Stevie: The Movie

There's a revealing moment in Ivy and Stevie when Kay Dick asks the writer if she ever nearly married, as Pompey in Novel on Yellow Paper nearly did. Smith's answer, so many years after her broken engagement, still has deep emotional reverberations.

Oh no-well yes, I suppose I did really. At that period I thought it was the right thing to do, one ought to-that it was the natural thing to dohey-ho-but I wasn't very keen on it. Then I felt I couldn't manage it . . .

Smith was unwilling to give up her independence. She questioned the ideology of domesticity, of inscribed gender roles, of marriage. She felt that most young girls, especially in Palmers Green, clung to the idea of marriage like a life raft, as if getting married could somehow make everything right ("It is like the refrain in The Three Sisters," she says with sudden recognition: "It is the leitmotif of all their lives. It is their Moscow"), whereas many times it wouldn't be right at all. Smith had a tremendous anxiety about losing herself to intimacy. She was apprehensive-gingerly-about commitment. She felt she could never maintain herself within marital relations.

There's a key moment in. the film when she tries to explain to Freddy why it would be utterly foolish, utterly suicidal, for them to marry:

"If we get married, I won't be Stevie anymore. I'll be Mrs. Freddy. That's what frightens me."

"It's the same for any other girl," he says uncomprehendingly.

"I'm not any other girl. I'm me."

The scene takes a nasty turn and Freddy erupts cruelly, "You ll die alone, and you'll deserve to. Little pets like you deserve to be lonely "

It's a stab to the heart. "Go to hell!" Stevie yells at Freddy as he slams the door behind him. Irrevocably gone.

Smith's refusal to marry was. necessary for her psychic survival, but the emotional cost of her renunciation was high. She was grief stricken over what she had lost-perhaps not Freddy himself so much as the possibility he must at one time have represented, the possibility of a marital connection, union, a certain recognizable kind of happiness. The recognition that she would never be able to manage it must have been devastating. All her life she suffered from a restless unfulfillment in romantic love. There was a great compensatory love in her relationship with the Lion Aunt, but she was also left with a secret and at times unbearable loneliness, a sense of desperately sinking.

It's years later. Stevie has her head down, her hands folded on the same table. Lost in thought, in memories. Jackson gathers herself together and gives a beautifully hopeless speech that reverberates in the direction of Smith's most famous poem, "Not Waving but Drowning."

It's like escaping from a sunk submarine. You must stand quietly and without panic until the flood-water in the escape room is covering your shoulders, is creeping up to your mouth, and only then when the whole of your escape-room is flooded to drowning point will you be able to shoot up through the escape-funnel, to shoot up forever and away. Then it's over. But when it's over, then it's tearing inside, it's 'tearing in the belly,' and one wishes oneself dead and unborn.