Forever young Bessie Smith
Robert Crawford’s poetic response to the too short life of SOE agent Violette Szabo is a moving tribute to her sacrifice, writes Joyce Mcmillan
England and France – Englishness and Frenchness – were the two poles between which the wartime heroine Violette Szabo lived her life; so it seems both poignant and fitting that this extraordinary response to her life by the acclaimed Scottish poet, biographer and academic Robert Crawford is published in a slim but elegant bilingual edition, with Crawford’s text on the right-hand pages, and on the left a perfectly poised French version by Paul Malgrati.
The year 2021 marks the centenary of Szabo’s birth, on 26 June 1921; and although her brief career as a British secret agent parachuted into France in 1944 has been immortalised in several biographies, and in the book and film Carve Her Name With Pride, Crawford’s impulse to create this centenary tribute is more than justified by the sheer poetic power of his text, and by the unusual and haunting form it takes.
Essentially, Crawford’s poem reflects on Szabo’s life through five sections each laid out like a Curriculum Vitae, created at successive points during her adult life. In the first, dated 1938, she is Violette Bushell, a 17-year-old shop assistant in Brixton, the daughter of an English father and a French mother who met in Paris at the end of the First World War; in the fifth and last, dated 1945, she is Ensign Violette Szabo of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a prisoner in Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp north of Berlin, facing imminent death.
Each CV follows the same pattern, over seven or eight well spaced pages; name, date of birth, address, date of document, weather, and then a series of increasingly eccentric or surreal categories, capturing Violette’s journeys (through lists of station names with fleeting impressions), the terrain in which she has found herself, an old story that touches on her situation, a shopping list, a prayer, an assessment of her performance, a food diary, a list of possessions carried with her.
In a sense, this is a simple technique; but it is hard to overstate the impact of a format that combines such a detailed, sensitive and loving poetic evocation of a life with such an inexorable documentation of the loss of that life, through Violette’s marriage in 1940 to Free French soldier Etienne Szabo, the birth of their daughter in 1942, his death in action in North Africa later that year, her recruitment to the Special Operations Executive and training in Scotland, her brief but heroic service in France in the summer of 1944, and her eventual capture, interrogation, imprisonment and death, executed with a single shot at Ravensbruck in February 1945.
Crawford opens his book with an extended quotation from the philosopher David Hume in which he questions the idea of the self as a stable presence. Hume says that all he can see, when he considers himself, is a shifting set of perceptions; and
There are some people whose voices ring out across the centuries, who, even after they have gone, possess a strange ability to still be effortlessly here. Bessie Smith’s voice has that quality. Unsettled most of her life, she still unsettles. Try to imagine asking her about anything that is going on today, from the floods, to the climate crisis, to the coronavirus, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the Me Too movement, to the refugee crisis, and you would find an answer in her rich and resonant blues narratives. We could match any of today’s troubles and anxieties to her music. The blues are not past. Bessie’s blues are current.
Her narratives are even eerily prescient – she sang about floods, about sexual abuse, about financial crashes, about sudden changes in circumstances, changes in love. There isn’t anything that life could currently throw at her that would surprise her. Her blues sought the truth – the truth in all its multiplicity; the hard truth, the strangest truth, the supernatural truth. The whole truth has a different ring to it in the world of Bessie’s blues. In these surreal times, where distinguishing the truth is a challenge, Bessie’s voice has a pure and true ring. She is telling it like it is. There’s nothing fake about her. And because she was not afraid to bear witness to her times, to rising racism and the Ku Klux Klan, to inequalities and class differences, to hypocrisy and the dangers of celebrity, she also manages to bear witness to our times. Pioneers don’t just lead the way in their own time; they continue to refract and reflect our time. Pioneers can perform the magic trick of being contemporary in any time.
For my twelfth birthday, my dad bought me my first double album. It was Bessie Smith’s Any Woman’s Blues. I was drawn to the twosided picture of her on the cover, the smiling Bessie and the sorrowful one. It wasn’t long before I made her part of my extended imaginary black family, before I felt not just as if she belonged to me, but as if I belonged to her.
About the author
Born in Edinburgh, Jackie
Kay is the third modern
Makar, or poet laureate of Scotland. Her first novel,
Trumpet, won the Authors’
Club First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. She is also the author of three collections of stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, Wish I Was Here, and Reality, Reality; the autobiography Red Dust Road, and numerous poetry collections including Bantam, Fiere, and The Adoption Papers. The above extract is taken from the introduction to a new edition of Bessie Smith, Kay’s biography of the blues singer, published this week by Faber & Faber, priced £9.99.