This intense tale of a destructive love affair is a masterpiece

Times

30-07-2025

According to the novelist Angela Carter, the feminist press Virago — of which she was a leading light — was fuelled in part by 'the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in the position to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, exquisite prose though it might contain. 'By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls' would be more like it.'
The man whose balls needed to be torn off was the poet George Barker, a heavy-drinking roué who fathered 15 children by four women. This tomcattery, however, did not diminish Elizabeth Smart's love for him. It seemed that nothing could, for hers was a frenzied love, sparked in the late Thirties when she chanced upon Barker's poetry in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road and declared herself smitten. Until her death in 1986 she kept every memento of their relationship stored under her bed, as their four children would eventually discover.
The intense, destructive romance between Smart, a budding writer from an affluent Canadian family, and Barker, a fêted but impecunious poet from Essex, inspired her best-known work. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a slim volume of poetic prose, garnered little attention when it was published in 1945, but gained a cult following after it was reissued in 1966, its lyricism later influencing musicians such as Morrissey.
After Smart's fateful encounter with Barker's poetry she struck up a correspondence with him. Although Barker was married and teaching in Japan, she paid to fly him and his wife to visit her in California where she had joined a writers' colony. The book's opening is based on this episode and what follows is a chaotic, rhapsodic account of the early years of their affair, which would play out across continents and last for decades.
I use 'account' loosely for the story is fictionalised and deliberately threadbare — the mere outline of a love triangle between nameless characters — and the prose is a maelstrom of metaphors. As the narrator plucks lines from TS Eliot and draws on classical mythology, pining like Dido for Aeneas, we are left to piece together the events that have occurred. Along the way we deduce liaisons, pregnancy, exasperated parents (hers), broken promises (his), bitterness and rows.
At one stage the lovers are arrested for — we presume — being an unmarried couple intent on having sex and crossing a US state border. This is where the biblical language comes into its own (the book's title, of course, is taken from Psalm 137, but with the rivers of Babylon replaced by Grand Central Station, where the final chapter is set). During the interrogation the policeman's questions are spliced with verses from the Song of Solomon: 'What relation is this man to you? (My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies) … Were you intending to commit fornication in Arizona? (He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.)'
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The hard truth is that it is difficult to sympathise with the narrator or her beloved. Smart's moral compass is often as out of kilter as Barker's. In the clutches of her infatuation she makes questionable choices (understatement!) and is so beholden to her volatile, self-centred lover that 'neither the shabby streets nor the cooped-up hotel ever became for me, as they were always for him, symbols of wretchedness and no cash'.
So a light read this is not. Every page is driven by torment. As the author and critic Brigid Brophy put it, 'The entire book is a wound.' Yet Smart's ability to capture the pain and ecstasy of love is nothing short of extraordinary. Her narrator, knowing the spectacular hurt that lies ahead, declares that she is 'mortally pierced with the seeds of love' and the cooing mourning-doves 'are the hangmen pronouncing my sentence'.
After the Second World War, Smart worked as an advertising copywriter to support her family. She joined Queen magazine in the early Sixties, co-wrote cookery books and eventually settled in a remote part of Suffolk to focus on her creative writing. There were several short collections of poetry and, most notably, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals (1978) in which she returned to her and Barker's tale, again by way of a nameless female narrator and her faithless lover.
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I suspect that Carter was more approving of that later book title yet it was By Grand Central Station that she hailed as 'a masterpiece'. If you can brace yourself for a heavy dose of abstraction there are lines of searing beauty that will long stay with you.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart (HarperCollins £10.99 pp160). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members