Surprising literary ventures Gary Dexter
JIMMY STEWART AND HIS POEMS
(1989) by Jimmy Stewart
The most intriguing thing about this book is its title. Ernest Hemingway and His Novel by Ernest Hemingway would not work. Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield wouldn’t either. Poems by Jimmy Stewart would be ridiculous, as if he were pretending to be Auden. But Jimmy Stewart and His Poems by Jimmy Stewart is perfect, managing to suggest that Jimmy Stewart realises that writing poetry is a highly eccentric activity, but that he knows he’s a bit of an oddball in a loveable, self-effacing, gangling sort of a way, and so he thought he’d have a stab at it. Remarkably, this volume contains only four poems, each with around 30 lines, which carries gangling self-effacement almost to the level of genius. The best one is probably the shortest, ‘The Top Step in the Hotel in Junín’, about a flight of stairs that always ‘trips you right on your ass’:
Of all the degrading, inhuman, mean things, That I in my life have yet seen, The gross, most despicable one of them all Is the top step in the hotel in Junín.
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