Elizabeth Smart

I don't remember how I came across this glimpse into Elizabeth Smart's love affair with poet George Barker.

She bore four of his 15 or so children - all without him ever leaving his wife.

She poured her heartache into a novel entitled By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

Here's the excerpt that spoke to me:

“He has martyred me, but for no cause, nor has he any idea of the size and consequence of my wounds,” she writes, “Perhaps he will never know, for to say, You killed me daily and O most especially nightly, would imply blame. I do not blame, nor even say, You might have done this or this rather than that. I even say, You must do that, you have to do it, there is no alternative, urging my own murder. But if a knife is stuck in the engine that pumps my blood, my blood stops, no matter how I reason with it. Will he notice that my heart has ceased to beat? But he may, O he may at one glance, restore me and flood me with so much new love that every scar will have a satin covering and be new glitter to attack his heart. From this great distance, after these nights of separation, more I cannot see. My imagination is snowed under the eternal unpunctuated hours”.

“How can I put love up to my hopes so suicidal and wild-eyed when the matter is too simple and too plain: It is her tears he feels trickling over his breast each night; it is for her he feels the concern; and the pity after all, not the love, fills all his twenty-four hours”.