In Charing Cross Road she picked up a book

David Wright

BY HEART: ELIZABETH SMART, A LIFE by Rosemary Sullivan Lime Tree,f1 7.99, pp. 416 Elizabeth Smart was an extraordinary woman. Even more extraordinary is the Story of her life — as unbelievable as the Plot of a bad Gothic novel.

The dead spit of Marilyn Monroe in her early photographs, Elizabeth Smart was the daughter of a prosperous Canadian lawyer and businessman. Before she was 24 she had travelled round the world, studied drama with Peter Ustinov under Michel St Denis, nearly married a lord, and lived in a "lenage h trois with the painter Jean Varda. Her ambition was to write. One fatal day in 1937 she picked up a slim volume of poetry In a Charing Cross Road bookshop, to fall Immediately and calamitously in love with its author. The poet was George Barker. As a later friend remarked, Elizabeth's response to language was erotic: the exotic yocabutary directed by a subtle and Intuitive intellect, was custom-built to bowl her over. On the spot she decided he was the man she was going to marry and have children by. Three years were to pass before they met. Through Lawrence Durrell she began by buying Barker's manuscripts. A correspon- dence ensued. Eternally impecunious, Barker was ruthlessly committed to his vocation, Elizabeth as ruthlessly to getting What she wanted. She wanted Barker, and she got him. Just before war broke out he Went to Japan to take up a professorship (a job that Eliot got for him). Japan aPpalled Barker: desperate to escape, he b. egged his patroness, then living at Big Sur In California, to help him get away — he needed two tickets for America. This was Elizabeth's first intimation that Barker was already married. Undeterred, she moved heaven and earth and Christopher Isher- wood to raise the money. At the beginning of July 1940 Barker and his wife Jessica arrived at Big Sur; by the end of the month George and Elizabeth were lovers. They never married. Barker strove to get away; Elizabeth followed him to England ----- her ship was torpedoed en route. Mean- While, Jessica stayed on in America, where Liter twins were born within days of Eliza- Lueth s first baby. George attempted to go °,ack to Jessica, but she had had enough. ,1110tb George and Elizabeth were hounded L'Y guilt over Jessica — but Elizabeth's

motto was 'better be wrong than restrained', whereas George would 'rehabilitate the dignity of the un- forgivable'. Over the next 17 years the two met and parted and lacerated one another in a lethal minuet, yet were never able to break loose, though the one was to have several more companionate wives — all remarkable women — and 15 children (four of them by Elizabeth) and the other a dozen or so non-permanent affairs.

The romantic agony found vent in two extraordinary novels — Elizabeth's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Barker's The Dead Seagull — obverse and reverse of the same coin — and in the poem (perhaps the best he ever wrote), The True Confession of George Barker'. Ignored when it appeared in 1945, Eliza- beth's novel was reprinted 20 years later, to become a classic almost overnight. In the interval she wrote nothing, but with indomitable courage raised and educated her four children (the two boys went to public school and university) with little help from their father. Barker always regarded her as a rich woman, though she had only a small pittance from her family (outraged by Elizabeth's flouting of convention, her mother burnt every copy of her novel to reach Canada), and was often penniless. But by the Fifties and Sixties Elizabeth had become a highly paid copy- writer and journalist: according to a colleague on Queen magazine, she helped to change literary journalism in England and to set the tone for the Sixties.

In those days Elizabeth became a habituee of the pubs and clubs of Soho, then in their heyday. Here her biographer — never having experienced the ambience and mores of that unique sodality — is a bit out of her depth. And while neither Barker nor Elizabeth emerges spotless from the tale Rosemary Sullivan has to tell, her animus is laid, not surprisingly, on Barker, who could be violent. Generous and contemptuous of money, Elizabeth didn't give a damn what she did; her behaviour could be appalling — 'better to read about than cope with', as a disconcert- ed professor fAiarked when Elizabeth was Writer in Residence at a Canadian Univer-

sity. If she wa§ humourless, in contrast Barker was a humorist, profound and sharply ,intuitMF- he gave her, she admit- ted, the couilge to 'break the surface bonds' and stdp, Into her own life.

The Crisis taine in 1957 when Barker was temporarily living with Elizabeth in Westbourne Terrace, while their close friCnd, the painter Patrick Swift and his fantily bad the basement flat below hers.

Swift.and Barker had gone to the local pub

without Ativiting Elizabeth, to her chagrin. When they returned to the top floor flat with bottles to continue the party, she was lying on her bed. George bent down to kiss her, when she fastened her teeth on his upper lip and bit it through.

Of this episode Professor Sullivan records two versions and inclines to believe Elizabeth's, according to whom Barker was trying to strangle her while his friends sat around watching till in self-defence she bit him. According to Barker, Elizabeth bit him for no reason. I have given the version I heard from Swift, the friend of both, who was there, and took Barker to hospital to have his lip sewn back; and from Barker himself who came to me that same night to sleep on my spare bed. 'Who did that?', I asked. 'Eliza-bite!'

Paradoxically, this traumatic event was not the end but the beginning of their friendship. By the Seventies Elizabeth had

become famous — By Grand Central Station was tailor-made for the feminist

movement, though she never was one — while Barker's brand of poetry was no longer the mode. Her children grown up, herself freed from the necessity to make money, Elizabeth retired to a country cottage to write, after her spell in Canada as Writer in Residence — but fate was against her. All she was able to produce was a book of prose sketches and a collection of poems. Her youngest daughter, Rose, had become a drug addict and died tragically early. To Elizabeth, as ever, fell the task of looking after Rose's three children, which she did until her own

death in 1985. In the service of his muse, Barker — like James, Joyce — never

hesitated to sacrifice others as well as himself. Elizabeth, being a woman, sacrificed her muse to serve her children.

The Gods exacted a price from me [wrote Barker], and it's too expensive. The song's not worth the money, and vice versa. I saw Ezra 18 months before he died and he said 'Everything I did was wrong.'

As for Elizabeth, she wrote:

His pampered Muse Knew no veto.

Hers lived In a female ghetto.

Guilt drove him on Guilt held her down (She hadn't a wife To lean upon.)