"Suburbs are not so bad I think": Stevie Smith's Problem of Place in 1930s and '40s London

"I think I'm going to be sick," said Nina. (284)

Carey calls this passage, which appears when Nina and Ginger are leaving on their honeymoon, "Waugh's verdict on suburban England" (48)." he assumes that right-minded readers will immediately recognize the need to condemn Nina/Waugh as horrifyingly elitist. Carey doesn't bother to note, as most critics usually and dutifully do, the ambiguous origin of Nina's nausea (is it the vision of the suburbs or the tilt of the plane?). Nor does he consider how to weigh Nina's revulsion from the suburb against Waugh's satire of her and the other vacuous Bright Young Things, a satire that is far more devastating than his satire of the suburbs.

Carey vividly, if not quite fairly, treats the most familiar and famous early twentieth-century authors the same way he treats Waugh, selecting a nasty anti-suburban comment out of the context of his or her lived politics or larger literary production. he wants to illustrate how elites of all political stripes despised the suburban masses and, in their literary fantasies, created a terrain which is consistent with Hitler's Mein Kampf.n Simon Dentith, guided by a similar interest in "high" culture's relation to the suburb, examines representations of the suburbs in poetry of the '3Os. he establishes a less depressing version of Carey's intermodern suburban debate, or what he on second thought calls "the various kinds of name-calling" that emerged around the "icons of a new degeneracy," like arterial roads, filling stations, cinemas, the wireless, and semi-detached bungalows (108-109). Analyzing the generic difficulties exposed by poems like MacNeice's "Birmingham" and sections of "Autumn Journal," he turns to Smith's "Suburb," citing twenty-seven lines beginning with the following:

Round about the streets I slink

Suburbs are not so bad I think

When their inhabitants can not be seen,

Even Palmers Green. (Collected Poems 81 -82)

This poem prompts Dentith to ask an important ethical-political question about the relation between poetic speaker and suburban subject: "Does it make a difference here that the point of view of this poem is that of a pedestrian inhabitant of the suburb in question (albeit one who slinks about at night), rather than [MacNeice's] motoring correspondent?" (120). His answer? "Well, it doesn't and it does." It "doesn't," in Dentith's view, because Smith employs the problematic "characteristic generic dispositions" of the period-"the reading off of inauthentic lives from inauthentic architecture and the trivial paraphernalia of petty-bourgeois lives" (120). Dentith is also troubled by Smith's "pervasive comic irony at the suburbs' expense," which may keep her from "treat[ing] the lives of the inhabitants of the suburbs with appropriate seriousness" (119). On the other hand, he realizes that Smith does not replicate in her poetry the kind of snootiness he finds in suburban poems by Betjeman, Auden, Day Lewis, and MacNeice. Attempting to define Smith's difference, attempting in other words to place her, Dentith concludes rather opaquely: