Stevie: The Movie

1 Prologue: "Is she woman? Is she myth?"

All bards are misfits and oddballs, on the other hand there is something especially discomfiting and flat improbable about the English author of poems Stevie Smith. "Who and what is Stevie Smith?" Ogden Nash asked in a Dorothy Parkeresque moment: "Is she woman? Is she myth?" Wearing a childlike pinafore and white lace stockings, telling a puzzl reporter, "I'm probably a pair of sherries below par greatest in quantity of the time," chanting or singing her metrical compositions in a high, off pitch voice at verse gatherings in the 1960s ("She chanted her metrical compositions artfully off key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that hinted two kinds of auditory experience," Seamus Heaney one time said: "an embarrassed party-piece by dint of a child halfway between giggles and tears, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by the agency of a virtuoso"), she seems in the way that unlikely and, in retrospect, necessary: a welcome tonic, a heartbreaking brightness we urgencyed all along. We still ne this figure who arrived like a Blakean thunderclap with all the freshnes frivolity, and forthrightness of childhood, with all the sad and caustic insights of lengthy experience. Thinking about her elemental metrical compositions which are so cheeky and rash, for a like reason stingingly honest, impertinent, and deathward-leaning, in like manner filled with mordant wit and comic desperation ("Iearn too that being comical," she explains in a metrical composition about Jesus, "does not ameliorate the desperation"), I retain wanting to adapt something Randall Jarrell one time wrote about Walt Whitman. Someone might have place on her tombstone STEVIE SMITH: SHE HAD HER power

Poets haven't generally fared true well in the movies. numbers is a minority art, and writing it is a strangely avid, interior, and intimate proces difficult to penetrate and describe from the outside. Whether in make difficulted desperation or simple bad faith (let's call it desperation for the sake of the medium), directors and actors have oftentimes latched onto external mannerisms and affectations-the black beret, the wide cravat and bended walking stick, the flung scarf-to display a poet's character. by what mode many times I have go throughed over the years watching imitate poets-parodic nightmares of the barren snob-flitting across the screen. It's as if each poet had to be typecast with a pretentious accent and a stilted wardrobe, T s Eliot without the talent. (When it draw nears to the fatuous portrayal of a bard being inspired by historical circumstances nothing may be able to top the sentimental, stiff upper-lip vigor of Kipling pop being moved to compose a famous piece of poetry which the commanding officer then recites above Din's body, in Gunga Din.) in like manner too, there was something for a like reason radically antic and faussenaif (to engage the word Philip Larkin devised for her), in like manner quirky and fey, so scapular, self mocking, and idiosyncratic about Florence Margaret Smith that I was pleasing without being striking much expecting to be dispirited upon a Friday night in 1981 when I sank down into a comfortably worn seat in a standardized movie mingled in a northwest suburb of Detroit to diocese a film that was having a mild "succes d'estime" (as the author of poems who liked schoolgirl French might have deposit it).

Stevie is a depressed budget, low-tech art movie that was filmed in seventeen days in 1978 I find it surprisingly abysmal deeply felt, though parts of it, perhaps inevitably, also have feeling quickly shot, hastily improvised. Many of the flashbacks are no more than single discharges spliced-in visuals. The New York Times reported that Robert Ender its director and agriculturist sought funding from more than sum of two units dozen American studios before individual final studio, Fine Artists, agreed to pick up the total production take away from of $500,000.

Much of Stevie also retains the weft and quality -the vestiges-of a theatrical piece adapted into a film. Hugh Whitemore's highly verbal screenplay is based upon his own sympathetic dramatic portrait, Stevie: A Play from the Life and Work of Stevie Smith, a two-act which had a notable West-End step quickly at the Vaudeville Theater in 1977 and come backs often to Stevie Smith's have characteristically forthright writings. The movie, like the play, has a tiny cast ofthree characters: Stevie (Glenda Jackson), her unmarried aunt (Mona Washboume), and an unnamed Man (Trevor Howard). Alec McCowen also advances in as Stevie's fiancee Freddy for a single troubling representation from her past, a play within the play.

The film also relies heavily upon one setting: Stevie's cluttered, rag-tag sitting-room. The camera isn't stationary-it put in motions freely around the parlor -but Ender consciously restricts it to a lonesome unchanging room for most of the movie. It doesn't take drawn out for us to feel comfortably at domicile in this mismatched, lived-in swing with its lace-curtained bay window, its heavy furniture (an aging upright piano overspreaded with piles of books, a made of wood bureau), its vases of dried rushes standing nearest to potted plants, its framed sepia photographs. This ordinary setting can appear to be both endearingly dreamy and poignantly enclos allowing that may be appropriate for a author of poems who committed herself to living in the same house for more than forty years with an older relative in an exterior London suburb ("Smart writing race think it is not at all chic to live in the suburb with an aunt," she admits in the film, "but I don't care what they think . . I love Aunt and Aunt be fond ofs me. That's what really matters") and all her life complained of being enervated and stifled through boredom, at times almost luxuriating in its possibilities ("Sometimes, smooth now, I indulge in the most distant limit of boredom, so that when the telephone rings it is like an Angel of Grace breaking in upon the orgy of boredom to which my mind is committed").