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| This month features By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart |
I'm tempted to say: READ THIS BOOK BEFORE YOU READ THE INTRODUCTION. Because, however tenderly I handle it, I'm bound to rub at least some of the blush off its perfect poetic peachiness.
'Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.'
In By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart, like John Donne in 'A Nocturnall upon St Lucies Day', makes of self-pity something exhilarating, almost epic.
The comparison between the two writers could be extended: By Grand Central Station... is perhaps the most strictly metaphysical novel ever written. It is full of conceits, allegorical figures; it is written in a prose that gift-wraps its diamonds, its insights, as lavishly as Tiffany's.
I find it hard to think of another novel, or another prose style, that could so easily be parodied. (I will resist.)
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.
'The language of love', over the course of the book, becomes gradually more and more problematic.
Elizabeth Smart makes it clear, in brief asides, that she is well aware how close her supercharged romanticism is to becoming ludicrous: 'No morbid adolescent ever clutched toward melodramatic conclusion so wildly.'
By Grand Central Station... is emotionally pompous, yet entirely endearing; it is verbally overblown, yet has one's heart singing along to the anguished melody as the tensile wire inside a piano answers sympathetically to a nearby shriek.
In this, Smart resembles Rilke, a poet she quotes - a poet who has one performing a pas de deux with his own wandering, lonely steps:
'Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved. (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)'
This is the feeling, common in music, rare in poetry, almost unheard of in prose, of being oneself said by the text; the I becomes you becomes I becomes you again.
The story of By Grand Central Station... is not worth paraphrasing, for the damage it would do to the book. Enough to say that it is about a love affair, one which goes right for a brief time and wrong for a longer time. To say that it is 'set' either here or there is to distort it; the book has a number of stated locations - the Pacific Coast, Ottowa, New York - but, in Smart's prose, a hotel room is just as much a hurricane.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept can be read in an hour; if you didn't heed my suggestion at the start of this introduction, and have still to experience this novel, please take note of these final words: Read it in one go - and let your soul hold its breath from first page to last.
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