Book of a Lifetime: Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

From The Independent archive: Frances Spalding on the poet and novelist’s exuberant celebration of the uncircumscribed spirit

Every new reading of Smith’s first novel uncovers further depths (Getty)

A small bookshop in Caterham, Surrey, was my regular haunt as a teenager and young adult. Here I found, among the Penguin Modern Classics, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Intrigued by its title, I took it off the shelf and read the opening: “Beginning this book (not as they say ‘book’ in our trade – they mean magazine), beginning this book, I should like if I may, I should like, if I may (that is the way Sir Phoebus writes), I should like then to say: Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends. And for why? Read on, Reader, read on and work it out for yourself.”

Such button-holing immediacy was impossible to resist. The voice intrigued with its flip informality, its teasing rhythms, and the way it both cajoled and rebuffed. We soon discover that Pompey Casmilus, the gossipy office-girl narrator, works as a secretary for Sir Phoebus Ullwater, the director of a magazine empire, just as Smith went to work for Sir Neville Pearson at Newnes. It was evident that Sir Phoebus, like Sir Neville, was merely a figurehead. Both Pompey and Sir Phoebus get quickly bored.