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BOOKS
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By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
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By Elizabeth Smart, review by Bruce Meyer
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By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
By Elizabeth Smart, review by Bruce Meyer
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At the height of the Second World War, as the Nazi V2 rockets were falling on London, diplomat Lester B. Pearson, gathered together a heap of books and burned them in the garden of the Canadian Embassy. He was doing so on the instructions of an Ottawa socialite, who was concerned that her daughter's new novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, would bring scandal to the family. The novel, a short, intense prose poem in worship of love, tells the story of a faceless narrator and her overpowering desire for a married man. In what has been called a piece of "emotionally pompous" writing and a "slight prose poem," Elizabeth Smart created a classic of passion that embraces the essential traditions of love literature.
Read between the lines for literary references
Reading By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a process akin to taking a tour of the great works of literature. The Bible, Shakespeare's great tragedies, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poetry of Hart Crane and other notable texts make appearances in Smart's tightly packed poetic language.
The trick to reading the novel is to read it out loud -- it is a beautiful poem -- and not to be impeded by the references. Smart was an author in love with literature and, in particular, the literature of the Modernist movement that drew a significant portion of its beauty and strength by relying on other texts for its meaning. What is known as intertextuality can be baffling to some readers. The best advice to those following Smart on her journey of passionate discovery is to pass over the references and keep reading with the proviso that one is not encountering merely one lover, but the voice of all lovers crying in the city streets and longing for the lost other. When critic and Smart biographer, Rosemary Sullivan, asked Elizabeth Smart just who the lover was, Smart replied "he's a love object."
Smart's love and life
In reality, the novel is profoundly autobiographical. In the late 1930s, Smart traveled to England and there she discovered the poetry of the Byronic bard, George Barker. She and Barker struck up a correspondence, and when war loomed and Barker and his wife narrowly escaped internment in Japan, they fled to California where Elizabeth Smart was waiting for them. As By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept opens, the "vulgar disembarkers," a pun on the poet's name, are arriving at the bus stop in Monterey. The rest, as they say -- the story of passion, desertion, rejection, longing and suffering -- are history. And like the history that is echoed in the title's reference to Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion." For Smart, her personal Zion, her great moment of crowning passion, was her relationship with George Barker. It is recorded in this novel, and embraces not only a moment from the dark days of the Second World War, but the lasting passions that draw together all great lovers.
Visit the homemakers.com Reading Room forum for more book club discussion.
For further reading:
Sullivan, Rosemary. By Heart: The Life of Elizabeth Smart. Flamingo, Toronto, 1992.
On the Web:
The following page at Brock University site provides a useful bibliography and some biographical information on Elizabeth Smart and her works.
http://www.brocku.ca/english/CWP/smart_e.htm
This independent site offers some of Smart's poems and a link to a website dedicated to her work.
http://jrong.tripod.com/smart.html
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