Stevie Smith, English Poet and Author of Novel on Yellow Paper

By Katharine Armbrester | On August 27, 2024 | Updated August 30, 2024 | Comments (0)

Stevie Smith (September 20, 1902 – March 7, 1971) was known for satirical poetry as well as novels (including her best known, Novel on Yellow Paper) suffused with black humor, acid wit, and unorthodox contemplations of death.

Vastly different cultural epochs bookended her life. She was born the year after the end of the conservative Victorian Era and died the year after the turbulent “Me Decade”of the 1970s, as author Tom Wolfe dubbed it — began. (Photo above courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

As The British Empire lost its colonies and women gained independence, Smith’s poetry tapped into the era’s emotional and societal upheaval.

Early life

Florence Margaret Smith was born in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England in 1902. Her father was a shipping agent, and her maternal grandfather was a maritime engineer. Her parents’ marriage was disastrous, and the year Stevie turned three, her father abandoned the family to pursue a career at sea.

Stevie’s father occasionally appeared on 24-hour leaves or sent the briefest of postcards. She and her older sister Molly refused to meet him in later life or attend his funeral. Stevie later described the rupture with characteristic levity that couldn’t disguise her inner pain:

I sat upright in my baby carriage
And wished mama hadn’t made such a foolish marriage,
I tried to hide it, but it showed in my eyes unfortunately
And a fortnight later papa ran away to sea.
( “Papa Love Baby”)

Another major event in Stevie’s childhood was a diagnosis of tubercular peritonitis at age five, and she was sent to a nursing home for tubercular children, per the custom of the time. When she recovered and returned home three years later, she was thankfully enveloped once again in what she described as a secure “house of female habitation.”

For the rest of her life, Stevie vividly described the terrors of childhood without a whiff of sentimentality. In her persona as a poet, she combined the forlorn air of a “little girl lost” with the cool-headed cynicism necessary to survive as a woman writer.

Stevie, Molly, and their mother moved to a house in the suburb Palmer’s Green in North London, along with their maternal aunt Madge Spear, who was soon dubbed “Lion Aunt.” As their mother declined from the heart disease that killed her the year Stevie turned sixteen, Madge raised her nieces with fierce pride and devotion, even if she did not always understand her niece’s literary bent.

There wasn’t much money, but Lion Aunt insisted on her nieces attending excellent schools, and Smith and her sister enjoyed theatricals, the hymns at church, and trips to the country. The nickname “Stevie” was acquired in her late teens when she was riding with a friend and was compared to legendary horse jockey Steve Donoghue. She kept the moniker for the rest of her life.

. . . . . . . . . .

Stevie Smith in 1966 (fair use image)
. . . . . . . . . .

Young adulthood and the start of a career

Stevie described herself as “nervy, bold, and grim.” Her friend and literary executor James MacGibbon described her singular appearance:

“She … dressed with some care in a style of her own which had, at first sight, and specially when she aged, a ‘little girl’ look; but one soon saw that it was perfectly appropriate and never without dignity … her fine-boned features were of a striking beauty that was never more apparent than when death approached.”

Stevie memorably described her appearance in her poem “The Actress”:

I have a poet’s mind, but a poor exterior,
What goes on inside me is superior.

Instead of attending university, Stevie worked as a secretary in a magazine publishing company, where she remained for the next thirty years. She later supplemented her salary by writing book reviews for The Observer, among other prestigious publications. The undemanding job ensured she had time to entertain visiting friends in her office with tea, buttered toast, and strawberry jam, as well as write acerbic poems on the sly.

Stevie remained in the same house for the rest of her life and devotedly cared for her aunt until her death at age ninety-six.

. . . . . . . . .

Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)
. . . . . . . . . .

Stevie Smith’s novels

Stevie didn’t gain notice with her first printed poems, and an editor told her to try to write a novel instead. In six weeks, she finished her first, Novel on Yellow Paper, published in 1936. Her first poetry collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, arrived a year later.

When Novel on Yellow Paper was published, it caused a minor furor in the London literary scene. She had come out of nowhere and written a heroine—Pompey Casmilus—who, like Stevie, was a secretary with very determined opinions about seemingly everything that affected an independent young woman in interwar England. Pompey even has opinions about her countrymen and their views:

“One of the greatest qualities which have made the English a great people is their eminently sane, reasonable, fair-minded inability to conceive that any viewpoint save their own can possibly have the slightest merit.”

The London Times Literary Supplement described the debut novel as “a curious, amusing, provocative and very serious piece of work.” Stevie’s subsequent novels, Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949), never achieved her debut novel’s notoriety or varied readership, and Smith appeared happy to return to poetry.

In 1962, Stevie received a letter from another poet, another young woman chafing at society’s expectations, who was looking forward to finally getting to read the novel nearly thirty years after it was first published:

“I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith-addict. I have wanted for ages to get hold of A Novel on Yellow Paper (I am jealous of that title, it is beautiful, I’ve just finished my first, on pink, but that’s no help to the title I fear) … I am hoping by a work of magic, to get myself and the babies to a flat in London by the New Year and would be very grateful in advance to hear if you might be able to come to tea or coffee when I manage my move—to cheer me up a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.”

The letter was from Sylvia Plath, the now-iconic poet and author of The Bell Jar. Sadly, Plath never got to have tea with Stevie — she took her own life less than three months later.

. . . . . . . . . .

Stevie Smith’s poetry, style, and themes

With a typical dry understatement, Stevie detailed her unique views on the craft of poetry in her essay “My Muse”:

“All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is to listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet.”

Stevie trusted her instincts, and early on, she knew which poetry subjects interested her the most and which her style best suited. She rarely wrote of pressing political subjects (although her poem The Leader is a powerful and frighteningly relevant portrait of a Fascist dictator).

She also rarely wrote about romance or happy relationships, finding the travails of modern courtships and marriages — both in the isolated suburbs and crowded cities — more intriguing. In a letter, she bluntly confided, “I don’t much like the ding dong theme of love, love, love.”

Many of her poems are flavored with spiky, biting, black humor. Smith was not interested in sugar-coating anything, and she knew that a laugh or a punchline could get an unpleasant point across. In her (typically cheeky) poem “To an American Publisher,” she retorts:

You say I must write another book? But
I’ve just written this one.
You like it so much that’s the reason?
Read it again then.

Peruse a handful of Stevie Smith’s poems, and you’ll see that, like Emily Dickinson, she flagrantly used hymn meter to structure many of her poems. This stylistic choice enabled many of her poems to have a deceptive simplicity and sense of urgency and make them easier to remember.

I am not God’s little lamb
I am God’s sick tiger.
And I prowl about at night
And what most I love I bite.
from “Little Boy Sick”

Though she appeared very secure in her choice of themes and writing style, Smith still needed reassurance from friends and fellow writers. She once wrote to author Rosamond Lehmann: “I wish there was some litmus paper test you could have for your poems, blue for bad and pink for good.”

Two of the most recurring themes in her poetry are God and death, which are often intertwined. “You are quite potty about death,” says one of her characters to another in her novel The Holiday. Despite her nearly lifelong agnosticism, she didn’t appear to be afraid of death. Musing on it was a good copy of her poems and the siren call to return to the faith.

“I’m a backslider as a non-believer,” she once described herself. In her poem “God the Eater,” she described the pull of faith:

There is a god in whom I do not believe
Yet to this god my love stretches.

Reverend Gerard Irvine, an unlikely longtime friend, described Smith’s religious beliefs thus:

“In religion, Stevie was ambivalent: neither a believer, an unbeliever nor agnostic, but oddly all three at once…She was scornful of what she considered watered-down reformulations of the faith, and disgusted by their liturgical expression. One could say she did not like the God of Christian orthodoxy, but she could not disregard Him nor ever quite bring herself to disbelieve in him.”

The year before her death, Smith wrote a scathing review of the publication of the New English Bible, describing its translators as “smudgers and meddlers.” She often expressed to friends her love of the King James Version. Again and again, she appears to approach Christianity, only to recoil once again due to the condemnatory doctrine of hell and the hypocritical behavior of many of its followers.

In her poem “Thought About the Christian Doctrine of Eternal Hell,” which is part of her extended essay “Some Impediments to Christian Commitment,” she described her overwhelmingly adverse reaction to organized religion—including its history of using violence to quell dissent and the moral hypocrisy of many of its followers—as such:

The religion of Christianity
Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty…
This God the Christians show
Out with him, out with him, let him go.

Repeatedly, Stevie attested to her love of the figure of Jesus Christ and the stately church ceremonies, but she always withdrew, writing of her conflict with the brutal honesty. After the publication of Harold’s Leap (1950), Michael Tatham described her as “one of the few religious poets of our time.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Stevie Smith’s illustrations

Stevie loved decorating her poems with her simple line illustrations. They look deceptively like juvenile stick-figure doodles, but she can ably and disconcertingly depict confusion, malice, and despair in just a few pen strokes.

In his preface to her Collected Poems, James MacGibbon described her poetry as “embroidered” by her illustrations. He said, “If Stevie had taken them more seriously, no doubt these drawings would have made her a renowned cartoonist.”

Stevie was in good company when it came to her unconventional illustrations: William Blake and Ogden Nash often illustrated their poems, and Flannery O’Connor (also eccentric, mordant-witted, and intensely critical of religious hypocrites) seriously considered a career as a cartoonist before turning to fiction.

Private life

As it happens often with lifelong unmarried women authors, there are speculations about Stevie’s personal life, and if her writing fulfilled her as much as marriage and children would have done. Regarding children, she once wrote: “I’m very fond of children. Why I admire children so much is that I think all the time, ‘Thank heaven they aren’t mine.’”

There are also lingering questions about whether she had a relationship with George Orwell when they briefly worked together during World War II. (And her book of illustrations—Some Are More Human Than Others—obviously references Orwell’s Animal Farm.) However, Smith had this to say of speculating about the dead who cannot explain or defend themselves:

“Read the stories and the poems the sinners write, but leave their private lives (as we should like our own sinning lives to be left—remembering that equation which cannot truly be cast by any human being) to heaven. So one feels. One may be wrong.”

“Unique and cheerfully gruesome” — success as a poet

In 1953, Stevie attempted to take her own life, and doctors encouraged intensive physical rest. She retired from her publishing job with a good pension and settled into book reviewing and writing poetry full time, with her aunt guarding the door from unwelcome distractions.

A second attempt never occurred, and increasing stature as a poet brought more color and friendships into her life at Palmers Green.

Stevie’s flagrant depiction of friends and acquaintances in her poetry and novels often lost those people as a result, but many more remained. Although devoted to her aunt, Smith enjoyed her jaunts into sophisticated London literary circles and invitations to some of England’s most splendid country houses.

When asked about her motivation for writing, she told her friend John Hayward: “It’s not the fame, dear, it’s the company.”

Her near brush with death gave her plenty of material to draw from, and in 1957, the title poem of her collection Not Waving but Drowning became her most famous and anthologized.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Read the rest of this poem here.

In her analysis for the Poetry Foundation, Caitlin Kimball writes that the poem is a “twelve-line punch to the gut” and “one of her most sober and plainly nihilistic pieces…It’s a grim premise: Life is a series of opportunities to be misunderstood.”

For the rest of her career, Stevie wrote about death, viewing it dispassionately as an inevitable conclusion to her life rather than with existentialist trepidation.

Augmented with jabs of humor and unassuming illustrations, Stevie knew that her poems, simple at first glance, could pack a punch. This often resulted in mixed reviews from her contemporaries, but most were cautiously admiring.

“One turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice,” wrote the American poet Robert Lowell.

Critic Linda Rahm Hallett wrote that “the apparent geniality of many of her poems is in fact more frightening than the solemn keening and sentimental despair of other poets, for it is based on a clear-sighted acceptance, by a mind neither obtuse nor unimaginative, but sharp and serious, innocent but far from naive.”

In 1966, Stevie Smith was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets. Along with her poetry collections, she enjoyed having a radio play produced by the BBC and increasing notoriety as a poetic voice for disgruntled nonconformists.

Final years

A doctor once told Stevie that her life “was a failure,” presumably due to her being unmarried and childless. She wrote of loneliness, often the inevitable companion of a writer who willfully rows against the cultural tide. She frequently wrote of mismatched marriages and unhappy families, suggesting that conformity to a social ideal didn’t protect one from loneliness.

Anthony Thwaite, a fellow poet and critic, wrote of her “vast succession of friends, male and female, single and married, literary and non-literary…She was also a copious letter and postcard writer, a keeper-in-touch.”

Her letters reveal the pleasure she took in encouraging and promoting fellow writers’ work, as she wrote to one of them: “I hope you are flourishing and writing like stink.”

In her later years, Stevie gave unusual readings at literary societies and in schools, often chanting her poems in a sing-song voice. She attended a “Psychedelic Feast” poetry event in 1967 alongside much younger Beat poets and was a hit with those in attendance.

In 1968, Stevie lost her “Lion Aunt.” She had left her job to nurse her Aunt Madge and was happy to return the devotion her aunt had showered on her for so long. In Novel on Yellow Paper, Stevie paid tribute to the most steadfast love in her life. “Darling Auntie Lion … You are yourself like shining gold.” Sadly, soon after their aunt’s passing, Stevie’s older sister Molly suffered a stroke.

A year later, Stevie was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II; her friends were amused by varying preposterous descriptions of the royal encounter.

She saw the publication of her ninth poetry collection, The Best Beast, but was soon after diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The battle was mercifully brief, and she passed away on March 7, 1971, at the age of sixty-eight.

The legacy of Stevie Smith

Ogden Nash, a fellow poet born the same year as Stevie, wrote of her when her Selected Poems (1962) was published in the United States:

Who and what is Stevie Smith?
Is she woman? Is she myth?

To say that Stevie marched to the beat of her own drum—both in her poetry and personal life—is an understatement. Her determined commitment to her poetic style and unconventional voice led to a surge of renewed interest in her writing in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Six years after Stevie’s passing, Hugh Whitemore depicted her life with her “Lion Aunt” in his play Stevie, starring the revered actresses Glenda Jackson and Mona Washbourne.

Whitemore adapted his play for the screen adaptation in 1978, with Jackson and Washbourne reprising their roles. American film critic Roger Ebert was intrigued by Smith’s deceptively uneventful life as rendered by Jackson and gave the film his highest rating of four stars.

Author and critic Rosemary Dinnage long resisted the pull of Stevie Smith’s poetry, believing her to be “affected,” but eventually became an admirer, writing: “the free-floating imagination, the sure instinct for style, above all the deep note of death, death, death sounding through the wispy poems eventually wins one over.”

The revered theologian, social activist, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton was an unlikely admirer of Stevie Smith. “I love her, I am crazy about her,” he wrote, “she is innocent and smashing like a Blake only new, and a lot of pathos under the deadpan sad funny stuff, a lot of true religion.”

Biographer Sanford Sternlicht wrote admiringly of her “profound ability both to verbalize and symbolize the melancholy, the frustration, the rage, and the vengefulness of the intelligent women of her generation.”

Stevie Smith’s writing deserves another revival of interest, as it enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. There’s still an audience for those who wish to read about themes such as nonconformity, isolation, and death with a heaping dose of black humor; there are still people who are, as she wrote in her most famous poem, “Too Far Out.”

“The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won’t they?” She wrote. Her writing has the potential to inspire hopeful authors (as she once did Plath). On the subject of writing, here is Stevie Smith with her signature self-deprecating humor in “My Muse”:

Why does my Muse speak only when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy, I live and despise writing.
For my Muse this cannot be but disquieting.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, who graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and loves periodicals, history, and writing.

Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work

Stevie Smith, English Poet and Author of Novel on Yellow Paper

By Katharine Armbrester | On August 27, 2024 | Updated August 30, 2024 | Comments (0)

Early life

Young adulthood and the start of a career

Stevie Smith’s novels

Stevie Smith’s poetry, style, and themes

Stevie Smith’s illustrations

Private life

“Unique and cheerfully gruesome” — success as a poet

Final years

The legacy of Stevie Smith

Further Reading and Sources

Categories: Author biography

Leave a Reply Cancel Reply