The Heavy Blanks

During my first year of university I was told that anyone who hopes to write ought to find a writer whose work they can learn from. I don’t know yet whether this was sound advice, as some seem to cringe at the thought of being so influenced by someone else, but I decided it made sense to me.After all, fledgling artists usually study the techniques of great artists before developing their own, and budding musicians hone their skills learning Brahms. The same must be true of writing, so I started to read important Canadian novels in hopes of finding a writer whose style I could try on as unpretentiously as my nineteen year old self would allow. After Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Sinclair Ross, I read Elizabeth Smart.First I came across her novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, published in 1945 and based on her tumultuous affair with the poet George Barker. My response as a reader was to stop everything and read on. I was in awe and eager to hunt down more of her work. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is Smart’s only novel, so I started to read her poetry and short fiction before I came upon Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart, edited by Alice Van Wart.These journals are what I found to be most arresting, as they catalogued her life from a young Canadian debutante to a discerning woman with tremendous literary impulses. For the first time in my experience of reading, I was able to watch the growth of a writer whom I admired rather than simply read the finished works. This was my first view into a writer’s private relationship with her vocation. Naively, I was astounded to read that such a skilled stylist struggled to get her writing done.Out of these struggles came By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, today considered a classic of prose poetry. I wanted to know how she battled her writer’s block and produced a work that today is so celebrated. Entry after entry of her journal examines her difficulty in getting words on a page, so I was surprised to learn that she finished writing By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept in August of 1941, just over a year after meeting Barker, the main inspiration for the book. I wanted to know what it was that pushed through her block. The true story, I learned in such biographies as By Heart: The Life of Elizabeth Smart by Rosemary Sullivan and Christopher Barker’s The Arms of the Infinite: Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, was as mythic and commanding as the fiction.Their love story began in 1937, when, in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road, Smart plucked a slim volume of Barker’s poetry off a shelf. She quickly fell in love with the poetry and just as quickly with the author. She decided almost immediately that she would marry him. She began asking around at parties, seeking someone in the London poetry scene who might be connected with him. This paid off, and she did eventually begin a correspondence which continued until 1940 when Barker, who was Professor of English Literature at Sendai Imperial University in Japan, wrote to Smart to say that he was miserable and could not write anymore. He then made a request that Smart send him two tickets back to North America. At the time of the request, Smart and Barker had not yet properly met, but during their exchange Smart had bought one of his manuscripts, and her reputation as a wealthy Canadian traveler made its way to him. To Barker, Smart was his best chance of leaving Japan. In exchange for the two tickets, Barker promised her the unpublished manuscripts of his journals as well as his gratitude. His request for two tickets was the first indication Barker made to Smart that he was married.Smart began a campaign to raise the needed funds, and flew Barker and his wife Jessica to California, meeting them at a bus station in Monterey in July of 1940. This scene, her first glimpse of both, inspired the first paragraphs of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept:

I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire. ... But then it is her eyes that come forward out of the vulgar disembarkers to reassure me that the bus has not disgorged disaster: her madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusting as the untempted. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire. Her eyes shower me with their innocence and surprise.

Was it for her, after all, for her whom I had never expected or imagined, that there had been compounded such ruses of coincidence? Behind her he for whom I have waited so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams, fumbles with the tickets and the bags, and shuffles up to the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds.Here Smart fictionalized the moment that in life she had pursued since she’d first read his poetry; here was George Barker. There is no published journal entry for this encounter. The only known written record Smart left of their meeting exists as the opening of her novel. Though later she would confess privately to Van Wart that her honest reaction to seeing Barker for the first time was that he was “all wrong” physically, so entered into her life the man who inspired her ferociously poetic novel. By August the two were lovers, and so began a relationship that spanned decades and resulted in four children.Smart’s proclamation that the two would marry never came to be, and their relationship was marked by numerous separations and reconciliations. Their son Christopher recalls those periods of separation for The Observer:

As children we weren’t party to their rows, most of them happening after we had gone to bed. But the outcome was the same: our father, whose presence we yearned for, would be gone again and we would be left trailing round miserably praying for his return. Again we would be fatherless, and yet I always felt they never really parted all their lives.

It became obvious that the chaos of this relationship is what forced Smart to write through the blocks that she experienced before that point. She was a dedicated diarist and was certainly able to record her daily observations, but her difficulty seemed to be in transferring these observations to her work. I was fascinated by a writer who could write so much about not writing:

Why don’t I write the terrible, heavy blanks. I open the book, I stare. I say, there is nothing to write. But there is the important, powerful, evil blankness to write. Catch the disease, and dissect it to find the cure. Put facts if necessary, and minutely the bleak-eyed look.

I began to love her for the way she would force herself to go on, for acknowledging her block and trying to overcome it. This was a writer I wanted to learn from. Necessary Secrets is just one volume of her journals, spanning from 1933 to 1941, chronicling the period of her life before she met Barker, before she had any idea of their impending affair or of the novel that would be its result. In these entries, Smart is an Ottawa socialite traveling the globe as secretary to Margaret Watt, then head of the Associated Country Women of the World. Smart documented her life in minute detail, noting books she was reading, music she was practicing, observing the lives of privileged society and writing candidly of her suitors. But in the end, Smart always returned with her sharp eye to scrutinize herself. Again and again she used her journals to analyze herself and her relationship with writing:

All my life I fight the glazed eye, the lethargy. I insist I am independent. I will the sitting down at the blank page to write. I say I have no need of the people; I can pull out the vital thing myself if I am strong and moral enough. But I go flatfootedly up the hills, blearily eyed searching for my vision with a dead heart ... But it is the dance I have invoked and not the poetry.

Many of her entries explore this theme. Smart questioned herself in order to find a point of entry, then wrote unrelentingly about not writing, the sadness of it, her despondency and loneliness. Smart’s relationship with writing seemed to be spiritual, and her blocks weighed on her:

“Write the blanks,” I said before. This evil, this sin, so monstrous in its descent - its jellyfish anatomy so known, so stale. It is just the flight of all delight, mystery and love - unambiguous bones left but invoking less than any earthly skeleton or a lead grey day. A pall, a drugged relapse into the state of nonexistence - no pain except the fatal knowledge that life is embracing me and I cannot feel her touch.

While reading through Necessary Secrets, I was captivated by her sadness and her honesty. Her analysis of herself impressed me, as did her hunger to seek change in herself:

The thing said calms the wonder, but, unattended, the mystery grows. You see why I wept under the birch trees? I am not honest enough. I am too fond of the veiling metaphor. I cringe. I acquiesce; I am a coward to hurt people’s feelings. I haven’t the dignity to speak out, to dare to be myself even if it offends. But I don’t want to offend. But I can’t call anyone fool. I must find a solution.

Smart was not a hobbyist; she wrote with the need to understand herself. Her entire body of work is analysis of her experience and herself. To me, who was ready to begin learning what a good writer ought to know, this was incredibly important. This theme continued through her entire life and is reflected just as powerfully in the second volume of her journals, On the Side of the Angels. The second volume contains entries Smart made from 1941 until 1984, two years before her death, and it appears that as she grew older, her struggle with writing her experience evolved and grew more focussed:

The Book has to have more shape i.e. beginning, middle and end. Statement, elaboration, elucidation, resolve. Try (unless you think it would be dangerous) to make a statement about it. It’s too vague just to say: Here look this is what it’s like to me, to be alive now. To have had children, to work, to try to write, to not be able to write, to try to love, sometimes to succeed, sometimes not. The conflict between work and garden, God and the ruthless muse.

Smart had been struggling to complete new projects, and this dissection of her work and its form communicates that tension. What I found so interesting about Smart’s journals was that, at every opportunity, she would inspect herself and her writing and, in a way, engage in a conversation with herself. Through this writing she was telling herself to go on, that she wasn't doing enough.Smart’s struggle to write became her reason to write. Alice Van Wart, who edited her journals, notes about Smart’s relationship with writing:

For Smart writing was both spiritual and sexual. She believed in the muse, in the act of being overtaken by words. She refers to the act of writing as a fertilization of muse and words; there is a gestation period and then the giving birth. The gestation for Smart was always long and the giving birth painful. A single thread runs through Smart’s journals and that is her difficulty in being able to write.

Throughout her life, Smart remained troubled over the issue of creativity, particularly that of women, who, if they wished to write, must obey both nature and the muse. Smart believed profoundly in both and to the end of her life she would attempt to obey the imperatives of each.Smart did publish again in her later years, never another novel, but poetry and short fiction.According to Van Wart, Smart’s block followed her to the end of her life. She abandoned a new project called the ‘Mother Book’ and tried instead to carry on with her memoirs, but her entries began to shorten and some even went undated. However, her inexhaustible quest for the muse continued into her final entries, published in In the Meantime:

Muse - Ou êtes vous?This stuff is too loose to make any bricks of. Is it any use at all? We’ll see. The thing is to keep the hand moving.

To me, that is the crucial bit. In reading Smart’s account of her battle with writing, I hope I have learned that lesson. I am inexperienced and young, a little clumsy as a writer, but I hope that I remember to urge myself on. There are so many to learn from._____Jason Purcell is a student at the University of Alberta and an intern at Eighteen Bridges.