This month features Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith, Virago, 0860681467, £6.99 |
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NO ONE CAN BLAME HER, SHE DID ALL SHE COULD.
Stevie Smith composed her own ‘word of warning’ to the potential reader of Novel on Yellow Paper:
‘This is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand... And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation.’
And she also explained why her rhythmic, eccentric, poet’s prose (in the best sense) was as it was:
‘For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.’
Most famous for her punchline-as-title poem, ‘Not waving but drowning’, Stevie Smith wrote Novel on Yellow Paper in the mid-1930s. It comprises the autobiographical ramblings of one Pompey Casmilus, Secretary to the Editor of an obscurely characterised Ladies’ Magazine. Pompey’s thoughts are given, haphazardly, upon many Unashamedly Big Subjects.
Here’s Death: ‘I get the idea that that’s what will happen when we’re dead, dead and gone-o, and we shall spend eternity wishing we could set eyes on Aunt Martha’s old cape...’
And Sex: ‘Oh how I enjoy sex and oh how I enjoy it.’
And Christian Theology: ‘But alas! Where the Church of England is free to keep the good and discard the bad, the Roman Catholics have to swallow themselves whole, and the persecuting clauses are still on their books, albeit inoperative.’
Among the slightly smaller, less abstract subjects covered are Germans and Jews, haystacks and ivory towers, Dionysus and Bobby Shafto, coffee and biscuits.
Throughout the book, Pompey follows her foot-off-the-ground logic – never quite as eccentric as it would have itself believe – wherever it goes. It comes off as effortless, but this kind of inconsequence – maintained yet unwearying – is a great technical achievement; and half that technique is comprised of cheek and chutzpah. What it is all based around (like Pompey’s morality) is a kind of benign, slightly disinterested promiscuity. This, in turn, is based on a profound desire neither to bore nor to be bored.
Stevie Smith’s manner, while often compared to the ‘nonsense’ writers Lewis Carroll and Edmund Lear, was legitimated by the Modernist writings of the preceding two decades. By the opening paragraph of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming that was coming down the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nice little boy named baby tuckoo...’
And by a few lines (Mrs Porter and her daughter) of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land', and by Gertrude Stein’s ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ prose.
At the centre of the book - Pompey’s dilemma - is one of the oldest, most novelly questions of all: ‘Should this woman marry this man?’ But the outcome is never in doubt.
If you take against it, you’ll probably think Novel on Yellow Paper nothing more than an extended witter – albeit an occasionally witty one. It’s also possible you’ll believe that Smith’s cranky pose is a little too knowing really to come off. But, if you fall in love with the book, it will probably be for the beautifully controlled rhythms - lulling, jumping, syncopating and cutting bathetically off – of its sentences, and the deftly skew-whiff wisdom they contain:
‘Oh these Stock Exchange people are awfully sweet and old chappie, and underneath if you haven’t got good introductions, good security, all very slap up and O.K., you might as well try and get capital out of a cow.’
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Author interviews
