By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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For some of the people / some of the times, I mean (being old enough to know those who have made it into something sustainable). This was my dream, and why I had circles under my eyes this morning at breakfast. Everyone noticed it, and I think one of them sniggered.

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’.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". De hecho, a pesar de todos los reveses recibidos, el amor que sentía la hizo sentir invencible, poderosa, fecunda. “¿Necesitáis alegría, necesitáis amor? ¿Sois hojas empapadas en algún patio olvidado? ¿Sufrís frío, hambre, soledad, parálisis, ceguera? Tengo lo que queráis, a puñados, a brazadas, para todos.” Una fecundidad capaz de alumbrar una obra tan bella y conmovedora como En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré; una joya literaria que sorprende por su plasticidad y por su pasión, pero también por el uso que Elizabeth Smart hace del lenguaje, tan rico y libre como su forma de amar. Todo lo inunda el agua del amor: de todo lo que ve el ojo, no hay nada que el agua del amor no cubra. No existe un solo ángulo en el mundo que el amor en mis ojos no pueda convertir en símbolo de amor. Incluso la precisa geometría de su mano, cuando la contemplo, me disuelve en agua, y la corriente del amor me arrastra… El amor me posee, y no tengo alternativa. Cuando el Ford traquetea hasta la puerta, con cinco minutos (cinco años) de retraso, y él cruza el césped bajo los pimenteros, permanezco de pie detrás de las cortinas de gasa, incapaz de moverme para ir a su encuentro, o de hablar: estoy convirtiéndome en líquido para invadir cada uno de sus orificios en cuanto abra la puerta. Tenaz como un pájaro recién nacido, todo boca con su único deseo, cierro los ojos y tiemblo, esperando el paraíso: va a tocarme.” In an essay for Open Letters Monthly, Ingrid Norton stated "the power of emotion to transform one’s perspective on the world is the theme of this wildly poetic novel", calling it "a howl of a book, shot through with vivid imagery and ecstatic language, alternately exasperating and invigorating".

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.

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because i write huge purple monsters of sentences and only end up making myself small and shy when i come across them years later. Elizabeth Smart, escritora y poetisa precoz, nació en 1913 en el seno de una de las familias más destacadas e influyentes de Ottawa. En 1937, con tan sólo veinticuatro años, leyó un libro del poeta inglés George Barker e inmediatamente se enamoró de sus versos y de paso, sin siquiera conocerle, de él. Hizo todo lo posible por encontrarse con él, a pesar de que sabía que estaba casado, y finalmente se las ingenió para conseguir, a principios de los años cuarenta, que Barker visitara junto con su esposa la colonia de escritores en la que Elizabeth vivía en California. a b Norton, Ingrid (October 1, 2010). "A Year with Short Novels: Elizabeth Smart, Queen of Sheba". Open Letters Monthly. The first piece in this book is an autobiographical-ish story of the authors love for the poet George Barker. She totally falls in love with him before even meeting him and sets him up to move from England to America and they fall in love and they have a bunch of kids together. There only hitch in this storybook romance is that George Barker is married to another woman, whom he stays married too. I don't know what his wife knew, what the arrangements were, but this wasn't a Henry & June kind of arrangement. This was a woman totally in love with this poet and basically giving her life to him and only getting to be the second most important woman in his life. The first piece is about the feelings of being in love with someone attainable but not fully attainable. The second piece is about living without the person, in a foreign country, during a war with a few kids by the person. The second piece takes a while to get going, it's not until after the scene is set of life during and immediately after wartime that Smart finds her stride and really gets going. The voice of the first half of the book was varied. Now it is tired. It is bitter. It doesn't see the world through the eyes of a romantic poem, even a tragic one but sees the ugliness now. In the first part she wouldn't have seen a rose and say:

there is a way to be evocative and complicated and beautiful all at once, "the smile on your face was the deadest thing alive enough to have the strength to die," anyone?? I can’t take it, so I lie on the hotel bed dissolving into chemicals whose adventure will pursue time to her extinguishment, without the slightest influence from these few years when I held them together in human passion.” Very divided about this book, hence the 3 stars. On the one hand, gorgeous gorgeous prose: there were many sentences I read over and over. And the subject matter--obsessive love--is conveyed with the sort of honesty that's humbling ("honesty" actually feels pretty pallid when applied to Elizabeth Smart, but I can't think of a word that means "beyond honesty"). What hand of fate placed this book in my path after I'd finished a long series of Muriel Spark books I do not know. All I know is that I found myself taking this book home and loving it all evening, and all through the next day, and when I reached the end, I started loving it all over again from the beginning, this time reveling in the difference between it and Spark's books. Where Spark is all concision, Smart is all excess, where Spark is firm and trim, Smart is soft and yielding. I didn't know I needed this excess of words, this soft pulpy innerness, but I did. I see now that I was thirsty for writing that had feelings and heart instead of control and cleverness. I just didn't know it. This has survived as a cult book largely thanks to Morrissey. Grand Central Station has over a hundred times more readers on here than the memoir of the affair by Smart's lover George Barker. You've won, Liz... Though - as they remained, tempestuously and non-exclusively, involved until her demise - she'd no doubt think he was woefully underappreciated now. From the little I've read elsewhere, it sounds like his former fame had much to do with personal charisma, which meant it waned after his death in old age.)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. Yes, but I get confused. One day she saw a golden oriel in the orchard. One day she said, Then have your orgy with Blondie, work out your passion on her.