150. Elizabeth Smart — By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept with Rosemary Sullivan and Maya Gallus

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes. Today's lost lady hadn't been on our spreadsheet for potential future subjects, but it seems like her book almost picked me. It caught my attention at the library on one of those paperback carousels that you sort of casually glance at, you know? This title, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, intrigued me right away, and so did a blurb on the cover, which read "Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning. A masterpiece." So of course, I took it home and started reading it, and I felt instantly in love with it.

KIM: Yes. I'm so glad you did, and actually seems like a fitting way to discover Elizabeth Smart, especially once you know the details of the deeply personal and enthralling love story she elogizes in this book of poetic prose. First published in 1945, it sold very few copies and disappeared without much fanfare, but in the decades that followed, it began to acquire a cult following and was reissued to much acclaim in 1966. Literary critic Brigid Brophy called the book "One of the half dozen masterpieces of poetic prose in the world," and it's also said to be a favorite of the songwriter Morrissey. You can see the book's influence in certain songs by the Smiths.

AMY: I want to circle back to that line comparing this book to Madame Bovary blasted by lightning because that was written by the novelist Angela Carter in her Guardian review of the book, but she privately admitted to a friend that this was the book that inspired her to join the editorial board of the feminist publishing house, Virago Press. She said she wanted to make sure that "no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able 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, I should hope." End quote.

KIM: Okay, as that statement pretty much indicates there is a lot to unpack with this book and with the life trajectory of its Canadian born author. Luckily, we have two of the best authorities on Elizabeth Smart with us today to help us talk through it.

AMY: Yes, their respective works helped feed my newfound Elizabeth Smart obsession, and I can't wait to introduce them. So let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our first guest today, Rosemary Sullivan, is an award-winning biographer whose titles include Stalin's Daughter; Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, and The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Her latest book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation has been sold in 20 countries since its publication last year. In 2012, Rosemary was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. And yes, if that sounds big time, that's because it is. Rosemary also wrote a wonderfully insightful and engrossing 1991 biography of Elizabeth Smart called By Heart. We should add that Rosemary actually knew Elizabeth Smart, and we can't wait to find out more about that. Rosemary, it's so good to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

ROSEMARY SULLIVAN: Thank you for inviting me.

KIM: Joining Rosemary today is filmmaker Maya Gallus. She's the co-founder of Red Queen Productions, which specializes in making documentaries about women in culture and the arts, frequently exploring the female gaze. This includes her debut documentary from 1991, Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels. This one hour film shares Smart's story through candid interviews with Smart's children and friends, rare archival photos, and visual dramatizations excerpting from Smart's works. Listeners, we'll share in our show notes how and where you can access this movie online. It's really worth checking out. Maya has directed, written, and or produced 15 films to date, the most recent of which is 2018's The Heat: A Kitchen Revolution, which opened at the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival. A year prior at that same festival, Maya was honored with a mid-career retrospective highlighting her work. Maya, welcome to the show.

MAYA GALLUS: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, and, I might add, it's a pleasure to revisit the world of Elizabeth Smart.

AMY: Okay. Rosemary, I'd like to start with you. Would you tell us about your experience reading this novel for the first time? Because it wound up being your introduction to Elizabeth Smart in more ways than one, right?

ROSEMARY: Right. Well, in fact, I probably read it for the first time in university. But it became important to me in the late Seventies because I was experiencing the kind of obsessive passion that Elizabeth Smart talks about. And I had actually gone to live in London to turn myself into a writer and to put the ocean between me and this love object, as Elizabeth would say. I went in 1978 to London and I wrote to her and said I was Canadian living in London, and could I come and visit her? And she said yes. So I got myself down to her house. She was very shy. I felt shy. She had prepared this beautiful meal, and we drank too much, you know, and, and collapsed in the afternoon. Um, I had expected to ask her about her novel as a solution to my own obsessions, but in fact, that's not what happened. I started asking her about something curious that struck me in the novel, which was that you had no description of the men. Here's this huge figure who totally enmeshes her emotions. And yet I can't tell you what he looks like. So I said, "Elizabeth, he has no face." She said, "Of course. He's a love object." And it took me a long time to understand what she meant by that. In fact, she had come to the realization, but we'll get there later, that in fact, it was an auto drama that she was experiencing in this obsessive passion.

KIM: Mm. Okay. I can't wait to talk more about that. So, Maya, we're gonna ask you the same question. How did you first discover Elizabeth Smart and this novel, and what made you decide to make her the subject of a documentary film?

MAYA: I had first heard of Elizabeth Smart in the early Eighties. She had returned to Canada from London in 1982 as a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept had been republished around the same time. There was a lot of writing about that, so I read the book out of curiosity and, um, it didn't, really engage me at the time. I felt it was a bit, um, over the top. So a few years later, in 1986, after she passed away, I just found this little article in the paper that 85 boxes of material had been donated to the archives in Canada, including diaries, photographs, grocery lists, uh, manuscripts, you name it. And I had been casting around for what might become my first film, and I thought, "Oh, someone should make a film about this extraordinary writer and this extraordinary life." And I posted it on my bulletin board and forgot about it. And then a few months later, I thought "I should make this film." But in order to do that, I thought, "Okay, well if I'm going to make this film, I have to reread the novel because it has to have meaning for me." I read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and it just knocked me flat. I was so blown away by the power, the intensity, the beautiful language, the um, extraordinary description of obsessive love written from the point of view of being in the eye of the hurricane. I had never read anything like that before. It was just so beautiful. And that was the beginning of the journey of making the film. 

KIM: Amazing.

 AMY: It's funny when you say, you know, your first reaction was that it was over the top, because this is not the sort of book I would normally like. But I couldn't put it down. I got so wrapped up in it. Um, we'll talk about that all a little bit, but, um, let's talk about Elizabeth Smart's life. She was born into a prominent and cultured family in Ottawa, Ontario in 1913. But maybe we should jump ahead a little bit to the start of the book itself, because it features a very pivotal autobiographical detail that kind of shaped her entire destiny. I'm gonna go ahead and read the first three paragraphs from By Grand Central Station. I Sat Down and Wept.

I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire. Apprehension and the summer afternoon keep drying my lips, prepared at ten-minute intervals all through the five-hour wait.

      But then it is her eyes that come forward out of the vulgar disembarkers to reassure me that the bus has not disgorged disaster: her madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusting as the untempted. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire. Her eyes shower me with their innocence and surprise.

   Was it for her, after all, for her whom I had never expected nor imagined, that there had been compounded such ruses of coincidence? Behind her he for whom I have waited so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams, fumbles with the tickets and the bags, and shuffles up to the event which too much anticipation has fingered to shreds.

KIM: Wow. So it's obviously a huge moment. and Maya, because most of our listeners probably don't know the story, can you please explain what Elizabeth Smart was doing at that bus station in Monterey that day?

MAYA: She was waiting to meet George Barker, and as it turned out, his wife, Jessica. She discovered his work in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London, and immediately was just blown away and drawn to his work. And she began a correspondence with him.

AMY: She decided " I'm going to be with this man." Right?

MAYA: Well, she had started working on the novel before she even met him. So she was already interested in the idea of love in love with love, if you like, perhaps in the same way that people talk about Romeo and Juliet being in love with love. When she discovered his work, I think she was really in love with his writing and with him as an artist. But she also felt it was predestined, and that there was no turning back. From the point of view of an artist, she recognized that he would provide the vehicle in order for her to be able to write this prose poem, and she knew that she had to live it before she could write it. He was living in Japan at the time and wanted to get out. It was during the Second World War. And she arranged money for him to come across the ocean to California. I think it's when he asked for the second passage that she realized he was married, which didn't quite work into her plan. So this was their first actual meeting in person. And as she describes in what I think is one of the most extraordinary openings of a book, she was underwhelmed by his appearance, and really, in many ways, overwhelmed by, um, the presence of his wife, I think for many reasons.

AMY: I think it's interesting that even though George Barker is the sun around which her world would revolve for years to come, she starts the novel off with Jessica, the wife, you know, in this love triangle. What do we make of that?

ROSEMARY: I would say one has to think of who Elizabeth Smart was before she entered that bookstore in Charing Cross Road and encountered the poetry of George Barker. She came from, as you described it, a very conventional, upwardly mobile, upper middle class family where her mother was dedicated to propriety , cocktail parties and so on. And Elizabeth was a rebel. She goes to the Charing Cross bookstore. She sees this book, she reads it. That's what she wants to write, that level of poetry. There's no picture of him, but he's the right age. She had already been hunting for the key. How did a woman in those years, in the 1940s, declare herself a writer? The only way was to attach yourself to a literary circle or another person. And these extraordinary relationships between very talented women and priapic, epic, bohemian, self-indulgent men is kind of the pattern of that time. So here she is, she finds the poetry she wants to write, she lets it be known among all her friends, she wants to meet and marry George Barker and have his children. That's so strange, really. She never did marry George Barker, and she said she never really cared that she did or not. We think when we read Grand Central Station that it's all about just love, and it is. But surrounding that is the person who was Elizabeth Smart.

 KIM: So she was able to play out this perceived destiny. She ended up having this affair with George. They actually ended up having four children over the years. But loving him ended up being part of a quote, "cruel bargain" that she'd entered into. She was frequently living as an impoverished single mother. She had to make do with these little scraps of time with George. He was running back and forth between Elizabeth and his wife. And that gets us to the title of the book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It describes the time he was supposed to meet her at Grand Central, and true to fashion, he just doesn't even show up. And the line is also a play on a line from the Book of Psalms: By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept.

AMY: Yeah, and there are actually a lot of biblical references woven into Smart's work, which is one of the things that makes it so beautiful. And of course it left me wondering about Elizabeth's relationship to religion. Rosemary, you write that she was really more interested in the mystical than in any organized religion, right?

ROSEMARY: I would say she was in love with language. For me, the line that I hold in my imagination from that book is "I could no more resist him than the earth could resist the rain," you know?

MAYA: Then the earth could refuse the rain. Yeah.

ROSEMARY: Yeah. Yeah. It was always at that level of extremism, a wonderful, rhetorical extremism that Elizabeth was working. He was never going to be faithful to her, she knew that really from the beginning. Uh, they did run away, leaving Jessica in San Francisco, and Elizabeth ended up in New York and he didn't show up. Um, but, but that time she had the child that she wanted. Interestingly, it was George who gave her the title By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and he fed her passionate commitment to the assumption of rogues and rascals you know? She wanted to be part of the extreme, dramatic set of people. The last thing she wanted was the conventionality of her Ottawa, neo-colonial, home, right? So she's always looking out for drama. I once said to her, "Elizabeth, how could you keep opening the door to George?" And she said "He had such a good sense of humor."

KIM: Wow, he must have.

ROSEMARY: He's the myth in the core of her story. When I asked him for permission to quote him, he refused. Uh, but I said, “I need to make it clear that you had a relationship with her.” And so I said, “Can I quote your description of her, which was, ‘She's summer over the Rockies.’” You get a few of those and it's pretty exciting.

KIM: Yeah, for sure.

MAYA: He was a very charismatic person. And I met him, um, before he died. He was brilliant, difficult, funny, charismatic. He didn't want to be in the film. And actually I was okay with that, because if he had been in the film, he might have overshadowed some aspects. And it really was a relationship of two artists, in the same way that we hear about many relationships with creative people who write their own versions of their relationship, whether in song and novels and poems and films. And they kind fed each other and fed off each other. So it was both positive and negative. I mean, he wrote his own version of their love affair, a book called The Dead Seagull. And it's not very flattering in the sense that he casts himself as this man who is being devoured by this woman. Perhaps that's how he saw himself in the relationship, but at the same time, he would show up and he was constantly leaving. And Elizabeth was using that for her poetry. She used it for her second novel, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. She really took everything that was happening to her. You know, as Nora Ephron said, “everything is copy,” you know. So she really did take that to heart and whatever happened she wrote it down and made it into art.

ROSEMARY: At that time, T.S. Eliot said that the poet who was going to continue his legacy was George Barker. He had that level of reputation, so, uh, yeah, she was aiming for the top. But George's work now, it doesn't really hold up. And George was afraid of being consumed by Elizabeth, and in fact, he would've been in a way because, uh, she had a romantic myth, a version of what, you know, as you said before, a predestined relationship, dictated from eternity. Not everybody wants to walk into that. So, you know, there's a part of me that has some sympathy for George. The only reason I don't have full sympathy is that there really was a model of the male poet who sacrificed everything to his genius, while some female supported him. I mean, the opportunism and expediency of the male genius of that time was really rather depressing.

KIM: Yeah.

MAYA: And, and it and it was very much the narrative of the time, still actually is, but not as much. There are so many different ways, I think, to navigate having a relationship, possibly family, but also pursue one's art. And for women, it really was a dilemma at the time. It's still a dilemma for many women. What was interesting though is that here was Elizabeth writing in what has been called a confessional style, writing in what has often been derided as "female literature" and therefore diminished because it's personal, it's inward looking rather than outward looking. She's writing about matters of the heart rather than matters of the world. That was 1945. Nobody was writing like that then. And of course, later we had Sylvia Plath, Margaret Duran, even, uh, you continue the line today if you look at auto fiction writers like Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, also writers who made their success in television like Lena Dunham with “Girls,” and before that, um, “Sex and the City.” And these stories of women that are reflecting in some ways popular culture, so they're not perhaps deep and profound. Some of them are, some aren't. But it's so interesting that it has taken this long for that form to be celebrated.

KIM: Yeah, for sure. Sure. And also given the time that you mentioned and everything, she was talking about some other things too. She was talking maybe about the bigger political picture that was going on. The events play out in North America while World War II was raging in Europe, and she references the war on multiple occasions. So what sort of connections do you think she was making between this love affair and World War II?

ROSEMARY: Well, um, one of the most entertaining moments I had in writing this biography was when I examined the text Grand Central. Um, I noted that the lovers, as they crossed the Arizona border, were arrested there. You know, there's no border crossing in Arizona. so obviously they were being followed. At that time there was I think it was called the Man Act. You weren't allowed to cross borders. As Elizabeth put it, you could cross borders, but not with sex in mind. So she was at the time, what, 28 or something. But still, they were arrested, and she ended up spending three days in jail till her father came and bailed her out. So Elizabeth, there's a politics to her book in that the prudery of the FBI following her, arresting her for her love affair, it confirms her commitment that the intensity and privacy of our emotions is more important, if you want, than the bureaucratic politics. She was very much aware of the war and horrified by it. And her solution to the war was in some ways to intensify the integrity of our emotional relationships. Uh, but Maya's description is excellent of the return to the personal narrative, because, you know, there was always this separation between the political and the personal. And now we understand that they're absolutely intimately connected. 

MAYA: The other interesting thing about her writing that at the time is, you know, as you say, the personal and the political is that she was always rebelling against whatever the prevailing notions and norms were. And here, you know, one was supposed to be writing about the ravages of war, and she was writing about the ravages of grand passion and love, but she was writing about it as if they had been through a war. And so there was this interesting kind of parallel of going to war and falling into obsessive love and surviving it, which is very much, when you read her later follow up, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, there is this feeling of someone who has survived the war or the wars, but it's not a literal war, it's the war of love and passion and is now experiencing the ravages of that.

KIM: It's incredibly harrowing reading the experience of her getting arrested, and frightening on an emotional level, a psychological level, so it does feel like warfare in a lot of ways.

AMY: But then she elevates that whole interrogation with this sublime addition of biblical passages from the Song of Songs, right? She intersperses it and in a way it's almost funny, but it's beautiful the way she meshes that all together. I also, let me, let me find, there's a little section where she's talking about what's happening in the world.

 …I saw then that there was nothing else anywhere but this one thing; that neither nunnery nor Pacific Islands nor jungles nor all the jazz of America nor the frenzy of warzones could hide any corner which housed an ounce of consolation if this failed. In all states of being, in all worlds, this is all there is. 

And then later she says: With it I can repopulate all the world. I can bring forth new worlds in underground shelters while the bombs are dropping above; I can do it in lifeboats as the ship goes down; I can do it in prisons without the guard's permission; and O, when I do it quietly in the lobby while the conference is going on, a lot of statesmen will emerge twirling their moustaches, and see the birth-blood and know that they have been foiled. 

Love is strong as death. 

So it basically goes back to what you were saying, about this inner stuff that's going on, this one connection with this other person is almost bigger than everything that's going on in the world. She's very intense.

 I kept going back to, especially reading your biography, Rosemary, like, okay, George Parker to me seems like no prize. I know you're saying he was charismatic. He must have been. But the way he treated the women in his life, God, you're almost frustrated with Elizabeth at times. Like, why? But I think it's true that you can just interchange George and the bigger idea of poetry. She saw him as an emblem for her true passion, which was language and poetry, right?

KIM: Yeah, she's living on another level.

MAYA: I would imagine that even though she had a very strong sense of herself as an artist, she hadn't quite developed that sense of entitlement yet, that she actually could stand on her own as an artist.

AMY: I mean, she writes about it, too, in both this book and The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals, she talks about the kind of unfair circumstances for women. There's another little bit that I'd love to read, just this sort of idea of what men are able to do versus what women are able to do. She says:

So between worry and action the faces of women fall away. Can they walk off, leaving behind everything spurious, futile, ignominious, love-lack, over those fields mysterious with mushrooms, over the hill spotted with cows shapeless as slugs in the dusk, and reach at last, that evening, ease in a London pub, where faces glow through smoke and sometimes through distracted anguish? Even a slight parole? 

No. They must stay. They must pray. They must bang their heads. Be beautiful. Wait. Love. Try to stop loving. Hate. Try to stop hating. Love again. Go on loving. Bustle about. Rush to and fro.

The truth clings onto them and bites into their beauty. 

The womb's an unwieldy baggage. Who can stagger uphill with such a noisy weight? 

And I mean, she was a mom of four kids. She was making her dandelion soup because they didn't have anything to eat half the time…

ROSEMARY: But I wanted to read, um, the other thing about Elizabeth Smart, in 1965, she became the editor of Queen magazine and she changed Queen entirely. I interviewed Edna O'Brien, the wonderful Irish writer, and she said, Elizabeth gave a place to women. And this is what Elizabeth writes. She says, "I see a phenomenon, women talking, women daring to tell the truth about themselves, women being intelligently articulate. Surely this wasn't always. So in the great folk tradition, the cleverest women smiled and said nothing is against their own interest to speak. And anyhow, who was there to listen? Men hate clever women. Be good, sweet maid and let who will be clever. And besides women were so busy, can it be irrelevant that Jane Austen, Christina Rosetti, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf had no children, or that Virginia Woolf had a husband. 

So, you know, uh, that issue of Elizabeth's commitment to having children is also so fascinating. What was it that compelled her to keep having her children? As you talked about it, the burden of the womb carrying the seed of new life.

AMY: But yeah, that was another side of her need to create, right? She loved being a mother. It was so clear.

MAYA: She did love it. And you know, sort of predictably, George, um, had many children with five different women, only two of whom he formally married. Including Elspeth Langlands, who was his last wife, and an extraordinary woman in her own right, and also a writer. But he had 15 children with these women, so he was very prolific in that regard as well. I think Elizabeth, despite how difficult it was, was really showing something that was really close to my heart, which is that the passion and intensity of living your life and your commitment to your art is perhaps more important than living a conventional life. And certainly she was really, as Rosemary pointed out, really rebelling. In fact, it seems that a lot of her choices were about rebelling against her mother, rebelling against that high society way of life. It was suffocating, and the only way that she could really find her expression was to completely reject that and live what was then, I guess, considered Bohemian life.

KIM: So what was the general reaction to this book when it came out in 1945? Did it get much critical response? Were people shocked by it?

ROSEMARY: When it came out in 1945, uh, there was rationing of paper. So it was a tiny little book, with very intense print. It did get a couple of good reviews. Cyril Connolly, I think, called it a good book, and then it just disappeared. I don't know what Elizabeth expected, but she just went into a kind of seclusion after that. The part of Elizabeth's life that, uh, is most powerful and tragic. Well, there's two elements to her life. The first is her mother, and the last is her daughter, Rose. Uh, as I said that afternoon when I visited her for the first time, we were both shy and somewhat intimidated by each other, and so we drank, and she took me up to this bed that was like Rapunzel's bed because it was cold. Winter. And then I heard her tossing in her sleep and she was crying, "Mother! Mother! Mother!" And this was 1979. I mean, she's born in 1913, right? I think, with her mother, there was an intensity of attachment and control and also an indifference. And then by the end, uh, her daughter, Rose, did have a drug addiction, which was not surprising. That's happened to many people, who were part of the Bohemian set in Soho and so on. Uh, and she was actually quitting. She had quit drugs, but it had compromised her liver, and so that's how she died. And it was an unbelievably painful thing for Elizabeth to deal with that. Here's Elizabeth writing in her diary: 

The fragile vulnerability because of the Rose blow — welling up into any vacuum in piercing detail and making so many words, signs, situations, excruciating—and now it becomes more and more difficult to speak of this, which at first and for a while I could naturally, sadly but not so sadly that it embarrassed the listener. Pain crouches everywhere, in ambush, as I totter unprotected, by. Which makes any plan to stand wobbly. Which makes lying down in sobriety dangerous. Which causes panic. So I stuff books in. 

Her diaries are very moving.

MAYA: Hmm. I'm glad you read that passage because when I think about Elizabeth and, um, I, I never met her when she came to Canada, but many people did meet her either in Edmonton or Toronto, and described this woman who had been ravaged by this passionate love affair and destroyed and drank too much and all of that. But my sense of her was that what she actually was ravaged by was the pain of the death of her daughter, and could never get over that. She was, yes, perhaps destroyed by pain, but it wasn't about the love affair. It was about the loss of her child. 

AMY: Yeah, it seems like her life was hard. 

KIM: Yeah.

 AMY: Well, getting back to her mom, her parents did not approve of the relationship with George Barker, and then her mother definitely did not approve of the book, right? I mean, she successfully got it banned in Canada.

MAYA: Well, I think her mother was a narcissist, and she somehow saw the book as being about her, that it brought shame to her. And so she needed to get rid of it. Maybe on some level, she was right in the sense that so much of Elizabeth's rebellion was about her mother, but certainly the book was not about her mother. It was Elizabeth exploring her own interests and passion and doing it beautifully. She was constantly looking for different ways to express her sexuality and herself, and also find a way to connect that to her art. And that would've just been anathema to her mother. So, uh, she couldn't escape the guilt. Even By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has a sort of moralistic underpinning to it. And perhaps even her inclusion of the biblical references is kind of a sly wink. And certainly in The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, there's a sense of, okay, now the debt must be paid for what I have done. So here's a passage: After being knocked out on the battlefield of love of passion, nevermind. Now I lay a long time like Lazarus waiting for Jesus to come and tell me to get up. He may have come or he may not, or he may have come and I have moved to another address, or maybe he kissed me in a spot where too much local anesthetic lingered. Anyway, there has been no resurrection.

ROSEMARY: Wonderful. I think that's, it's so, so, right on. And the idea that her mother, uh, she went to the prime minister to get Grand Central Station banned. It must have been rewarding for her mother to know that she could go to that level and get the book banned. And the book was banned because A, it's promiscuous, you know, a woman having a love affair with a married man, but B, she's not even really in it. There's a couple of sentences about the parents, and as you say, as a narcissist, "Where am I in this book?" 

AMY: There was one other little bit about her mother that made me laugh in Rogues and Rascals. She just writes:

 "Mother, Mother, my soul's on fire.” 

“Yes dear. Is that a new little pimple I see appearing? Shall we try milk of magnesia?" 

So it perfectly illustrates her soul's on fire and her mother is so conventional and like Donna Reed kind of character, that you can see why they would be so at odds with one another.

MAYA: I think it must have been terrifying for her mother and actually for many people when the book was initially published because, in its way, it was explicit. It was explicit not only in terms of acknowledging that this was a sexual relationship between a man and a woman who were not married, but also explicit in terms of its emotion. And one of the things that I love about Elizabeth's writing, in addition to the beautiful language, is that she wasn't afraid of the messiness, that she wrote about the birth blood. Those are the things that again, have been derided in women's, you know, confessional writing, and that only now, um, you know, a writer like Lidia Yuknavitch or um, maybe Mary Karr, you know, who are writing about the messy, really deeply personal aspects of a woman's life. And, um, the fact that Elizabeth was doing that at that time would've just been shocking and yet also is so extraordinary and ahead of its time.

AMY: It's nice that she was able to see renewed interest in this book in her lifetime, right? People gradually started to, you know, come around to it. What sort of sparked the renewed interest in the 1960s?

ROSEMARY: I think it was Brigid Brophy's comment and review that this was “one of the half dozen masterpieces of poetic prose in English.” She was by then, uh, editor at Queen magazine and pulling in all these women writers, so people turned to that book and discovered it, as it had been, as it were overshadowed or lain dormant for so many years. 

MAYA: I don't know how much, um, enjoyment she got from the later discovery of her work. It seems to me that some people described her as masochistic in some way. And I don't think she was masochistic. I think she understood that perhaps there was a price to be paid for the intensity of the way that she was pursuing her art and the way that she was pursuing her life in order to create art. And, um, there's a passage I'd like to read from Rogues and The Rascals because she really, in that book is coming to terms with her choices and trying to make peace, maybe, or at least reconcile in some way. Okay, these are the choices you made. Um, as she says, at one point You expected a bill and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it. So she's very matter of fact about it, but at another point, um, she says:

But where, woman wailing above your station, is that you want to go to, get to accomplish, communicate? Can't you be amply satisfied with such pain, such babies, such balancing? 

No. no. There is a blood-flecked urge to go even a step further.

Above the laughter, above the miseries, above the clatter of glasses and the cries of children, I hear a voice saying: Isn't there some statement you'd like to make? Anything noted while alive? Anything felt, seen, heard, done? You are here. You're having your turn. Isn't there something you know and nobody else does? What if nobody listens? Is it all to be wasted? All blasted? What about that pricey pain?

AMY: I loved The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals for everything you're saying. I think they have to be read 

MAYA: together. 

Mm-hmm. It's a companion piece.

AMY: Yeah. But it's like all the things that I was frustrated about with George, you know, masochistic was a word that came to mind for me. But in the second book, she has the blinders off and she's able to reflect on it all. We see a wiser woman, in some respects. I was torn between which one I liked more, to be perfectly honest.

MAYA: Well, I mean, there's no question that By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the literary masterpiece, but at the same time, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals is the companion piece. And, like so many works, one can be understood much more deeply by reading the other, and then you can go back and forth between the two. And also, who does one relate to? Do you relate to the young woman in the throes of passion, or do you relate to the older woman looking back on her life and reconciling the choices that she's made?

AMY: Right. And it probably depends on what period in your own life you're reading these. If I had read Grand Central Station in my twenties, I would've had an entirely different relationship to it as now being older and looking back on it, too. 

MAYA: She was clearly a very deep feeling and deep thinking person, and she thought a lot about the choices she had made and what may or may not have been the consequences of those choices. But it's so important to remember that she had agency every step of the way. She chose her path. She made those choices and she made them deliberately because she knew that it was the way through in order to create a masterpiece, which is what she did.

AMY: Absolutely.

ROSEMARY: That is a theme of my book. I remember one of the chapters, uh, was called “Marginal Notes, Never the Text.” And she turned herself into the text, because it's she and her book that we celebrate.

MAYA: It's true. 

AMY: Listeners, to get a more complete chronological picture of Elizabeth Smart's story, her life, I would encourage you to check out Rosemary's biography of her. Watch Maya's documentary online at, I believe it's called vucavu.com. That's V U C A V U.com. Just create an account and stream it from there for $3. There were no weird strings attached. (I'm sometimes nervous about signing up for things like that, but it was all simple and easy.) Um, the film is great. And by the way, Elizabeth Smart is so gorgeous. It's worth checking out this film just to see all the old, amazing photographs of her.

KIM: There's also a really great interview with Elizabeth Smart from later on in her life it's really amazing to watch. Um, you can't look away from it. And we'll link to that in our show notes and also in our Facebook forum so you can watch it also.

AMY: Maya, Rosemary, thank you for being with us.

KIM: Yes.Thank you so much. 

MAYA: And it's actually, I have to say, it's been wonderful to have this discussion, not only with both of you, but with Rosemary as well. I think it's extraordinary that here we are, all these years later, we're talking about this extraordinary piece of work and this amazing author. And that's how it's going to continue, that Elizabeth will continually be rediscovered with each decade because there's more and more layers for us to discover. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to check back with us next week because we will be talking a little bit about George Barker's final wife, the final lady in his life. Elsbeth Barker and her book O Caledonia. So we have more to say on the topic.

KIM: Yeah, I love that book. I can't wait for that mini episode next week.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.