Readings

by Rick Dietrich

Tuesday's Child, Born on a Wednesday

… continued from April 2006

My friend is back, the one who waved, "looking a lot like Stevie Smith"; or so I wrote last time. She had come, I wrote, to talk about Joshua Foa Dienstag's book on pessimism. And she had stayed to explain it. Then, she had left, waving.

Now she knocks, walks in immediately, sits down. She is not happy. "You described me as looking like Stevie Smith," she says.

" 'Something like,' " I reply. It's not what I wrote; I'm backing down.

"Not a compliment."

"No?"

"I'm not going to say she was an ugly, mousey little woman, Stevie — she wasn't … ugly; but …" My friend stands up, tall and straight like a young tree.

"Lissome" comes to mind. And "glistening." She twirls. Next door, someone is playing a flute. I know she is both serious in what she says and mocking her own seriousness; so I can only shake my head.

"But by all accounts, while a brilliant, witty conversationalist …," she pauses, "she was nasty, too — self-centered, demanding, rude."

"Yes."

"So, not a compliment."

"No." It's best to defer to someone who knows what she is talking about — or seems to. At least, so I've always found. But then she stops, my friend, sits down and looks at me. My turn.

"I meant your waving," I said. "I was thinking of that poem."

"Not Waving but Drowning" — no doubt Stevie Smith's best-known poem. Of course, as my friend would surely point out, it is not Stevie who is not waving, but a character she has created, a man, dead in the first verse though somehow still "moaning":

I was further out than you
thought
and not waving but
drowning.

"Poor chap," his friends, who cannot hear, are thinking: it must have gotten too cold for him and his heart failed. But he continues moaning, that "it was too cold always,"

I was much too far out all
my life
And not waving but
drowning.

"I was thinking of that poem," I say.

"I see. I'm not sure that's pessimism, to return to the subject," she says. Then, she says something completely different: "She wasn't a Christian, you know."

"No," yielding again.

"And I try to be, pessimism aside."

"Yes."

Stevie Smith's difficulties with the Christian faith come down to two. To her, at these two main points, it was simply (straightforwardly!) illogical. The first: Hell. Stevie wanted to believe — claimed she did believe — in a God of love; but Hell was inconsistent with that. And you couldn't get rid of Hell, though her Christian friends, it seems, were always trying to (as in "Thoughts about the Christian Doctrine of Eternal Hell"):

Is it not interesting to see
How the Christians
continually
Try to separate themselves
in vain
From the doctrine of
eternal pain.

But they can't — not and be Christians (followers of Christ), Stevie says!

Their Lord said it,
They must believe it.

The sweetness of Christianity is so mixed with cruelty that one cannot be separated from the other. The Christ that takes the little children on his knee will cast the one that errs into the fire. Is this love? It is not, Stevie concludes. The God of the Christians is not love. And the Christ of the Christians is not God and man. That is impossible, the poet believes. She tried to clarify for herself the two natures doctrine in several (somewhat repetitive) poems. The best-known of these is probably "The Airy Christ," written, the subtitle tells us, "after reading Dr. Rieu's translation of Mark's Gospel." But her objections are probably best stated in "Was He Married?" which begins

Was he married, did he try
To support as he grew less
fond of them
Wife and family?

No, he wasn't married. He didn't get tangled up that way. He didn't get tangled up at all, because he "did not love in the human way." So he couldn't know that "there is no suffering like having made a mistake." And he never needed to learn the human lesson that even "being comical / Does not ameliorate the desperation" human love and the inevitable mistakes cause.

Only human beings feel this,
… because they are so mixed.

He was not mixed, for perfection cannot "be less than perfection." So Stevie writes in "Oh Christianity, Oh Christianity." And with perfection, she is sure, there goes sin, at least in any human sense. He might take our sins upon Him, but what does that mean?

To take sin upon one is not the same
As to have sin inside one and feel guilty.

These poems all come to the same conclusion: the church fathers, if they were right, were wrong, because they didn't understand everyday human nature — not as poets do.

"Where does that leave us?" I ask my friend, continuing to defer.

"I don't know where that leaves us," she says with the stamp of a foot in her voice. "I don't know … ."

"But you're pessimistic," I say smiling, joking.

"Yes," she says. "I am. And you can be comical, but it won't help." She laughs.

My friend doesn't raise her objection to being compared to Stevie Smith without doing some research. She read Frances Spalding's biography called simply Stevie Smith (New York: Norton, 1989) and "every poem but six" in Stevie Smith: Collected Poems (James MacGibbon, ed. New York: New Directions, 1983).