Content provided in partnership with
Stevie: The Movie
American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2000 by Hirsch, Edward
1. Prologue: "Is she woman? Is she myth?"
All poets are misfits and oddballs, but there is something especially discomfiting and even improbable about the English poet Stevie Smith. "Who and what is Stevie Smith?" Ogden Nash asked in a Dorothy Parkeresque moment: "Is she woman? Is she myth?" Wearing a childlike pinafore and white lace stockings, telling a puzzled reporter, "I'm probably a couple of sherries below par most of the time," chanting or singing her poems in a high, off pitch voice at poetry gatherings in the 1960s ("She chanted her poems artfully off key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that suggested two kinds of auditory experience," Seamus Heaney once said: "an embarrassed party-piece by a child halfway between giggles and tears, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso"), she seems so unlikely and, in retrospect, necessary: a welcome tonic, a heartbreaking brightness we needed all along. We still need this figure who arrived like a Blakean thunderclap with all the freshness, frivolity, and forthrightness of childhood, with all the sad and caustic insights of long experience. Thinking about her elemental poems, which are so cheeky and rash, so stingingly honest, impertinent, and deathward-leaning, so filled with mordant wit and comic desperation ("Iearn too that being comical," she explains in a poem about Jesus, "does not ameliorate the desperation"), I keep wanting to adapt something Randall Jarrell once wrote about Walt Whitman. Someone might have put on her tombstone STEVIE SMITH: SHE HAD HER NERVE.
Poets haven't generally fared very well in the movies. Poetry is a minority art, and writing it is a strangely avid, interior, and intimate process difficult to penetrate and describe from the outside. Whether in perplexed desperation or simple bad faith (let's call it desperation for the sake of the medium), directors and actors have often latched onto external mannerisms and affectations-the black beret, the wide cravat and crooked walking stick, the flung scarf-to display a poet's character. How many times I have suffered over the years watching mock poets-parodic nightmares of the effete snob-flitting across the screen. It's as if every poet had to be typecast with a pretentious accent and a stilted wardrobe, T. S. Eliot without the talent. (When it comes to the fatuous portrayal of a poet being inspired by historical events, nothing may be able to top the sentimental, stiff upper-lip vigor of Kipling suddenly being moved to compose a famous poem, which the commanding officer then recites over Din's body, in Gunga Din.) So, too, there was something so radically antic and faussenaif (to employ the word Philip Larkin devised for her), so quirky and fey, so scapular, self mocking, and idiosyncratic about Florence Margaret Smith that I was pretty much expecting to be dispirited on a Friday night in 1981 when I sank down into a comfortably worn seat in a standardized movie complex in a northwest suburb of Detroit to see a film that was having a mild "success d'estime" (as the poet who liked schoolgirl French might have put it).
Stevie is a low budget, low-tech art movie that was filmed in seventeen days in 1978. I find it surprisingly profound, deeply felt, though parts of it, perhaps inevitably, also feel quickly shot, hastily improvised. Many of the flashbacks are no more than single shots, spliced-in visuals. The New York Times reported that Robert Enders, its director and producer, sought funding from more than two dozen American studios before one final studio, Fine Artists, agreed to pick up the total production cost of $500,000.
Much of Stevie also retains the texture and quality -the vestiges-of a theatrical piece adapted into a film. Hugh Whitemore's highly verbal screenplay is based on his own sympathetic dramatic portrait, Stevie: A Play from the Life and Work of Stevie Smith, a two-act which had a notable West-End run at the Vaudeville Theater in 1977 and recurs often to Stevie Smith's own characteristically forthright writings. The movie, like the play, has a tiny cast ofthree characters: Stevie (Glenda Jackson), her unmarried aunt (Mona Washboume), and an unnamed Man (Trevor Howard). Alec McCowen also comes in as Stevie's fiancee Freddy for a single troubling scene from her past, a play within the play.
The film also relies heavily on one setting: Stevie's cluttered, rag-tag sitting-room. The camera isn't stationary-it moves freely around the parlor -but Enders consciously restricts it to a lone, unchanging room for most of the movie. It doesn't take long for us to feel comfortably at home in this mismatched, lived-in room with its lace-curtained bay window, its heavy furniture (an aging upright piano covered with piles of books, a wooden bureau), its vases of dried rushes standing next to potted plants, its framed sepia photographs. This ordinary setting can seem both endearingly dreamy and poignantly enclosed, though that may be appropriate for a poet who committed herself to living in the same house for more than forty years with an older relative in an outer London suburb ("Smart writing people think it is not at all chic to live in the suburbs with an aunt," she admits in the film, "but I don't care what they think . . . I love Aunt and Aunt loves me. That's what really matters") and all her life complained of being enervated and stifled by boredom, at times almost luxuriating in its possibilities ("Sometimes, even now, I indulge in the utmost limit of boredom, so that when the telephone rings it is like an Angel of Grace breaking in on the orgy of boredom to which my soul is committed").
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History