Yann Martel - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

In discussing that sort of thing , Smart makes a number of Biblical references, most obviously with the title, that marvellous amalgam of a New York train station and the ache of Jewish exile, but her more frequent allusions are pre-Christian. ‘Jupiter has been with Leda, I thought, and now nothing can avert the Trojan Wars,’ is one example. She also refers to the Golden Fleece, to Helen of Troy, to Diogenes, to Penelope, to Dido.

There is indeed something of an ancient Greek sensibility to this book, in which the morality of behaviour comes second to its emotional import. I feel, therefore I am – and with a truth of being that no moral code can affect. By Grand Central Station came out in 1945, and we all know what happened between 1939 and 1945. Smart was not ignorant or unfeeling – she makes heartfelt references to the victims of the Holocaust, for example – but as she puts it:

Why should even ten centuries of the world’s woe lessen the fact that I love? Cradle the seed, cradle the seed, even in the volcano’s mouth. I am the last pregnant woman in a desolated world. The bed is cold and jealousy is cruel as the grave.

Was she self-centered, solipsistic, detached from reality? Not at all. She demanded bliss, while accepting that she might end up in hell. ‘The Thing is at hand. There is nothing to do but crouch and receive God’s wrath,’ she says. And wrath was to come, not only from police authorities and other representatives of the harsh world at large, but closer at hand, because George Barker was married – he flew over from Japan with his wife, Jessica, whom Smart also sets eyes on for the first time in Monterey – and he would have durable relations with more women than just his first wife and Elizabeth Smart, and more children than just the four he had with her (fifteen in all!).

Here’s the point in comparing Elizabeth Smart’s art with her life, and the proof that this jewel of a book is no mere idle romance: Elizabeth fell in love with George, it took time, tricks and money to meet him, they got into trouble with the law, they became social outcasts, it was killing for her heart – and she had four children with the man, children whom she raised all on her own. This is a woman who took seriously not only the premise of love, but its consequences. This is a book about one creature’s obdurate desire to love and be loved, no matter what. Smart was lucid, resilient, hard-working, and responsible in her love-madness.

The photo at the back of the edition I have, published during the author’s lifetime, shows a woman aged beyond her sixty-seven years, her hair unstyled, bags under her eyes, a cigarette at her mouth. It is a provocatively honest photo of a woman worn down by love and life, but on the internet, where time is so easily erased, there is a photo of the young Elizabeth – and she is indeed the ‘goodlooking blonde’ that others in the book call her. I don’t imagine George quite knew what he was getting, that here was a not only physical beauty but a verbal beauty. Their relationship was a difficult one, and it can’t have been easy raising four illegitimate children. But still, that question that glows without fading: What do you live for then?

When I first read this book some years ago it left me dumbfounded. What powerful stuff, what a thing to experience, what a life to live. I felt unfeeling, unknowing, unlived by comparison. On what surface do I skate? Why can’t I plunge to the depths? Then I looked around and I determined, by a simple act of emotional observation, that I too love my George Barker stand-in and that I too love my children, and this, with a love as dogged and deep, as visceral and guiding, as Elizabeth Smart’s. Only mine is mostly unexpressed and undwelled upon, jostled aside by the intruding world and the endless errands of daily life – because I too have four children. A love that is lived has its prosaic aspects. Sure, there’s love to be made, but there are also bills to be paid and groceries to be bought.

And therein lies the greatness of Elizabeth Smart. She takes what is yours and mine, what is everyday and everywhere, what exists in every suburb and in every flat, and makes it mythical. You’re not just Doris and Dave who live in Essex. You’re also Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, Elizabeth and George – only you don’t know it, or you’ve forgotten it momentarily, or you just missed the boat (but perhaps it’s not too late to catch the next one).

Read this book aloud, because while love is the theme, language is the plot, the character and the setting. It’s a perfect book to be shared, to be read aloud to someone . And hopefully, as you are doing so, you will find yourself waking from a hundred-year slumber.

Yann Martel

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