Name: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Rating: 3.4 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679738046

Elizabeth Smart

Originally published in 1945, this book of poetic prose encapsulates former journalist Elizabeth Smart’s relationship with poet George Barker. Instantly, upon picking up a book of his poetry while browsing through a London bookshop, Smart fell in love with the poet. They would soon begin an indulgent love affair during which she gave birth to four of his children. He, however, remained legally married to his wife. This tale of passionate but fanatical love is a modern reflection of the Romantic poets. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius. Foreword by Brigid Brophy

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Helen 

But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention. My mind may reason that the tenseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. 

I am possessed by love and have no options. 

When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door. More single-purposed than the new bird, all mouth with his one want, I close my eyes ana tremble, anticipating the heaven of actual touch.

Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return. 

Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury And if then she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no one has me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness. 

ayoni

Parents’ imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

I never was in love with death before, nor felt grateful because the rocks below could promise certain death. But now the idea of dying violently becomes an act wrapped in attractive melancholy, and displayed with every blandishment. For there is no beauty in denying love, except perhaps by death, and towards love what way is there?

But if you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me.

What I would give to be able to write like this.

Lily Cooper

‘Threateners of life are horrible enough, and she whom I have injured, and whose agony it is my penalty to watch, lies gasping, but still living, on the land. Shuddering like a coward, I dare not grasp either life or death from the ghoulish palm that offers them.’

Chloe

And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire.

When his soft shadow, which yet in the night comes barbed with all the weapons of guilt, is cast up hugely on the pane, I watch it as from a loge in the theatre, the continually vibrating I in the darkness. Swearing invulnerability, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.

But that huge shadow is more than my only moon, more even than my destruction: it has the innocent slipping advent of the next generation, which enters in one night of joy, and leaves a meadowful of lamenting milkmaids when its purpose is grown to fruit.  

The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart: the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done. 

To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite’s face is repulsive when placed too near the truth. Farther off from the centre of the world, of all worlds, I might be better fooled, but can I see the light of a match while burning in the arms of the sun? 

It has happened, the miracle has arrived, everything begins today, everything you touch is born; the new moon attended by two enormous stars; the sunny day fading with a glow to exhilaration; all the paraphernalia of existence, all my sad companions of these last twenty years, the pots and pans in Mrs Wurtle’s kitchen, ribbons of streets, wilted geraniums, thin children’s legs, all the world solicits me with joy, leaps at me electrically, claiming its birth at last. 

Wherever we went, though, whatever we did, we had always to return like cornered foxes to the hotel room. And always the wallpaper dispersed with its heavy writing any optimism we might have gathered. There were no solutions in the writing on the wall. It urged us to despair. It is criminally responsible for all histories. 

For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action. 

Why does he write 'minor martyrdoms? Didn't the crucifixion only last three days? Is it the shortness of the days of torture or the fact that hope still breathes that lets him say minor? How can anything so total not be major? 

He has martyred me, but for no cause, nor has he any idea of the size and consequence of my wounds. Perhaps he will never know, for to say, You killed me daily and O most especially nightly, would imply blame. I do not blame, nor even say, You might have done this or this rather than that. 

I even say, You must do that, you have to do it, there is no alternative, urging my own murder. 

How can I pity him even though he lies so vulnerable up there in the stinging winds, when every hole that bleeds me was made by a kiss of his? He is beautiful as allegory. He is beautiful as the legend the imagination washes up on the sand. 

found out about this book through taylor russell, saying its her favorite book. thats also how i found out this is canadian literature and the said actress is also canadian. wow, once again, yall know im canada down 🫎🇨🇦

enjoyed this ! it read like a mix of anne carson and anais nin :^]

Nica

found out about this book through taylor russell, saying its her favorite book. thats also how i found out this is canadian literature and the said actress is also canadian. wow, once again, yall know im canada down 🫎🇨🇦

enjoyed this ! it read like a mix of anne carson and anais nin :^]

The intensity of the language is both overwhelming and also the entire soul of the book. If nothing else, this is an experience and a tour de force in poetic prose

Lorelei Petcu

Elizabeth Smart’s passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as ‘Like MADAME BOVARY blasted by lightning ... A masterpiece’.

i would’ve wept at the grand central too if i had to love a man

Saffy

Smart has ripped out my heart and torn it to shreds. She is poetic and profound and her account of love is devastating. How terrifying it must be to be able to detail your love in such depth, and to also be the love that another feels to such depths.

elizabeth smart you are smart and amazing, the writing is one of the most beautiful i've ever read in my entire life. every word is meticulously placed to build a masterpiece of a paragraph. she feels love on a whole different level of depth, where you as the reader yourself are creeped throughout the body with her pain, wrath and loneliness of her love. though i admit, i do not tolerate some of her actions. no man ever deserves that kind of devotion.

it's getting better the second time i read this

readingsnmusings 

"Shuddering like a coward, I dare not grasp either life or death from the ghoulish palm that offers them."

"What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one."

"There is no room for pity, of anything. In a bleeding heart I should find only exhilaration in the richness of the red."

"so all my dreams are of water, across which the ghost of an almost accomplished calamity beckons."

"The grief trumpets its triumph. It is raving. It craves violence for expression, but can find none. There is no end. The drowning never ceases. The water submerges and blends, but I am not dead. O I am not dead. I am under the sea. The entire sea is on top of me."

"Yes, it’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are, that’s all."

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. This is a poetic prose recreation of her side of the affair, during which she bore him four children and he remained with his wife.

Jesse Morley

The grief trumpets its triumph. It is raving. It craves violence for expression, but can find none. There is no end. The drowning never ceases. The water submerges and blends, but I am not dead. O I am not dead. I am under the sea. The entire sea is on top of me.

For me, good poetry has an element of universality; the act of reading/interpretation becomes itself an act of authorship (à la Barthes). But the emotional charge in By Grand Central Station seems tied to Smart’s personal experience in a way that limits its accessibility. It feels both shockingly public and elusively private.

I wanted the text to be either more or less coherently grounded in the reality of the events Smart was chronicling (events that require research in order to follow with any degree of clarity). At times the narrative context is handed directly to the reader, but at other times it’s completely obscured (often in its place Smart asks us to build impressions on a sparse framework of intertextual references), while the sense of it being crucial to the text’s interpretation remains frustratingly present.

There’s no denying the power of the cutting imagery that flashes throughout this work, but ultimately I just wasn’t moved by this in the way that I thought I might be.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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