Stevie Smith: Not Drowning but Prevailing

Suicide is the occupational hazard of female poets, like falls from buildings for window washers.  The western suburbs of Boston form a sort of Bermuda Triangle of this phenomenon: Sylvia Plath, raised in Wellesley, took her life by her gas oven; Anne Sexton, born in neighboring Newton, locked herself in her garage in Weston, one town over, with the car running.

Stevie Smith

Whether suicide and poetry are companion products of the creative mind is unclear; to some extent, the culture of contemporary poetry may foster self-destructive tendencies by promoting the belief that the only good female poets are the suicidal ones.  When Anne Sexton heard of Plath's suicide, she is reported to have said "Good career move."

Anne Sexton

Florence Margaret Smith, known from childhood as "Stevie" after a jockey a friend thought she resembled, is a notable exception to this rule.  Her father abandoned the family when she was three after his business failed; he ran away to sea and communicated with her only sporadically and telegraphically thereafter; "Off to Valparaiso--Love Daddy" read one of his post cards.  Perhaps Stevie's unsentimental style was conceived by the chilly and clipped tone that were all she knew of him.

Smith

Raised by her mother and a feminist aunt, Stevie developed an independent streak and never married.  The transformative event of her childhood was her hospitalization for tuberculous peritonitis at the age of five; she was sent away to a sanatorium intermittently for the next several years.  Distressed at her separation from her mother, she began to suffer from depression, a condition that would afflict her for the rest of her life.  She traced her preoccupation with death--most famously expressed in her poem "Not Waving but Drowning"--to this period.

Sylvia Plath

Unlike Plath and Sexton, however, Smith looked upon death as an ultimate consolation, not a short cut.  As a result, she not only endured until she died of a brain tumor at the age of 68, she prevailed, enjoying her greatest popularity after she retired at the age of 51 from her lifelong job as private secretary to the owner of a publishing company.

The mordant tone of "Not Waving but Drowning", in which the friends of a drowned man mistake his signal of distress for a sign that he is "larking", offers an insight into the state of mind that, like a grain of sand, served as the irritation that causes an oyster to produce a pearl.  Stevie could have slipped beneath the waves, but she righted herself and swam ashore.