Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith is among the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem “Not Waving but Drowning” has been widely anthologized, and her life was celebrated in the classic movie Stevie. This new and updated edition includes hundreds of works from her thirty-five-year career. In addition to the poems and illustrations from all her published volumes, the Smith scholar Will May discovered never-before-published verses and provides fascinating details about their provenance. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, Stevie Smith’s poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling.

Extraordinarily funny, with the fresh eye of a visitor from another world, Stevie Smith is a poet to savor. Wielding a throwaway wit and the strangest irony, Stevie Smith was deeply read in the classics and yet sprinkled her poetry with delightful doodles. Her poems are often very dark; her characters are perpetually saying “goodbye” to their friends or welcoming death. At the same time her work has an eerie levity. Countless are her witty ways. The title of her first collection says it perfectly: “A Good Time Was Had by All.”

I longed for companionship rather, But my companions I always wished farther. And now in the desolate night I think only of people I should like to bite.

Stevie Smith is a magnificent wild card in the deck of this century’s great writers––beyond category and past calculation. As Annie Dillard has said, “She is a wonder.” A great poet and novelist (Novel on Yellow Paper), Stevie Smith also wrote delightful short prose. And here, in A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith, is the very best of it: eight stories and four essays mixing throw-away charm and deadly sophistication. Her stories delight and surprise: her essays defend favorite subjects, such as cats and the suburbs. “Life in the suburbs is richer at the lower levels. At these levels people are not self-conscious at all, they are at liberty to be as eccentric as they please, they do not know they are eccentric.” And Stevie herself, at liberty to be as eccentric as she pleased, is the antidote to every form of literary dullness.

I am a forward-thinking girl, and don’t stay where I am. ‘Left right, be bright.’

Pompey Casmilus, Stevie Smith’s loquacious alter ego, works as a secretary and writes down on yellow office paper this wickedly amusing novel. “Dear Reader,” she addresses us politely in the whirlwind of her opinions on death, sex, anti-Semitism, art, Greek tragedy, friendship, marriage, Nazism, gossip, and the suburbs. But most of all Pompey talks about love.

When Smith first tried to get her poems published in 1935, she was told by a publisher to “go away and write a novel.” Novel on Yellow Paper, the happy result of this advice, made its author an instant celebrity and was acclaimed as “a curious, amusing, provocative and very serious piece of work” (The London Times Literary Supplement, 1936).

The British poet Stevie Smith, as her many readers well know, sprinkled her drawings throughout her poetry collections. In this sketchbook, Some Are More Human Than Others, she did the opposite––she spiced her drawings with words. Together they resound with what Robert Lowell described as Smith’s “unique and cheerfully gruesome voice” and open up a little world of peculiar experience: something somber and something gay, innocent and cruel––truths of our world trapped off guard.

This New Directions Paperbook brings back into print the 1975 Oxford University Press edition of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems, her complete poetic works edited by her long-time friend James MacGibbon. “On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet,” commented Robert Lowell about the book that introduced Stevie to American readers, her Selected Poems (New Directions, 1964). The Selected won her many enthusiasts, but it was not until the release of Hugh Whitemore’s film Stevie in 1981 that her poetry found a wider audience and sent that little book repeatedly back to press. The title of Miss Smith’s first published collection (London, 1937) was A Good Time Was Had By All, and indeed that is what her poetry, embroidered by her delightful, apposite doodles, provides. It brings us too into the company of wit, irony, and, as Brendan Gill remarked, “images of joy and terror.” A Newsweek reviewer wrote, “Even in the lightest of her verse, the briefest epigram, there is a resonance, the reverberation of a triangle, if not a gong.”