By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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Wherever we went, though, whatever we did, we had always to return like cornered foxes to the hotel room. And always the wallpaper dispersed with its heavy writing any optimism we might have gathered. There were no solutions in the writing on the wall. It urged us to despair. It is criminally responsible for all histories. I am unnerved by the opponents of God, and God is out of earshot. I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me. Fue durante aquellos primeros años en Inglaterra cuando Elizabeth Smart escribió En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré. Fueron tiempos duros –la guerra, los altibajos en la relación con George, el rechazo de la sociedad por su vida escandalosa– que dejaron su huella en el texto. Aun sin tener la cultura necesaria para exprimir todo el sentido a las múltiples referencias, relaciones y citas que incluye, la obra puede disfrutarse como lo que es, una dramática y lírica plegaria por un amor complicado. Un libro carente de línea argumental, a veces caótico, siempre exigente y extraordinario, y sí, por momentos, oscuro e inescrutable (¡Ay esa parte siete!). Pero no es necesario entender cada frase, cada párrafo para captar y aprehender y saborear la fuerza del sentimiento que trasmite, la tragedia que retrata. El libro es el alma de su autora. De lo exterior, de los hechos, solo podemos hacernos una nebulosa idea: suficiente. Y en cada una de esas etapas, esta tormenta de emociones queda enmarcada dentro de un triángulo amoroso omnipresente, en el que la relación entre ambas mujeres –la rivalidad, la admiración, la culpa– es tan importante como las otras dos.

A pesar de los esfuerzos de la familia de la autora para que el libro no viese la luz, en los círculos literarios de Nueva York y Londres terminó por convertirse en una obra de culto. Se volvió a publicar en 1966 y, en esta ocasión, su inmediato éxito permitió a Elizabeth Smart dedicarse por fin una carrera literaria que había comenzado a los diez años y que sus pasiones habían truncado. This is about love, desperation, and mental disparity (contemplated suicide also plays a role here). It is beautiful and disjointed; somber, yet hopeful; trenchant, yet gracious, and articulate, but at times, also reticent. But with or without us, the Day itself must return, we insist, when the Joke at least sits basking in the sun, decorating her idle body with nameless red, once blood. Me bastó leer el título para visualizar toda una historia. Quizá sea el poder evocador de las estaciones de tren, o la solemnidad de la referencia bíblica, el caso es que ahí estaba esa mujer, sentada en un banco tras despedir a alguien, o después de esperar largamente a quien nunca llegó, dejando correr lágrimas contenidas durante tanto tiempo. Más que imaginar esa historia, la vi. Porque eso es En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré, situado a medio camino entre la poesía y la novela; imágenes de una intensidad y una belleza fuera de lo común. Smart discovered Barker's poetry—specifically his poem Daedalus—in the late 1930s in Better Books on Charing Cross Road, London. Their affair lasted 18 years; Smart bore four of the 15 children he had by four women. [1] In the novel, the multiple pregnancies are reduced to one, other details of the affair are omitted, and the narrator's lover is barely described, as Smart focuses on her own experience and feelings, which was rare for the male-centric literature of that day. [2] Barker documented the affair in his novel The Dead Seagull (1950).when i was fifteen, i had a journal. and i would smoke a joint and lie on my tummy and record my huge earthshattering thoughts. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: The Novel as a Poem by Alice Van Wart, in Studies in Canadian Literature Todo está condensado en esas diez fotografías sacadas del álbum de Elizabeth y George: los nervios del primer encuentro; la exaltación de la felicidad, de la belleza y la juventud que no pueden desperdiciarse sin amor; la feminidad desbordada; el orgullo de sentirse amada; el dolor y la desesperación en los momentos de separación; la espera interminable; el rechazo de los demás. 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. Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate.

Poetry in prose. Very emotional telling of a forbidden relationship. It is said to be a classic in this genre. Se suele decir que una imagen vale más que mil palabras, y quizá la única manera de expresar una pasión tan profunda como la que sintió Elizabeth Smart sea emplear imágenes, aunque sean imágenes formadas por palabras. Y pese a tanto sufrimiento, Smart expone claramente su preferencia por esta destructora cara del amor si la alternativa es la mera indiferencia. Pues no querría yo sentir una pasión tan desgarradora, ni que la sintieran por mí, no querría ser yo, no soy, esta yonqui del sentimiento que rehúsa cualquier método de desintoxicación y capaz de decir:Elizabeth Smart tuvo el valor, en el remilgado Canadá de los años cuarenta, de elegir libremente – “Sé lo que quiero, a quién quiero. Le escogí a él, de entre todas las cosas. Fría y deliberadamente le elegí. Pero la pasión no fue fría. Me prendió fuego. Incendió el mundo.” – y, lo que es más grave, no avergonzarse de ello, no esconderse. El “aura del deseo satisfecho” siempre provoca la envidia de los mediocres, de los puritanos, pero ella nunca se doblegó ni hizo concesiones. because i write huge purple monsters of sentences and only end up making myself small and shy when i come across them years later.

Excerpts from the novel, and other of the author's writings, feature in Elizabeth Smart: On The Side of the Angels (1991), an hour-long documentary of the writer, written and directed by Maya Gallus. El resultado es un texto emocionante, poético, de una sensualidad abrumadora, en la que los sentimientos se expresan a veces como un grito desgarrador y otras a través de referencias a la mitología y a la Biblia, a los clásicos, al Cantar de los cantares, a Rilke, a algunos de los poetas ingleses más relevantes de los últimos siglos, como Milton, Blake o Auden y, por supuesto, a Shakespeare –ahí está el famoso monólogo de Macbeth, del que también han bebido Javier Marías o Faulkner–. Estas referencias no son un intento de lucimiento intelectual, ni un ejercicio de estilo; sencillamente la autora necesitó echar mano de todas las herramientas que tenía a su alcance, desde la cultura clásica hasta los anuncios de la radio, para esculpir un monumento al amor, a la valentía y a la libertad tan extraordinario e inolvidable.The novel has been referenced many times by the British singer Morrissey. The title was adapted by the band The Kitchens of Distinction in the song "On Tooting Broadway Station". One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker – and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker’s impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife from Japan, where he was teaching, to join her in the United States. Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written – ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’. Porque impúdica es la desnudez sentimental con la que se nos presenta Smart en la novela, la absoluta falta de contención al dar rienda suelta a su desgarro, al dolor que siente por la devastadora, tiránica y totalizadora pasión que la domina y que antepone a todo, a su familia, a sus hijos, a ella misma. But my eyes, like the bloody setting sun, peer through the veils and mists which rise from sorrow, towards that meeting which I must have or die. Just 2000 copies of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept were printed on its initial publication in 1945, and it did not achieve popularity at its initial release. Smart's mother Louise led a successful campaign with government officials to have its publication banned in Canada. She bought up as many copies as she could find of those that made their way into the country, and had them burned. [2] Barker himself, in a letter to Smart, described the novel as " a Catherine wheel of a book." [1]

In the 1930's, Elizabeth Smart was browsing a London bookstore on Charring Cross Road, when she came across a book of poetry written by British poet George Barker, and instantly fell in love with the man, never having met him, and declaring him the love of her life. This epiphany would eventually bring them together, and even though he was married, they would begin a love affair that would last for years, produce four children, and cause untold grief and heartache for everyone involved. When you keep that in mind while you are reading, you can see the beauty of what she is saying, and the genius in the writing of it.

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brigid brophy's introduction is excellent. i read it last, of course, and it made me appreciate the book so much more in retrospect, and it also reminded me of the several parts i did enjoy. but i have to give it two stars, because i really didn't enjoy reading it. there were moments of great beauty, but too many parts where i was just gagging on her prose. i am all for pain and howling emotions,but isn't it the responsibility of the writer to marry the vulnerable raw nerves with craft?? it is true there were many moments where i was totally on-board with her writing, but when it was bad, it was very very bad.