/herself in a mirror and for the first time recognises themselves as a being in the world that can be looked at by others, a sort of separation.

Here the idea of an obsessive concern with subjectivity and the text as a mirror of the narrator's self, possibly a narcissistic mode that closes down the world to the main interest of this affair all seem to be indicated. And Milton's Eve is associated with loss and exile from Eden, while Narcissus fades away and is transformed into a flower because his love for his shadow-self can't ever by fully reciprocated - possibly a figure for how love in pain is transformed into art.

So, in a way, the entire movement of the book is encapsulated in these first ten pages which are all I've read so far.

Part 4:

Can anyone (American?) explain why the Arizona border guards ask all those questions about whether they sleep in the same bed etc. and then arrest them?

Roman Clodia wrote: "Part 4:

Can anyone (American?) explain why the Arizona border guards ask all those questions about whether they sleep in the same bed etc. and then arrest them?"

Adultery was against the law there, think it might still be, certainly remember it being in the news a few years ago.

Roman Clodia wrote: "All that excess feels a little performative to me and the writing is definitely operatic which encompasses a slight feel of artificiality.

I think the melding of different systems of metaphor is ..."

It reminded me a lot of Anais Nin in some of her diaries but Nin has a steely side which usually holds her back. I read this a while ago and all it did was irritate me, clearly I lack a passionate soul.

Roman Clodia wrote: "That's an intriguing comparison - I had to read Under the Volcano as an undergrad on a modern literature course and hated it, pretty sure I never finished it. But it made me think of Graham Greene,..."

I've tried that twice and couldn't make it past chapter two.

Alwynne wrote: "It reminded me a lot of Anais Nin in some of her diaries but Nin has a steely side which usually holds her back. I read this a while ago and all it did was irritate me, clearly I lack a passionate soul."

I've just finished and reviewed the book and I felt the same. Absolutely right about Nin's inner steel while Smart is all about metaphors of dissolving, flooding and melding.

Some of the writing - not unusual for this style - gets almost incoherent too.

Given Ben's comment above, I think it's the book, not us!

Alwynne wrote: "Adultery was against the law there"

Ah, that makes sense of the book - but don't even get me started on policing private life and the intrusiveness of the questions as she is interrogated.

My review: www.goodreads.com/review/show/7452878401

Roman Clodia wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "It reminded me a lot of Anais Nin in some of her diaries but Nin has a steely side which usually holds her back. I read this a while ago and all it did was irritate me, clearly I la..."

I wonder why George Barker inspired all this gushing? He had fifteen children with various women so presumably he was a bit of a rake, makes me think of Lucien Freud. I'd like to read Raffealla Barker's novel based on her childhood with him and Elspeth Come and Tell Me Some Lies

Alwynne wrote: "I wonder why George Barker inspired all this gushing?"

One of the things I thought while reading is that this great love is self-created - it's not based on the man who is eclipsed in the book by the narrator's subjectivity, and we keep hearing about how her mind 'reads' their relationship in mythical/biblical terms, making it seemingly transhistorical or timeless as well as like a force of nature. It's abstract and not embedded in any kind of 'reality' - perhaps there's a bit more intimation of actual conversations towards the end with the pregnancies.

So the book doesn't give any indications of personal qualities or even writerly ones. I don't know Barker's poetry but, of course, Smart infamously fell in love with him via his verse - a pretty unstable basis for a relationship.

It's also quite unlike Nin who conveys a sense of people - minds and bodies - in contact and communion with each other, even when things are fraught. Smart's book is all about the narrator and her subjectivity. So no real clues here about Barker, I'm afraid.

Your comment above RC expresses my views about the book better than I can!

There were a few sections I enjoyed, and I would have appreciated this type of subjectivity in the form of a poem or a reflection after a scene or even as internal dialogue, but to work as a novel/memoir it needed more variation in tone and scene. The bits like the scene at the Arizona border or the dialogue with her mother were welcome breaks, but not sufficient.

These were the days when in films an "immoral" man and woman checking into a hotel would indicate their status by giving their names as Mr and Mrs. Smith!

I admit I do struggle a bit with books like this and Lispector's Near to the Heart

Ben wrote: "Your comment above RC expresses my views about the book better than I can!"

Ha, sounds like we agree about the abstract nature of this feeling static - I, too, wanted more variety of tone even though this was only a two hour read.

I also felt that knowing what we know extra-textually made me more critical of the book than I might have been if I'd been able to read it solely on its own terms.

It might have felt more original in 1945(?) than now - and I'm always resistant to biblical imagery being used in such a straightforward way.

While I did think the merging of different mythological systems was interesting, I also found the narrative voice irritating and self-indulgent.

On Mr and Mrs Smith, I knew that it was frowned upon socially but didn't know it was actually illegal in America (or certain states?). I'm constantly amazed at what I don't know about the US!

I think I'm with Angela Carter on this:

"In the spring of 1977, Angela Carter met the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart in London at the launch of Bananas, a new literary magazine. A prolific writer at the age of 37, Carter was already the author of eight novels, two collections of poetry, and one collection of short stories—“profane pieces,” as the book’s subtitle proclaimed. Her story in the issue, titled “The Company of Wolves,” was a feminist retelling of “Red Riding Hood,” in which the adolescent girl, unafraid of her foe, ends up sleeping sweetly “between the paws of the tender wolf.” Smart’s 1945 novella By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, the story of a disconsolate, abandoned woman, was about to be reissued by Virago press, where Carter was on the editorial board.

Carter admired Smart’s “exquisite prose,” but she was scornful of the book’s wrenching, self-punishing descriptions of erotic love. (A representative line: “But what except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tigershark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every possible side?”) In a review, Carter described the book as “a masochistic season in hell.” She was similarly skeptical of Smart in person. “She clearly wanted to talk in polished gnomic epigrams about anguish and death and boredom,” Carter later recounted to a friend.

I honestly couldn’t think of anything to say. Except, I understand why men hate women and they are right, yes, right … And I began to plot a study of the Jean Rhys/E. Smart/E. O’Brien woman titled “Self-Inflicted Wounds.” "
https://newrepublic.com/article/14389...

Although I don't agree about Rhys, I think there's more to her work than abjection/submission.

But it's interesting that Carter met Smart at the Bananas launch, Bananas linked to Emma Tennant, who wrote a book along similar lines about her affair with Ted Hughes, less florid, but still basically in awe of famous men, definite starfucker vibe. Also a pretty masochistic relationship.

Ben wrote: "I admit I do struggle a bit with books like this and Lispector's Near to the Heart"

I'd never have put those two books together even though they're both written via modes of female subjectivity which I'm guessing is why you've related them?

We've discussed Lispector before and have divergent opinions - Near to the Wild Heart was 5-stars for me if I remember correctly.

That didn't have the solipsistic concern that I found so problematic here, and was concerned with relationships with a patriarchy via father and husband. It had movement even if that was interior. This book is essentially one-note - and a slightly screechy one!

Roman Clodia wrote: "Ben wrote: "I admit I do struggle a bit with books like this and Lispector's Near to the Heart"

I'd never have put those two books together even though they're both written via mode..."

I wouldn't equate Lispector with Smart either. Lispector has some overlap possibly with Rhys - who's also addressing issues around class, economic status and patriarchal culture. Her representation of her relationship with Ford Madox Ford far more grounded, self-aware.

Alwynne wrote: "“She clearly wanted to talk in polished gnomic epigrams about anguish and death and boredom,” Carter later recounted to a friend."

That's a great Carter phrase! Her point about self-inflicted wounds chimes with what I was trying to express in my review about the 'great love' being self-willed and that sense of self-indulgence.

Totally agree with you about excluding Rhys - she's so knowing and her so-called abject women also express moments of pure rage and are so much more complicated.

Some of the 'exquisite prose' veers over into purple too: I had to scribble exclamation marks in the margin - 'the cold semen of grief' particularly stuck in my mind!

Alwynne wrote: "Roman Clodia wrote: "Ben wrote: "I admit I do struggle a bit with books like this and Lispector's Near to the Heart"

I'd never have put those two books together even though they're ..."

Sorry, I was referring to the style of interiority that I struggled with in both, not the quality of the writing. I thought the Lispector book was far superior and gave me a real sense of place and character separate from the thoughts and emotions of the narrator.

Yes, I guessed that's where you were coming from, Ben.

I think Smart is not just writing from a subjective position but that I had to ask whether the whole 'great love' was a creation of the narrator's own mind - I found myself quite a resistant reader to the narrative that's being presented here.