If you’ve heard of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart, it’s likely because of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, her thin but thunderous book of prose poetry first published, in England, in 1945. Based loosely on Smart’s obsessive pursuit of married British poet George Barker during her mid-twenties and the doomed chaos that ensued when they passionately collided, the book slowly gained an international cult following after its initial print run of just 2,000 and was eventually hailed as a masterpiece of rhapsodic fictionalized memoir. “Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning,” was how novelist Angela Carter described it in the sixties. Gloomy British singer-songwriter Morrissey plucked lines from it in the eighties to coopt as lyrics, including the novella’s final sentence, “Do you hear me where you sleep?” The BBC recently adapted it as a radio play, and on YouTube today, viewers can hear Smart’s lines tremulously intoned over shaky hand-held footage of the titular New York station.
Densely metaphorical, seemingly written at a fever pitch, and—as Smart herself freely admitted—only grudgingly plotted, the book has the richness and cadence of scripture. “There are no problems, no sorrows or errors: they join us in the urging song that everything sings,” she writes of angels and the transformative effects of love. “Just to lie savoring is enough life. Is enough.” Though Smart published a few other books later in life, and even her gardening notes have been immortalized in print, it is By Grand Central Station that anchors her literary reputation.
If there is someone thinking these are “just” cosmetic, mandarin matters, it is not so! For us—for me and my good editor—this is what matters. The word that matches what we see and feel explains us to ourselves and does what Robert Frost says of poetry: It stays our confusion.
“The lotteries” not only changed how the Selective Service chose men for the conflict in Vietnam, they also marked a turning point in the history of science. By assigning military induction via an arbitrary factor uncorrelated with personal traits, the lotteries amounted to an experiment.
Yet, unlike most academic experiments, its treatment condition utterly changed individuals’ lives. And, unlike previous draft lotteries, the Vietnam lotteries arrived at a Goldilocks moment in the history of human science. They began just when the systematic collection of data in durable formats had taken root, but before social and behavioral scientists became so enamored with field experiments that excessive efforts to study them degraded their “naturalness.”
Now, 50 years later, the Vietnam draft lotteries have become the drosophila of the social sciences: the model organism for researchers to discern how a life-changing intervention carries implications for the individuals who experienced it, versus those who escaped it by chance.
In the first grip of grief, Riley hears language more acutely – the world’s slipshod tactlessness is all around. She writes about how kindly intentioned people say they can’t imagine how she feels. She argues that they should try (her book will help). She observes the world’s obliviousness: “where people rush about loudly, with their astonishing confidence. Each one of them a candidate for sudden death, and so helplessly vulnerable … Later everyone on the street seems to rattle together like dead leaves in heaps.”