Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "dodie-smith"

Dear Blog,

I have two large boxes in our basement filled with the journals I kept from age 10 until my mid-twenties. When I moved back to North America several years ago and retrieved this box from my parents' attic, I spent a long afternoon reading over my childhood and adolescence, rolling my eyes, laughing, and shuddering at me-of-the-past. There are three years of little hardcover notebooks filled with snarky observations in an ugly ballpoint scrawl. When I turned thirteen I started using big fat spiral notebooks and writing nicely with a fountain pen, so the journals become much easier to read. My style changed, too, becoming suddenly quite flowery and British-sounding. I was writing longer entries, trying to "capture" people and places and give events a fictionalized feel. The reason for the change was obvious and I laughed aloud in the attic realizing what it was: I had read Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle for the first time.

This was by far my favourite book in my early teens (also a great read for adults, like any really good YA). It is presented as the journal of Cassandra Mortmain, middle child of the eccentric Mortmain family, who live in destitution in a Victorian house attached to a castle in the countryside near London. It tells the story of their changing fortunes when their rich, young American landlord moves to England to claim his estate after his grandfather's death. The beautiful oldest child, Rose, who cannot bear their poverty any longer, sets her sights on marrying him. The story starts out (as Cassandra notes) a sort of cross between Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, but carries on past the engagement and what might have been the "happy ever after" in a very different sort of story (for example, a Jane Austen / Charlotte Bronte book) to explore all the complications of real life and real love.

Here is Cassandra on happy endings, which this book is far too good to offer up in any pat way:

Oh, I'd love the clothes and the wedding. I am not sure I should like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them, and one obviously has to try them sooner or later. What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to. Of course no life is perfectly happy - Rose's children will probably get ill, the servants may be difficult, perhaps dear Mrs. Cotton will prove to be the teeniest fly in the ointment. (I should like to know what fly was originally in what ointment.) There are hundreds of worries and even sorrows that may come along, but - I think what I really mean is that Rose won't be wanting things to happen. She will want things to stay just as they are. She will never have the fun of hoping something wonderful and exciting may be just round the corner.

It made me think about wanting, and how differently we want and hope when we are young and every door is still open (or, many of them, if we are lucky). I used to take long walks in my teens and early twenties imagining the places I would go and the life I would have - it was different every time of course. I still have a long list of places I want to go and I still want things for myself - mainly time to write and money to travel - but something has shifted and now most of my wants, the really big wants, are for my children. Hopes and dreams for my own life are narrower and more practical. I've closed so many doors. And one has to, eventually (or maybe one doesn't - but the desire for children and perhaps the connected desire to stop thinking / dreaming about myself is a whole other post for another time). In any case, the book deals beautifully with dissatisfaction and wanting and the sense of anything-is-possible that (can) characterize youth. In a way, Cassandra is content in their dire straits and enjoys entertaining hopes for the future, until she falls in love and wanting becomes something altogether different for her. It is as authentic and painful and powerful a depiction of first love as I've ever read, and Cassandra is one of the most likable, enjoyable narrators in any book anywhere ever.

Three more observations about I Capture The Castle :

1. I am really interested in the way different authors write about children and teenagers wrestling with and questioning religion. Dodie Smith writes wonderfully about Cassandra's own faith / lack of faith. Cassandra is not quite an atheist - she goes to church on occasion, and she prays, but she has no certain and definite faith. Her prayers are a bit like wishing on a possibility. The vicar in the book talks very beautifully to Cassandra about faith, about religion as an art form, perhaps the greatest art, "an extension of the communion all other arts attempt." Later, considering this, Cassandra writes: I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretence that things are real, due to one's longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art - and then I had a glimpse of how religion really can cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful.

It's an interesting passage (I think) and made an impression on me as a teen, because it seemed to separate religion from real faith in a way. It was sort of like the way an atheist might choose to be religious. And in fact Cassandra does not convert, but her thoughts on religion (and the vicar's too) are worth reading and beautifully expressed.

2. I have been reading a lot of YA lately and was struck but just how slow this book is, comparatively. Not that there isn't narrative tension - Dodie Smith is a master of it. But she takes her time. She is not constantly driving the plot forwards. She takes us on long journeys inside Cassandra's thoughts. She "captures" the Castle and the countryside and the village and the characters vividly and at length. When Cassandra rides her bike to the train station, we get the whole bike ride: her thoughts, the weather, the scenery. YA books in particular tend to be page-turners these days. It is rare to get such a long and languid book. I'm not sure exactly what I want to say about that. The old fogey in me wonders if it isn't that our attention span is suffering ( I Capture the Castle was published in 1949). Books now have to compete with television, with the internet, with the endless click click click on to something else as soon as your attention wanders a bit. I wonder if we read differently now - if a book really has to hook a reader and not let go in order to keep them. I Capture the Castle is a slow and quite "literary" book (and in a sense I just mean that the characters themselves are very literary-minded; there are long scenes of Cassandra taking walks with other characters and talking about books and poems - it assumes a well-read reader, though it does not require one). I wonder if a book like this could be published in its current form, now, and it makes me sad to think perhaps not. But maybe I am just being a grumpy pessimist. I do love page-turners, too, but reading this I was startled to realize just how slow it seemed, in a good way.

3. I've sometimes wondered (and I know my parents did) why I was such a train wreck in my teens. I came from a sane and happy home with two parents who loved us and each other and didn't even yell. The awful conclusion I've come to is that I was bored and wanted something exciting to write about in my journal. Cassandra's "journal" was full of angst and event. I wanted my story to be A Story, too. I succeeded in that, in any case - my journal does become much more interesting in my teens. I was not, of course, modeling myself on Cassandra, an incredibly sensible, kind, bookish virgin in unusual and interesting circumstances. I just modeled my writing on hers (via Dodie Smith). For a teenager leading a very conventional life and trying to create her own "interesting circumstances," the options are limited and certain kinds of misbehavior are an easy (rather unimaginative) way to stir things up. My journal turns very Cassandra Mortmain just as I start to experiment with being a Bad Apple. There, I've said it: I blame Dodie Smith for all the worry I caused my parents!

Well. Another post perhaps, on whether books can really be Bad Influences (we'll see where that post ends up but for now I'll say I think no, but it's a complicated no, and depends a bit on what you mean by influence, and what you mean by bad).

Yours, blaming-beloved-authors-for-my-mistakes,

Catherine

Dear Blog,

I’m trying to rewrite the opening of my work-in-progress, which has me thinking about great openings to books I’ve loved. Like Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” which opens with the answer to the who-dunnit, setting up a brilliant, complicated “why-dunnit” (ripped that off from someone but I’ve no idea who so can’t credit). Or like “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” – you know from that first line that you are in the hands of a master. The first line, first paragraph, first page of a book will ideally offer a voice that the reader can fall in love with and, of course, stay in love with for all the pages to follow. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in my own effort, and may find myself rewriting it again, and again, but since it’s on my mind, here are seven openings to books (picked quickly and randomly off my shelves just now) that equaled love-at-first-glance, for me.

Imaginary Girls – Nova Ren Suma

Ruby said I’d never drown – not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone’s bottomless backyard pool. She said she’d seen me hold my breath underwater for minutes at a time, but to hear her tell it you’d think she meant days. Long enough to live down there if needed, to skim the seafloor collecting shells and shiny soda caps, looking up every so often for the rescue lights, even if they took forever to come.

It sounded impossible, something no one would believe if anyone other than Ruby were the one to tell it. But Ruby was right: The body they found that night wouldn’t be, couldn’t be mine.


Bones of Faerie – Janni Lee Simner

I had a sister once. She was a beautiful baby, eyes silver as moonlight off the river at night. From the hour of her birth she was long-limbed and graceful, faerie-pale hair clear as glass from Before, so pale you could almost see through to the soft skin beneath.

My father was a sensible man. He set her out on the hillside that very night, though my mother wept and even old Jayce argued against it. “If the faerie folk want her, let them take her,” Father said. “If not, the fault’s theirs for not claiming one of their own.” He left my sister, and he never looked back.

I did. I crept out before dawn to see whether the faeries had really come. They hadn’t, but some wild creature had. One glance was all I could take. I turned and ran for home, telling no one where I’d been.


I Capture The Castle – Dodie Smith

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.
…
It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing – though she obviously can’t see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but have a neatish face.


Goodbye Without Leaving – Laurie Colwin

During my career as a backup singer with Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes, it often occurred to me that this was not a lifetime occupation and that someday I would have to figure out my rightful place in society.
I did not want to think about these things: I wanted to get out on stage and dance. The Shakelys thought it was cool to hire a white Shakette every once in a while, and for a while I was it.

Previous to that I had been a graduate student, sitting in the library at the University of Chicago getting older and older, trying to think of a topic for my doctoral dissertation and, once having found the topic, trying to write about it. I was an English major and I intended to write something that would turn into a book entitled “Jane Austen and the War of the Sexes.” Another thing I did not like to think about was how much I did not want to write about this or any other thing.


The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.


Goblin Fruit – from Lips Touch, Three Times – Laini Taylor

There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.

Them.

The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.

Like Kizzy.


And in terms of a hook to grab the reader with, I think the opening to R.J. Anderson’s “Ultraviolet” cannot be beat:

Ultraviolet – R.J. Anderson

Once upon a time there was a girl who was special. Her hair flowed like honey and her eyes were blue as music. She grew up bright and beautiful, with deft fingers, a quick mind, and a charm that impressed everyone she met. Her parents adored her, her teachers praised her, and her schoolmates admired her many talents. Even the oddly shaped birthmark on her upper arm seemed like a sign of some great destiny.

This is not her story.

Unless you count the part where I killed her.

I should add that these are all books that live up to their killer openings, and that, I suppose, is the real challenge. Feel free to share favorite openings, here or on my Feel free to share favorite openings, here or on my facebook page.

Yours, beginning again,
Catherine