The second misstep I took when reading this book is that I read the foreword. I generally try to avoid reading the foreword to books, but after reading Angela Davis’ helpful introduction to Assata Shakur’s autobiography I decided to go for it. Unfortunately, it did what I fear of forewords: it coloured my reading of the text in a way that narrowed the book. The introductory comments painted a narrative of epic / mythic allusions as foundational to the text—it’s not wrong, but I did feel that the richness of the text was reduced by examining it in such a particular framework. [Also, I tend to have an anti-epic bias due to my own ignorance of Homer, Ovid, and so on, so the significance of many of the references is probably lost on me].
In any case, after my missteps I persisted in reading By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It’s apparently quite a ‘big deal’ (Morrissey recycles phrases from the text!) but somehow I had never heard of it. The book is, to some extent, a novel, though only the faintest sketch of one. Really, it’s a work of prose poetry. The narrative emerges in hints of shadows but the real heart of the story is in the interior experience of the central character and her emoting through flowery and incisive language.
From what I can divine of the story, the central character falls in love with a taken man (I’m a little unclear on whether he and his other partner are married or not). She travels to stay with him and his partner. It presents an initially uneasy idyll where I found the narrator actually spends a fair amount of attention on the other woman, with some of the most tender and lovely passages dedicated to her:
“Then she leans over in the pool and her damp dark hair falls like sorrow, like mercy, like the mourning-weeds of pity. Sitting nymphlike in the pool in the late afternoon her pathetic slenderness is covered over with a love as gentle as trusting as tenacious as the birds who rebuild their continually violated nests” (23).
Smart returns to the hair imagery later in the text, noting, “her hair, falling like grief, floats in the deserted park, lifted with every dead leaf the wind disturbs; or her gesture that stumbled with too many meanings to stroke his temple with the back of her hand” (86).There’s a wispy gentleness in the description of the lover’s lover that shines brightly against the underlaying infidelity; I also appreciate the tenderness toward the betrayed. She first seems like Narcissus at the pond, oblivious to her similarity to “birds who rebuild their continually violated nests.” After Narcissus, we get an Echo of nest imagery: dead leaves in the wind. It’s a beautiful, if sombre, depiction of the poor woman.
While staying with the couple, the narrator and the man have a charged attraction and, eventually, under the pretence of being the man’s stenographer for his own writing, they find some alone time to consummate their passion. The narrator’s account reads: “For excuse, for our being together, we sit at the typewriter, pretending a necessary collaboration” (25). You can see how Smart embellishes the moment that takes the work from a novel into poetic flare: “He has a book to be typed, but the words I try to force out die on the air and dissolve into kisses whose chemicals are even more deadly if undelivered. My fingers cannot be martial at the touch of an instrument so much connected with him. The machine sits like a temple of love among the papers we never finish, and if I awake at night and see it outlined in the dark, I am electrified with memories of dangerous propinquity” (25). The personification of words is a nice way to elevate the scene—words dying on the air, the mess implied by the papers never finished, and the disconnect between a manual typewriter and the electrification the speaker experiences are all great ways to take an ordinary moment into something more grand.
Following their initial tryst, the relationship seems doomed. At one point, there is something involving authorities at the border; whether this is a metaphorical or literal barrier to their love is of secondary importance. From an outsider perspective, following this moment, the relationship looks one-sided. While the narrator battles her parents over the immorality of the relationship, the narrator’s love remains with his other partner. He seems committed to his other partner, and the middle section of the book is largely an outpouring of frustrated and complicated emotions of a lover scorned but devoted. To be honest, the initial charm of the book starts to wear off in this section; the combination of catharsis and inaction is a difficult position for an author to navigate; it is only through Smart’s linguistic flourish and variety that the book doesn’t fall apart at the seams.
As the book continues, there is a surprising pregnancy and birth, the child of which comes to bear symbolic significance for the narrator’s connection to her now absent lover. I found that the book sort of peters out; by the end I’m not sure what is left to say from a position of such stasis.
Central to the text is the antithetical, paradoxical relationship between despair and hope, which is also reflected through the intensity of Smart’s style in moments of profound despair or hope, and, at her best, both at once. In one moment, the narrator is skulking through streets hoping to pass by unnoticed and says, “But I was afraid, I was timid, and I did not believe, I hoped. I thought it would be like a bird in the hand, not a wild sea that treated me like flotsam” (42). The way Smart problematizes hope as non-linear feeling is fantastic; hope is not a thing with feathers, but a storm. Those contrasting images perfectly encapsulate the complexity of such feelings.
For a book that is so focused on a love story, Smart engages in a fair amount of violent imagery. Again, reversing the expectations of despair, Smart includes passages where something extremely dark gives birth to something more optimistic: “Letters blackly scarred with the censor’s knife translate the unimaginable: ‘I heard a child ask where its legs were.’ ‘We think with longing now of onions and lemons.’ The radio voice says: ‘Out of privation and the death of friends arises a new determination.’” (79). These ideas emerge in the context of war, and it is such passages that seem to resonate: “Bombs are bigger, but the human brains they burst remain the same” (79). Smart continues, “It is the faces we once kissed that are being smashed in the English coastal towns, the hands we shook that are swept up with the debris; the headlines speak to us of our private lives: yet still the mangy dog skulking under our window arouses a realer pity. Babylon and Sodom and the Roman Empire fell, but the winter buzzard cuts as cruelly as ever, and love still uproots the heart better than an imagined landmine” (79). It’s worth noting how grandiose Smart’s metaphors are, but the animal imagery is what really speaks to me here. The notion of mangy dogs inspiring “realer pity” than humans is a heartbreaking reality and the “winter buzzard cuts as cruelly as ever” is just a great line—despite buzzards being associated with the desert, aligning them with winter gives them a new dimension. If you’d like to do a little experiment, take that passage and add some line breaks: the poetry will emerge even more clearly.
Tragedy is at the core of the book, and some of the lines encapsulate such a wonderful sadness. Smart’s description of depression is often apt and touching: “For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action” (83). Just wonderful.
The risk of such a text is to become to self-absorbed, but there are moments when the tenderness of the central character emerges beautifully. There’s some controversy around pregnancy early in the novel and it seems like the lover’s lover lost a child. The narrator takes responsibility on herself and notes, “I have broken her heart like a robin’s egg. Its wreck reaches her finite horizon” (35). Again, the depth of feeling is never easy. Despite experiencing such intense love, it is necessarily at the expense of someone else. Immediately after the moment of sympathy, the narrator notes: “But it is not for her my heart opens and breaks: I die again and again only for myself. For her moving image prevents even my cry to him for help. For even if he loves me, he is in her arms” (86). Once again, love is rendered selfish.
For a book so intensely focused on language, there are actually moments where it fails beyond repair. It begs the question of whether words give voice to feeling, or whether they give rise to them—do feelings exist without the words to describe them? In the midst of her tumultuous longing during the early visit, she notes that “days go by without even this much exchange of metaphor, and my tongue seems to wither in my throat from the unhappy silence, and the moons that rise and set unused, and the suns that melt the Pacific uselessly, drive me to tears and my cliff of vigil at the end of the peninsula” (21). Elsewhere, she notes that “texts are meaningless, they are the enemy’s deception” (35). These seem to emerge in moments of particular destruction: “My foot danced by mistake over the helpless, and bled no solace for my butchery. My heart was not great enough to assuage my guilt. Tell me how to atone, dove in the eucalyptus, who speak with thunder of the future’s revenge” (35). As texts and words disappear, an incantatory tone emerges—it makes me think of the poems people used to write prior to the poem they actually wanted to write, a kind of prayer to a muse. She continues, “A wet wing brushes away the trembling night, and morning breathes cold analysis into my spectre-waiting mind. The vines assume their social airs, ingratiating green with children’s fingers” (35). I find the language here so evocative; moreover, it speaks to a contrast between artful language and more ‘cold’ methods for perceiving the world. She describes “cold analysis” here, and elsewhere she refers to “the irregular graph of my doom, merciless as a mathematician” (21)---funnily enough, the “lowest vines conspire to abet my plot, and the poison oak thrusts its insinuation under my foot” (21). There’s a kind of angular violence associated with mathematicians and scientists and the fluidity of artful vines assists the evil plans of the narrator—perhaps ploys are only bad when you’re not the one doing them.
Incidentally, I did a little bit of searching on the author of the book. From what I can tell this novel is essentially autobiographical. There are so many parallels (her being mistress to a married man, bearing children with him, him not leaving his wife, her working in the war, and so on). If we consider the book a journal, it’s one of unparalleled poetic turns of phrase. If we consider it a novel, it’s a bit awkward how closely it follows her life.
Ultimately, this is a complex little book that confronts some uncomfortable paradoxes and contradictions. Despite not resolving them, the book is reasonably engaging, if somewhat solipsistic. Towards the end of the novel, something seems to go wrong for the beloved. There’s a poetic, paradoxical question I’d like to end on; because the book ends without real closure, I’ll follow Elizabeth Smart’s lead:
“How can I pity him even though he lies so vulnerable up there in the stinging winds, when every hole that bleeds me was made by a kiss of his?” (108).
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