Holiday reading - Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
This is a novel of "poetic prose"; in my own reading the closest contemporary author to the style would be Michael Ondaatje (who is full of praise for this book).
It was published in 1945. The plot is autobiographical - Smart had a long affair with the (married) poet George Barker, and bore him four children. The novel goes from the narrator meeting the poet and his wife (all are unnamed in the book), beginning the affair, being arrested crossing the border from California into Arizona (there are still state laws on the books regarding crossing state-lines for illicit sexual conduct), returning home to Ottawa, and resigning herself to the realization that the poet will not leave his wife.
But, really, the plot is not what the book is about (such that the summary I just gave is both correct and misleading). This is a book about love and obsession. One of the very few simple sentences in the book: "I am possessed by love and have no options."
On first encounter the language struck me, and I imagine it would many readers, as over the top. But I became engrossed by it, and did not put it down (it is a short novel, and can, and should be, read in a single evening).
In a recent post, novelist Toby Litt writes:
What Elizabeth Smart does, in this book, is to overcome the embarrassment (which everyone feels) of standing in front of oneself not in one's nakedness but in one's grandiose, romantic, dressed up and overdressed self-adornment.
Yet there is a great honesty in admitting that the way we voice our lives to ourselves, as literary souls, is more Shakespeare than shopping list, more opera than operational, more purple than prosaic.
I think that is right.
Trivia point one: I've read that Smart's parents were so upset by the book and by their daughter's behaviour that they were able to prevent the publication of the novel in Canada for over two decades.
Trivia point two: I've not listened to The Smiths very much, but apparently Morrissey was very taken with the novel, and on many songs has borrowed phrases from it in his lyrics.
This is a novel of "poetic prose"; in my own reading the closest contemporary author to the style would be Michael Ondaatje (who is full of praise for this book).
It was published in 1945. The plot is autobiographical - Smart had a long affair with the (married) poet George Barker, and bore him four children. The novel goes from the narrator meeting the poet and his wife (all are unnamed in the book), beginning the affair, being arrested crossing the border from California into Arizona (there are still state laws on the books regarding crossing state-lines for illicit sexual conduct), returning home to Ottawa, and resigning herself to the realization that the poet will not leave his wife.
But, really, the plot is not what the book is about (such that the summary I just gave is both correct and misleading). This is a book about love and obsession. One of the very few simple sentences in the book: "I am possessed by love and have no options."
On first encounter the language struck me, and I imagine it would many readers, as over the top. But I became engrossed by it, and did not put it down (it is a short novel, and can, and should be, read in a single evening).
In a recent post, novelist Toby Litt writes:
What Elizabeth Smart does, in this book, is to overcome the embarrassment (which everyone feels) of standing in front of oneself not in one's nakedness but in one's grandiose, romantic, dressed up and overdressed self-adornment.
Yet there is a great honesty in admitting that the way we voice our lives to ourselves, as literary souls, is more Shakespeare than shopping list, more opera than operational, more purple than prosaic.
I think that is right.
Trivia point one: I've read that Smart's parents were so upset by the book and by their daughter's behaviour that they were able to prevent the publication of the novel in Canada for over two decades.
Trivia point two: I've not listened to The Smiths very much, but apparently Morrissey was very taken with the novel, and on many songs has borrowed phrases from it in his lyrics.
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