‘The Small-Girl’s Proust’

One of the worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel became a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Capture the Castle, her coming-of-age story told through the diary of a teenage girl, had just made the New York Times top ten fiction list. The American Literary Guild, which chose it as the November book of the month, ordered more than half a million copies and sent her a $42,000 check.

“Anyone reading through my press-cuttings book would believe the novel had had a great critical success and a great commercial one,” Smith wrote in her diary that December. “But the fact remains that [I] have been bitterly disappointed; and the weeks which followed publication were amongst the most unhappy in my life.” The book’s popularity confirmed her greatest fear: that, for all her effort, it would be received not as a literary work but as middlebrow. The critics who mattered had passed it “over as lightweight and unimportant.” She stopped eating and retreated to bed.

Smith may be best known for her children’s book The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), but I Capture the Castle, now considered a Young Adult classic, a very English comedy, a touching romance, and, as it has been repeatedly called, a comfort read, remains her most charismatic work. Yet it has never received the critical treatment Smith hoped for. The cultural conflict that defined its reception—between “lightweight and unimportant” middlebrow writing and the highbrow literary fiction that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s—is one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself. Beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit, as well as an affecting portrait of the artist as a young girl.

Dorothy Gladys Smith, originally nicknamed “Dodo,” grew up in Manchester with her mother, maternal grandparents, three uncles, two aunts, and two maids. She recalls her chaotic home with affection in the first of her five volumes of memoir, Look Back with Love (1974). When she was eight her grandmother gave her a shilling exercise book (“very thick, with a shiny black cover that smelt inspiring—I licked it occasionally”) and she used it to begin her first piece of fiction, in which “the heroine had dancing eyes and the only touch of originality was in the spelling.”

In her teens she wrote short stories and plays and acted in local productions. After leaving school, she trained as an actor at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, in her early twenties, made just enough money from small roles to survive. (As Valerie Grove writes in her colorful biography Dear Dodie, Smith lived in a Marylebone performers’ hostel on a diet of Heinz tinned spaghetti, baked beans, and a weekly egg.) At twenty-seven she gave up on acting and took a job in the department store Heal’s, where she had an affair with the proprietor, the British designer Ambrose Heal. He used his London society contacts to drum up interest in her first staged play, Autumn Crocus, written under the pseudonym C. L. Anthony, which premiered in 1931.

It was well received. Nineteen journalists turned up to interview Smith; the headline on the Evening News billboards read “SHOPGIRL WRITES PLAY.” The production brought her sudden wealth. She was invited to join the all-male Dramatists’ Club and became part of London’s theater scene, befriending Noël Coward, John Gielgud, and the impresario Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. She wrote and staged a further five plays, including her biggest success, Call It a Day, and her best-known dramatic work, Dear Octopus. These lighthearted depictions of human relationships, full of wry observations of middle-class life, gave her a reputation as a dramatist of slightly twee comedies aimed at women; the critic J. C. Trewin called Dear Octopus her “cozy corner on the domestic-sentimental.”

In early 1939 Smith fled with her husband Alec Beesley, a conscientious objector, from London to California. She spent the war years unhappy in the “pitiless” sunshine and longing for her Essex cottage; to console herself she wrote a novel about a crumbling castle she had once visited.

Set in 1935, I Capture the Castle consists of the diary entries of Cassandra Mortmain, the middle child of a celebrated modernist novelist with chronic writer’s block. In her journal Cassandra records her hopeless, eccentric family’s efforts to survive without an income in their drafty and unfurnished castle on an estate in Suffolk. Her father James’s reputation rests on Jacob’s Wrestling, a formally experimental work “without forerunners or successors.” But he stopped writing when Cassandra was five years old, after a three-month stint in prison, where he was sent when a neighbor witnessed him brandishing a knife at his wife as he was about to cut a cake. Cassandra describes the incident in the first few pages of the novel as “ludicrous” rather than alarming. Three years later her mother dies “from perfectly natural causes.”

The family now consists of Cassandra, her beautiful, self-absorbed twenty-one-year-old sister Rose, her fifteen-year-old brother Thomas (“all homework and appetite”), their father, and their stepmother of three years, a pretentious but caring artist’s model named Topaz (“There is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that”). Hungry and cold, they live in cheerful denial about their dire circumstances.

Joining them in the castle is Stephen, the eighteen-year-old orphaned son of their former maid. He works for the family for no pay and has an all-consuming crush on Cassandra, who thinks he is “very fair and noble-looking but his expression is just a fraction daft.” When two rich American brothers, Simon and Neil, who have inherited the estate, arrive in the village, the sisters imagine one of them sweeping in to marry Rose and rescue them all from destitution.

Smith kept extensive diaries on looseleaf paper, page-numbered, which now reside in her papers at the Howard Gottlieb Research Center at Boston University.¹ Her wartime entries—written in a cramped, tense hand—are filled with homesickness and guilt. On Christmas Day 1941, she is surprised to note that something “kept my mind off England, lately—and even, a little, of the war”: she was immersed in “my semi-novel, I Capture the Castle,” of which she had written around 20,000 words.

But soon she set the manuscript aside, distracted by news of the conflict. Only in 1945 did she take up the novel again; that August she rushed through the last chapters. She was anxious about its literary merit: “I can’t make out if the whole will be rather original and charming or childish and hot-making” (that is, embarrassing). She told friends the novel, which she worked on “with a care that would not have disgraced Flaubert,” was like the pulpy romance magazine “Peg’s Paper written by the small-girl’s Proust.” She felt Proust and Joyce were its biggest influences—“strange forefathers,” she admitted, for a romance novel.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a culture war raged on both sides of the Atlantic: the “battle of the brows.” The late-Victorian terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” emerged from the fashionable pseudoscience of phrenology, which posited that a larger forehead indicated a larger brain and a more intelligent mind—a myth used to justify all manner of white supremacist beliefs. The terms had grown popular in discussions of culture at the turn of the century, particularly in the United States. Soon they became pejoratives. In his 1915 essay “Highbrow and Lowbrow,” the American critic Van Wyck Brooks contrasted “literature” with the lowbrow “best-seller,” which amounted to “richly rewarded trash.”

In 1925 the British satirical magazine Punch responded to the creation of the BBC—with its commitment to “inform, educate and entertain” the British public—by coining the word “middlebrow” for “people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.” In a posthumously published letter to a reviewer, Virginia Woolf proudly declared herself a highbrow: “If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead.” In Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Q. D. Leavis deemed book clubs like the American Book of the Month (founded in 1926) and the Literary Guild (founded in 1927) “instruments not for improving taste but for standardising it at the middlebrow level.”

Almost as soon as these cultural distinctions had been drawn, they took on gendered connotations. The majority of Book of the Month club members were female; in Britain women rented twice as much popular fiction from “twopenny libraries” as men. In a 1936 essay George Orwell noted that “the average novel”—that is “the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff”—“seems to exist only for women.” In their work of social history The Long Week-End (1940), Robert Graves and Alan Hodge reflected that “as the Twenties lapsed into the Thirties…the low-brow public in Great Britain gradually grew up” and “the mezzo-brow ‘Book of the Month’…became (through the Twopenny Libraries) the shop-girls’ reading.” 

Smith’s anxieties about the literary status of her book were not incidental to its narrative. This is a book about literature, asking what makes a work “literary” rather than middlebrow or, God forbid, pretentious. As the critic Victoria Stewart has noted, two types of writing are set against each other in I Capture the Castle: the dutiful realism of Cassandra’s diary, with its conventionally “feminine” concerns (family relationships, domestic problems, romance, the private emotions of a seventeen-year-old girl), and her father’s high modernism, which mixes genres (“fiction, philosophy and poetry”) and undertakes experiments like a “ladder chapter… printed so that it actually looks like a ladder.”² James Mortmain is modeled on Joyce: he is one of “the forerunners of post-war literature…a link in the chain of writers who have been obsessed by form.” It has been “a good twelve years” since he was last published, meaning that Jacob’s Wrestling would have appeared around the same time as Ulysses. Now he spends hours absorbed in middlebrow culture—children’s stories, detective novels, comics, and crosswords—and mutters to himself about literary form: “Design, deduction, reconstruction—symbol—pattern and problem—search for ever unfolding—enigma eternal.”

The title of Smith’s novel calls to mind not only Cassandra’s efforts at literary representation but also a military battle or chess game. Father and daughter are locked in a literary power struggle that plays out both on the page and in the castle: at one point he physically throws her out of his study; by the end of the novel, she has lured him out. After James reads one of Cassandra’s stories, she remembers, “he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.” At first she follows his advice:

I am writing this journal partly to practice my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel—I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought.

The earliest entries are unselfconscious, blending breezy confidence, humor, and rose-tinted depictions of an artistic family in genteel poverty. These scenes are some of the book’s most memorable: Cassandra dyeing her hands green in the bath, the sisters making wishes on the stone gargoyle above the kitchen fireplace or whispering in bed about Austen and Charlotte Brontë and their rich American neighbors.

But soon Cassandra begins to grapple with problems of perspective and remembrance. Looking through a window at her family, “they seem quite different, a bit the way rooms seen in looking-glasses do. I can’t get the feeling into words—it slipped away when I tried to capture it.” A dinner party at the Americans’ grand Scoatney Hall “glows in my memory like a dark picture with a luminous centre—candlelight and shining floors and the night pressing against the black windows.” Toward the book’s end Cassandra has a Proustian recollection on hearing the “tinkling chime” of a clock that belonged to her late mother:

And then my mind’s eye saw her face—not the photograph of it which is what I always see when I think of her, but her face as it was. I saw her light brown hair and freckled skin—I had forgotten until then that she had freckles. And that same instant, I heard her voice in my head—after all these years of not being able to hear it.

Gradually the tone shifts. Simon becomes engaged to her sister, but Cassandra falls in love with him in spite of herself. As she ruminates on her blossoming feelings, grows detached from her childhood pleasures, and imagines a life beyond the castle, she has to learn to write in a new way. By the end of the novel, she notes: “I don’t intend to go on with this journal; I have grown out of wanting to write about myself.”

In the novel’s farcical crescendo, having taken literally the idea that a psychoanalyst would put her father “back in prison” to cure his writers’ block, Cassandra locks him in the castle tower. He emerges with a first page that contains a single sentence (“THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT”) in “large block capitals—badly formed ones, such as a child makes when learning to write.” This is to be the start of Mortmain’s groundbreaking novel—a Portrait of the Artist–style depiction of the birth of the writer’s consciousness, from childhood, that is also a series of puzzles for the reader to solve—and a literary movement, “Enigmatism.”

Skepticism toward the avant-garde was something of a hallmark of “middlebrow” fiction of the period, which specialized, in the scholar Nicola Humble’s words, in “gleefully mocking highbrow intellectual pretensions.” But, as Humble notes, by the 1940s high modernism was “being taken more seriously by the middlebrow,” allowing Smith to “borrow” its devices and represent it with “the sting out.”³ Stewart argues that “Smith does not simply parody or devalue modernism.” Indeed, the novel comes to suggest that Cassandra’s writing has more in common with her father’s than it first appears—even that they might have equal literary standing. Her book, too, circles many of the central preoccupations of modernist authors: how to pin down thoughts, sensations, and momentary experiences on the page; how to register the pressures of the past and the future on the present. On Midsummer Day “the castle seemed to be mine in a way it never had been before,” she writes:

The day seemed specially to belong to me; I even had a feeling that I owned myself more than I usually do. I became very conscious of all my movements—if I raised my arm I looked at it wonderingly, thinking, “That is mine!” And I took pleasure in moving, both in the physical effort and in the touch of the air—it was most queer how the air did seem to touch me, even when it was absolutely still. All day long I had a sense of great ease and spaciousness. And my happiness had a strange, remembered quality as though I had lived it before. Oh, how can I recapture it—that utterly right, homecoming sense of recognition? It seems to me now that the whole day was like an avenue leading to a home I had loved once but forgotten, the memory of which was coming back so dimly, so gradually, as I wandered along, that only when my home at last lay before me did I cry: “Now I know why I have been happy!”… On and on I wander, beneath the vaulted roof of branch and leaf…and all the time, the avenue is yesterday, that long approach to beauty.

Just as she approaches the ineffable, she gives up, ending with a shrug. “Images in the mind, how strange they are…”

It was a challenge for Smith to channel her literary ambitions through a teenager’s voice. In October 1945 she began revisions that would take almost three years. Revisiting her first chapters, she was “staggered by their badness” and could barely get through a page a day. In her fourth volume of memoir, Look Back With Gratitude (1985), she recalled that “sentence after sentence had to be rewritten—often several times—before it satisfied my mind, my ear and my conception of the seventeen-year-old journal-writer.” The “relentless revising” affected her health. Her handwriting disintegrated.

By July 1947 she was in despair. Working on a few pages “leaves me good for nothing, not even capable of taking pleasure in music or reading.” She compared the “agonies” of revision to crucifixion, or childbirth, imagining the book will make “a very wretched, wizened infant.” In August her husband read the draft aloud, and they made a list of changes that was over fifty pages long. “Sometimes I spent two hours struggling with the revision of one sentence,” she wrote in her diary that autumn,

with my head bursting and worrying pains in my heart. And then had to give up without getting anything done. Things got so bad that I woke up in a state of dread, with my heart racing, again and again at the thought of beginning work.

Finally, in October 1947, the first manuscript was completed, but Smith was haunted by “superstitious fears” that she would die before it was published. She had planned for the novel’s cover to read “by Cassandra Mortmain”—now she worried that the name’s French root contained a dark premonition. “Will it indeed have been written by a dead hand?”

That December, her friend the British playwright John Van Druten read the manuscript in a few hours. He told her it was “a lovely book to read over hot-buttered toast,” though he “had a guilty feeling at enjoying it—as if he had eaten a box of chocolates without stopping.” Smith was indignant, recording his questions in her journal: “How could I, with my appreciation of James, Proust etc, write anything so trivial?” “How important did I think it?” (She noted caustically that Druten used the word “important” in precisely the same grave, pseudointellectual manner that Topaz uses “significant.”) “He wanted to know why, if I had been clever enough to invent Mortmain’s work, I couldn’t have written his book instead of this one!”

In 1948, when Smith learned that the novel had been picked by the Literary Guild, she fretted over the club’s “lower-brow” taste for “bosom books.” The critics, she feared, would “approach my book with a pre-conceived idea of cheapness.” She imagined what her friend Christopher Isherwood would make of it: “Quite apart from what will seem to him the triviality of my story…its extreme femininity will bore him.” Still, she privately hoped that her “fairly small talent” had produced something above the level of popular fiction, that the “handling put it into the slight work-of-art category.”

When the reviews came, her worry that the novel’s “entertainment value would swamp the merits of the writing were most fully justified.” She felt that “a very large number of provincial critics” lacked “the critical equipment” to appreciate it. Only “pseudo-good critics” reviewed it: “bad highbrow imitations of good highbrows; they have tended to rudeness and dishonesty.” She was stung by a short, anonymous “in brief” review in The New Yorker, which concluded, “Neither Mrs. Smith’s facile dialogue nor the very romantic scenery…is enough to cover up the essential silliness of the story.” The New York Times noted that “343 pages of teen-age chatter” would simply be too “wearisome and superficial” for readers.

Smith was furious: “The book is unpretentious, simply written, very English. The New York critics tend to literary snobbishness.” But it was a post-publication advert that tipped her over the edge. More Peg’s Paper than Proust, it featured a drawing of Cassandra sitting in the kitchen sink that made her look “sexy” in “a skin-tight sweater.” Smith had never seen anything so “common,” so “crude.” “I let out a roar of fury, I screamed with rage.” She could no longer stand to look at her book.

One friend did seem to understand it: far from finding it boring, Isherwood said the novel was “like really good carving; the more you look at it, the more you see.” In a letter to Smith, he mocked readers who criticized it as trivial: the book, he wrote, “is full of meanings, but under the surface, not rammed into the reader’s face.” He rightly predicted that I Capture the Castle would be “very much lived in by many people; because you can live inside it, like Dickens.”

Smith was so moved that she transcribed his entire letter into her diary. She clung to comments about the novel’s literary qualities: the critic Llyod Morris “took the book dead seriously” and claimed that Smith’s hero, Henry James, would have admired its “technical handling” and “non-static first person.” At last some readers had appreciated her pursuit of authenticity, her metafictional flourishes, her protagonist’s fluid, maturing mind.

In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James wrote of the “problem” of a novel that takes the trials of an ordinary young woman’s life as its subject: “the wonder being, all the while, as we look at the world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering.” Smith’s hope was that the diary of a teenage girl, written with wit and melodrama, might, “in some tiny way,” insist on mattering—that it might have literary merit of its own.

In the final words of I Capture the Castle, Cassandra writes “I love you” over and over in the margins of her diary. She is addressing Simon, who soon leaves for America, but her words seem to more broadly acknowledge that opening one’s heart to the world requires letting in pain. The implication is ambiguous. In ending the novel with a woman’s affirmation of romantic feeling, thrice repeated, Smith gestures toward Ulysses, echoing Molly Bloom’s expansive “yes I said yes I will Yes.” But she might also be read as affirming the book’s least literary, most romantic and girlish qualities.

When Smith was in her eighties and writing the final, never-published volume of her autobiography, she reflected on her life. “Why,” she wondered, “have I been allowed so little pleasure out of my books?” With The Hundred and One Dalmatians, she wrote an even more popular novel, in a genre—children’s fiction—that had long been no less feminized than the middlebrow best-seller. Its reception too left her unsatisfied. “I was miserable over the publication of I Capture the Castle, and able to find little joy in its eventual success. The same applies to Dalmatians.”

But Smith recorded one happy memory in 1948. It was early April, a lovely spring day. She had just secured the Literary Guild selection and went for a walk along a stream in the woods around her Pennsylvania cottage. “The daffodils were at their last, the hushed, waiting feeling I have so often experienced on English spring evenings was there,” she writes. For once she wasn’t homesick. “I was so deeply grateful that all these years of work had not been wasted—that many, many people would at last have the chance to like my book.”

She hesitates. The critics won’t like it, “but I think it is the thought of the book’s reaching a really large public which matters most to me.” The word “think” is underlined. She hesitates again, tries to convince herself. A long, five-point ellipsis stretches across the page. “Still . . . . . Yes, I’m deeply grateful.”