Flat Stevie Smith

Critics of Stevie Smith’s work often lean on the word “flat.” Usually, the term is meant to evoke Smith’s “simplicity” and lack of ornamentation, her refusal to lift into “poetic resonance,” or her unreadable tone. This essay attends more closely to flatness in Smith’s work, exploring the ways Smith finds flatness fascinating and proposing that the language of the “flat,” in all its senses, offers an illuminating way of grappling with the difficulty of her puzzling and unsettling prose and poetry. It unpacks the idea of the “flat”—a word that claims implicitly that no unpacking remains to be done—foregrounding the diversity of flatness’s associated emotions, as well as the ways it remains compelling. Drawing out the breadth of aesthetic and interpretative connotations that flatness holds for her, the essay argues, provides a coherent way of reading her work. Beginning with an examination of how “feeling flat” involves, for Smith, a diverse and complex set of emotions, the essay moves into outlining how flat landscapes offer Smith a mode of lingering habitation that derives its interest precisely from the absence of anything evidently interesting. In the process, it offers a critical language with which to approach other twentieth-century writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, whose work has remained elusive precisely because of its insistence that it has made its meaning abundantly available—that it has nothing to hide.

ROB KEELEY (b. 1960)Five Songs on Poems by Stevie Smith (2000)

This chapter explores British composer and pianist Robert Keeley’s Five Songs on Poems by Stevie Smith (2000). The distinctive flavour of Stevie Smith’s poems—wistful, fey, and mordantly perceptive by turn—is captured in music of fluency and confidence, the subtle layers of the texts unpeeled with skill and empathy. Though the range indicates a mezzo, one or two high-lying repeated fragments do require the special lightness and agility more usually found in sopranos. The lowest notes, however, must have ‘bite’, and a weightier, more dramatic voice will have the advantage in riding the denser textures of the final song. The singer needs to be versatile, able to convey unaffected joy, bitter foreboding, and heart-on-sleeve longing, with the lithe, quirky exuberance of Song No. 3 (‘Le Singe qui swing’) providing a cheerful interlude. In general, lines move easily and cover a wide range. Keeley has a penchant for repeated, catchy ‘motto’ fragments in both voice and piano. These linger in the memory and contribute to a disciplined, clear structural impression.

Stevie Smith

James Underwood supplements recent scholarship on the poetry of Stevie Smith by focusing on the problem of personality. One word that has come to be associated with Smith and her work is ‘eccentric’. Whilst certain variations on this word may be intended as praise, the perception of eccentricity has been offered in lieu of actual integration into twentieth-century literary history. The essay opens up Kristin Bluemel’s argument that we require an entirely new category of literary history to properly comprehend the achievement of an intermodernist writer like Smith. Philip Larkin’s intervention in reviewing Smith’s work and later in creating an archive at the University of Hull is assessed alongside her own seizing of the means of production by the performance of her poetry and her personality in the early 1960s, a move which enhanced her poetic reputation at the same time as it played to the reputation she was given.

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960

British Women Writers 1930 – 1960: Between the Waves contributes to the vital recuperative work on mid-twentieth century writing by and for women. Fourteen original essays from leading academics and emerging critical voices shed new light on writers commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of the fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism of a selection authors including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. The neologism ‘interfeminism’, coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’, locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths which have traditionally overshadowed its members. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing, the volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the inter- and post- bellum anticipate the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterize second and third wave feminism. Exploration of popular women’s magazines of the period, and new archival material, add an innovative dimension to this study of the literature of a volatile and transformative period of British social and cultural history.

TERENCE ALLBRIGHT (b. 1946)Two Songs (1999)

This chapter describes the work of composer-pianist Terence Allbright. Two Songs is a brief but distinctive cycle that is freely atonal but meticulously worked and rhythmically inventive. These characteristics demonstrate a deep affinity with the poetry of Stevie Smith. Through this piece, Allbright conveys introspection and the finer subtleties of meaning underlying the texts’ spare lines. Nothing is overstated, but an inner turbulence is palpable. Words are set with clarity and sensitivity, and vocal phrasing is not difficult. The darker colours of the baritone voice are used to considerable effect, with dynamic nuances precisely calibrated. The singer's principal challenge is thus to negotiate the varied rhythms, so that they seem to flow without effort.