Stevie Smith and Authorship by William May (review)

In what has become a famous couplet, the poet Ogden Nash asks a question that delights and intrigues Stevie Smith readers to this day: "Who and what is Stevie Smith? / Is she woman, Is she a myth?" (p. 130).¹ William May offers a fresh answer to Nash's question in his monograph, Stevie Smith and Authorship. He describes Smith as one who constructs: she builds authorial masks, ideal readers, specific critical receptions, and eccentric poetry performances. In addition, his investigation into her personal reading practices, her publishing history, and the illustrations appended to her writings suggests that Smith is less "woman" or "myth" but more of an "impresario . . . of her own literary reputation" (p. vi). Smith is poet/author/narrator who resists easy categorization because of "her own concern with the subjective limits of the reading process" (pp. 16-17). As such, May uses reader-response theory to scrutinize how she foregrounds the act of composition and the ways in which readers have misread her or have been led to misread her by the wily poet herself.

Such an extended use of a reader-response approach is new in Smith studies, and it serves May well, especially in chapter five when he places Pompey's treatment of the reader in Over the Frontier (1938) against Stanley Fish's and E. D. Hirsch's explorations of the relationship between author and reader. May is at his best when he teases out the richness in Smith's framings. Throughout the book, May shows us the ways in which her authorial representations mutate and slip behind disguises; in chapter five he traces Smith's construction of her reader as "confidante and rival, an object variously of pity, scorn and anger" (p. 142). Coupled with theory, May's archival research reveals moments of surprise for the Smith scholar who may not have had access to the Smith archives at the McFarlin Library Special Collections at the University of Tulsa. For instance, in chapter six he lists the many critics who have noted the incongruity between the male speaker of Smith's most famous poem, "Not Waving But Drowning" (1957) and the drawing of a female figure. Then, in a wonderful reveal, he includes the original illustration for the poem, taken from a typed proof. The drawing depicts a presumably dead man being pulled out of the sea. As such, it serves as a more clear illustration of the poem, but one that Smith ultimately rejected in favor of a drawing that would stand in a more hermeneutically challenging manner between the reader and the text.

May's book provides a rich overview of Smith, her critics and readers, and her archives. Since he takes a reader-response approach, I feel justified in adding that as a feminist reader, I noticed the great pains he takes in avoiding feminist critique. In chapter one, he only traces a male poetic lineage for Smith and disagrees in a sentence with the many convincing feminist readings of her revisionist fairy tales. In chapter four, he allows for the possibility of the pseudonym "Stevie" to be an authorial veil that might have different implications for women than for men, but the defense of this argument, in the form of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), is consigned to a footnote. The numerous, successful feminist readings of Smith do not have to dismissed in order for another study to be effective. As May himself argues in his closing lines, "[Smith's] readers, far from providing a distraction or impediment to her art, are in fact the most important cog in its wheel" (p. 216).