Stevie: The Movie

4. Speaking to the Camera, Talking to Lion Aunt

One striking feature of the performance is how naturally-how intimately-Jackson addresses the camera throughout the film. It's as if she is turning away from the conversation with her aunt to enter into another one with us. ("I spoke to the camera as a person," she told one interviewer.) This carries over to the confident, conversational way she recites Smith's poetry throughout the film. Jackson was apparently edgy and apprehensive about reciting poetry directly into the camera, but had a breakthrough when the director suggested that she should think of the camera as a guest in her home. ("You don't always look at a person when you are speaking," the actress said: "It was more interesting than pretending I was talking to cinemas full of people.") The wisdom of this is evident in the final version: when Jackson recites poetry in the film one feels like a welcome visitor, a confidant, a co-conspirator.

Jackson also seems to have internalized the feeling in Smith's lyrics, which she also recordedperhaps a little too somberly-for Argo Record Company (Glenda Jackson Reads Stevie Smith, 1978). Reciting the poems aloud as if to a guest gives them an intimate spontaneity. At times she effectively says them as if musing to herself. The down side of the film's approach may be that all the poems seem content driven, primarily used to support the poet's biography-rather than the other way around. Yet a poet's biography primarily resides in the pattern of sounds she makes, the words she uses and arranges. (Stevie Smith liked to refer to her poems as "sound vehicles.") Some of the lines are also wrenched out of their fictive contexts to give them biographical applicability. Yet the supple strength of this approach is that the poems also seem to come bursting forth from Stevie's life. They brim up directly from experience-these stabbing intuitions that cried out to be written down and shaped, inscribed, spoken, heard.

Stevie never seemed to have minded that her aunt didn't approve of her work and considered it all a "soppy waste of time." Maybe the aunt's incomprehension gave her the deep privacy-the interior space-she required to do her work. It must at times have taken its toll. The director hit on a device that resonates with-that parallels-Stevie's situation. It's as if our presence gives her the license-the opportunity-to talk away from Aunt, as she did in her own work, to express herself apart from domestic life. Still, there's no doubt Stevie was taken care of and cherished, steadied down and comforted, tethered to daily life by her mother's sister. Something in her was also arrested. "When you live with an old lady from an early age you never cease to be a child," Stevie admitted after her aunt had died. Childhood wasn't so much a stage in her development as an imaginative place she could call on and return to at any time. It was a habitation always available to her. Childhood wasn't something she sought-as it was for, say, Wordsworth-but something she already possessed.