Dear Octopus - Dodie Smith

 
When I was reading Dodie Smith's first volume of autobiography, Look Back With Love, the title which cropped up most (and most intrigued me) was her play Dear Octopus (1938).  She didn't write much about its creation or production, since obviously she didn't write the play during her first eleven years, but she makes allusions now and then.  My attention was grabbed by the mention of family reunions, John Gielguid, and that curious title.  Actually, I'll instantly put you out of your misery, lest you think this is a play set in an aquarium.  The title derives from the speech Nicholas gives at his parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary:

"To the family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to."

Despite being an only child, Dodie Smith seems very able at portraying sibling relationships within large families.  (Indeed, one character claims to be 'crazy about large families', and their husband caustically remarks 'That's because you're an only child.')  Rose and Cassandra always seemed very believable in I Capture the Castle (albeit Thomas rather less so) and Dear Octopus is no different.  The size of the cast, and the various familial and marital relationships, was rather dizzying - but, of course, it would have been rather easier to identify everyone when seeing it on the stage, rather than reading the play.  We discussed reading plays a couple of years ago, and it seems that I am in a minority - although it has to be said that I do prefer reading plays with small casts, rather than the mammoth ensemble of Dear Octopus.

The situation is a tried and tested catalyst for all manner of action: a family reunion.  I don't think there's much point in me going into specifics, but it involves all the expected angles.  A daughter returns after a seven year absence, holding a secret; a sister-in-law holds resentment about a long-ago rejection; siblings compete and misunderstand each other; children try to understand the adult world; the gathering draws further attention to one family member who has recently died.  And, naturally, there is a romance plot threaded through - which culminates rather too neatly, perhaps, but everyone likes a bit of feel-good theatre.

There is plenty in Dear Octopus which does remind one of the insouciance of much of I Capture the Castle - and, indeed, Cassandra's faux-sophistication.  Like this, for example:

MARGERY: Ken'll carry on with anyone who crooks their little finger at him.

HILDA: Don't you mind?

MARGERY: Not in the least.  It's a safety valve.

Young love and young marriages are treated quite flippantly at times, although elsewhere the oncoming war (they must have known it was oncoming?) does crash through this flippancy:

LAUREL: Your father's picture.  He was exactly your age when he was killed. (Suddenly.)  Oh, darling, darling--

HUGH: What?

LAUREL: Sometimes I wish we were quite middle-aged.

HUGH: Good lord, why?

LAUREL: So that you wouldn't have to go if there's another war.

HUGH: It'll take a damn good cause to get me to war.

LAUREL: Oh, you all say that.

But the focal point is not budding romance - it is the security and trust of a fifty-year long marriage.  There is a lovely sense through that the anniversary couple in question (Charles and Dora) can cope with the antics of their family because of the depth of their bond.  For a young(ish) unmarried woman, Smith conveys this very well, and very calmly.

Dear Octopus doesn't reinvent the wheel.  There are a lot of plays in a similar mould, and even with a similar tone, but Smith's construction and balance throughout is so well done that this seems like an exemplar within its crowded genre.  Perhaps it won't overly excite the reader, or transform any lives, but it does its job rather well.  I don't know how often the play is revived now, but you do get a chance to see it, grab the opportunity.  Otherwise, I recommend you track down a copy, and have an entertaining afternoon...

Look Back With Love - Dodie Smith

I am growing very fond of those lovely folk at Slightly Foxed.  Last December I had spotted that they were publishing Dodie Smith's first autobiography, Look Back With Love (1974), and was umming and ahhhing about asking for a review copy... when they offered me one!  Although I'm always flattered to be offered books by any publisher, my heart does a little jump for joy (medically sound, no?) when it's a reprint publisher doing the offering.  And even more so when it's one of these beautiful little Slightly Foxed Editions (I covet the *lot*) - and even more so when it's a title I've wanted to read ever since I first read and loved I Capture the Castle back in 2003.

I was not disappointed.  Look Back With Love is simply a lovely, warming, absorbing book.  It is only the possibility that I may prefer one of her other three autobiographical instalments (think of it; three!) which prevents me adding it to my 50 Books You Must Read list just yet...

You may have gathered from all those volumes of autobiography that Smith doesn't cover her whole life in Look Back With Love.  Indeed, she only gets as far as fourteen by the end of this book, placing it firmly in childhood memoir territory.  I do have a definite fondness for memoirs which focus on, or at least include, childhood - as evinced by my championing of Emma Smith's The Great Western Beach, Angelica Garnett's Deceived With Kindness, Harriet Devine's Being George Devine's Daughter, Terence Frisby's Kisses on a Postcard, Christopher Milne's The Enchanted Places, and one of Slightly Foxed's other recent titles, P.Y. Betts' People Who Say Goodbye.  I especially like them if they cover the Edwardian period - perhaps because that means the subjects will have been adults in the interwar period which I love so dearly.  What links all these autobiographies, besides their recountings of childhood, is that they recount happy childhoods.  That is to say, they all find and express happy moments from within their childhoods, rather than prioritising the miserable or cruel.  Misery memoirs, I'm afraid, will never have a place on my bookcases.  I can understand why people write them - it must be a form of catharsis - but I cannot begin to fathom why people want to read them.

Dodie Smith's family sounds like it was wonderfully fun.  True, her father died in her early childhood, and she was an only child, but these sad circumstances do not seem to have held her back.  She certainly didn't grow up isolated: her widowed mother moved back to her parents' house, and so Dodie grew up surrounded by grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  The aunts gradually married and moved, but three uncles remained bachelors and meant (Smith says) that she never felt the absence of a father.  The dynamics of the family certainly don't seem to be lacking much.  As the only child amidst so many adults, Smith was showered with affection and approval - and no small amount of teasing...

Somehow I knew I must never resent teasing and though I sometimes kicked my uncles' shins in impotent rage, never, never did it make me cry.  Teasing must be accepted as fun.  And I now see it as one of the great blessings bestowed on me by those three uncles whom, even when they became elderly men, I still referred to as 'the boys'.

Smith's autobiography is not a string of momentous occasions, really, but a continuous, welcoming stream of memory.  Of course there are individual anecdotes, but the overall impression I got was of a childhood gradually being unveiled before us, with stories and impressions threaded subtly into what feels like a complete picture.  I was mostly struck by how accurate Smith's memory seems to be:

All the memories I have so far described are crystal clear in my mind; I see them almost like scenes on the stage, each one lit by its own particular light: sunlight, twilight, flickering firelight, charmless gaslight or the, to me, dramatic light of a carried taper.

This particular comment is actually an apology for the fact that, for recollections before she turned seven, Smith cannot recall exact chronology.  Well!  I have come to realise that my own memory is rather shoddy.  I remember strikingly little about my childhood - or, indeed, about any of my past.  If family and friends talk about an event, there's a good 50/50 chance that it'll come back to me - but if I were to sit down and try to write an autobiography, I think I'd come unstuck on about p.5.  I just can't remember very much, at least not without prompts.  Curious.  But it makes me all the more impressed when writers like Smith seem effortlessly to delve into their past and convey it so wonderfully - especially since Smith was in her late 70s when she wrote this memoir.

With memoirs, I seem especially drawn to people (like Harriet Devine) who grew up amongst theatrical folk, people (like Irene Vanbrugh) who became actors, or (like Felicity Kendal) both.  There's always been a part of me that wishes I'd grown up alongside actors and theatre managers.  Although I have no genuine aspirations to be an actor, I'm endlessly fascinated by the world of the stage, especially before 1950.  Well, although Smith's relatives were not connected with the theatre professionally, several were keen amateurs, and some of my many delights in Look Back With Love were Smith's first adventures upon the stage - especially the ad-libbing.

These sections were all the more enjoyable because Smith made frequent reference to her later career as a playwright.  (I've only read one of her plays - her first, published under a pseudonym - but am now keen to read more.)  When I wrote about P.Y. Betts' People Who Say Goodbye I commented that it was as though her childhood had been hermetically sealed.  Not once did she introduce her later life, or make links across the decades.  This worked fine for me, since I'd never heard of Betts before, and was happy to take her memoir on her terms.  Since I came to Look Back With Love with an extant interest in Dodie Smith, I've have been disgruntled if she hadn't made these connections between stages in her life (although, tchuh, she didn't mention I Capture the Castle.)

I keep saying that different things from this book were my favourite part... well, that's because I loved so much of it.  But I think, honestly and truly, my favourite element was Smith's ability to write about houses.  I love houses.  Not just to live in (they're handy for that) but as subjects for novels, autobiographies, TV redecoration programmes...  Chuck me a novel where the house is central, and I'm in.  Write something like Ashcombe and I'm delirious.  So I loved the way Smith conveyed the various houses she lived in.  Not that she wrote in huge detail about decor or style, although these were mentioned - more that, somehow, she manages to make the reader feel as though they were also residents in the houses, looking around each room with the familiarity of those who share Smith's memories.  I can't pinpoint an excerpt which made me feel like this; it permeates the book.

Most of Look Back With Love is (as the title suggests) lit by the glow of nostalgia.  The humour tends to be gentle, intertwined with the fond remembrance of innocent times past, rather than knockabout comedy, but there was one excerpt which made me laugh out loud.  It's part of Smith's tales of schooldays:

My mother felt the elocution lessons were well worth the extra she paid for them, but she was not pleased when Art became an extra, too.  Drawing, plain and simple, was in the curriculum but, after we had been drawing for a year or so, the visiting mistress would bend over one's shoulder and say quietly, "I think, dear, you may now tell your mother you are ready for Shading."  This, said my mother, merely meant she had to pay half a guinea extra for me to smother my clothes with charcoal; but it would have been a bad social error to refuse Shading once one was ready for it, so she gave in.  I then spent a full term on a bunch of grapes - the drawing mistress brought them with her twice and then we had to remember them; they were tiring fast.  After a few terms of Shading pupils were permitted to tell their mothers they were "ready for Oils", but mothers must have been unresponsive for I can recall only one painting pupil.  She had a very small canvas on a very large easel and was generally to be seen staring helplessly at three apples and a Japanese fan.  After many weeks I heard the drawing mistress say to her brightly, "One sometimes finds the best plan is to start all over again."

Lovely, no?

This has gone on for quite long enough, so I'm going to finish off with a characteristic piece of Dodie's writing.  The setting, ladies and gents, is the senior (mark it, senior) dancing class.

There were so many superb boys that I did not see how I could be without a partner, but I was soon to realise that there were two girls too many and I was always one of them.  Few of the boys were younger than fifteen.  I was only nine and small for my age, but I could never understand why they were not interested in me - I felt so very interesting.

This is the rhythm which is maintained throughout Look Back With Love: young Dodie always thought she was very interesting, and old Dodie looks back across the years with the same level of interest, albeit now more detached.  There is every possibility that this level of self-importance in a child would have been irritating for those around her - Smith freely confesses that she used to recite and perform at the merest suggestion of the drop of a hat - but, from the adult Smith, it pulls the reader along with the same happy enthusiasm.  Smith's childhood was not wildly unusual, but the way she is able to describe it elevates Look Back With Love above other childhood memoirs.  Everything, everyone, is capable of interesting Dodie Smith (adult and infant), and this makes her the most fascinating subject of all.  It is rare that I am bereft to finish a book.  A mere handful of titles have had this effect on me in the past five years.  But Look Back With Love is one - as I turned the final page, I longed for more; I longed to know why she made such dark hints about her stepfather; how her playwriting took off; how she experienced the theatre of the 1930s... thank goodness there are three more volumes to read!


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

Well, I was going to do a round-up of other bloggers who've written about Look Back With Love, but I can only find one who has!  But they say it's quality not quantity, and you couldn't do better than Elaine's review over on Random Jottings:  "Look back with Love is a lovely, lovely, lovely book.  It is charming, it is delightful, it is beguiling, it made me laugh and it made me cry and I adored every single word of it and was very sad to finish it. [...]"

Blooming Smith

Following your recent advice and comments, tonight I'm going to blog about a novel which is very difficult to find at an affordable price, or indeed to find at all. Having re-read I Capture the Castle a while ago, I was intrigued to see what else Dodie Smith had to offer. I asked around, and general consensus was to look out for The New Moon with the Old or, failing that, The Town in Bloom. I can't afford £20-£30 for novels I know nothing about, and Oxfordshire libraries didn't have The New Moon with the Old, so I went for The Town in Bloom (1965).


The novel kicks off with a reunion between friends known as the Mouse, Moll Byblow, Madam Lily de Luxe and Zelle, reminiscing about their days living in a 'club' together in the 1920s, going through turbulent youthful events and trying to find work in the theatre. It's now over four decades later. But... Zelle is absent, as she has been at all their five-yearly reunions. But is the shabby old woman across the road, who reminds 'Mouse' (the otherwise unnamed narrator) 'of the crones said to have sat knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror', actually Zelle? And, if so, has she donned a disguise, or have 45 years apart led her to destitution?

And suddenly the novel flings us back those 45 years, to Mouse leaving her aunt's house and arriving in London, at that club. We see her first experiences through the lens of her journal, which feels like we're in familiar I Capture the Castle territory...

I am here at last! I arrived this afternoon, at Marylebone Station so I only had a short taxi drive - I wished it could have been longer as it was thrilling to be driving through London on my own. And it was such a lovely day. The trees here are further out than they are at home. Home! I haven't one any more. That thought doesn't make me feel sad. It makes me feel wonderfully free.

Mouse, despite her nickname, isn't particularly timid, and isn't all that different from Cassandra of Smith's more famous novel. Both are young and inexperienced, but oddly confident and more worldly than they seem. Both are incredibly introspective, yet manage not to be annoyingly so - although Mouse gets rather closer to 'annoying' than Cassandra does. But while Cassandra is isolated in a highly romanticised setting in rural Suffolk, Mouse is flung into the maelstrom of the theatre. Oh, and the journal fades away after a few pages - being replaced with first-person narrative (so she is hardly ever called 'Mouse' in the book) but from the distance of 45 years.

I love books about the theatre, fact or fiction, especially if it's about theatre of the 1920s or 1930s. So I lapped up the first half of The Town in Bloom - which is set in a theatre run by actor-manager Rex Crossway, last in a line of theatrical Crossways. Dodie Smith was herself both an actress and playwright (it was as pseudonymous playwright C. L. Anthony that she first found fame) so she writes this section in an informed and entertaining manner. Mouse launches herself into his world through an impromptu audition for The School for Scandal, playing both Sir Peter and Lady Teazle.

I played both of them. First, as Sir Peter, I looked to my right and used a deep, rich voice. Then, looking left, I became Lazy Teazle and used a lighter voice than was natural to me. Backwards and forwards from right to left I went, speaking fast because I feared Mr. Crossway would stop me. I particularly wanted to reach what was, for me, the high moment of the scene, when Sir Peter tells Lady Teazle she had no taste when she married him. Lady T. then goes into fits of laughter - that is, she did in my interpretation. And never had I laughed better, louder or longer than I did for Mr. Crossway. I checked my laughter with some very amusing gasps and continued the scene. Still Mr. Crossway did not interrupt me. So I went on until Lady Teazle's exit when I sketched a pert curtsy to Sir Peter - and then made a very deep one to Mr. Crossway.

It was a brave, and a delicious, decision on Dodie Smith's part to make Mouse no prodigy - she is an appalling actress, and no amount of advice from Crossway can make her anything else. So, instead, she starts working in one of the theatre offices with Eve Lester, a kind, sensible, and wise woman in an environment of those who are often kind, but rarely the rest.

The backstage goings-on of a theatre fascinate me, and I loved all the minutiae of rehearsals, editing, understudies etc. - and a very amusing scene where Mouse takes it upon herself to replace the ill leading lady halfway through a play, completely changing the interpretation, and rather ruining the whole affair. All written rather cleverly, and Mouse's combination of naivety and knowingness make for a fun read.

But then...

Yes, Mouse falls in love with Mr. Crossway. Of course she does. At which point The Town in Bloom becomes significantly less interesting, while she repeatedly tries to seduce Mr. Crossway into an affair. I know there are plenty of real life relationships with big age gaps which work well, but I find them almost universally disturbing in novels - even up to and including Emma and Mr. Knightley. This is the sort of affair where Mr. Crossway laughingly calls her 'my dear' a lot, and she pontificates on how she will never love anybody else, not as long as she lives. And so on and so forth.

There are a few more twists to the tale, and her flatmates do play more significant roles than this review suggests, but I'm afraid The Town in Bloom turned into a rather tedious novel. There is enough momentum from the first half - and the lingering question from the prologue of what happened to Zelle - but the re-focus upon a rather tawdry romantic storyline is significantly duller than the theatrical focus of the earlier section to the novel.

In this respect, as in several others, The Town in Bloom is something of a pale shadow of I Capture the Castle, and I can quite see why nobody has bothered to reprint it for a while. I wish Smith had had the courage to leave out the romance/affair/adultery storyline altogether - this would have been an infinitely better novel without it, and would also have been rather further away from I Capture the Castle territory, and thus easier to appraise on its merits, not judged on its comparative demerits.


And not a dalmatian in sight.

Recapturing

Wow, thanks for all your comments yesterday - that was quite impressive, and every single author was recommended to me... well, thanks for that! Someone (anonymous) did say that they suspected I'd only read Brideshead Revisited by Waugh - but, in fact, I have not read that, and I have read The Loved One, Decline and Fall, and Put Out More Flags - so there you go! I must confess, composing this list did make me realise how many authors I have sampled. But that would be a rather more self-congratulatory list to make. Instead I shall challenge you COWARDS who weren't going to make your own lists - hie to it! (Heehee...!)

I'm having a mini-reader's-block at the moment, and seem to be mostly re-reading books for the past few weeks. Not sure quite what the cause is, but I daresay the remedy is Jane Austen - but for now I'm content going over some familiar ground.

I've been meaning to re-read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1949) for ages and, as I mentioned the other day, my book group has been reading it this month. It catapaulted it up my must-reread list, and I'm delighted that I did - since I was a bit worried that it might not work now that I am much older than Cassandra. I was 17 or 18 when I originally read it - so perhaps not the age at which most people become life-long-lovers of this delightful novel - but it was Cassandra's age.

For those who don't know the story, Cassandra lives in a castle with her older sister Rose, younger brother Thomas, father known as Mortmain (their surname), stepmother Topaz, and sort-of-servant Stephen. She famously opens the novel "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" - for this is where she starts recording her life in a diary, trying to capture the people around her. There is an atmosphere of a fairy-tale permeating the book - not surprisingly, given the family live in a castle. Cassandra thinks back to the first time the family saw it:

All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn't enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last we came to a neglected signpost with TO BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in it at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back - I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to go back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was - but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.

But it's now a rather tumble-down castle, falling apart, and from which most of the furniture has been sold. Mortmain wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Jacob Wrestling (think Ulysses, in terms of being experimental and avant-garde) but the proceeds have dwindled after fourteen years (including a little spate in jail, for having threatened his - now dead - wife with a cake knife). The family thus live in poverty - but although they bemoan and bewail this, it never feels quite real - it is never meant to. They have to share towels, and can barely afford to eat - but that fairy-tale feeling prevents anything feeling too serious.

Cassandra does her job of 'capturing the castle' so well that I'm going to find it tricky to detail the characters quickly... but I'll do my best. Mortmain is absent-minded and idle; Topaz idolises him and communes with nature a lot; Topaz hankers after finer things in life, and will do much to achieve them; Stephen is subservient and besotted with Cassandra; Thomas more or less loiters in the background.

Of course they are all rather more complex than that, but you have to meet them first-hand to appreciate them, so we'll move on to Cassandra, the narrator. And what a wonderful narrator she is. Through her eyes, we see all the events of family life - especially the arrival of American brothers Simon and Neil to the large nearby house, the estate of which includes the castle. Their arrival is the catalyst for change at the castle, as Rose determines to marry Simon, whether or not she loves him (and she hopes she does) to help her family escape their destitution. Only after Simon and Rose have got engaged does Cassandra realise she has fallen in love with Simon herself...

In Cassandra, Dodie Smith has created someone quite extraordinary. The basic plot of I Capture the Castle is not the stuff of the finest literary mind - crossed wires; crossed lovers, and so forth. But because they are focalised through Cassandra, they are fascinating. Somehow Smith manages to present a teenage girl in love whose viewpoint is not remotely irritating - instead it is credible, and raises sympathy rather than annoyance in the reader. I was lucky enough not to fall in love until after I was a teenager, so I didn't experience all the woes of angsty, unrequited teenage love which Cassandra endures - so I cannot really empathise, nor say how realistic Cassandra's emotions are, but I do know that she is a wholly engaging heroine.

I love her for her slightly skewed view upon life, and the slightly odd, inexperienced things she says. Some examples: 'I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them.' She labels champagne 'lovely, rather like very good ginger ale without the ginger.' And perhaps her wisest piece of advice - 'No bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.'

Dodie Smith is very clever, and she incorporates in the novel the criticism which might be directed at Cassandra - she overhears Simon telling Neil that he thinks her 'consciously naive'. It is the perfect description for part of her personality (she is mostly, however, unconsciously naive) - but by including it like this, Dodie Smith makes the reader leap to Cassandra's defence, and love her all the more. Spending the whole book in her company, it is important that we do love her - and I do.

I Capture the Castle is, incidentally, the only diary-style novel I've read which actually felt like a diary. Cassandra often breaks off entries because something has happened, or starts writing by saying she has something exciting to relate, but will try and contain herself. Much as I love books like Diary of a Provincial Lady and Diary of a Nobody, they both strike me as a little unrealistic - when on earth do they actually write their journals?

But that's just the icing on the cake. I Capture the Castle is almost perfect in every way - Dodie Smith is not a great prose stylist, perhaps, and it's interesting to see her write undisparagingly about Mortmain, who is essentially a Modernist author - which Smith obviously isn't. But I Capture the Castle is cosy, amusing, warm - and yet not dull or predictable or everyone-is-happy-all-the-time. It's like a fairy-tale brought into the 20th century, and not allowed to be either saccharine or gloomy. Instead, it is just right. Perhaps I should recommend it to Goldilocks...

P.S. the film is brilliant too. Perhaps I'll write about that properly someday.