What better way to dress her ‘kiddo’ – her ‘poems’, the stunted and fractured form of a ‘child’ aborted from her mind – than with the garments deemed acceptable by the society into which they will grow and claim their own space? Language, words, sentences and punctuation are the pieces of cloth, ripped apart and stitched together again to fit the creations of Patience ‘Pompey’ Casmilus’s mind, making manifest “this book on yellow paper.” (p. 15) Stevie Smith’s own textual ‘maternal’ influence is ever present though, as she clothes her ‘kiddo’ – what readers might call the ‘real’ Novel on Yellow Paper – in ‘funny disguises’ comprised of Pompey’s voice, which constantly toys with language and manipulates the conventional sentence as it is constructed on the page. Though the “talking voice” of Pompey, fragmented and childlike as it is, is born of Smith in itself, there still appears to hang a translucent layer separating the imagined voice conceived from Smith’s own life and experiences. “It is its mistress’ voice indeed”, but there seems to exist a closer bond than mere ‘mistress’ and ‘servant’ (or even ‘lover’ as the regular collocation might imply) that resembles a maternal relationship. The two female figures remain somewhat separated as the realms of reality and fiction are defined, yet also curiously defied, by the existence of Pompey’s disembodied voice.
Though Smith suggests a shared ownership of the Novel and its contents with herself and her ‘alter ego’, Pompey does ultimately remain a projection, an extension of Smith, despite the authorial tensions within the close parallels between the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, ‘authentic’ and stereotypical fabrication of a woman. It would indeed be better to align Smith with the process of creating, giving birth to Novel on Yellow Paper, as Laura Severin suggests, than with the imagined creator figure of “this book on yellow paper”. Pompey resides mostly within the inner frames of the narrative, drifting out only far enough to reach some notion of an audience beyond her, whom she collectively Christens “Reader”.
The process of almost literally ‘thinking things out’ in “this dangerous way I am running on” (p. 16), “this book…the talking voice that runs on” (p.39) allows Pompey’s mind to exhaust itself. The stretch of narrative ‘runs’ between flitting thoughts that “come”, about people who “come too, and come and go”, and distractions in the guise of “Favourite quotations”, “nice little quotations for your scrapbook” that both interrupt and construct parts of her story. These patches of writing give Pompey’s voice its childlike quality in its barefaced and seemingly unfocused nature, embossing the maternal relationship between Smith and her ‘kiddo’. But before the ‘Reader’ can settle into the world of Pompey, we are warned, “I say here, there’s not a person nor a thing in this book that ever stepped outside of this book. It’s just all out of my head.” (p. 19) Though her voice often wanders excitedly from thought to passing thought like an infant caught in a fast-paced world of motion and distraction, at least Pompey reveals that she is acutely aware of this. She stitches various hints into her narrative that point to the highly metaltextual nature of Novel on Yellow Paper; she mentions many times, as though in snippets of passing thoughts, her process of giving birth to this patchwork of a book:
“So I’m getting on and sticking to my typewriter, and come Christmas this book will be ready for binding in limp yap and setting on your rich aunt’s breakfast plate next the crumpled corn.” (p. 28-9)
The reader might by lulled into falsely labelling her according to the patriarchal archetype: a superficial and ‘lowbrow’ woman with the apparent obsession with the material world of magazines and trends in mass culture; “not as they say ‘book’ in our trade – they mean magazine” (‘our’ being the woman writer, ‘they’ being the still oppressive society of post-suffrage Britain). ‘Sticking’ and ‘binding’ the physical book portrays the final form, the fully-dressed ‘kiddo’, yet there lingers the self-derisive air surrounding the book’s birth. It is bound ‘in limp yap’.
Later appears the notion of grammatically ‘binding’ the words and fixing them in sentences on the page, covering the nakedness of their unrestricted and intuitive feminine body. Pompey assures us, “And for my part I will try to punctuate this book to make it easy for you to read, to break it up, with spaces for a pause, as the publisher has asked me to do.” (p. 39) This declaration is elaborately torn into pieces by itself – for Pompey’s “part” – and ‘broken up’ by the ironic use of excessive commas that are meant to ‘simplify’ the sentence. Smith laughs in the face of the publisher, presumably intended to be imagined as the overbearing male ‘smug-pug’ targeted shortly afterwards. A childish compounded ‘insult’, just what the male misogynist constructed by Pompey and, consequentially, by Smith, might expect of a woman who is not to be taken seriously, Smith mocks and undermines this stereotypical conclusion by playing up to it according to expectations. It is clear that Smith presents to us a cheap imitation, a parody of how the female author’s identity and authority is dismissed by a misogynistic society, all underneath the thin veil of Pompey’s character. Language becomes a type of costume, a disguise for Smith to partially shroud her novel in but deliberately leave her frustrations peeking out beneath.
A striking scene that combines this material fixation with the ideologies it aims to imitate and mock occurs when Pompey recalls being dressed up by a “genuine ballerina”, Lottie who “always wore evening dress, very fat and tight”. Again, the shallow, material focus of ‘a woman’s mind’ is foregrounded; Lottie appears to the reader, neatly packaged and labelled by Pompey as little more than her feminine occupation, her marital situation and her physical appearance – a true conformist vision of a woman. Pompey remembers one specific occasion spent in Lottie’s flat: “Lottie said: Pompey you should dress with more chic. So. And she put on me her hat and a coat with hanging sequin sleeves, and round my neck a piece of fur.” (p. 61) The garish decadence of the borrowed outfit, against the ensuing laughter from Pompey’s reaction (“[I] couldn’t quite get the hang of that look, and I stood in front of a long glass and began to laugh silently”) is an eloquently put symbol of a woman who resists the norm by allowing herself to be clothed in it and then cutting, changing, altering it to look utterly laughable. Pompey utters her trademark line as if to make the situation ‘easy for you to read’: “Because it was funny”. If we must take a ‘pause’ in the narrative, as prescribed by Pompey’s publisher, let us do so to hear the echo of Smith’s laughter once more.
