The other night we happened to drive by Rockcliffe Park’s Elmwood School, a private “independent day school for girls” originally established in 1915 as the Rockcliffe Preparatory School. This was where a young Elizabeth Smart attended studies from 1922 to 1929, during which time she began work on her infamous diaries. Smart, of course, is best known simultaneously for her tumultuous affair with the married British poet George Barker, which resulted in four children she raised solo, and her remarkable lyric novel that emerged from that initial turmoil, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945).

Rockcliffe Park is a bit off our usual Ottawa routes and routines: what were we doing out there? Christine had scheduled a photography session for our young ladies and the photographer was running a sequence of sessions among the trees, blossoms and foliage of a late spring early evening in the village park. There seems something otherworldly about Elizabeth Smart’s origins in this village patch of old money, yet her presence hangs, incongruously, in the air across these tree-lined streets. Hers was an upbringing of private schools and luxury travel, hanging with Ottawa’s political elite, including prominent politicians and civil servants, and at least one future prime minister.

The reality of Rockcliffe Park, nestled just north of Beechwood and up against the Ottawa River, suggests a far different Ottawa than any I might usually encounter. We drove slow through narrow streets unencumbered by sidewalks but lined with embassies and grand homes. This is a walking neighbourhood, with few cars on the roads, and certainly no public transit. A twenty-minute drive straight north of our 1950s-era suburban Alta Vista, it might well be a foreign country.

I keep digging around our house for the biography by Rosemary Sullivan, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life (1991), a book I would have read during the same period I discovered Smart’s work, so as to confirm where exactly the Smarts had lived. They were just a bit west, into Lowertown. I move dozens of volumes in a variety of corners of my office, but still can’t locate the biography. Must every essay I write include a missing volume? Smart has long been one of those authors I return to, almost as touchstone, as a way to renew or reinvigorate my own navigations through prose. As Kim Echlin’s Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity (2004) writes of Smart’s debut, “The great originality of By Grand Central Station is its use of the first-person voice. The voice belongs to a twentieth-century woman who is ironic and passionate, in love with a married man and pregnant. She knows her literary classics and she has a good ear for the advertising jingles and song lyrics of popular culture. It is a classic romantic love story told from a fresh point of view.”

It is this ear that allowed Smart to become, as part of her subsequent years as an advertising copywriter in London, the highest paid copywriter in England. While I always admired the daring originality of her lyric voice, Smart initially became important to my twentysomething Ottawa-based self as someone “from here” who was able to not only write, and make a life out of that, but to produce such masterful work.

This first foray of ours through Rockcliffe Park has me reconsidering Smart’s particular influence on my own approach: perhaps it was more than simple geography. Perhaps it was how Smart managed, eventually, to escape the burden of Ottawa’s deep-seated provincialism and conservative social considerations for the sake of the large romantic gesture. She seemed fearless, unrestricted by expectations on the prose sentence or the social expectations of her upbringing. And of course, unlike most authors one might be interested in reading, one can’t look at Smart’s writing without considering her life. Digging around the internet, I discover a 2015 article in the Independent, “Yann Martel on the genius of Elizabeth Smart: Author’s great novel has been republished,” that argues the point of comparing Smart’s art with her life: “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.”

Earlier this year, Christine went through my Paladin paperback of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for the sake of a reading series solicitation: each performer selecting passages by writers who had influenced them. I hadn’t been conscious of Smart’s influence on Christine’s work, although her own engagement with the lyric gesture, far different than my own, is one that also favours density, language jumbles, emotional intensity and a flow of clear music over any straightforward narrative meaning. The music in Smart’s work is unmistakable, there from the moment her debut novel begins: “I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire.”

Elizabeth Smart spent a lifetime working a daily journal, which allowed her prose style to flourish, and includes multiple fragments and drafts of what evolved into her novel. She wrote daily, but in scraps, fragments, journal entries and a variety of works-in-progress, blending fiction with non-fiction. There have been some curated selections published as books, but not nearly enough for my liking.

I spent years attempting to compose my own journal, but could never sustain my diaristic interest, instead incorporating my thoughts directly into my other writing. The closest I’ve come has been through assembling book-length essay accumulations, including my current project, “Lecture for an Empty Room,” a sequence of short essays on literature, community, reviewing, thinking and writing; or through letters, including hundreds composed and mailed out to friends during those first two pandemic years.

Instead, I’ve been providing our young ladies with my accidental collection of unused journals, books they fill quickly with drawings and abandon. We’ve become aware that my middle daughter, Rose, recently began writing out her own thoughts and feelings in a notebook she refers to as her diary. We avoid reading her entries, obviously, as she deserves her own space in which to gather her thoughts. Where might that lead, if anywhere? What voice might emerge for our dervishly brilliant and imaginative nine-year-old?

The push to create and articulate can be strong, rewarding and lifelong, as might also be that doubt that anyone is listening. But is the listening important? How best to be heard? And how does one, as a parent, encourage the potential for creative self-reflection without potentially setting her up for a silence? On April 6, 1979, at the age of sixty-five, and echoing a sentiment that could be part of any life, Smart wrote this in her journal, collected as part of In the Meantime (1984): “It is possible there are people hearing me? There are tiny signs, but it seems too good to be true. Would this be a help to me? Or too much of a responsibility? O a help, I think, a help to know one was not a totally mistaken person, piling up a small heap of old rubbish. It’s a heady thrilling thought to think that things do get through, might, have.”

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Image: Jenny Bou, L'éveil de la bienveillance, 2020, handmade collage on cardboard

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