Book Report: Over the Frontier

Second childhoods are supposed to be the onset of what used to be called senility, brought on by poor blood circulation. Since one's muscles are withering for lack of activity, one's brain is fading out, too, like a guttering candle. 

When I was at the opposite end of my life - a few years after it's beginning, one of my favorite school assignments was writing what were called Book Reports. So I've decided to write them again, at a little more length and more in-depth than those I wrote fiftysomething years ago, and with fewer misspells and - I hope - grammatical gaffes. A pity Mrs. Bradshaw, bless her heart, is no longer around to grade them. Here goes the first. 

Over the Frontier by Stevie Smith. This was the second novel written by Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in 1902, but she is best known as a poet. Her wry, sardonic voice gives her poems a strangely childish note, while tackling very grown-up subjects, like her recognition of death and her quarrel with God. 

What care I if Skies are blue, 

If God created Gnat and Gnu, 

What care I if good God be 

If he be not good to me? 

("Egocentric") 

You want to take her seriously, but she almost doesn't let you. This has led to her acquiring a quite unfair reputation as a mere eccentric curiosity. 

In Over the Frontier, published in 1938, a war in Germany or against Germany is forecast in the first half of the novel and is happening throughout the second half. Smith had visited Berlin in 1931 and, like many members of her generation, knew that something terrible was coming for Europe. Her heroine, Pompey Casmilus, is invalided from London, which seems surprisingly carefree, to a spa on the northern frontier of Germany. There she encounters various people, all of whom may or may not be spying for the other side - whatever the other side is. 

I grind my teeth to think of Germany and her infection of arrogance and weakness and cruelty that has spread to our own particular enemy, has set on foot this abominable war, has brought us all to this pass, and me to a hatred that is not without guilt, is not, is not a pure flame of altruism; ah, hatred is never this, is always rather to make use of this grand altruistic feeling, to bring to a head in ourselves all that there is in us of a hatred and fury upon a less convenient truth. 

Over the Frontier doesn't work very well as a novel. Some argue that its use of different styles was an early example of postmodernism. In the novel's second half, Smith adopts the tropes and action of a suspense/adventure story like John Buchan's The 39 Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a splendid film. There are midnight rides across bleak, deserted landscapes, but Smith never succeeds in establishing any sense of scale or distance. The long ride that Tom and Pompey take goes on for several nights and only adds to the fantasy atmosphere. But then Pompey (the same protagonist in Smith's first novel, Novel in Yellow Paper) makes pronouncements on evil and death that seem - but only seem - to suggest a connection to Nazi Germany. Pompey sees a coming war, but knows that her side (our side) will win. 

In England there is no national ideology, or not one that is formed, to be carried through, to be expressed in a word and impressed upon a people, as in Germany it is expressed and impressed, with what of an original pure intention we cannot know, with what of a calamity in event we know too well. And upon this side of the frontier it marches with the enemy, it informs their dotty heroism. But we shall win, we shall win. We have the arms and the money, the mercenaries and the riff-raff of many armies. Death to the dotty idealismus, death to all ideologies; death upon the flying bullet that has been paid for; death from the bent form of the hired soldier; death upon the wind from the north. 

Was Smith satirizing, in the first half of the book, the British ruling class for its obliviousness in ignoring the signs of the coming of war? George Orwell's Coming Up for Air was published the same year as Over the Frontier and also foreshadows the war, but it's a war that Orwell's hero anticipates with some relish. Pompey, forever bored, seems just as bored by the war, even if she finds in it a sense of purpose. Pompey feels herself, in the book's last pages, being seduced by the high demonic style of the German evil, the ideology of hate, and its powerful sado-masochism. It isn't Smith's admission of sympathy for the devil. It comes across as just talk, the quasi-philosophical ramblings of her insufferable heroine. But in trying to avoid a melodramatic ending, that bends over backwards, if necessary, to resolve itself favorably, Smith goes too far the other way and finds melodrama there. Smith ends with this ominous-sounding sentence: 

Power and cruelty are the strength of our life, and in its weakness only is there the sweetness of love. 

But I prefer to remember Pompey's deliberate ambiguity in the poem Smith interposes several pages ahead of the ending: 

In my dreams I am always saying good-bye and riding away 

Whither and why I know not nor do I care 

And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweetest 

And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air. 

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying good-bye 

And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink 

I am glad the journey is set I am glad I am going 

I am glad I am glad that my friends don’t know what I think. 

"In My Dreams" from Tender Only to One (1938)