Her mother died when Smith was seventeen the next year she began to work at the office of a magazine publisher, Arthur Pearson, publishing poems in magazines, and started to call herself Stevie. After her father abandoned the family, in 1905, she went with her mother and elder sister Molly to Palmers Green, in North London, to the home of her Aunt Madge, where she would live for the rest of her life. She was born Florence Margaret Smith in Hull, Yorkshire, in 1902. Her biography reads like a checklist to the life of a certain kind of eccentric writer-a life of measuring out in coffee spoons, punctuated by enthusiasms. Like the doomed swimmer, one way or another, Stevie Smith was far out all her life. Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Stevie Smith’s most famous poem is “Not Waving but Drowning,” which begins: That feeling of the uncanny-the universe rhyming in a minor key, the recurring bad dream-is the undercurrent of almost all of Stevie Smith’s poems, although a few of them are festooned by joy. I was reminded of these books-the hair rising on the back of my neck-while reading the new, comprehensive volume of Stevie Smith’s poems, edited and introduced by Will May. For years, I forgot I had read these books, as one might suppress a traumatic event, but later, when I happened on them again, one after the other, I realized that here, like sugar laced with rat poison, was the source of the feeling of unease, a ripple below the skin, that rarely deserts me. The other day, an acquaintance used the expression “It scared the bejesus out of me,” and even now I thought of that narrator, Merricat. The second was Shirley Jackson’s murder-spiked family tale, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” It was my first exposure to an unreliable narrator, and it scared me to death. It’s not an attractive doll, and its menacing presence turns nice girls into wicked ones. Arthur, was about a little English girl, Melissa, who finds a very old, knobby wooden doll, called Dido, in an attic. The first, “A Candle in Her Room,” by Ruth M. One book was for children the other was not. The books smelled of damp, and there was sand in the bindings. I read them both early, at nine or ten, in the summer in a tiny public library on Cape Cod, above the town hall, where my mother deposited me, often with my little sister, while she did errands. Two books have haunted me since childhood.
The poet Stevie Smith, in a photograph originally published in 1954.
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