For our kick-off to Season 3, we are reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you.
Today, we are welcoming you to Season 3 by reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you.
Over the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.
Featured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer. This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Producer Bio:
Myra Bloom is Assistant Professor of Canadian literature at York University-Glendon campus. She is currently writing a book called Evasive Maneuvers about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart, and is preparing a SSHRC-funded podcast on the same topic.
Guest Bios
Kim Echlin is a novelist. Her novel, The Disappeared, was short-listed for the Giller Prize. She has written a biography of Elizabeth Smart titled Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity in which she discussed the work and life of Elizabeth Smart in the context of writing, motherhood, and earning a living. Her new novel will appear next year.
Maya Gallus is an award winning documentary filmmaker whose work screens at numerous international film festivals. Most recently, The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution, was the opening night film at the 2017 Hot Docs Film Festival and the 2018 Berlinale Culinary Cinema programme. She is also recognized for her critically acclaimed literary biographies, The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche and Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels.
Sina Queyras is a Canadian writer, editor, and creative writing professor at Concordia University. They have published seven collections of poetry, a novel and an essay collection. Their third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound, received the Pat Lowther Award and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and their fourth, Expressway, was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Award for poetry. They are currently researching Elizabeth Smart for an academic project.
Rosemary Sullivan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and the author of By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life. She has published fourteen books in the multiple genres of biography, memoir, poetry, travelogue, and short fiction. Her biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won numerous prizes including the Governor General’s Non-Fiction Award. Her latest book, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 23 countries, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the BC National Non-Fiction Award, the RBC Charles Taylor prize, the Plutarch Biographers International Award and was a finalist for American PEN /Bograd Weld Prize and the U.S. National Books Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Special thanks to Vineeta Patel for transcription help. Donna Downey at the MUN archives. The Glendon Media Lab. Aisha Jamal, Ali Weinstein, Heather White, Lauren Neefe, Sarah O’Brien, Lynn Bloom, Leonard Bloom, Lana Swartz for feedback.
Credits:
Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.
MUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.
All the music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.
Clips Featured in Introduction:
The voices of Michael O’Driscoll, Annie Murray, and Jason Camlot from Stories of SpokenWeb
A clip of Mavis Gallant from Mavis Gallant Reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU
The voices of Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy from Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU
A clip of Muriel Rukeyser and the voice of Katherine McLeod from ShortCuts minisode You Are Here
Music in the introduction is Lick Stick by Nursery from Blue Dot Sessions.
Tape noise sound effects from FreeSound.org.
00:18
SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do here.
00:18
Hannah McGregor:
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.]
00:35
Hannah McGregor:
My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I'll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.
00:50
Hannah McGregor:
Welcome to Season Three of the SpokenWeb Podcast. We are so excited to bring you another season of the podcast, featuring the research and ideas of the SpokenWeb community and a few special guests. We hope this podcast is a source of joy, inspiration, and learning for you. It certainly is for us.
01:09
Hannah McGregor:
We want to open Season Three with an invitation to collectively reflect on the sounds we've been listening to. And the questions we've been exploring – beginning with a conversation about sonic literary research with episode producer Myra Bloom, followed by a replaying of Myra's Season One episode: "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart". Myra and I go back to her episode to ask: how does listening to archival audio shift our relationship to the authors we're studying or reading?
01:40
Hannah McGregor:
This question is at the heart of the SpokenWeb project, which is dedicated to the discovery and preservation of recordings that have captured the literary events of the past. Writers and artists have been avidly documenting their performances of literary works, events, and conversations since portable tape recording technologies became available in the 1960s. Yet, most of these audio archives remain inaccessible or in danger of imminent decay. Even those that are digitized are often hard to discover, siloed on different institutional websites. Our goal is to help researchers and the public engage with these sonic literary artifacts today. [Start Music: Instrumental Jazz] Now you might be asking, why should we care about decaying old recordings? In the very first episode of our podcast, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod interviewed SpokenWeb researchers about how they got interested in literary sound and the SpokenWeb project. [Sound Effect: Tape Being Put in a Recorder. Beep of Recording Starting]
02:41
Audio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Michael O’Driscoll:
Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. They –we only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them.
02:51
Audio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Annie Murray:
What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets were going on reading tours [Audio Recording: Overlapping Voices Performing Poetry]. We were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings. Where [Audio Recording: Audience Applause] did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read?
03:11
Audio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Jason Camlot:
I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach. And the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class, played to me by my professor, John Miller. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson receiting "The Charge of the Light Brigade." [Audio Clip: Muffled Recording of Tennyson receiting "The Charge of the Light Brigade]
03:37
Hannah McGregor:
We've discovered that once we make old tapes listenable again, the results are powerful –
03:43
Audio Recording, S2E6 “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”, Mavis Gallant:
This is a story called Grippes and Poche.
03:45
Hannah McGregor:
[Audio Recording of Mavis Gallant continues] –like the voice of Mavis Gallant, inspiring producers, Kate, Kandice, and Michelle, to ask new research questions about her life and literary work.
03:55
Audio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:
[Sound Effect: Beep of Recording Starting] Why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984?
04:00
Audio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kate Moffat:
We wondered how our reception of it might've differed, or not, from that of the individuals attending the event.
04:05
Audio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kandice Sharren:
It was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.
04:11
Audio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:
It's like, where is this voice coming from? It did seem really unusual.
04:17
Hannah McGregor:
[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] Actually hearing an author reminds us that literary works can have a presence beyond the page. Like this moment that Katherine McLeod documents in a series of ShortCuts minisodes about Muriel Rukeyser – [Audio Recording of Muriel Rukeyser Begins] a moment of author and audience sharing a literary experience.
04:36
Audio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Muriel Rukeyser:
You know, this part of the story.
04:38
Audio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Katherine McLeod:
I can see by your nods. You know this part of the story. By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are.
04:52
Hannah McGregor:
[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] The sounds of literature are embodied and emotional – they resonate within us. As the SpokenWeb Podcast begins its third season, we're continuing to reflect on our mission asking ourselves questions like: how do we ethically manage and share old recordings with care? What can literary scholars learn from studies? What is present and absent from the sonic archive? And how does gathering sounds of the past change the way literary research happens in the present?
05:27
Hannah McGregor:
Now that I've set the scene, I'm delighted to bring Myra Bloom into the conversation. Myra is an assistant professor of English at York University, and was the producer of our Season One episode, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart". In this episode, Myra used archival audio, her own narrative reflections, and interviews to examine the great passion behind Smart's famous work By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – and the obstacles that impacted Smart's literary career.
05:56
Hannah McGregor:
Could you start off by telling us a little bit about what the process was like for you of making this episode originally?
06:03
Myra Bloom:
So I –as anyone who knows me knows, I love Elizabeth Smart and I love By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and I had been thinking for a while about doing some kind of project about it. I've written about it before, I wanted to do a critical edition of that book, but for issues of obtaining the rights, I was a bit thwarted from that project. But I still had it in my mind that I wanted to do a lot of kind of archival research and primary research. I had done a lot actually. And I talked to some of the people already who were important players in Smarts, kind of afterlife, her biographers. I'd talked to Kim Echlin, I talked to Rosemary Sullivan, and I wanted –I loved the way that they spoke about her. And so I knew in my mind as I was conceiving of the piece that I wanted to bring in other voices, other women in particular, who had been inspired by Elizabeth Smart. And then it suddenly occurred to me that even though I'd spent some time in the archives looking at various documents, I'd actually never heard her voice. And so I decided – I looked around and tried to find if there were any archives of her actually reading. And I found two pieces that I ended up including in the episode, one of which was a video that I harvested the audio from, the other of which was an audio recording of a reading. And that's kind of where the piece began to take shape for me.
07:32
Hannah McGregor:
So what was it like for you hearing her voice for the first time? How did that shift your relationship to the work?
07:37
Myra Bloom:
It was very jarring, to be honest with you. Many of us have this image in our minds of Elizabeth Smart as this passionate young, beautiful, intense, almost tragic heroine figure. At least that was sort of the image that I always carried with me. I think that book is so powerful and transcendent and youthful and it's spirit and language. It's very accomplished, but it's the passionate intensity of a young person. And as I say in the piece, those are feelings I really had related to as a 19- 20 year old encountering it for the first time, full of that kind of passionate intensity. But the thing about Smart that's kind of interesting for Canadians is that we only really encountered her later in life. She came to Canada as a writer in residence in 1982 and she died in 1986.
08:29
Hannah McGregor:
Wow.
08:30
Myra Bloom:
So, yeah. And so that's really kind of the Elizabeth Smart that Canadians knew. And it was this feeling of belatedness – a lot of people spoke about this at the time that we kind of discovered her too late. And that was really the feeling that I had almost listening to the audio, not just that it was too late, but sort of the poignancy of the fact that Smart as an older woman was sort of reanimating this work from her earlier life. But the texture of her voice – this is a woman who drank a lot and smoked a lot and led a pretty Bohemian life. And you can hear that in the grain of her voice. So hearing her read that audio, I was really connecting with the older Smart, as opposed to the younger Smart I thought I had set out to encounter.
09:20
Hannah McGregor:
Yeah. Which really sort of contextualizes the whole sense of what that book means differently.
09:26
Myra Bloom:
Absolutely. And you know, she's a fascinating figure as well because that book is such a magnum opus and it presages such amazing things. And then she sort of had lifelong writer's block, a lot of the works that came after The Assumption of the Roads and the Rascals –her other novella – is good, but it's not the same level of good. And her poetry in my mind is not quite as accomplished as the novellas. And so, there's a way in which she sort of lived on the laurels of that work and was kind of forced to re-encounter it again and again.
10:04
Myra Bloom:
And there's always this sort of element of, I don't know, maybe regret or a feeling of not having achieved what she could have achieved potentially. So the disappointment –there's a sense of disappointment I always hear in the reading. In fact, in some of those archives, she reads a poem twice because she starts out reading it at the beginning of the reading and then it gets a good reception. And then she says, I think I'm just going to read that one again. And you can really feel her kind of like soaking up the attention, which was, which was really denied to her for so much of her life when she was raising her children and kind of wallowing and obscurity [Laughs] – not obscurity that's the wrong way to put it because she was a very successful copywriter. She just was never heralded as the great modernist that she really was.
10:48
Hannah McGregor:
That's remarkable to be able to hear that in the recording too, the sense that your encounter with this voice in the archive is also a sort of re-encounter that what you are hearing is a sort of much later articulation of a relationship to this work. And it is this reminder of the way that author's own relationships to their work transforms over time. And often you can only hear that in the audio record.
11:15
Myra Bloom:
Absolutely. And I think, if she had gone on to write consistently throughout her career, maybe she would offer something in her late style and then throw in a hit or two from her juvenilia, which By Grand Central Station would have been at that point. But because she never – she was kind of a one hit wonder – not exactly, and again, as I say, I don't mean to diminish the rest of her output, which was considerable. I read somewhere that she was the first person to use sexy in an ad, the word sexy, although I have to independently verify that fact, because if that's true, it's amazing.
11:47
Hannah McGregor:
Amazing.
11:47
Myra Bloom:
Yeah, it's amazing. But yeah, but she kind of had to figure out what work was going to mean to her for the entire rest of her life over and over after the George Barker of that work.
11:59
Myra Bloom:
I mean, not again – my interests are very much in severing biographical readings of texts from the text itself. I think that's too facile a conflation, but certainly George Barker, her lover, was a kind of animating inspiration for the love affair we see depicted in that book. And by the time she's reading in Canada – their relationship, they had produced four children, it had completely fallen apart. They were friends and then they were frenemies and then they weren't speaking. And this is like having to summon the passion of a relationship that has – is decades exhausted. So it's interesting in that sense too.
12:37
Hannah McGregor:
Yeah, that is really interesting. So to follow up on that, your interest in severing the biographical tie in particularly women's writing. We know this is something that haunts women writers in particular that while male writers are generally allowed to be making art, women are always read as operating in the autobiographical mode. This is like the great Sylvia Plath conundrum. How is that relationship complicated by encountering this work read, but in the authors’ voices?
13:12
Myra Bloom:
Elizabeth Smart was really canny about how she herself framed this work. So when it originally came out, sometimes she and George Barker would appear at readings together and sort of play up the biographical elements of the work. Sometimes she would say, "Oh, this is, this is about a great love affair." She would really emphasize that aspect. Other times she would lie about its composition. She would say, "Oh, I sat down for two hours crying and writing this book", which is not true. It evolved over a number of years. So she would make it sound like it was an outpouring, but the moment that kind of biographical reading would get applied to her, like when they tried to do an adaptation for, I think for film ,where the characters were named George and Elizabeth, she totally freaked out and completely recanted that biographical conflation.
14:03
Myra Bloom:
And so I think that– I was aware going into it that she herself had played in that gray zone between the biography and the art. I think for me hearing it read in the voice of an older woman, it was no longer about George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. It was much more about an older woman's relationship to her younger self. And to me that's so fascinating because what draws many of us to this book is the sort of cult of youth and beauty and passion and all these transcendent emotions. But, anyone who's heard this piece or will hear this piece that I ended up producing knows that it's really much more about a kind of – it's a more reflective piece. It has a more – I tried to take a more reflective tone and just to kind of open it up to a broader rumination on art making and the things that impede women from art making. I opted for a more sober, reflective tone to the piece, ultimately.
15:02
Hannah McGregor:
And so, I know that you have recently gotten funding to do a whole podcast series. Can you talk to us a little bit about sort of what inspired you to propose that in the first place and what that series is going to take up?
15:17
Myra Bloom:
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. I am currently writing a book whose provisional title is Evasive Maneuvers. And the book is all about the ways that certain contemporary Canadian writers subversively inhabit the confessional mode, which historically has always been a powerful mode for women. It's – we wrote in letters and diaries and journals before we could access the publishing sphere and certainly confessional poetry and the United States and the 60s was a very powerful mode. And I should say that obviously persists to this day where confession is a very popular internet, social media, these kinds of first person narrative mode for women. But historically at every moment, the confession has also held out a kind of trap or a snare for women in that the moment you use it, you get accused of being overly effusive, of being not a serious writer, of being kind of compelled by your hysterical passions, right?
16:16
Myra Bloom:
Feeding into these stereotypes of who women are and what forces they're animated by. And in the internet, a lot of women try to use first person writing as a way to become published and then kind of immediately had those doors slammed on them when they were subsequently perceived as non-serious writers, precisely because they were writing about "I found a hair ball in my vagina" or something like that. Anyways. So keeping in mind all of this, this backdrop, I was interested in how women find ways to negotiate these confessional aporias or confessional problems in their work. And I'm really interested in kind of auto fiction or hybrid genre works, or the insertion of autobiographical content into poetry, or all these unexpected venues where the confessional kind of wells up in this ambiguous subversive way. So I'm working on the book, but I also realized it would be so powerful and interesting to hear women talking about these things in their own voice and to have the chance to actually do some interviews.
17:16
Myra Bloom:
I was thinking today about how within the discourse of CanLit, social media and the internet has come to play such an important role and identity politics are really triangulating a number of these issues in a very, very personal way. So I thought, oh, well, maybe I could talk to some of the people who have tweeted very personal things about their experience that have gone on to factor prominently in the so-called CanLit dumpster fire. So I just realized there's a lot of possibilities for talking to people that open up when you do something in a forum, like a podcast, rather than a book and different modes of scholarship, modes of engagement, modes of approaching an issue. And I am a huge, huge podcast listener. I have a very active podcast listening practice, and this was my first experience producing a podcast myself, for SpokenWeb. And I enjoyed the experience so much, I thought, okay, now I'm ready to really take on something at a larger scale. So yeah, so ultimately the SSHRC insight development project that I'm doing is going to be this multi episode engagement with this question of how contemporary Canadian writers and maybe even scholars are using confessional modes.
18:21
Hannah McGregor:
That's very exciting. Okay. One last question. And that is, if anybody who is listening right now is an academic who wants to dip their toe into the world of podcasting, but is hesitant to do so, do you have any advice as somebody who went from a first time podcaster to now a passionate podcaster?
18:42
Myra Bloom:
Absolutely. Yeah. So my advice is the same advice that I would give to anyone who wants to be a writer or wants to practice any skill. The first thing you have to do, if you want to be a writer, is be a reader. And the first thing you have to do, if you want to be a broadcaster, is listen to podcasts. Just start listening to the medium and get a sense of what you want to do and what you like, and then just try it. It's great. It's very rewarding.
19:03
Hannah McGregor:
Thanks again for joining us. Myra. Now here is Myra Bloom in our January, 2020 episode [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] "The Agony and Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart." [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].
19:19
Music:
[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]
19:31
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
I thought, if it's agreeable with you, that I'd read a chapter book I wrote called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. And this is about a couple of people, in case you haven't read it. Well, I fall in love and they're dashing away across America, madly in love.
19:55
Myra Bloom:
I first encountered the writer Elizabeth Smart in a time of great passion. I was 19 and reading her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for an undergraduate class. Her description of a transcendent, debilitating obsession captured what I was going through at the time: the beautiful harrowing torment of first love. By Grand Central Station details a love affair that comes to an end as hyperbolically as it began. As the title implies, it ends with the narrator pregnant, bereft, and crying out to her lover who by this point has returned to his wife. I would soon come to relate to these darker feelings too, as my own relationship combusted, albeit under less salacious circumstances. I'm pretty sure there's a direct line between my feelings about this novel and my decision to teach literature for a living. I wanted to talk to other women who had been similarly affected by the novel. I sought out writers and filmmakers who had written or made films about Elizabeth, or were planning to do so to ask them what drew them to her. I expected that their stories would sound similar to mine, that they would tell me tales of great loves, loved and lost. I was planning an anthropological study of female passion, but those weren't the stories they told me.
21:28
Sina Queyras:
It was on Vancouver Island and I was living in the rainforest and they had a cabin and I could see through the walls and it would just rain and rain and rain and rain. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental]
21:36
Myra Bloom:
This is poet and professor Sina Queyras.
21:40
Sina Queyras:
And I was sitting there reading this – somebody sent it to me, my friend Rita whos a fellow from creative writing, sent me this book and that had been, I mean the reason she sent it to me was I loved Marguerite Duras' A Lover and they're sister books, right? They're totally sister books. But the surprising thing about the Smart was that there's just no Canadian voice that's anywhere near the depth of feeling and just the intellectual precariousness, like she's so present but also vulnerable and self propelled. There's just nothing –I mean, I guess Margaret Lawrence, but that's not ecstatic like By Grand Central Station is just so ecstatic. So I know that going forward it was like, it's like Sappho, it's like Sappho wrote a novel.
22:57
Music
[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]
22:58
Kim Echlin:
My name is Kim Echlin. I'm the author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fuge Essay on Women and Creativity, and I was drawn to Elizabeth Smart first because of her great passionate love affair with George Barker. But then that quickly led me down to a much more complex story and it is the story of her as exile in England, as writer, as mother, and as a single woman earning a living. Romantic love is by definition irrational. It means sexual passion, the love of beauty, the potential for destruction, the taste of immortality. It is obsessive. Sometimes it flickers briefly, deliciously. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental] Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Its destructiveness evident even to the lovers themselves. Yet, lovers are loath to give up romantic love. Lovers believe they are most alive and it's embrace. With strange pleasure we watch ill-matched lovers devour each other. They believe that their love is their very life force.
24:01
Kim Echlin:
I think about passionate, romantic love when I consider Bluebird's Castle or some of John Donne's poetry or Wagner's Tristan und Isolde or such novels as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I think of a different kind of love, one that still has no name, when I think of some of Samuel Beckett's characters and of Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Rosalind ironically and wittily says to the object of her desire, "love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as mad man do, and the reason why there are not so punished and cured is the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too." Elizabeth wrote this ordinary lunacy in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but her telling is extraordinary. Just as Rosalind tells love in a fresh way from a woman's point of view disguised as a boy, the narrator of By Grand Central Station tells love in a fresh way from the point of view of an unmarried pregnant woman. But before Elizabeth wrote it, she had to live it. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]
25:17
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
By Grand Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow, but I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone, It leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces, everyone compromises. They say, as we grow older, we embrace resignation, but oh, they totter into it blind and unprotesting and from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there's no redemption. It's the sin of damnation. What except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tiger shark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every impossible side. The senses deliver the unbearable into sleep. And it ceases, except that it appears gruesomely at the edges of my dreams making ghastly signs, which wear away peace, but which I cannot understand. The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end, it had operatic grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station, like a Judgment Day. It was more iron muscle than Samson in his moment of revelation. It might've shown me all Dante's dream, but there was no way to endure.
26:53
Myra Bloom:
And what did it mean for you for Elizabeth Smart to be the subject of your first film? Is that important to you?
27:00
Maya Gallus:
It was important to me. My mother was an artist and I saw her struggle as an artist and a mother, also a single parent. [End Music: Instrumental Jazz]
27:10
Myra Bloom:
Documentary filmmaker, Maya Gallus.
27:13
Maya Gallus:
So I think that Elizabeth represented some of those elements for me as well, because I was trying to figure out how to be a woman and an artist in the world. And it seemed to me that women of my mother's generation and previously of Elizabeth's generation really had this conflict and dilemma about being able to stake their claim in what is largely a male dominated world. And also then the additional challenges of being a mother. So I was kind of figuring all of that out and Elizabeth's writings really spoke to me because she really went into the nub of that in a lot of her work and her poems. A poem like “The Muse: His and Hers”, I still find is a very relevant, in many ways. I mean, we still are living in a male dominated world and people are speaking about it a little more openly now than before. And perhaps people are more willing to listen to what women have to say and recognize that actually women have something important to say about life and art and love. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]
28:33
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Now, I would like to read you a little poem that most amazingly I wrote last week. It just sort of popped out and lo and behold, it's a feminist poem. I hope this won't give any offense. [Audience Member: Why worry?] I'm not worried. Anyhow, it's called “The Muse: His and Hers”. His pampered Muse / Knew no veto. / Hers lived / In a female ghetto. / When his Muse cried / He replied / Loud and clear / Yes! Yes! I'm waiting here. / Her Muse screamed / But children louder. / Then which strength / Made her prouder? / Neither. Either / Pushed and shoved / With the strength of the loved / and the, unloved, / Clashed rebuked. / All was wrong. / (Can you put opposites / into the song?) / Kettles boiling! /Cobwebs coiling! / Doorbells ringing! / Needs haranguing! / Her Muse called / In her crowded ear / She heard but had / Her dirty house to clear. / Guilt drove him on. / Guilt held her down. / (She hadn't a wife / to lean upon.) The dichotomy was killing me.
29:58
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
She said till old age came to assuage. /Now Muse, now you can have your way. Now, what was it I want him to say? /And used, abused and not amused. The mind's gone blank./ Is it life you have to thank?/ Stevie, the Emily's, Mrs. Woolf bypass the womb and kept the self/ But she said, try and see if it's true and without cheating. My muse can do./ Can women do? Can women make? /When the womb rests animus awake./ Pale at my space starved and thin, /like hibernating bear too weak to begin./ To roar with authority, poems in the spring./ So late in the autumn of their suffering./ Those gaps. It's decades of lying low./ Earthquakes, deep frozen mind askew./ Is it too late at 68?/ Oh fragile, fresh reanimate./ Oh flabby, teetering, body concentrate./ Astute, true woman, any late profligacy squandered on the loving of people and other irrelevancy/ useful in the dark in articulacy./ But drop it like poison now if you want poetry./ Let the doorbell ring, let the fireman put out the fire or light it up again./ Sheepish and shamefaced at 9:00 AM/ till the Muse commands her ritual hymn./ See lucky man, get off his knee./ And here now his roar of authority./ This test case woman could also be,/ just in time for a small cacophony/ A meaningful scream between folded womb and grave./ A brief, respite from the enclave.
32:09
Rosemary Sullivan:
I remember one wonderful moment when Elizabeth and I went to this reading.
32:15
Myra Bloom:
This is Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth Smart's biographer.
32:21
Rosemary Sullivan:
And it was by Mavis Gallant, who of course one admires deeply. And it was amusing to see how jealous Elizabeth was [Laughs] because, she'd written a great book when she was in her late twenties, and then she didn't write again for 30 years. She used to say, when asked her who she was, she'd say, I'm my son Sebastian, the poet's mother. And when we talked about this in detail, she did say, and this is quote that she felt that the maestro of the masculine was sitting on her shoulder telling her she could never be good enough. So she had sought out George Barker because he wrote the kind of poetry she wanted to write. And then George, being a poet of his era in the tradition of not T.S Elliot, but Dylan Thomas, kind of knocked her down .
33:17
Rosemary Sullivan:
And she said that she needed to be knocked down because she came from this wonderfully arrogant position of a debutante in Ottawa, put forward by her mother hobnobbing with the prime minister's set, and so on. She said, "I needed to be knocked down a little bit, but not nearly as much as George knocked me down." Then of course you asked her, well, why did you keep – what was it about George that was so seductive? And she said, "oh God, he had such a sense of humor." [Laughs] So.. I did meet George.
33:55
Myra Bloom:
What was he like?
33:57
Rosemary Sullivan:
Exactly what she said. He was with his last wife, Elsbeth, you know that he had – this could not happen now. He had five wives, two of them legal, 15 children. And then they all adored him, because the creative male was given a kind of permission that he can't be given today. But here I was at Elsbeth’s and she was lovely. There was a point at which she had tried to get Elizabeth to take George back, she was so fed up with him, but it didn't work. And she was teaching, she was a Latin teacher, even though she had at one point aspired to be a poet. But again, that was part of the time you –if you wanted to be creative, you were creative vicariously through a man, right?
34:44
Audio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:
[Start Music: Jazz Instrumental] Yes. You – in another of your poems you talk about – this is the trying to write one, that you read last night. You talk about it being unfeminine to write.
35:00
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Yes, yes. And somebody asked me last night too, about why I said that love was parallel. You see, I do feel that I've always been thinking about that you really have to be ruthless to write. And it isn't– so it isn't a loving thing. And of course we all want to be good, perhaps, but they do conflict. If you're good, you're not ruthless. You always think somebody else, they want to come in and tell you about their troubles. You're writing. You don't say "No, off. I'm busy." You say, "come in." And I listen to them.
35:31
Audio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:
This is called “Trying To Write”. Why am I so frightened to say I'm me / And publicly acknowledge my small mastery? / Waited for sixty years till the people take out the horses / And draw me to the theatre with triumphant voices? / I know this won't happen until it's too late / And the deed done (or not done) so I prevaricate, / Egging them on, and keeping Roads open (just in case) / Go on! Go on and do it in my place! / Giving love to get it (The only way to behave). / But hated and naked could I stand up and say / Fuck off! or, be my slave? / To be in a very unfeminine very unloving state / Is the desperate need / Of anyone trying to write.
36:32
Audio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:
And so in fact, goodness and art are parallel and can never meet. That was my theory.
36:39
Audio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:
That it's egocentric to write.
36:42
Audio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:
Yeah you really have to have a large ego. I felt the mind been rather squashed so that I feel I have to get it back a bit.
36:50
Audio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:
And do you think this is a particularly female problem? That it's a problem of the woman writer?
36:53
Audio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:
Well I do because whatever people say, I do think that women are – perhaps it's a training, I don't know, but they do want to be more loving and kind and helpful, don't they? Maybe that's because they're in that position.
37:10
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
When you speak about – it is necessary for a writer to be ruthless. I mean, it does remind me of Virginia Woolf and her, her essay on the angel of the house.
37:18
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
The angel of the house.
37:21
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
Yes, that a woman to write successfully had to kill the angel of the house.
37:25
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Well that's it, that's the same thing.
37:26
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
She could not, no longer be if she was going to write, she couldn't be responsible in this way or recognize or wait for family in her house or else she would never find time to write.
37:35
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
And then most with children and the house, I mean, you're always, you're fragmented your mind. You think, "Oh dear, we're out of Vim". Or "the soap flakes are down" you can't, you know, these sort of things that are in your mind.
37:47
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
Yes.
37:47
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
And you've got to remember to go and get this. Well the men, well they are doing it more now, but there was never any question: they wouldn't notice if you'd run out of lavatory paper or something.
37:57
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
Yes. Yeah.
37:59
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
In fact, George would just tear out a sheet of a book. [Laughs]
38:04
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
Really?
38:04
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Yeah. No respect for literature.
38:11
Audio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:
Not his own books?
38:11
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Yes! Yes, his own ones. He wouldn't care.
38:13
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
And yet, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, I know you've written so much more recently and that is all sort of new developments and further thoughts and you may be tired at times of hearing people hark back to the book you wrote many years ago –
38:29
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Oh no, I'm delighted to have a little attention so late in the evening.
38:31
Audio Recording, Ann Hart:
Yes. Well, so many people, particularly I think women, do identify with it. It is a love story, which must've been very unique, still is unique. But when it was published in 1945, a very moving, very explicit, very passionate description of a love affair. And I think at that time, it must've been thought, well this is a bizarre thing. I mean, I think it would be men that had been writing about this sort of thing. I mean, did you get that sort of reaction?
39:07
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Yes. I think I mentioned last night that they said "a trivial subject". Women's feelings are trivial subjects. And nobody said how shocking to say it's a trivial subject, they just took that.
39:20
Audio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:
Well, does it make you angry when they said that?
39:24
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
I didn't know. One just thinks, that's the way things are. I don't really make any judgment. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental]
39:34
Myra Bloom:
Do you really feel that Elizabeth writer's block was attributable to the fact that she felt overshadowed by George? You don't necessarily attribute it to the material circumstances of having to raise four children? [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]
39:47
Rosemary Sullivan:
You know, I know people who've raised four children and continued to write, Judith Thompson is one. So in fact, what's so interesting is when you look at Elizabeth's work, she was writing Grand Central before she met George. So he was simply the embodiment of it. After that, I do think that she lost her ego as a writer and it's easy to – writing is such a fragile activity. I mean, I haven't written poems for quite a while because I think I need that vertical sledgehammer into time before I can write. Everything's going horizontally. There's every reason not to write. And so, it became a habit, not writing. But also Elizabeth would – she had her youngest daughter Rose in a private school, so those children were off during the week and sometimes on the weekend they'd have these crazy so-called uncles taking care of them. So in fact it was – she had a professional life. But some people had managed a professional life with writing at night. But I think Elizabeth lost her nerve. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]
41:12
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
A warning. This old woman waddles toward love, becomes human, but the Muse does not approve. This going flesh is loved and is forgiven by the generous. But houses the demon. Hello my dear, sit down. I'll soothe your pain. I've known what you've known, but won't again. Though passion is not gone. Merely contracted into a last ditch weapon. A deed, not dead. A mine unexploded and not safe to have near the playground of innocent life. Keep clear of this frail old, harmless person. 50 years fuel of aimed frustration could shatter the calm and scald the soul. And love falls like napalm, over the school.
42:13
Music:
[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]
42:15
Maya Gallus:
Oh, I think Elizabeth Smart should always be read. I think she brings an enormous amount of wisdom and life experience to the later work and an enormous amount of passion and literary innovation to the early work. And also some of her poems are really powerful as well. Her poem, “A Bonus” is one that I always think of whenever I finish writing something because she captures so beautifully that feeling of being in a bubble. And as she says, "feeling dirty and roughly dressed" and getting through this difficult thing of finishing something, and then that beautiful feeling of completion.
43:06
Myra Bloom:
[Reciting Poem] "A Bonus". That day I finished/ A small piece/ For an obscure magazine/ I popped it in the box // And such a starry elation/ Came over me/ That I got whistled at in the street/ For the first time in a long time// I was dirty and roughly dressed/ And had circles under my eyes/ And far, far from flirtation/ But so full of completion/ Of a deed duly done/ An act of consummation// That the freedom and force it engendered/ Shone and spun/ Out of my old raincoat.// It must've looked like love/ Or a fabulous free holiday/ To the young men sauntering/ Down Berwick Street./ I still think this is most mysterious/ For while I was writing it/ It was gritty it felt like self-abuse/ Constipation, desperately unsocial/ But done, done, done/ Everything in the world /Flowed back/ Like a huge bonus.
44:20
Maya Gallus:
I can't think of another poem that captures that moment and that feeling as beautifully as that does. So I think Elizabeth is relevant now and we'll continue to be relevant for continuing generations.
44:35
Myra Bloom:
I hope so. Okay. Thank you.
44:39
Maya Gallus:
You're welcome.
44:46
Audio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:
Good morning boss. A cup of coffee and two fried eggs. Look at the idiot boy begot with that knife. He's all the world that is left. He is American better than love. He is civilization's heir oh you mob whose actions brought him into bed. He is happier than you, sweetheart. But will he do to fill in these coming thousand years? Well, it's too late now to complain, my honeydove. Yes. It's all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are. That's all. You have to learn to be adaptable. I myself prefer Boulder Dam to Chartres Cathedral. I prefer dogs to children. I before in corn cobs to the genitals of the male, everything's hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything's OK. It's in the bag. It can't miss. My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep? [Audience Applause]
45:56
Hannah McGregor:
[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. The episode we replayed for you today. "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart" was originally released on January 6th, 2020 and was produced by Myra Bloom. The new introduction to this episode was produced by Judith Burr and me ,Hannah McGregor, with special thanks to Myra Bloom for coming back to discuss her episode again with us. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our transcriptions are created by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]