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Over the Frontier
A powerful novel about cruelty in a world preparing for war.
Over the Frontier was first published in 1938 and was Stevie Smith's second novel, closely following Novel on Yellow Paper, beginning where that novel ends. While sharing the poetic quality, the quirky humour and caustic wit common to all her work, Over the Frontier is quite unlike anything else Stevie Smith wrote. It is a fantastic tale of adventure and intrigue — one in which Stevie dons the unlikely mantle of John Buchan — and a profound exploration of larger themes: ambition, militarism, nationalism, love, loyalty and death.
Over the Frontier was first published in 1938 and was Stevie Smith's second novel, closely following Novel on Yellow Paper, beginning where that novel ends. While sharing the poetic quality, the quirky humour and caustic wit common to all her work, Over the Frontier is quite unlike anything else Stevie Smith wrote. It is a fantastic tale of adventure and intrigue — one in which Stevie dons the unlikely mantle of John Buchan — and a profound exploration of larger themes: ambition, militarism, nationalism, love, loyalty and death.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1938
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About the author
Stevie Smith
74 books129 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
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June 21, 2019The word 'frontier' in the title of this book could well be a line down the middle separating the first half from the second half.
In the earlier chapters, I sometimes forgot I wasn't still reading Stevie Smith's first book, Novel on Yellow Paper. All the characters from that book pop up again in this one, and the narrator, Pompey Casmilus, is still rambling on in her familiar and idiosyncratic voice: There is a message to buy some cod's roe. But I have tried, I have rung up Fortnums and Harrods, it is absolutely not the season for cod's roe, it is but absolutely impossible. For instance it is possible to force asparagus out of season, but the female cod will not be so constrained. She will not have it. It is impossible...So I come back to my work in rather a scattered frame of mind. And here on the page before me is another problem...but now it is running around in my mind with the offended female cod that must not, that must not be thought of to be mishandled in this out of season way. It is an outrage even to think of this quiet female cod — Well now look, she is sitting at rest upon the lovely soft warm green mud of some steep rock pool. And do I not wish that I was so happily situated as she? I do wish this.
Pompey made me aware eventually that the pages I was reading couldn't possibly be extra chapters from Novel on Yellow Paper as I'd first thought, and that she had moved on in her life. On page 106, she makes this clear, I am involved in the proof corrections of my first novel, even while I write these words, so well on now into the second. Perhaps it is a little debilitating to begin a second while the first is on hand...
And there is indeed a debilitated feeling running through the first half of the book. Pompey finds proofreading very trying, and life itself is becoming difficult to live, as if she were that female cod being constrained in some dreadful out of season way.
Illness was a theme in the first book, but now it is mentioned more often, and though she talks of influenza, Pompey seems to be suffering from something more like extreme nervous exhaustion. I had been reminded of Virginia Woolf's The Waves while reading the earlier novel, and the resemblances continue here. Pompey talks of needing a barrier between herself and the the great thunder stone that she fears will come dropping down. That fear sounds a lot like the dread expressed in The Waves, a dread that in the shadows, there is always the great beast stamping. Incidentally, a note at the end of Novel on Yellow Paper mentioned that a critic of the time had surmised that the novel had been written by Woolf under a pseudonym. Although I found some resemblances, I don't think I'd ever have thought Woolf had written any of Smith's three novels.
So Pompey's health continues to deteriorate. She is a very fretful patient, and not at all 'the good soldier' her doctor wishes her to be. Finally, with some prompting from the patient herself, the doctor recommends a complete change of scene: a sea voyage, and a stay in a Kurhaus on the Baltic. The chosen sanatorium is located on the Polish side of the Polish/German frontier because this is 1937 and Germany is no longer Pompey's favourite holiday destination as it was in Novel on Yellow Paper.
This is the point in the novel where my imaginary frontier line dividing the book in two would be drawn. From this point on, the novel transforms from a memoir-type narrative into a madcap adventure story with a cast of colorful characters who wouldn't be out of place in one of Muriel Spark's more absurdly plotted novels. And Pompey, who has never been a 'good soldier', metamorphoses overnight into an unbelievably great code-breaker and tactician, involved, it seems, in a complicated plot to overthrow Hitler, though his name is never mentioned.
The book was published in 1938
In the earlier chapters, I sometimes forgot I wasn't still reading Stevie Smith's first book, Novel on Yellow Paper. All the characters from that book pop up again in this one, and the narrator, Pompey Casmilus, is still rambling on in her familiar and idiosyncratic voice: There is a message to buy some cod's roe. But I have tried, I have rung up Fortnums and Harrods, it is absolutely not the season for cod's roe, it is but absolutely impossible. For instance it is possible to force asparagus out of season, but the female cod will not be so constrained. She will not have it. It is impossible...So I come back to my work in rather a scattered frame of mind. And here on the page before me is another problem...but now it is running around in my mind with the offended female cod that must not, that must not be thought of to be mishandled in this out of season way. It is an outrage even to think of this quiet female cod — Well now look, she is sitting at rest upon the lovely soft warm green mud of some steep rock pool. And do I not wish that I was so happily situated as she? I do wish this.
Pompey made me aware eventually that the pages I was reading couldn't possibly be extra chapters from Novel on Yellow Paper as I'd first thought, and that she had moved on in her life. On page 106, she makes this clear, I am involved in the proof corrections of my first novel, even while I write these words, so well on now into the second. Perhaps it is a little debilitating to begin a second while the first is on hand...
And there is indeed a debilitated feeling running through the first half of the book. Pompey finds proofreading very trying, and life itself is becoming difficult to live, as if she were that female cod being constrained in some dreadful out of season way.
Illness was a theme in the first book, but now it is mentioned more often, and though she talks of influenza, Pompey seems to be suffering from something more like extreme nervous exhaustion. I had been reminded of Virginia Woolf's The Waves while reading the earlier novel, and the resemblances continue here. Pompey talks of needing a barrier between herself and the the great thunder stone that she fears will come dropping down. That fear sounds a lot like the dread expressed in The Waves, a dread that in the shadows, there is always the great beast stamping. Incidentally, a note at the end of Novel on Yellow Paper mentioned that a critic of the time had surmised that the novel had been written by Woolf under a pseudonym. Although I found some resemblances, I don't think I'd ever have thought Woolf had written any of Smith's three novels.
So Pompey's health continues to deteriorate. She is a very fretful patient, and not at all 'the good soldier' her doctor wishes her to be. Finally, with some prompting from the patient herself, the doctor recommends a complete change of scene: a sea voyage, and a stay in a Kurhaus on the Baltic. The chosen sanatorium is located on the Polish side of the Polish/German frontier because this is 1937 and Germany is no longer Pompey's favourite holiday destination as it was in Novel on Yellow Paper.
This is the point in the novel where my imaginary frontier line dividing the book in two would be drawn. From this point on, the novel transforms from a memoir-type narrative into a madcap adventure story with a cast of colorful characters who wouldn't be out of place in one of Muriel Spark's more absurdly plotted novels. And Pompey, who has never been a 'good soldier', metamorphoses overnight into an unbelievably great code-breaker and tactician, involved, it seems, in a complicated plot to overthrow Hitler, though his name is never mentioned.
The book was published in 1938
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May 21, 2018I find it nearly impossible to review this novel in any meaningful way. Set in 1936 and first published in 1938, the threat of war haunts nearly every page and the key theme of the novel is militarism. The early part of the book is similar-ish to her first novel in that it deals with typical Stevie topics - friends, the 'lion Aunt', her job, her broken love affair. Of course the 'I' of the book is the character Pompey Casmilus, but Pompey seems so very much a part of Stevie (or perhaps I should say, what we know of Stevie's life) that it's tempting to conflate them.
There is no real plotline save that Pompey, feeling blue at the end of her relationship with Freddy, takes a recuperative holiday with her friend Josephine on the Baltic coast. At this point the narrative, which up to this point has been decidedly odd but basically realistic, takes off and becomes dream-like. The frontier of the title refers to the frontier between peace and war, which Pompey crosses.
Stevie's prose style is unique - sometimes cloying, often maddening. This novel doesn't have the charm of 'Novel on Yellow Paper' and it is difficult not to share Stevie's own view of this novel as being a failed experiment. Nevertheless, the final line of the novel is striking and memorable, though bleak: "Power and cruelty are the strengths of our lives, and only in their weakness is there love." [September 2006]
There is no real plotline save that Pompey, feeling blue at the end of her relationship with Freddy, takes a recuperative holiday with her friend Josephine on the Baltic coast. At this point the narrative, which up to this point has been decidedly odd but basically realistic, takes off and becomes dream-like. The frontier of the title refers to the frontier between peace and war, which Pompey crosses.
Stevie's prose style is unique - sometimes cloying, often maddening. This novel doesn't have the charm of 'Novel on Yellow Paper' and it is difficult not to share Stevie's own view of this novel as being a failed experiment. Nevertheless, the final line of the novel is striking and memorable, though bleak: "Power and cruelty are the strengths of our lives, and only in their weakness is there love." [September 2006]
May 19, 2021
this book is a bit of an odd one. the first half or so reads mostly like a continuation of Novel on Yellow Paper complete with the digressive narration of that book but with more of a focus on war(the memory of ww1 and the impending arrival of ww2), but then our narrator somehow gets involved in a mysterious and shadowy espionage sequence! it's all very oblique and ambiguous as to what it means but with sentences like these i'm down with just about anything
"But oh the tearing seering suffering of Germany after the war, the disintegration and diminution the backward journeying the fear the cringing corroding terror of poverty and hopelessness, The Old Men of 1922, the old broken shamefully broken body of the shattered soldier drawn up lifted up crucified upon his crutches lifted up above the old-young child, and over it all and undertoning it all is shame and loss and flight into darkness."
"Do you ever have the thought, gentle Reader, the thought to have an empty mind, to be like the clam that sits upon the mud in the sunlight, without the burden of this voracious conciousness that goes to eating up everything it sees and hears to make a thought about it?"
"Last night I went out to dinner with a young dryasdust that has a charming wife. Well may be anyway the young dryasdust as the years go by will shed some of his academic suet pudding that sits so heavy on the stomach. But to the moment he can do nothing but be this dryasdust that covers the living limbs of the poets with the vile slime of commentary, so dull, so pompous, so without hope and cruel in its stupidity."
"On on we ride, and thinking again these sad thoughts I fall into tears, weeping silently for such unnecessary life; and pride, ambition, and all such light motives, are drowned a hundred times deeper than the loftiest mountain peak in the flood of a thought upon death. But since I am thus desperately out of love with life, in war shall I not do well, so well as my Pouncer has wished me, so well so very well? For the gods laugh very much when people go to war to be done with life, they laugh very much and turn aside the swift glancing weapons of Death, that are for happy people only, and for hearts that are not reconciled to him. Indeed this is the best joke the gods have, and they are like a child in the boring way they will have their joke, and have it to play it out again and again, with never a yawn for tedious repetition. 'Fear and be slain they only may...'"
"But oh the tearing seering suffering of Germany after the war, the disintegration and diminution the backward journeying the fear the cringing corroding terror of poverty and hopelessness, The Old Men of 1922, the old broken shamefully broken body of the shattered soldier drawn up lifted up crucified upon his crutches lifted up above the old-young child, and over it all and undertoning it all is shame and loss and flight into darkness."
"Do you ever have the thought, gentle Reader, the thought to have an empty mind, to be like the clam that sits upon the mud in the sunlight, without the burden of this voracious conciousness that goes to eating up everything it sees and hears to make a thought about it?"
"Last night I went out to dinner with a young dryasdust that has a charming wife. Well may be anyway the young dryasdust as the years go by will shed some of his academic suet pudding that sits so heavy on the stomach. But to the moment he can do nothing but be this dryasdust that covers the living limbs of the poets with the vile slime of commentary, so dull, so pompous, so without hope and cruel in its stupidity."
"On on we ride, and thinking again these sad thoughts I fall into tears, weeping silently for such unnecessary life; and pride, ambition, and all such light motives, are drowned a hundred times deeper than the loftiest mountain peak in the flood of a thought upon death. But since I am thus desperately out of love with life, in war shall I not do well, so well as my Pouncer has wished me, so well so very well? For the gods laugh very much when people go to war to be done with life, they laugh very much and turn aside the swift glancing weapons of Death, that are for happy people only, and for hearts that are not reconciled to him. Indeed this is the best joke the gods have, and they are like a child in the boring way they will have their joke, and have it to play it out again and again, with never a yawn for tedious repetition. 'Fear and be slain they only may...'"
May 27, 2020
Funny, sharp—and much too long because of its formlessness, its feeling of the record of a mind.
January 29, 2025
I DID IT. Absolutely baffling woman. The book is about war … that’s pretty much all I have to say.
March 10, 2011
"Do you ever have the thought, gentle reader, the thought to have an empty mind, to be like the clam that sits upon the mud in the sunlight, without the burden of this voracious consciousness that goes eating up everything it sees and hears to make up a thought about it?"
"How arbitrary is the rhythm of existence, with mood succeeding mood and power shifting from hand to hand..."
A critique of war and nationalism from one held spellbound by its mystery.
"How arbitrary is the rhythm of existence, with mood succeeding mood and power shifting from hand to hand..."
A critique of war and nationalism from one held spellbound by its mystery.
January 1, 2018
Definitely a letdown after how much I enjoyed her other fiction. It starts being more of an actual novel, with more of a linear plot and development, rather than a rambling, personal, innovative reflection on her life and her world. I missed hearing about Stevie, rather than a made-up protagonist.
January 10, 2020
Completely weird but I loved Pompey, the most charming heroine on earth
April 15, 2024
Stevie Smith's follow up to Novel on YP. I thought it was just as good as the first journey through the mind of Pompey Casmillus, and at times (the first half of the novel) thought it was even better than YP. My obsession with Smith continues. Over the Frontier, and Smith's style in general, also reminds me Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten, one of my very favourite books (and authors) of all time. Their style is so similar... funny, flighty, touches the heart, distant and solitary, yet filled with a deep love for humanity, and very in tune with all the world's beauty and ugliness, cruelty and injustice, etc...
Do you ever have the thought, gentle Reader, the thought to have an empty mind, to be like the calm that sits upon the mud in sunlight, without the burden of this voracious consciousness that goes to eating up everything it sees and hears to make up a thought about it?
Several weeks running into months now I have been sick again, I am suffering from the chic Victorian complaint of swooning and the vapours, but I have not yet come to chewing blotting-paper as the anaemic girls of that time did, quires of pink blotting-paper between meals. I imagine them getting together slyly in the rainswept gardens under the rose trees of an evening in July. How many sheets of blotting-paper dear Amelia, well that is good but not so good as Edwina, they say that she...whisper, whisper. How very exciting that must have been.
How romantic and melodramatic is Pompey at midnight and two hours past.
For remember, my chicks, capitalism is not only wrong, it is also very difficult. Very difficult and exasperating indeed is this capitalismus toil that has in it all of the exasperating deviations and incalculabilities of the human factor, that goes to make it in its practical every-day application so much so very much more difficult and exasperating than the simple straightforwardness of the abstractions upon a theme that is all that there is of all that there is of Monsieur Karl.
Do you ever have the thought, gentle Reader, the thought to have an empty mind, to be like the calm that sits upon the mud in sunlight, without the burden of this voracious consciousness that goes to eating up everything it sees and hears to make up a thought about it?
Several weeks running into months now I have been sick again, I am suffering from the chic Victorian complaint of swooning and the vapours, but I have not yet come to chewing blotting-paper as the anaemic girls of that time did, quires of pink blotting-paper between meals. I imagine them getting together slyly in the rainswept gardens under the rose trees of an evening in July. How many sheets of blotting-paper dear Amelia, well that is good but not so good as Edwina, they say that she...whisper, whisper. How very exciting that must have been.
How romantic and melodramatic is Pompey at midnight and two hours past.
For remember, my chicks, capitalism is not only wrong, it is also very difficult. Very difficult and exasperating indeed is this capitalismus toil that has in it all of the exasperating deviations and incalculabilities of the human factor, that goes to make it in its practical every-day application so much so very much more difficult and exasperating than the simple straightforwardness of the abstractions upon a theme that is all that there is of all that there is of Monsieur Karl.
November 6, 2024
I don't know why I waited 11 years after reading the first of Stevie Smith's three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper, which I enjoyed almost as much as her poetry, to read her second. Anyway, Over the Frontier turns out to be fascinating and profoundly odd even by Smith's standards. The first half is a continuation of Novel on Yellow Paper, following Stevie's alter-ego Pompey Casmilus, secretary to a senior civil servant or possibly financier or both, as she succumbs to melancholy in the wake of her break-up with darling Freddie. Eventually her pal Josephine persuades her that what she needs is six months at a Kurhaus on the German Baltic, and it's shortly after they get there that things take a turn for the oneiric. Pompey is drawn into the orbit of a dashing military man — all this takes place (and the novel was published) just before WWII — and caught up in a spy/adventure yarn in the runup to war, with double agents aplenty among the hotel guests, secret cyphers and midnight rides "over the frontier" into Poland. But it all takes place behind the veil of Smith's nebulous prose, the boundaries between perception, imagination and reality almost totally effaced. The way I read it was that Pompey in the fantasy world of the Kurhaus, surrounded by the ugliness of Nazism and the drums of looming war, is seduced by her own power fantasy, perhaps as a way of finally putting darling Freddie behind her. It's almost impossible to describe, this mix of the personal and political, and I'm not sure if it works or not. But I won't be waiting another 11 years to read The Holiday, her own favourite of her novels, and I'm as convinced as ever of her uniqueness as a writer.
December 9, 2025
I abandoned reading this novel twice, but after reading the prequel 'Novel on Yellow Paper', decided to try reading 'Over the Frontier' (published 1938) a third time and decided that there is a lot to like. Lead character Pompey Casmilus lives in London with her aunt. works for a publisher, moves in literary circles and visits art galleries. After a failed love affair she seems to drift into spying and goes on a mission to Nazi Germany. Events appear to happen to Pompey, beyond her control. She seems perpetually on the verge of tears, despairs of the encroaching militarism, motivated by a clumsy humanitarian impulse. The standard modernist techniques ; reporting the Present as it unravels, describing sensations, thoughts, impressions, as they occur are employed until all turns into a dream sequence. Remarkable work.
March 15, 2023
I struggled with this and in the end gave up just after the second part of the book started, when she got to the Schloss. I found the first part so self indulgent, as stream of consciousness can be, that I was longing to get onto the second, but I found I wasn't interested in that, either, so left it unfinished. Part of my problem was with the prejudice and the snobbery, and I could tell that wasn't going to change. Not for me.
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December 6, 2021I am giving this 0 stars as I didn't make it past about the first 20 pages - I disliked the writing style so much that it went into the box to go to the charity shop.
February 14, 2025
Somewhere between H.D.'s HERmione and Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet lives this deeply strange novel that is also a solid banger.
January 31, 2016
"There is certainly nothing worse than to be not funny enough. indeed it is better to be serious."
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