The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals by Elizabeth Smart
By The Criticess
In 1940, Elizabeth Smart began an affair with the poet, George Barker, which she eternalized in its many agonies and seemingly far fewer ecstasies in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Though Barker stayed with his wife, they had four children who Smart supported through journalism and advertising work in London before dropping out of the literary scene and moving to the country.
The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals is roughly a sequel to By Grand Central Station and meanders through Smart’s life in post-WW2 London as she struggled to support her family through bouts of poverty and rationing. By turns, poetic, grim, pleading, wise, and witty, it isn’t the easiest read. Smart has a tendency to career off into rants and bursts of dialogue, mostly revolving around not having enough money to buy a beer, her boredom at work, and general disappointment with her lot. Reviews at the time of the book’s original release tended to resort to lengthy comparisons to other writers, which is all very well if the reader happens to share the same extensive knowledge of said writers – or, at least, a similar fondness for literary name-dropping – but isn’t very helpful in attempting to decipher Smart’s sometimes seemingly nonsensical novella.
Though it does detract from the book’s impact, the need for some deciphering doesn’t rob it of its power. Smart casts a keen, if often melancholy, eye over the everyday lives of those around her who “make up ways to make things possible” and to get by with “their offices, their surgeries, their rehearsal halls, their notebooks, their night-crying babies, their laboratory experiments, their flagging lettuces”. Not that she fares a great deal better in her own life. Even sunshine and youth, it seems, are not immune from her disappointment: “on this lovely afternoon, what is left of my youth rushes up like a geyser, as I sit in the sun, combing the lice out of my hair. For it is difficult to stop expecting (What my heart first waking whispered the world was), even though I am a woman of 31½, with lice in her hair and a faithless lover”.
But, even in the face of her pervasive despair, there is a wilfulness in every emotional state. “A pen is a furious weapon”, she writes, “But it needs a rage of will”. That rage drives the book on and acts as the thread that binds together a tale that sometimes necessarily veers dangerously close to an incoherent rambling. It’s not always an uplifting read, but a genuinely rending account of life less ordinary which is difficult to put away unfinished.
About the author:
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The Criticess was born out of a desire to steal female writers, labelled classics and consigned to the doldrums of academia, and to explore them in all their unhinged, electrifying, mischievous, eloquent, mistressful glory. For a time, she wrote for the Edinburgh literary publication, The One O'Clock Gun, and now she is here, bringing to The Fine Line those women and works too vital to grow old on dusty bookshelves. |
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