SOURCE: "Frivolous and Vulnerable," in New Statesman, Vol. LXIV, No. 1646, September 28, 1962, pp. 416, 418.

Finding Stevie Smith's Not Waving But Drowning in a bookshop one Christmas some years ago, I was sufficiently impressed by it to buy a number of copies for random distribution among friends. The surprise this caused them was partly, no doubt, due to the reaction that before the war led us to emend the celebrated cigarette-advertisement 'If So-and-So [usually a well-known theatrical personality] offered you a cigarette it would be a Kensitas' by substituting for the brand name the words bloody miracle. But equally they were, I think, bothered to know whether I seriously expected them to admire it. The more I insisted that I did, the more suspicious they became. An unfortunate episode.

Not that I blame them. I am not aware that Stevie Smith's poems have ever received serious critical assessment, though recently I have seen signs that this may not be far off. They are certainly presented with that hallmark of frivolity, drawings, and if my friends had been asked to place Miss Smith they would no doubt have put her somewhere in the uneasy marches between humorous and children's. She has also written a book about cats, which as far as I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name. Nevertheless, her poems, to my mind, have two virtues: they are completely original, and now and again they are moving. These qualities alone set them above 95 per cent of present-day output.

Her mode of writing, broadly speaking, is that of the faussenaïve, the 'feminine' doodler or jotter who puts down everything as it strikes her, no matter how silly or tragic, in a kind of Gertrude Stein-Daisy Ashford-Lorelei Lee way. This method derives from her novels, those strange monologues (beginning in 1936 with Novel On Yellow Paper, or, Work It Out For Yourself) by a girl called Pompey or Celia, who works in some office or ministry, has childhood memories of the Humber, and at times breaks out into poems that are subsequently reprinted under the name of Stevie Smith.

I must admit I cannot remember a single thing that happens in any of them, but looking at them afresh I am struck now, as then, by the ease with which they skitter from 'Phew-oops dearie, this was a facer, and a grand new opening gambit that I hadn't heard before' to 'I feel I am an instrument of God, that is not altogether the Christian God; that I am an instrument of God that must calcine these clods, that are at the same time stupid and vulgar, and set free this God's prisoners, that are swift, white and beautiful and very bright and flaming-fierce.' The accent of The Holiday (1949) is unremittingly artificial, yet the extraordinary scene at the end where Celia writes her uncle's sermon and begins to read it to him catches the attention in a way that suggests it is a key passage:

There is little landscape where you are going and no warmth. In that landscape of harsh winter where the rivers are frozen fast, and the only sound is the crash of winter tree-branches beneath the weight of the snow that is piled on them, for the birds that might have been singing froze long ago, dropping like stone from the cold sky … The soul, frivolous and vulnerable, will now lie down and draw the snow over her for a blanket. Now she is terrified, look, the tears freeze as they stand in her eyes. She is naked in this desert, she has no friends, she is alone.

This is not the note of a comic writer, and it is a note that sounds throughout her work again and again.

When one turns to the 'poems and drawings' (it is not easy to get hold of A Good Time Was Had By All or Tender Only To One, the pre-war volumes), it is a tossup whether one is too irritated by the streak of facetiousness ('Kathleen ni Houlihan Walking down the boule-igan Ran into a hooligan' etc.) to find the pieces which carry the unique and curious flavour for which they come to be sought. There are, to be frank, a few poems in every book that should never have got outside the family. Nor do the drawings help: a mixture of 'cute' and 'crazy', they have an amateurishness reminiscent of Lear, Waugh and Thurber without much compensating felicity. But one does not have to read far before coming on something that at first seems completely surprising (I was about to say out of place):

     Dirge

From a friend's friend I taste friendship
From a friend's friend love,
My spirit in confusion
Long years I strove,
But now I know that never
Nearer I shall move,
Than a friend's friend to friendship,
To love than a friend's love.

Or if that is too recognizably poetry, what about this:

     The White Thought

I shall be glad to be silent, Mother, and hear you speak,
You encouraged me to tell too much, and my thoughts are weak,
I shall keep them to myself for a while, and when I am older

They will shine as a white worm shines under a green boulder.

It is typical of Miss Smith that she sees something poetic move where we do not, takes a pot-shot at it, and when she holds it up forces us to admit that there was something there, even though we have never seen anything like it before.

Do take Muriel out
She is looking so glum
Do take Muriel out
All her friends have gone.

Do take Muriel out
Although your name is Death …

Although Not Waving But Drowning (1957) was very much the same kind of book as its predecessors, it seemed to me then, as it does now, more confident, surer in getting its effects, than they were. Its poems were less divided into 'serious' and 'silly': as in Lear, the silliness was part of the seriousness:

With my looks I am bound to look simple or fast I would rather look simple
So I wear a tall hat on the back of my head that is rather a temple
And I walk rather queerly and comb my long hair
And people say, Don't bother about her …

Poem after poem begins in her peculiarly plangent way, like a hand swept across strings:

'Twas the voice of the sweet dove
I heard him move
I heard him cry
Love, love …

Put out that Light,
Put out that bright Light,
Let darkness fall …

Or, as in 'This is Disgraceful and Abominable', she can scold remarkably like D. H. Lawrence ('Animals are animals and have their nature And that's enough, it is enough, leave it alone'). But she is always at her most characteristic when uttering the unexpected that once expressed is never forgotten. Her most celebrated poem, 'Not Waving but Drowning', does precisely this:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Looking through this volume of Selected Poems makes it possible to form one or two conclusions about this almost unclassifiable writer. It is impossible, as the blurb says, to date any given poem even to a decade, and yet one has the feeling she is improving—not, of course, becoming more consistent, for that is not her way, but dealing with stronger themes, having less to discard. Then there is the constant preoccupation with the concepts and language of Christianity—life, death, eternity, love, sin, all these are continually recurring in different contexts and from different angles. They do not make the best poems, but Miss Smith cannot leave them alone. It is not easy to judge her attitude to them. At times her tone is prophetic:

I walked abroad in Easter Park,
I heard the wild dog's distant bark,
I knew my Lord was risen again,—
Wild dog, wild dog, you bark in vain.

But at others it has a kind of Rationalist Press sunlessness:

A god is man's doll, you ass,
He makes him up like this on purpose.

He might have made him up worse.

He often has, in the past.

The language and history of the Church of England and its Liturgy are in her blood, but so is doubt; in 'Edmonton, thy cemetery … ' she writes how:

Doubt returns with dreary face
And fills my heart with dread

…..

And I begin to sing with him
As if Belief had never been
Ah me, the countless dead, ah me
The countless countless dead.

And there comes a passage at the conclusion of the 'Thoughts about the Person from Porlock' that sounds as if it is as near as imagination can get to faith:

These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing.
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again …

I stress this aspect of her work because it may correct the bias of general opinion towards the view that she is a light-hearted purveyor of bizarrerie. Of course her extraordinary jumble of cats, knights, children, Racine, Excalibur, England and so on gives some colour to that view, but the truth of the matter is that her talent is, as she translates Rimbaud's line, 'drawn by everything in turn'. Almost anything can strike her, and she will have a stab at conveying just how it made her feel—a singing cat, Cranmer, Copernicus, 14-year-old girls, The Occasional Yarrow (a charming little poem, unaccountably missing from this collection), and thoughts and reflections that are hardly more than twists and grace-notes of the mind such as no one else would ever attempt to put into words. And her successes are not full-scale four-square poems that can be anthologized and anatomized, but occasional phrases ('not waving but drowning') or refrains ('For I love you more than ever In the wet and stormy weather') that one finds hanging about one's mind like nursery rhymes, or folk poetry, long after one has put the book down in favour of Wallace Stevens.

Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.

Perhaps this explains it. For all the freaks and sports of her fancy, for all her short pieces that are like rejected Pansies and her long pieces that are like William Blake rewritten by Ogden Nash, Miss Smith's poems speak with the authority of sadness.