Poetic prose is tricky. Not a huge revelation there. It is dangerous and without stable footing and risks meandering into the musically of words rather than the strict plot of fiction. I would say that the poetic novel is what is tricky - a tumultuous achievement - but that assumes that this is a novel. And I’m not convinced that it is. Maybe novels have been experimental and avant guard and all sorts of weird in-between states. Moby Dick fully just becomes a play at one point, poignantly allowing the reader to feel the madness of being trapped at sea for so long. But this is not an experimental novel. Nor is it a “poets novel” in the realm of The Bell Jar. This is a novel of poetic prose - a long poem - which functions both within a plot and yet is not dictated by it.

I love Elizabeth Smart. I first came across her work in an English class called something along the lines of ( and rather problematically, now) “Women’s Literature” or “Women’s Writing” or something, at the University of Alberta taught by the iconoclastic Christine Wiesenthal, editor of The Collected Works of Pat Lowther - another groundbreaking Canadian poet.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a small book with (at least my copy) a deep blue surrealist cover. List all the clichés you want about not judging books by their covers, but covers can do a lot. As an art piece, I was drawn to this one. As a text, I could barely believe what I was reading. I was young, in my second year of university, in the process of having my heightened idea of self which seems to cling to all 19 ( or there abouts) year-olds dismantled very abruptly. I was learning quickly that I in fact new nothing - an astounding, resonating, nothing - which I did NOT like. But with the disillusion of everything that I believed I knew or know or thought, comes (this is a constant becoming, and not something that has finished with me yet) everything that I could not possibly have known and a learning and a discovery. I had no idea that you were “allowed” (what a horrific concept - allowed) to write like this.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is written in brazen and unflinching poetic prose which soars into air that I had never bothered looking up at before. Published first in 1945 and gaining the momentum it now enjoys only in the mid 1980’s, due in large part to the attempted (temporarily successful) suppression of its distribution by Smart’s wealthy Ottawa family - Smart’s mother allegedly travelled the country, buying and burning copies of the book to keep them out of the hands of readers, when they could not prevent the books original publication. You may wonder what Smart had done that was so awful as to ignite such scorn and venom in her own mother? Live without inhibition. Feel everything. Write everything. Write without shame. Write about desire. Write about want. Without pretence.

Predating (although not by much) the confessional feminist style made famous by Sylvia Plath, Smart wrote with uncompromising person honesty, paralleling in literature the deeply personal painting of feminist artists such as Frida Kahlo. (The idea that any art is not deeply personal, and why this idea of “personal” is tied to those artists labeled women by society is a discussion for another day.) Pushing the boundaries of what we now refer to as auto-fiction or creative non-fiction, or art writing, Smart placed herself at the centre of her poetry, using her own life as the raw material with which to express her poetic voice.

The novel’s speaker is a vaguely fictionalised version of Smart herself and the novel’s plot follows her through a relationship with an unnamed married man. The question of how much of the speaker is Smart, is one that can be almost entirely ignored at present. Woman are always accused of being synonymous with their speakers for a whole host of misogynistic reasons that will not be delved into here - society seems to hold the idea that non-cis-white-males are unable to write beyond themselves. To have any form of imagination.

The speaker hosts a married man and his wife (hence the being married) at her cottage in California during the Second World War, as people were being evacuated from the United Kingdom and volunteers were required to take them in temporarily. An affair quickly ensues between the speaker and the married man – to the detriment of all involved. Set against the backdrop of a World War as it is being fought, the novel was cast aside by critics of the time as frivolous because the speaker (and implicitly Smart herself) was not doing enough for the war effort, or because it wasn’t enough about the war. There is some truth to this allegation. Despite taking place during the war, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has surprisingly little to do with the political spheres of the world at large, giving it a timelessness when read outside of its linear context, but arguably a tone-deafness when read within. But does every book written during the war need to have the war as its subject?

The novel is written in the present tense, with sparse dialogue, and the singular consciousness of the speaker as the readers guide to every aspect of the inhabited world. This narrative form risks a stifling narrowness but feels robust in Smart’s skilful hands. The speaker is self-aware enough to understand that she is moving against conventionality, but in her view, towards something more valuable. Love overwhelms the speaker in Shakespearean overtures. The unnamed married man runs away with the speaker, temporarily leaving his heartbroken wife behind. They drive across country but are arrested on the Arizona border on suspicion of intent to have sexual intercourse while unmarried (which was a real crime, apparently). The poetry of the work comes into stark contrast with the realities of the world they occupy as the speaker is interrogated by Arizona law enforcement, in one of the novels most compelling scenes. She cannot step outside her own anguish, and so as the detective asks her questions in plain language, she responds in slices of the Song of Solomon. 

What relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies)

How long have you known him? (I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine: he feeders among the lilies.)

Did you sleep in the same room? (Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair: thou hast dove's eyes."

In the same bed? (Behold thou are fair, my beloved, yea pleasant, also our bed is green.) (47).

The speaker is sent from Arizona back to her parents in Canada. She is in her early twenties, pregnant and unmarried. She waits for her love to come to her. She gives birth to a child. “The child ejects calm, but he cannot dispel the loneliness.” (97). The unnamed man never comes back.  

It is beautiful in its solitude, disarming in its reverberation, and reservation. Smart’s speaker is a pulsating nerve, unprotected from the larger world, suffering from the trauma of being a consistently othered and infantilised self. A stirringly progressive novel, the plot of unrequited, or more potently rejected, love is used as a sheath in which to smuggle a female articulation of selfhood in complete and robust detail, showing the interior life of a woman demonised by her society. The alienation of the emotionality of the speaker is felt potently throughout the novel, as the reader is engrossed within her lived-experience, and repulsed by the callous reaction of the world at large. And the relatability of having trusted someone who then abandons or betrays us, is central to the stories resonant ending. Haven’t we all felt abandoned at a train station (metaphor or not) at some point in our lives? When what should have been done, by our own estimation, could not or should not or would not be done, and the world as we thought we knew it has crumbled before our eyes. And we sit alone in the wreckage. And we weep.

** Elizabeth Smart did fall in love with English poet George Barker, and she did sponsor he and his wife to stay with her in California during World War II. They did have an affair. They were arrested and separated in Arizona. Smart gave birth to their first child in 1941. Smart would eventually give birth to four children by Barker. He would publicly call her a temptress and accuse her of ruining his first marriage. He would also write a “tell-all” book about their affair, showing a very different scene of whorish seduction and one poor married man who tried to do the decent thing but was unable to resist Smart’s overwhelming sexuality. Their son, Christopher Barker has written about his parents tumultuous relationship.And while the reality behind the novels plot adds a certain level of intrigue to the book, it does nothing to change the reading of the book in and of itself.**

Smart, Elizabeth. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Flamingo, 1992.

meredith grace thompson (she/they) is a Canadian poet and essayist.  Longlisted for the Vallum 2020 Award for poetry, their work can be found in SPAM zine&press, GNU Journal, The Dallas Review, Queltehue Ediciones, and others. She is editor-of BlueHouse Journal and co-editor of OrangeApple Press.