By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Many will be put off by the self-pitying solipsism of this brief work and by its occasional slips into cliche (``Everything flows like the Mississippi''). Grand Central, first published in England in 1945, is a poetic prose recreation of her side of the affair, during which she bore him four children and he remained with his wife. One can only imagine how Carter would review the likes of Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey.Smart was a globe-trotting journalist until she picked up a collection of George Barker's poetry in a London bookshop and decided to fall in love with him. (BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.)

…the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. In a letter to the critic Lorna Sage, she said the book went against all of the reasons she founded Virago press. She declared the book “like Madame Bovary struck by lightning.”īut she admitted to friends that the submissiveness of the main character was depressing to her. When the volume was reissued in 1966, the great Angela Carter reviewed it for The Guardian. (Barker did leave his first wife after his affair with Smart, and they had a child together, though they never married.) And Smart channeled it into her well-loved book. Their love affair was rife with drama that still makes it into headlines. “It is the juicy sound that runs, bubbles over, that intoxicates til I can hardly follow,” she gushed about Barker’s poetry. She had written in her journal well before that that she intended to fall in love with a poet. Which is as good an excuse as any to share this sick burn from Angela Carter.īarker’s work doesn’t get much attention these days, but Smart says she fell in love with him the first time she read “Daedalus.” She was in Better Books on Charing Cross Road. Jonathan McAloon wrote about the love affair between Smart and poet George Barker for The Independent yesterday.

It’s been seventy years since the publication of Elizabeth Smart‘s prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Angela Carter reviews 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept' » MobyLivesĪngela Carter reviews “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept”

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart