Some Last Thoughts on Stevie, for now

 There is a law of diminishing returns involved in reading books, listening to music or any such thing as one goes through the outdoor from anything that might have been middle age and in through the indoor into what thus must be old age. I'm not even using my customary inverted commas to denote any of those terms as things that others might call them, they are what I think they are.

How would it be possible to find anything as new and exciting at the age of 64 as it was to hear She Loves You by The Beatles, or Move Over, Darling by Doris Day, for that matter, aged about 4. Or T. Rex, aged 12, Mozart and Beethoven, Tamla Motown, Al Green, all the usual list, up until The Magnetic Fields at the age of about 42. It's not going to happen, is it.

One can still be impressed, one can still enjoy both old things and more recent things, perhaps even more profoundly, but there simply isn't going to be another such moment as when one first heard Changes by David Bowie before one went to school when it was Tony Blackburn's 'Record of the Week' on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.

However, Stevie Smith's novel, Over the Frontier, gets closer than anything else has done for a long time. It is 'extra-ordinary' in all that that word, on examination, is intended to mean but it's not weird. It's just not like anything else of its genre. One could call it 'contrary' but only succeeed in saying why it is like other things that go beyond the remits of their genres.

It's been a long time since I was as thrilled by prose fiction as I was by Stevie Smith's. I'm glad there are some more much shorter stories in Me, Again because, in the absence of any more compelling demands on my reading time, I might decide to do it all over again with all three novels.

Because such reading time is a necessary anchor in the increasingly motiveless process of being alive. It was once implicit than one needed to get from one stage of one's life to the next but, that all done all paid for, it's easy to lack specific purpose. Being in a good book, if not in the process of writing any such thing oneself, is as good as it gets. I finished Over the Frontier before today's tracing began and then watched my makeshift attempts to conjure meaningless cash out of sport come to nothing for bthe second day running but it didn't matter much. The investment job has been in the bag for some time now and it's only money. What I really want to do is know all about Stevie Smith's prose fiction and why, on earth, is she remembered for her coy, faux-naive poems when her prose fiction was so much better.