Sob story

Paul Ableman

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept Elizabeth Smart (Polytaritric Press E2.95,

For my maiden review in this journal, I was offered a choice of two books, both having the peculiarity of being first-person, present-tense narrative. One is brand new and the other is a reissue of a work first published in the last year of the second World war. The new one proved to be repulsive and ill-written and so I must, albeit with a heavy heart, tackle By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

Why the despondency? Well, this is not my first encounter with the book. Perhaps a dozen years ago, rumours of its quality induced me to obtain a copy and, with joyous anticipation, attempt to read it.

Alas,! was put off by the first sentence: 'I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire.' I disliked the archness of the self-regarding present tense. I disliked the angularity of the prose and the shape of the sentence. Above all, I disliked the clumsy and, it seemed to me, selfdefeating metaphor, 'muscles of my will'. So far from creating a sense of intense moral effort, the brutal physicality of the image distracted attention from the alleged mental struggle.

However, one thing was clear. This was a book in which style was more important than story. I have always considered that the excellence of prose, like that of poetry, depends chiefly on use of language, and so I felt that I must give the book a fair trial. I can't remember how far I got. Certainly not to the end.

And while I encountered the odd potent phrase and some splendid images, most of the writing struck me as laboured. There were frequent plunges into bathos. Also, by the time I abandoned my attempt I had decided that there was no plot at all. And surely a novel should have some story?

I can now report that Elizabeth Smart's book does have a narrative thread albeit a very tenuous and obscure one. Even now, after a close scrutiny of the text, I can only proffer the following as a likely interpretation: a young girl falls guiltily in love with a married homosexual. She is sorry for the wife, her rival, but also bitterly jealous since the husband oscillates between the two women.

The young girl, who is the narrator, has an affair with the man, flees with him across a state border, is apprehended by the police and returned to her family. She finds that she is pregnant. The brief narrative leaves her wait

ing by Grand Central Station for a possible, and possibly final, meeting with her lover and contemplating suicide. Put like that it might seem that the book is adequately stocked with action. Fine novels have been made from less. The trouble is that no more than about 5 per cent of this work, that is scarcely longer than a long short story, is concerned with plot. The reSt is 'atmosphere'.

By Grand Central Station is, in fact, a rhapsody of doomed young love and will Probably awaken sympathetic echoes in the breasts of doomed young lovers. It is not, for all that, a naive work. There are concealed quotes from, or parodic allusions to, Blake, Thomas Wolfe and/or Milton, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and, preeminently, in the title and in an excellent Passage in which Solomon's Song of Songs IS elegantly juxtaposed with a banal inquisition by a policeman, the Bible. It has the

occasional flash of wise-cracking humour. It has, in its best passages, a distinctive lyr icism: `But I have become a part of the earth: I am one of its waves flooding and leaping. I am the same tune now as the trees, humming birds, sky, fruits, vegetables in rows. I am all or any of these. I can Metamorphose at will.'

The book belongs in the category of `poetic prose'. Here the French novelist and Playwright, Jean Genet, is usually considered king. Finding Genet tedious and overblown, I am clearly out of sympathy With the genre.

And yet it has long seemed to me that the Proper course for the novel to take, if it is to survive not only as diversion or instruction but as an art-form, is to fuse the precision of Poetry with the breadth of prose. Why then

am I repelled by works like By Grand Cen tral Station which undoubtedly contain eleMents of both? Because they have got it the

Wrong way round. Poetry is not a mere heaping up of succulent phrases. Prose, artistically speaking, is not just any mean dering narrative. To merge into art they

Must be harnessed to a specific artistic goal. In By Grand Central Station, as in the var

ious Genet novels I never finished, both imagery and narrative seem arbitrary. Plot, Where any can be discerned, and language could be radically altered without meaningfully affecting the result. There is no framework of necessity or hard logic to sustain the work.

That the rigorous and poetic use of language can be teamed with the versatility and

expansiveness of prose to produce masterpieces is attested by such works as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Naked Lunch and, for me supremely, The Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. But there is

another work, also by a North American girl, which is probably the most instructive

analogue for By Grand Central Station. This Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. Here too we have a rhapsody of love but one in which the

imagery illuminates the narrative and the story ratifies the imagery. Elizabeth Smart's team seem to me to be harnessed to opposite ends of the plough.