My weekly essay post is being pushed back to the middle of the week as I've spent all my reading time this weekend finishing Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper for the Slaves of Golconda (I should already know this...just because a book doesn't look long doesn't mean it's a quick read). It's turned out to be a very challenging novel for me, the type that is perfect to tackle in a group setting. I have a feeling that had I picked this one up on my own, I might have abandoned it for something else fairly quickly. But I do think it's good to read outside one's comfort zone sometimes and be exposed to different sorts of writing styles.
Stevie Smith was primarily a poet, but she also wrote three novels. She seems to have drawn heavily on her life in her work and some of the same motifs appear in her novels and poems. Born in Hull in 1902 she was named Florence Margaret though nicknamed Stevie after a famous jockey. She died of a brain tumor in 1971. There's a few of the basics out of the way, now on to the harder part.
Novel on Yellow Paper is an unusual novel. It's not exactly linear in its telling. It's not really episodic either, though I suppose arguments could be made that it is. The reader is treated to the thoughts in Pompey Casmilus's head on a variety of subjects--Love, Death, Sex, Religion, Politics to name a few. She's quite playful in many ways--speaking directly to the reader, adding poems to the text or being creative with wordplay and there's lots of repetition. In some ways it was almost sing-songy and I could imagine this being spoken. There's a fair amount of text in other languages--French, German, Latin (unfortunately my edition gave no translations), and lots of literary and mythological references. Per my book's introduction:
"The talking voice of Pompey Casmilus flirts and fools with its reader and subject-matter alike. It stops and starts, it dodges and teases. It picks up a person or an idea and drops them flat out of sudden boredom; it plays with words and speech-patterns. It speaks different languages, puts on foreign accents and funny disguises; it quotes from the literature of remote countries and centuries and the trash of contemporary England."
I'm not sure I can share with you any of the greater truths that she speaks about--the under the surface stuff, but I can at least share with you some superficial aspects of the story. Pompey is the private secretary of Sir Phoebus, who's very good to her. She's writing a novel on yellow office paper (so she doesn't get it mixed up with the regular correspondence). She travels to Germany on her holidays, though she wonders why she bothers. It's not like school holidays, as now you no sooner arrive than you must think of getting ready to return home. She calls her aunt the Lion of Hull. Her mother died when she was young and her father was absent during most of her life. She has a romantic entanglement with Freddy, who she decides not to marry, and she seems very obsessed with death.
Although I can tell you all sorts of little bits and pieces about the story, part of my struggle with this novel was trying to understand just what Pompey really felt about things. She (Pompey/Stevie Smith) expects the reader to work a little, but I had a hard time teasing out the inner feelings and grander meanings. Let me give you a couple examples.
"As a baby I was rather cynical. I wrote a poem about it which I will now give you. It will break up the page for you, and something fresh to the eye helps the tired brain and aids concentration. I dare say you find it hard to concentrate? Never mind, the great thing is never to mind. Just keep on trying, and one day you may figure as a case-sheet in one of those books the smarties write, that have such high-up titles, they would look well on any drawing-room table, like one I have in mind at the moment--'The Economics of Fatigue and Unrest."
I appreciate her humor, she knew how I was feeling, so she must have known her story would be a challenge. She tells the reader straight out that they had better be up for the challenge or maybe not even bother. But I persisted (even though maybe I should have been one of those not bothering!). It was how she often would segue from one thought to another (usually seamlessly, though not in any way less confusing) when she would lose me. I would know she was telling me something important, and then...
"So what do I mean by this vulgarity and stupidity? There was once a man that read Swinburne. This boy had read Swinburne. So? So that's the boy that read Swinburne. And by and by and by he was still never getting any further than being the boy that read Swinburne. But by and by I remember he was also reading Kipling. That gave him a line on the army. And he remembered he read the Bible."
Okay, so I am taking this out of context, but do you see how circuitous things become? I never did figure out what she meant by that vulgarity and stupidity. No doubt it was there, but my mind had moved on and lost the thread. But there are some very entertaining and clever passages as well that elicited a chuckle or two.
"...I will say now that William makes excellent coffee, and rightly prides himself on his coffee, so afterwards we were drinking a very great deal of this excellent coffee, and eating a very great many ginger biscuits, that were rather flabby I remember, but the ginger flavor was still left. And if they had lost that hard brittleness that young ginger biscuits have, I did not say so, I was feeling very kind and mellowed myself by now, and I should not have been so unkind as to say: William, your biscuits are flabby. No."
So, this was an interesting reading experience. I'm glad I read it, but it was a struggle at times. I'm not a poetry reader and I wonder if that is somehow tied up into my appreciation of it (she being a poet). She uses a lot of imagery that I just couldn't quite get (also part of my problem reading poetry). This is probably a book best understood (in my case anyway) as a reread after a little discussion or extracurricular reading. And it probably didn't help that I rushed through the last half this weekend! Now I'm off to see what the other Slaves have to say about it and hope that the discussion might shed further light on it.