id="ub8c582c8-a6c9-5f31-be6b-b3db75371b1b">
ELIZABETH SMART
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Foreword by Yann Martel
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Editions Poetry London (Nicholson & Watson) 1945
Copyright © the literary estate of Elizabeth Smart
Foreword copyright © Yann Martel 2015
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780586090398
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780007375882 Version: 2015-04-16
to Maximiliane von Upani Southwell
Table of Contents
At one point in this beautifully sad book, Elizabeth Smart says of herself, ‘I am more vulnerable than the princess for whom seven mattresses could not conceal the pea.’
The more appropriate fairy tale for the sake of comparison would be Sleeping Beauty, because By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the story of a woman who was asleep for a hundred years until the kiss of a man (more precisely his poetry) woke her up to life and to love.
Smart’s evocation of love is sweeping, aching, exhilarating, rapturous, incantatory:
When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door. More single-purposed than the new bird, all mouth with his one want, I close my eyes and tremble, anticipating touch.
And again:
What is going to happen? Nothing. For everything has happened. All time is now, and time can do no better. Nothing can ever be more now than now, and before this nothing was. There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.
I know, I know this is merely the introduction and not the book itself, but one more:
But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.
In this high-wire act of sustained emotional resonance, the following might help anchor the reader in the great wash of language: in August of 1937 in London, Elizabeth
