The literary establishment was slow to recognise that Stevie Smith was a poet of genius, possibly because her poetry is so entertaining, and for a long time she was accorded only the patronising and marginal status of interesting oddity or amusing eccentric. The reading public, unencumbered by the delusion that solemnity equal seriousness and the entertaining is by definition frivolous, was much quicker to spot that here was a complex and singular voice. The deceptive simplicity of her poetry masks a sophisticated technique and her playful and anarchic humour reveal the sober and sobering philosophy of one who found life perfectly tragic and unbearably funny.

Frances Spalding acknowledges that, at first glance, Smith is an unpromising subject for a biographer. Her life was outwardly uneventful: she lived with her Aunt in the same house in a North London suburb for most of her life, worked for many years in a humdrum job as a secretary to a magazine publisher, rarely ventured outside England and had few intimate relationships.

Nonetheless, this book certainly dispelled any lingering illusions I had about Stevie as the hermit of Palmers Green. She was, in fact, a dedicated party animal with many friends and acquaintances all of whom she satirised in her novels (‘Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends’ she writes at the start of Novel on Yellow Notepaper, and not without reason). The names of those friends and acquaintances, some of them still famous and others largely forgotten, evoke a lost cultural age: Malcolm Muggeridge, Inez Holden, Kay Dick, Anthony Powell, Robert Graves, H. G. Wells, Rosamond Lehman, Elizabeth Lutyens, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Olivia Manning and George Orwell. She contributed to Orwell’s pioneering wartime poetry broadcasts, may or may not have had an affair with him, and sent him up something rotten in her novel The Holiday. Like all great satirists she had a certain aloofness but, Spalding insists, when making merciless fun of her friends in print she was motivated not by malice but the intensity of her emotions and the need to record them honestly in her work.

This book is subtitled ‘A Critical Biography’ and is strong on the relationship between the life and the work. Smith was an autobiographical writer and the personality of the poems mirror her own - outwardly convivial and inwardly alienated. Like her poems, she was a curious cocktail of the naive and the knowing, humane but with an all too human vicious streak. On occasion she clearly could be a complete pain in the neck: when bored at dinner parties she would disrupt the conversation by bursting into song and always insisted on a lift home no matter the inconvenience caused. But she approached life with uncommon honesty, was supportive to young writers, had a subversive sense of fun and, in her own words, enjoyed ‘a good giggle’.

Suicide and death are recurring themes in her poetry with death viewed as a friend who will eventually arrive to free one from the burden of existence. Stevie Smith first contemplated suicide during a difficult period in childhood and the experience left her with a sense of control over her destiny which ‘cheered me up wonderfully and quite saved my life. For if one can remove oneself at any time from the world, why particularly now?’ This attitude might, paradoxically, explain why she didn’t commit suicide. Despite their divergent styles, it wasn’t that surprising to discover that Sylvia Plath wrote her an effusive fan letter declaring herself ‘a desperate Smith addict’ and asking to meet. Smith’s reply was gracious but less than effusive and also made it obvious that she had never read Plath.

Life for her, it seems, was largely a series of mutual misunderstandings; this idea is poignantly expressed in her most famous poem, Not Waving But Drowning, in which the desperate distress signals of a drowning man are misinterpreted by onlookers as cheery greetings and so ignored. She created characters and told stories but, as she attested in interviews, behind all of these was the character and story of Stevie Smith. She reworked Greek myths and fairy tales to express her own view of life. Her frog prince is quite content at the bottom of his well and views the prospect of disenchantment with some foreboding.

In the 1960s, and her own sixties (her last decade as it turned out, she died of a brain tumour in 1971), Stevie became a hit on the burgeoning poetry circuit performing alongside much younger poets like Michael Horowitz, Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten. A natural performer, she had done a bit of acting at school, she recited and sometimes sang her poetry in a deadpan style and acquired a new and youthful audience who were captivated by her individuality and questioning spirit. Recordings of her are available online and a rare delight they are too.

Spalding’s biography offers insight into Smith’s complex personality and scholarly analysis of the poems. She demolishes the myth of Smith as a wilfully quirky minor poet who peddled the bizarre and reveals an original and powerful artist; a poet who defies loneliness, isolation and despair with wit and humour and whose unflinching honesty about the human condition reduces the reader to tears of helpless laughter. ( )

First read in May 1983 and revisited today.
Stevie Smith had a unique literary voice: her idiosyncratic, wonderfully funny and poignant poems established her as one of the most individual of English modern poets. She claimed her own life was 'precious dull', but Frances Spalding's acclaimed biography, revised with a new introduction for this centenary edition, reveals a far from conventional woman. While she lived in suburbia with her beloved 'Lion Aunt', Stevie Smith was from the early 1930s a vibrant figure on London's intellectual scene, mixing with artists and writers, among them Radclyffe Hall, Olivia Manning, Rosamond Lehmann and George Orwell. She was noted for her wit -- often maliciously directed at friends -- and occasional public tantrums. Her use of real people in her writing angered many of her friends and brought the threat of libel. Always feeling herself out of step with the world, she was haunted by her father's absence during her childhood and her mother's early death; she longed for love yet was sexually ambivalent. In exploring the intimate relationship between Stevie Smith's life and work, Frances Spalding gives a new insight into a writer who always saw death as a friend, yet was also one of the great celebrators of life, whether commonplace or extraordinary. (less) ( )

Interesting and sympathetically written biography. ( )