By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth Smart
By The Criticess
In August 1937 writer Elizabeth Smart walked into a London bookshop, opened a collection of poems by George Barker and fell in love. By the time they met and began an affair three years later – resulting in the birth of four children, although he never left his wife – she was already so utterly besotted by his work that the writer and his writing had become fused into a single entity. In a sometimes terrifying account, she immortalised their relationship in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, exposing both its agonies and ecstasies, from infatuation to abandonment.
The book is terrifying for its exposure of an individual publicly skinned alive: the rawness of Smart’s vulnerability as each emotional layer is stripped away by her burgeoning adoration of Barker. She is at once both hungry for and horrified by his effect upon her. “He has martyred me, but for no cause, nor has he any idea of the size and consequence of my wounds,” she writes, “Perhaps he will never know, for to say, You killed me daily and O most especially nightly, would imply blame. I do not blame, nor even say, You might have done this or this rather than that. I even say, You must do that, you have to do it, there is no alternative, urging my own murder. But if a knife is stuck in the engine that pumps my blood, my blood stops, no matter how I reason with it. Will he notice that my heart has ceased to beat? But he may, O he may at one glance, restore me and flood me with so much new love that every scar will have a satin covering and be new glitter to attack his heart. From this great distance, after these nights of separation, more I cannot see. My imagination is snowed under the eternal unpunctuated hours”.
If her relationship with Barker cost her reason (“The parchment philosopher has no conception of the price of love…I posture in vain with his weapons.”), it gave her an insight and a voice which she could never revoke. For the creativity he unleashed and that compelled her to write, she plundered emotional chasms that, for everyday life to continue, would have been better left undiscovered. Instead she disgorged the agony without which the ecstasy would have meant nothing.
The exultation she did know remained unrivalled throughout the rest of her life. “Delirious with power and invulnerability” and with “happiness as inexhaustible as the ocean, and as warm and comfortable as the womb”, she entrusted herself to Barker completely. Smart’s insatiable hunger for the poet and for his effect upon her, gave her an avariciousness almost too intense to be sufficiently communicated in writing: her hunger was not for his wealth (he didn’t have any to speak of), but to be absorbed by his writing as though the man and his work were one and the same. There is something verging on the cannibalistic in the novel, as though Smart sought to consume Barker without regard for anyone or anything that might have assumed a prior hold over him: “In a bleeding heart I should find only exhilaration in the richness of the red”.
Her depiction of the man is so steeped in metaphor and the pitch often so achingly hyperbolic that – aside from the fact that she had four children with him – it seems as though Barker himself were almost incidental to Smart’s creativity. She wrote half the novel before actually meeting him and, like many of the most ardent and prolific writers of love poems and letters, she was infatuated and overtaken by the act of writing: perhaps more than by the man to and about whom she wrote. It’s possible, on reading Barker’s work, that she attributed an “I” to him that wasn’t entirely apposite to who he actually was. Proust always felt condemned to the “I” with which he wrote his first work and which readers ever after assumed to be him: perhaps Barker felt the same. He made great, and appropriately poetic, declarations to Elizabeth, saying he had fallen in love with her name even before he met her, but while his adoration of her may have been total, his loyalty was not. She is sometimes offended by her own flesh, so unlike Barker’s other lovers – “the boy with green eyes and long lashes” – about whom he dispassionately tells her, but it is his emotional promiscuity that she cannot bear. When he returns to his wife apparently out of pity – thereby committing “the one sin which Love will not allow” – it is not sexual jealousy Smart feels, but despair at the emotional investment Barker still has in his relationship with his wife. “How can I put love up to my hopes so suicidal and wild-eyed when the matter is too simple and too plain: It is her tears he feels trickling over his breast each night; it is for her he feels the concern; and the pity after all, not the love, fills all his twenty-four hours”.
Yet she knew all too well that, regardless of what she may have experienced through her relationship with Barker, the sympathy of onlookers would always reside with his wife, whose silence Smart regarded as “propaganda for sainthood”. “On her mangledness I am spreading my amorous sheets, 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?”.
Hoping to attain sainthood through silence is not, however, something of which Smart could have been accused. Though she made herself emotionally transparent to the reader, more striking is the way in which she did so to Barker. “I am the obsessional type,” she wrote to him, “Which type are you? If you are the butterfly type you will never forgive my intensity”. It would have been far easier to lie to him and feign indifference – as she occasionally tried to do – and to go instead, “whoring after oblivion” rather than have the courage to present herself to him unexpurgated. “But if you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me. Therefore, how much greater my loss must be which takes away even what appears to be mine by nature, my power to endure and resist.” In a sense, Smart’s declaration of her feelings to Barker should be almost unremarkable, but it is a risk not often or easily taken. By its courageous and untempered honesty, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept is a liberation of female sexual and emotional hunger: of a woman whose muse both freed and destroyed her.
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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