Canadian author Elizabeth Smart was introduced to the English poet George Barker by Lawrence Durrell at a writers colony in Big Sur in California. After an affair Smart became pregnant and returned to Ottawa to have the baby. The married Barker tried to visit her but her father, a prominent lawyer, notified the American authorities who arrested Barker under the Mann act in 1940.
The Mann act, passed on this day in 1910, is an interesting piece of nominative determinism. Also called the “White-Slave Traffic Act” it was designed to prevent the for-commerce transportation of female prostitutes. The act was famously misused by authorities it its lifetime. Jack Johnson the black boxer was arrested twice and convicted under the act for travelling with a white woman. She later became his wife.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Chuck Berry, Charles Manson and Charlie Chaplin were also arrested under the act.
When the act was employed to frustrate the affair of two writers it spawned novels by both Smart and Barker. Smart wrote the poetry prose novel “By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept”, published in 1945. Barker published “The Dead Seagull” in 1950. The couple went on to have 4 of Barker’s 15 children together.
In a bizarre coincidence another Elizabeth Smart, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, was abducted by Brian David Mitchell and his wife Wanda Ileen Barzee in 2002. Smart escaped nine months later and Mitchell was charged and convicted under the Mann act.
To my Mother; by George Barker
Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
under the window where I often found her
sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for
the lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her –
She is a procession no one can follow after
but be like a little dog following a brass band.
She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
to drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
but lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
that she will move from mourning into morning.
Mindship 