A Biography
E-Book, Englisch, 412 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80399-943-2
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
FRANCES SPALDING is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS, The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.
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CHAPTER 1
From Hull to Palmers Green
Reading her poems at the Edinburgh Festival in 1965, Stevie Smith received warmer and more immediate applause than that given to W. H. Auden. There was a startling incongruity between her small person, prim dress and apparent helplessness (she had to beg a pair of spectacles from her audience) and the steely, ironic entertainment she delivered. Recognition had come slowly to her, snowballing during the last decade of her life as she became part of the 1960s poetry boom, a star of the poetry-reading circuit. By then the character she had created for herself, beginning with the appearance of Pompey in Novel on Yellow Paper in 1936, had become indelibly fixed. One fact that she promoted was her unchanging address. ‘Born in Hull. But moved to London at age of three and has lived in the same house ever since.’ So she told Peter Orr when he was editing transcripts of recorded interviews with poets. ‘I started on the biographical note, which you asked for. But it didn’t get very far, as you see.’1 It surprised her friends that, living with her aunt in Palmers Green, Stevie Smith could find material for poetry in such restricted circumstances. She recounts the history of her home and its inhabitants in a late poem, ‘A House of Mercy’, which is accompanied by a drawing of a habitation, apparently in imminent state of collapse. In the first four stanzas the poem likewise teeters between the anti-poetic and a language evocative of ballads, fairy tales and romance. It was a house of female habitation, Two ladies fair inhabited the house, And they were brave. For although Fear knocked loud Upon the door, and said he must come in, They did not let him in. There were also two feeble babes, two girls, That Mrs S had by her husband had, He soon left them and went away to sea, Nor sent them money, nor came home again Except to borrow back Her Naval Officer’s Wife’s Allowance from Mrs S. Who gave it him at once, she thought she should. This blurring of genres allows mythical overtones to accrue: facts concerning Stevie Smith’s life take on a fictional air. ‘Who and what is Stevie Smith?’ asked Ogden Nash. ‘Is she woman? Is she myth?’ As the poem moves towards an affirmation of strength in the last two stanzas, there is a noticeable increase in formal control and a display of rhythmic felicity. Now I am old I tend my mother’s sister The noble aunt who so long tended us, Faithful and True her name is. Tranquil. Also Sardonic. And I tend the house. It is a house of female habitation A house expecting strength as it is strong A house of aristocratic mould that looks apart When tears fall; counts despair Derisory. Yet it has kept us well. For all its faults, If they are faults, of sternness and reserve, It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart A house of mercy. Paradoxically Stevie Smith’s rooted existence allowed her to become a poet of alienation, orphanhood and loneliness; to imbue her work with, Seamus Heaney argues, ‘a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled’.2 The tragic note sounded in her work is, however, made buoyant by a humour that keeps despair at bay; breezy commonsense, shrewdness and stoicism combat melancholy. Nevertheless her stark moral sense denied her comforting illusions and drove her to confront stupidity and cruelty, loneliness and loss. ‘Here is no home, here is but wilderness,’ is a line by Chaucer to be found in her Batsford Book of Children’s Verse (1970). Her poems are full of characters who are not at home in this world, who ‘walk rather queerly’ or give signals that are not answered. ‘We carry our own wilderness with us,’ remarks Pompey in Over the Frontier.3 ‘Celia,’ says another, in The Holiday, ‘you have always said that we are in exile in this world and must long for home.’4 Reviewing the memoirs of Prince Serge Obolensky, Stevie Smith remarked that he became ‘almost too much at home, and in a world really where one should not feel at home; too blunted, too destroyed’.5 With laughter always in close attendance upon her thoughts, she herself remained indestructibly sharp, pitifully alive. ‘Learn too’, she once wrote, ‘that being comical / Does not ameliorate the desperation.’6 Florence Margaret Smith was born in Hull on 20 September 1902. Not until the 1920s, when riding over a London common, did she acquire the name ‘Stevie’: some boys called out ‘Come on, Steve’, alluding to the well-known jockey, Steve Donaghue, whose fringe stood on end when he rode, and the friend with her thought the name apt. Steve became Stevie, a sobriquet that took over from ‘Peggy’, the name by which up till then she had been known to family and friends. She had one sister, Molly, who was almost two years older. Whereas Molly was christened Ethel Mary Frances in Hull’s most prestigious Anglican church, Holy Trinity, Peggy was baptized at home on 11 October 1902 owing to her critical health. ‘The doctor had given up all hope,’ her mother recorded, ‘but she began to improve this very night and thank God continued to do so.’7 Delapole Avenue, where the Smith family lived, is a narrow street in West Hull composed of two-storey, terraced houses. No. 34 is a modest but substantial house, having four bedrooms and a small back garden. The elaborate mouldings still visible in the hall attest to the fact that Hull was then a prosperous city which had, during the second half of the nineteenth century seen an enormous increase in trade. Between 1850 and 1876 the tonnage of ships entering Hull docks had increased from 81,000 to 2,258,000, an increase that caused considerable congestion in the docks and warehouses and led to the opening of the Alexandra Dock in 1885 and the breaking of the monopoly of the North Eastern Railway with the introduction of the Doncaster to Hull line. This increase in trade had attracted to the city a large immigrant community, creating problems of overcrowding and, in slump periods, unemployment and destitution. By the end of the century, however, a generation of reformers had effected improvements in all spheres of life and, owing to the work of the architect Alfred Gelder, the city was being transformed into a place of pomp and circumstance. The year after Stevie was born Victoria Square was opened by royalty, Queen Victoria’s statue unveiled and the foundation stone laid for the present-day City Hall. Stevie Smith never knew her maternal grandfather, John Spear, for he died the year before she was born. Nevertheless his presence was remembered owing to the legacy he left which funded her early years and paid for her schooling. Born in 1844, the son of a Devonshire yeoman Christopher Spear and his wife Ann Hearn, John Spear almost certainly began his career by going to sea before becoming a shore-based civil servant, a surveyor with the Board of Trade, first in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where his elder daughter, Margaret, was born in 1872, and that same year moving to the Posterngate office at Kingston-upon-Hull. In addition, he was chief engineer to the Royal Naval Reserve, probably in the Humber section. His job as a surveyor entailed the overseeing of vessels, particularly their engines, to determine whether they were seaworthy. He also acted as examiner of engineers. By 1882 he was well enough established to live in one of the fine Victorian houses that lined Park Street, with his wife, Amelia Frances, and two children, Stevie’s mother, Ethel Rahel, having been born in 1876. By 1885 he had become principal surveyor at the Board of Trade offices. Four years later he left, after seventeen years’ service, to take up a post elsewhere. His colleagues presented him with a gilded testimonial which, all Stevie Smith’s life, hung in the hallway at Palmers Green. John Spear left the Board of Trade to become a superintendent engineer with the shipping company Thomas Wilson and Sons. ‘Hull is Wilsons and Wilsons are Hull’ was the then popular Yorkshire expression. The firm had begun importing Swedish iron ore in the 1820s; after the death of its founder in 1869, Thomas Wilson’s sons expanded its fleet and trade routes, even westwards to America though geographically Hull is less well placed for these routes than other British ports. When John Spear joined the firm in 1889 it had a fleet of more than fifty ships and was on its way to becoming the world’s largest privately owned shipping company. Spear would again have been responsible for repairs and maintenance and for the appointment of seagoing engineers. He probably attended when new ships were being built and would certainly have been on board when they underwent trials. A man with considerable responsibility, he was regarded with pride by his family, up until Stevie’s death a photograph of him in dress naval uniform ornamented the sitting room at Palmers Green. John Spear had a sister, Martha Hearn Spear, who married Issac Clode of Sidmouth in Devon. After his wife died, Spear appointed Martha Hearn Clode one of three trustees of his estate, in the even tof him dying before his daughters came of age. She is named in Stevie’s poem, ‘A House of Mercy’ and is probably the original for ‘Great Aunt Boyle’ in The Holiday. In this book Stevie recounts tales of her ancestors by reporting conversations that...
