(by Elizabeth Smart)
I’ve been meaning to read this since, um, 2015, and I’m not sure what took me so long. I’m also not sure how I ultimately feel about this one: some of it felt like a slog—too vague, too much mythologizing. But at a sentence/paragraph level there is a lot I like, and our narrator’s arc from being crazy in love to being down bad feels intense and raw and true: at the book’s best moments, we’re right there with the narrator on the roller coaster of joy and pain of her love affair with a married man (and indeed, the book is based on Smart’s own affair with the poet George Barker—he was married to someone else, but Smart had four of his children).
The narrator talks about the affair as inevitable: even her imagined death “cannot undo the event to which there were never any alternatives”; “I am possessed by love and have no options,” she says. And in that love she finds a new intensity, as when she says this: “all the world solicits me with joy, leaps at me electrically.” It’s a bigger thing than she imagined: “I thought it would be like a bird in the hand, not a wild sea that treated me like flotsam.”
I love passages like this, about how the intensity of love transforms ordinary life: “Even in transient coffee-shops and hotels, or the gloom of taverns, the crooning of Bing Crosby out of a jukebox, and the bar-tender clanking glasses, achieve a perfect identity, a high round note of their own flavour, that makes me tearful with the gratitude of reception.”
But things don’t stay easy: our narrator gets pregnant; people judge her; her lover doesn’t leave his wife. She doubts that past intensity (“Was it ever like that? Did we lie so close like irresistible currents drawn together?”) and what’s left is “sorrow that dissolved even the chromium-plating the glass palaces the concrete of New York,” “When Lexington Avenue dissolved in my tears, and the houses and the neon lights and the nebulae fell jumbled into the flood.”
Also included in this volume is The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, which features the same narrator, now 31.5 rather than 23, and now in London, where she navigates “the wastes of Kensington” and the “neat ruins of the war” (WWII, that is). Her affair is still going, and going badly. She goes on vacation to France and we get sentences like this on her return: “Victoria Station is golden and anonymous. Angels cavort in the rafters. Loiterers lean like a Botticelli chorus by the ham-roll counter with their tea.” And even in the bomb-damaged city, and even in the narrator’s difficult life, there’s some joy, some release: “What do people do at 5.30 in the afternoon, when there’s an early amethyst sky, and happiness explodes irresponsible and irrepressible into the luminous evening over the weary city?” They go out, they drink, they listen to other people’s stories, they get by as best they can.
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