Barker fathered 15 children with four women. He married his later long-term partner Elspeth only when Jessica died, himself dying two years later. Library and Archivesīarker separated from his first wife Jessica soon after the book was written, but he would never commit to Smart. Magnetic and feckless, George Barker fathered 15 children with four women. Angela Carter, though in awe of its prose, hated the submissiveness of By Grand Central Station.
Smart would spend her life justifying Barker, apologising for his actions to their less forgiving children: all four of whom she raised by herself. She had found the kind of intensity for which she had been searching. Smart wrote in her journal that she intended to fall in love with a poet even before she read Barker. The narrator in this account of blind love is unblind: “It is enough”, she says “I do not accept it sadly or ruefully or wistfully”. Though full of lamentation in every sense, the book is surprisingly free of complaint. (Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.) Stay put! cried the guard, and struck me.”
In the book’s most famous and inventive passage, her police interrogation is interspersed with lines from The Song of Solomon: “Better not try any funny business, cried the guard, you’re only making things tough for yourself. Reimagining the first throes of what would go on to be an 18-year affair with the English poet George Barker (1913-1991), it details the real story of Smart’s ostracisation by her wealthy Canadian family and arrest under the Mann act, which forbade women from crossing US State lines for “immoral purposes”. This is how By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 prose poem, begins. Before she starts to completely resent her rival, she thinks: “I entirely renounce him for only her peace of mind”. But the person she first notices disembarking is the poet’s wife, for whose travel she has also paid. She has loved him from the moment she read a volume of his early poems.
She has never met him, and it has taken a year of ingenuity and planning – posing as a manuscript collector, scraping money together from parents and friends – to bring him from Japan, where he has been teaching. A woman is waiting at a Californian bus station for a man to arrive.
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