Elizabeth Smart
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By Heart
Elizabeth Smart - A Life
Rosemary Sullivan

Elizabeth's life was very social. She had numerous friends in Soho as well as professional friends. She continued to meet Barker when he came up to London — he was still living with Cass. The editors of X magazine, Patrick Swift and David Wright, would meet at her flat in the beginning of the sixties to do interviews, and Elizabeth sometimes offered her drawing room as a sort of office where they would hammer out their editorials. The artist Craigie Aitchison recalled being interviewed there by Paddy Swift, and Elizabeth wrote their words down, including the bits from the pub where they adjourned afterwards... The painter Frank Auerbach remembered her coming into The French one evening, having made thirty pounds in a couple of hours writing advertising for Jaeger fashions; they went back to the Westbourne Terrace flat, and, though the pipes were frozen, she produced food and drink. He, being penniless in those days and unable to get home, had fallen asleep on a bed and awoke to find a pound note in his pocket. "This happened two or three times. She deemed it a matter of course to make sacrifices for artists," said Auerbach. Over the years there was often somebody in residence, including Robert MacBryde, Mrs Watt's son Sholto Watt, John Deakin, Michael Asquith and his second wife, Hase, or Anthony Cronin and his wife.
— Rosemary Sullivan, By Heart, Elizabeth Smart - A Life, p.274, Flamingo, London, 1992


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On many occasions through the early Sixties, writers and painters such as David Gascoyne, Paddy Kavanagh, Roberts MacBryde and Colquhoun and Paddy Swift would gather at Westbourne Terrace in Paddington, our family home at that time. They came for editorial discussions about their poetry magazine, X.
— Christopher Barker, Rhymes of passion, The Observer, Sunday 20 August 2006


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...a stanza in a poem in the present collection called 'The Muse: His & Hers':

Stevie, the Emilys,
Mrs Wolf
By-passed the womb
And kept the Self.

I have quoted from it because it takes me back, through association, to the summer of 1957, when Elizabeth allowed me to stay several weeks in her flat in Westbourne Terrace in Paddington.
We spent a memorable day in the company of Stevie Smith, at the invitation of the painter Patrick Swift and his wife Oonagh, who occupied a studio-flat somewhere in the country not far to the north of London. After the meal, we all went out into the fields to hunt for mushrooms: a fairy ring, boleti, button mushrooms, and even the rare and startling Phallus impudicus hiding under a bush. Later, after a visit to Michael Andrews painting in a nearby studio, we ate the mushrooms for supper. Some tasted revolting, but none made us ill. Elizabeth and I accompanied Stevie Smith in the train back to Palmers Green, where we walked up the hill to the house she had lived in for sixty years. She had been amusing, sometimes caustic, but always agreeable.
— David Gascoyne, introduction to The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Smart (Paladin, London, 1992)

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On the side of the angels
Elizabeth Smart
edited by Alice Van Wart

The Second Volume of the Journals of Elizabeth Smart

The fifties for Smart began an intensely social period. Until 1954... Smart had worked in London during the week... She now moved her family to London, in 1955 settling in 9 Westbourne Terrace. Her home soon became the centre for various writers and artists. For a while the Scottish poet W S (Sydney) Graham rented a room. George Barker continued to appear, though he spent more and more time in Italy. His relationship with Smart was now one of friendship. Poet David Wright was a familiar figure at Smart's, as were the two Scottish artists, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, known as the Roberts, who were the children's nannies...
...in 1957, however, she managed to publish with her friend Oonagh Swift (who used the pseudonym Agnes Ryan) Cooking the French Way...
Smart's home at Westbourne Terrace became ever more popular during the sixties. The two Roberts remained. George Barker and David Wright came and went, as did poets David Gascoyne, Patrick Kavanagh, and artist Craigie Aitchison. Another artist Paddy Swift and his wife Oonagh lived in the basement of the same building...

— On the side of the angels, Elizabeth Smart, The Second Volume of the Journals of Elizabeth Smart, edited by Alice Van Wart, London, Harper-Collins, 1994






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By Swift
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Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
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Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All

By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh

Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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