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<\/p>\nAccording to the novelist Angela Carter, the feminist press Virago \u2014 of which she was a leading light \u2014 was fuelled in part by \u201cthe desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in the position to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, exquisite prose though it might contain. \u2018By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls\u2019 would be more like it.\u201d <\/p>\n
The man whose balls needed to be torn off was the poet George Barker, a heavy-drinking rou\u00e9 who fathered 15 children by four women. This tomcattery, however, did not diminish Elizabeth Smart\u2019s love for him. It seemed that nothing could, for hers was a frenzied love, sparked in the late Thirties when she chanced upon Barker\u2019s poetry in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road and declared herself smitten. Until her death in 1986 she kept every memento of their relationship stored under her bed, as their four children would eventually discover.<\/p>\n
The intense, destructive romance between Smart, a budding writer from an affluent Canadian family, and Barker, a f\u00eated but impecunious poet from Essex, inspired her best-known work. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a slim volume of poetic prose, garnered little attention when it was published in 1945, but gained a cult following after it was reissued in 1966, its lyricism later influencing musicians such as Morrissey. <\/p>\n
After Smart\u2019s fateful encounter with Barker\u2019s poetry she struck up a correspondence with him. Although Barker was married and teaching in Japan, she paid to fly him and his wife to visit her in California where she had joined a writers\u2019 colony. The book\u2019s opening is based on this episode and what follows is a chaotic, rhapsodic account of the early years of their affair, which would play out across continents and last for decades. <\/p>\n
I use \u201caccount\u201d loosely for the story is fictionalised and deliberately threadbare \u2014 the mere outline of a love triangle between nameless characters \u2014 and the prose is a maelstrom of metaphors. As the narrator plucks lines from TS Eliot and draws on classical mythology, pining like Dido for Aeneas, we are left to piece together the events that have occurred. Along the way we deduce liaisons, pregnancy, exasperated parents (hers), broken promises (his), bitterness and rows. <\/p>\n
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Grand Central Station in 1941<\/p>\n
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE\/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
At one stage the lovers are arrested for \u2014 we presume \u2014 being an unmarried couple intent on having sex and crossing a US state border. This is where the biblical language comes into its own (the book\u2019s title, of course, is taken from Psalm 137, but with the rivers of Babylon replaced by Grand Central Station, where the final chapter is set). During the interrogation the policeman\u2019s questions are spliced with verses from the Song of Solomon: \u201cWhat relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies) \u2026 Were you intending to commit fornication in Arizona? (He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.)\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 What we\u2019re reading this week \u2014 by the Times books team<\/a><\/p>\n The hard truth is that it is difficult to sympathise with the narrator or her beloved. Smart\u2019s moral compass is often as out of kilter as Barker\u2019s. In the clutches of her infatuation she makes questionable choices (understatement!) and is so beholden to her volatile, self-centred lover that \u201cneither the shabby streets nor the cooped-up hotel ever became for me, as they were always for him, symbols of wretchedness and no cash\u201d. <\/p>\n So a light read this is not. Every page is driven by torment. As the author and critic Brigid Brophy put it, \u201cThe entire book is a wound.\u201d Yet Smart\u2019s ability to capture the pain and ecstasy of love is nothing short of extraordinary. Her narrator, knowing the spectacular hurt that lies ahead, declares that she is \u201cmortally pierced with the seeds of love\u201d and the cooing mourning-doves \u201care the hangmen pronouncing my sentence\u201d.<\/p>\n After the Second World War, Smart worked as an advertising copywriter to support her family. She joined Queen magazine in the early Sixties, co-wrote cookery books and eventually settled in a remote part of Suffolk to focus on her creative writing. There were several short collections of poetry and, most notably, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals<\/a> (1978) in which she returned to her and Barker\u2019s tale, again by way of a nameless female narrator and her faithless lover. <\/p>\n