One of many worst moments of Dodie Smith’s life was when her debut novel turned a bestseller. It was 1948, she was fifty-two, and I Seize the Fortress, her coming-of-age story informed by way of the diary of a teenage lady, had simply made the New York Instances high ten fiction record. The American Literary Guild, which selected it because the November e-book of the month, ordered greater than half 1,000,000 copies and despatched her a $42,000 verify.
“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 e-book’s reputation confirmed her biggest worry: that, for all her effort, it might be acquired not as a literary work however as middlebrow. The critics who mattered had handed it “over as lightweight and unimportant.” She stopped consuming and retreated to mattress.
Smith could also be finest recognized for her youngsters’s e-book The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), however I Seize the Fortress, now thought-about a Younger Grownup traditional, a really English comedy, a touching romance, and, because it has been repeatedly known as, a consolation learn, stays her most charismatic work. But it has by no means acquired the essential therapy Smith hoped for. The cultural battle that outlined her its reception—between “lightweight and unimportant” middlebrow writing and the intellectual literary fiction that emerged within the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties—is without doubt one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself. Beneath its floor allure is a metaliterary inquiry into kind, model, and advantage, in addition to an affecting portrait of the artist as a younger lady.
Dorothy Gladys Smith, initially nicknamed “Dodo,” grew up in Manchester along with her mom, maternal grandparents, three uncles, two aunts, and two maids. She recollects her chaotic house with affection within the first of her 5 volumes of memoir, Look Again with Love (1974). When she was eight her grandmother gave her a shilling train e-book (“very thick, with a shiny black cover that smelt inspiring—I licked it occasionally”) and she or he used it to start her first piece of fiction, during which “the heroine had dancing eyes and the only touch of originality was in the spelling.”
In her teenagers she wrote quick tales and performs and acted in native productions. After leaving college, she educated as an actor at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Artwork and, in her early twenties, made simply sufficient cash from small roles to outlive. (As Valerie Grove writes in her colourful biography Pricey Dodie, Smith lived in a Marylebone performers’ hostel on a weight-reduction plan of Heinz tinned spaghetti, baked beans, and a weekly egg.) At twenty-seven she gave up on performing and took a job within the division retailer Heal’s, the place she had an affair with the proprietor, the British designer Ambrose Heal. He used his London society contacts to drum up curiosity in her first staged play, Autumn Crocus, written beneath the pseudonym C. L. Anthony, which premiered in 1931.
It was nicely acquired. Nineteen journalists turned as much as interview Smith; the headline on the Night Information billboards learn “SHOPGIRL WRITES PLAY.” The manufacturing introduced her sudden wealth. She was invited to affix the all-male Dramatists’ Membership and have become a part of London’s theater scene, befriending Noël Coward, John Gielgud, and the impresario Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. She wrote and staged an additional 5 performs, together with her greatest success, Name It a Day, and her best-known dramatic work, Pricey Octopus. These lighthearted depictions of human relationships, filled with wry observations of middle-class life, gave her a popularity as a dramatist of barely twee comedies aimed toward girls; the critic J. C. Trewin known as Pricey Octopus her “cozy corner on the domestic-sentimental.”
In early 1939 Smith fled along with her husband Alec Beesley, a conscientious objector, from London to California. She spent the battle years sad within the “pitiless” sunshine and eager for her Essex cottage; to console herself she wrote a novel a couple of crumbling fort she had as soon as visited.
Set in 1935, I Seize the Fortress consists of the diary entries of Cassandra Mortmain, the center baby of a celebrated modernist novelist with power author’s block. In her journal Cassandra information her hopeless, eccentric household’s efforts to outlive with out an earnings of their drafty and unfurnished fort on an property in Suffolk. Her father James’s popularity rests on Jacob’s Wrestling, a formally experimental work “without forerunners or successors.” However he stopped writing when Cassandra was 5 years previous, after a three-month stint in jail, the place he was despatched when a neighbor witnessed him brandishing a knife at his spouse as he was about to chop a cake. Cassandra describes the incident within the first few pages of the novel as “ludicrous” reasonably than alarming. Three years later her mom dies “from perfectly natural causes.”
The household now consists of Cassandra, her lovely, 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 however caring artist’s mannequin named Topaz (“There is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that”). Hungry and chilly, they dwell in cheerful denial about their dire circumstances.
Becoming a member of them within the fort is Stephen, the eighteen-year-old orphaned son of their former maid. He works for the household for no pay and has an all-consuming crush on Cassandra, who thinks he’s “very fair and noble-looking but his expression is just a fraction daft.” When two wealthy American brothers, Simon and Neil, who’ve inherited the property, arrive within the village, the sisters think about one among them sweeping in to marry Rose and rescue all of them from destitution.
Smith saved intensive diaries on looseleaf paper, page-numbered, which now reside in her papers on the Howard Gottlieb Analysis Heart at Boston College.1 Her wartime entries—written in a cramped, tense hand—are crammed with homesickness and guilt. On Christmas Day 1941, she is shocked to notice that one thing “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 round 20,000 phrases.
However quickly she set the manuscript apart, distracted by information of the battle. Solely in 1945 did she take up the novel once more; that August she rushed by way of the final chapters. She was anxious about its literary advantage: “I can’t make out if the whole will be rather original and charming or childish and hot-making” (that’s, embarrassing). She informed associates the novel, which she labored on “with a care that would not have disgraced Flaubert,” was just like the pulpy romance journal “Peg’s Paper written by the small-girl’s Proust.” She felt Proust and Joyce had been its greatest influences—“strange forefathers,” she admitted, for a romance novel.
Within the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, a tradition battle raged on either side of the Atlantic: the “battle of the brows.” The late-Victorian phrases “highbrow” and “lowbrow” emerged from the modern pseudoscience of phrenology, which posited {that a} bigger brow indicated a bigger mind and a extra clever thoughts—a delusion used to justify all method of white supremacist beliefs. The phrases had grown well-liked in discussions of tradition on the flip of the century, notably in the USA. Quickly they turned 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 journal Punch responded to the creation of the BBC—with its dedication to “inform, educate and entertain” the British public—by coining the phrase “middlebrow” for “people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.” In a posthumously printed letter to a reviewer, Virginia Woolf proudly declared herself a intellectual: “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 Studying Public (1932), Q. D. Leavis deemed e-book golf equipment just like the American Ebook of the Month (based in 1926) and the Literary Guild (based in 1927) “instruments not for improving taste but for standardising it at the middlebrow level.”
Virtually as quickly as these cultural distinctions had been drawn, they took on gendered connotations. Nearly all of Ebook of the Month membership members had been feminine; in Britain girls rented twice as a lot well-liked fiction from “twopenny libraries” as males. In a 1936 essay George Orwell famous that “the average novel”—that’s “the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff”—“seems to exist only for women.” Of their work of social historical past The Lengthy Week-Finish (1940), Robert Graves and Alan Hodge mirrored 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 concerning the literary standing of her e-book weren’t incidental to its narrative. It is a e-book about literature, asking what makes a piece “literary” reasonably than middlebrow or, God forbid, pretentious. Because the critic Victoria Stewart has famous, two varieties of writing are set in opposition to one another in I Seize the Fortress: the dutiful realism of Cassandra’s diary, with its conventionally “feminine” issues (household relationships, home issues, romance, the non-public feelings of a seventeen-year-old lady), and her father’s excessive 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’s one among “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 final printed, that means that Jacob’s Wrestling would have appeared across the identical time as Ulysses. Now he spends hours absorbed in middlebrow tradition—youngsters’s tales, detective novels, comics, and crosswords—and mutters to himself about literary kind: “Design, deduction, reconstruction—symbol—pattern and problem—search for ever unfolding—enigma eternal.”
The title of Smith’s novel calls to thoughts not solely Cassandra’s efforts at literary illustration but in addition a army battle or chess sport. Father and daughter are locked in a literary energy battle that performs out each on the web page and within the fort: at one level he bodily throws her out of his research; by the top of the novel, she has lured him out. After James reads one among Cassandra’s tales, 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 recommendation:
I’m penning this journal partly to follow my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to show myself the best way to write a novel—I intend to seize all our characters and put in conversations. It must be good for my model to sprint alongside with out a lot thought.
The earliest entries are unselfconscious, mixing breezy confidence, humor, and rose-tinted depictions of a creative household in genteel poverty. These scenes are a few of the e-book’s most memorable: Cassandra dyeing her palms inexperienced within the bathtub, the sisters making needs on the stone gargoyle above the kitchen hearth or whispering in mattress about Austen and Charlotte Brontë and their wealthy American neighbors.
However quickly Cassandra begins to grapple with issues of perspective and remembrance. Trying by way of a window at her household, “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 cocktail party on the People’ grand Scoatney Corridor “glows in my memory like a dark picture with a luminous centre—candlelight and shining floors and the night pressing against the black windows.” Towards the e-book’s finish Cassandra has a Proustian recollection on listening to the “tinkling chime” of a clock that belonged to her late mom:
After which my thoughts’s eye noticed her face—not the {photograph} of it which is what I at all times see once I consider her, however her face because it was. I noticed her gentle brown hair and freckled pores and skin—I had forgotten till then that she had freckles. And that very same on the spot, I heard her voice in my head—in any case these years of not with the ability to hear it.
Amgueddfa Cymru–Nationwide Museum Wales/Robin Maggs/Wikimedia Commons
Gwen John: Foliage, undated
Step by step the tone shifts. Simon turns into engaged to her sister, however Cassandra falls in love with him despite herself. As she ruminates on her blossoming emotions, grows indifferent from her childhood pleasures, and imagines a life past the fort, she has to be taught to put in writing in a brand new approach. By the top 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.”
Within the novel’s farcical crescendo, having taken actually the concept that a psychoanalyst would put her father “back in prison” to treatment his writers’ block, Cassandra locks him within the fort tower. He emerges with a primary web page that comprises 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.” That is to be the beginning of Mortmain’s groundbreaking novel—a Portrait of the Artist–model depiction of the beginning of the author’s consciousness, from childhood, that can be a sequence of puzzles for the reader to unravel—and a literary motion, “Enigmatism.”
Skepticism towards the avant-garde was one thing of an indicator of “middlebrow” fiction of the interval, which specialised, within the scholar Nicola Humble’s phrases, in “gleefully mocking highbrow intellectual pretensions.” However, as Humble notes, by the Nineteen Forties excessive modernism was “being taken more seriously by the middlebrow,” permitting Smith to “borrow” its gadgets and characterize it with “the sting out.”3 Stewart argues that “Smith does not simply parody or devalue modernism.” Certainly, the novel involves recommend that Cassandra’s writing has extra in frequent along with her father’s than it first seems—even that they may have equal literary standing. Her e-book, too, circles lots of the central preoccupations of modernist authors: the best way to pin down ideas, sensations, and momentary experiences on the web page; the best way to register the pressures of the previous and the long run on the current. On Midsummer Day “the castle seemed to be mine in a way it never had been before,” she writes:
The day appeared specifically to belong to me; I even had a sense that I owned myself greater than I often do. I turned very aware of all my actions—if I raised my arm I checked out it wonderingly, considering, “That is mine!” And I took pleasure in transferring, each within the bodily effort and within the contact of the air—it was most queer how the air did appear to the touch me, even when it was completely nonetheless. All day lengthy I had a way of nice ease and spaciousness. And my happiness had an odd, remembered high quality as if I had lived it earlier than. Oh, how can I recapture it—that totally proper, homecoming sense of recognition? It appears to me now that the entire day was like an avenue resulting in a house I had liked as soon as however forgotten, the reminiscence of which was coming again so dimly, so regularly, as I wandered alongside, that solely when my house ultimately lay earlier than me did I cry: “Now I know why I have been happy!”… On and on I wander, beneath the vaulted roof of department and leaf…and on a regular basis, the avenue is yesterday, that lengthy strategy to magnificence.
Simply as she approaches the ineffable, she provides up, ending with a shrug. “Images in the mind, how strange they are…”
It was a problem for Smith to channel her literary ambitions by way of a youngster’s voice. In October 1945 she started revisions that will take nearly three years. Revisiting her first chapters, she was “staggered by their badness” and will barely get by way of a web page a day. In her fourth quantity of memoir, Look Again 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 well being. Her handwriting disintegrated.
By July 1947 she was in despair. Engaged on a number of pages “leaves me good for nothing, not even capable of taking pleasure in music or reading.” She in contrast the “agonies” of revision to crucifixion, or childbirth, imagining the e-book will make “a very wretched, wizened infant.” In August her husband learn the draft aloud, they usually made an inventory of adjustments that was over fifty pages lengthy. “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 coronary heart. And then had to surrender with out getting something finished. Issues received so unhealthy that I awoke in a state of dread, with my coronary heart racing, time and again on the considered starting work.
Lastly, in October 1947, the primary manuscript was accomplished, however Smith was haunted by “superstitious fears” that she would die earlier than it was printed. She had deliberate for the novel’s cowl to learn “by Cassandra Mortmain”—now she frightened that the identify’s French root contained a darkish premonition. “Will it indeed have been written by a dead hand?”
That December, her good friend the British playwright John Van Druten learn the manuscript in a number of hours. He informed her it was “a lovely book to read over hot-buttered toast,” although 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 famous caustically that Druten used the phrase “important” in exactly the identical grave, pseudointellectual method that Topaz makes use of “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 realized that the novel had been picked by the Literary Guild, she fretted over the membership’s “lower-brow” style for “bosom books.” The critics, she feared, would “approach my book with a pre-conceived idea of cheapness.” She imagined what her good 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.” Nonetheless, she privately hoped that her “fairly small talent” had produced one thing above the extent of well-liked fiction, that the “handling put it into the slight work-of-art category.”
When the critiques got here, her fear 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 understand it. Solely “pseudo-good critics” reviewed it: “bad highbrow imitations of good highbrows; they have tended to rudeness and dishonesty.” She was stung by a brief, nameless “in brief” evaluate 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 Instances famous that “343 pages of teen-age chatter” would merely be too “wearisome and superficial” for readers.
Smith was livid: “The book is unpretentious, simply written, very English. The New York critics tend to literary snobbishness.” However it was a post-publication advert that tipped her over the sting. Extra Peg’s Paper than Proust, it featured a drawing of Cassandra sitting within the kitchen sink that made her look “sexy” in “a skin-tight sweater.” Smith had by no means seen something so “common,” so “crude.” “I let out a roar of fury, I screamed with rage.” She might not stand to take a look at her e-book.
One good friend did appear to know it: removed from discovering it boring, Isherwood stated 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 e-book, he wrote, “is full of meanings, but under the surface, not rammed into the reader’s face.” He rightly predicted that I Seize the Fortress could be “very much lived in by many people; because you can live inside it, like Dickens.”
Smith was so moved that she transcribed his complete letter into her diary. She clung to feedback concerning 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.” Ultimately some readers had appreciated her pursuit of authenticity, her metafictional thrives, her protagonist’s fluid, maturing thoughts.
In his preface to The Portrait of a Girl, James wrote of the “problem” of a novel that takes the trials of an unusual younger girl’s life as its topic: “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 lady, written with wit and melodrama, may, “in some tiny way,” insist on mattering—that it may need literary advantage of its personal.
Within the ultimate phrases of I Seize the Fortress, Cassandra writes “I love you” again and again within the margins of her diary. She is addressing Simon, who quickly leaves for America, however her phrases appear to extra broadly acknowledge that opening one’s coronary heart to the world requires letting in ache. The implication is ambiguous. In ending the novel with a lady’s affirmation of romantic feeling, thrice repeated, Smith gestures towards Ulysses, echoing Molly Bloom’s expansive “yes I said yes I will Yes.” However she may additionally be learn as affirming the e-book’s least literary, most romantic and girlish qualities.
When Smith was in her eighties and writing the ultimate, never-published quantity of her autobiography, she mirrored on her life. “Why,” she questioned, “have I been allowed so little pleasure out of my books?” With The Hundred and One Dalmatians, she wrote an much more well-liked novel, in a style—youngsters’s fiction—that had lengthy been no much less feminized than the middlebrow best-seller. Its reception too left her unhappy. “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.”
However Smith recorded one pleased reminiscence in 1948. It was early April, a beautiful spring day. She had simply secured the Literary Guild choice and went for a stroll alongside a stream within the woods round 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 as soon as 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 gained’t prefer it, “but I think it is the thought of the book’s reaching a really large public which matters most to me.” The phrase “think” is underlined. She hesitates once more, tries to persuade herself. An extended, five-point ellipsis stretches throughout the web page. “Still . . . . . Yes, I’m deeply grateful.”
