Some Thoughts as it's World Book Night... I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith

The 23rd April is a big day in England as it's St George's Day. It's also Shakespeare's birthday. And it's also World Book Night, a night when all things literary are celebrated. 500,000 books are given away absolutely free to encourage people to read something new by 'givers' specifically chosen because they love the 25 books chosen each year. Along with this, there are readings and events going on all over the country in a celebration of the written word. So I thought, in homage to all of the above, (and due to the fact that I'm feeling poorly-sick and not going out to one of these events) I'd write a little bit about my favourite novel I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

I first read I Capture the Castle when I was fifteen and have read it every year or so since then. The story is quite a simple one: Cassandra Mortmain is a seventeen year old girl writing a diary in 1935 full of thoughts and feelings about herself and her unusual family. The Mortmains comprise of her brilliant, avant-garde novelist father with writer's block, James Mortmain; glamorous former artist's model and nudism enthusiast step-mother, Topaz; desperately dramatic, hopeless, beautiful older sister Rose; younger school-boy brother Thomas; and the late housekeeper's son, the Adonis-like Stephen. They live in a tumbledown castle ruin in rural Suffolk wondering how they're going to survive on the dwindling royalties from Mortmain's Joycean first novel 'Jacobs Wrestling' when the new, young, rich American owners of their castle, and of the neighbouring Scoatney Hall estate, Simon and Neil Cotton, rock up. Instantly Rose determines to marry one of them to help them out of their alarming poverty and her own personal misery, and by the end of the novel she has succeeded as Cassandra looks on. As always, the plot stops here- if you want to know the hows and whys, you'll need to read it yourself.

Alright, so far, so ridiculously twee you think: this is going to be a tale of plucky young women winning round the men of their dreams- a sort of mouldering (Cassandra's word, here borrowed) Pride and Prejudice in a gentle comedy of manners. Well, yes and no (and a P & P comparison is nothing to be sniffed at in my book)- but it's not half as simple as that. The novel is deceptively 'grown-up' despite its very naive narrator. In Cassandra we have a little of the Nick Carraway (I'm half way though a blog on Gatsby and mega-excited for the film hence the slightly left-field comparison): she is a narrator almost buffeted along through the story by seemingly stronger characters, but who nonetheless delivers to her reader a view of the world which is both crystal clear and oddly blinkered. But despite being in amongst these strong, and often nutty characters, the novel is always Cassandra's story and, reflected by the time it was written in, there is a substantial departure from innocence for Cassandra over the course of the novel that Smith achieves with beautiful lightness of touch. Seemingly innocuous transitions of emotion compound on each other to bear witness to Cassandra's profound heartbreak, which occurs about two thirds of the way into the novel, and confusion that everything she has held as truth is not as it seems- which lasts until the end of the novel and, we are led to believe, beyond.

So many novels deal with a coming of age but I've never read a novel that so accurately portrays how miserable that can actually be and how first, or unrequited, love can be agony. Not to say that reading this novel is a morose affair- it is far from that. Cassandra, even at her lowest ebb, has a wonderful capacity for marvelling at the beauty around her and, along with the other components of the novel, happily combines moments of the absurd with a lovely understated reality: 'I write this' writes Cassandra in the novel's famous opening line, 'sitting in the kitchen sink' which is sweet, daft and literally informative all at the same time. Similarly in my favourite section of the novel, which also marks it's tonal transition, Cassandra performs a Pagan-lite Midsummer ritual in the same way she has done since she was a child before being whisked away to Scoatney Hall for dinner by her sister's fiance. Throughout the novel Smith juxtaposes the profoundly innocent with impending, and on occasion almost sinister, adulthood so that Cassandra, and by extension the reader, only just manages to keep up with proceedings. This is helped no end by the fact that Cassandra is often writing the diary to make sense of what has happened rather than her original intention to 'capture' her family in prose. This device also makes the organic unravelling of time over the course of the novel feel very natural.

The first image of Cassandra writing in the kitchen sink tells you almost all you need to know about how the novel works. The novel is undeniably domestic and 'small'- the social commentary that Smith chooses is understated, but that's not to say it's unimportant to the reading of the novel. Smith raises important questions around the nature of class, of the place of women, of the importance of art at a time when all of these questions were very important indeed (and in different ways, still are today). But this is ultimately a story that unites the reader with Cassandra, as Smith explores the notion of growing up, even when this process should be at an end (James Mortmain's regression in his quest to recapture his literary talent to an almost childlike state perfectly encapsulates this). Fundamentally it seems that, although her protagonist is very young, Cassandra is a means by which Smith lets her reader know that we are all going through the indefinite process of growing-up (at twenty-six, I certainly am) and becoming who we are, but that this also never changes.

In this way (brace yourselves) Smith and Sartre share a common bond and Cassandra in I Capture the Castle almost acts as a beginning point for early development that Sartre deems to end at the 'age of reason'. I am exactly half way between seventeen and thirty-five and so maybe that's why this makes sense to me now. And maybe my favourite book will take on another significance when I am thirty-five, or fifty or eighty. I think that it will, and perhaps this is also why it is my favourite book. And I think that's why it is always important to keep reading- even when you think you might have all the answers.

So on that thought, happy World Book Night everyone.

The Age of Reason- Jean-Paul Sartre

There's a quote from The Simpsons, in the episode where Springfield hosts a film festival, where guest judge and film critic Jay Sherman impresses the Simpson/Bouvier women by saying 'Camus can do- but Sartre is smartrer' (much to Homer's chagrin). I love a pun so I've always thought this quote was quite funny but, although I read a bit of Camus at uni, I could never really claim to understand it as I'd never read any Sartre. This has now changed (hence the title and subject of today's blog) but I thought that starting the blog with a reference to The Simpsons might assure you that reading Sartre doesn't turn you into a cultural snob (which, I have to admit, was a fear of mine before I started).

The story of The Age of Reason could be described as a multi-level exercise in problem-solving. The protagonist Mathieu, a 35 year old philosophy lecturer living in Paris, is trying to find enough money to give to his sort-of girlfriend of seven years, Marcelle, so that she can get a safe abortion from a Jewish doctor who, in light of the gathering spectre of the Second World War, is only in the country for a few more days before leaving for America. At the same time Mathieu is also trying to figure out whether he is in love with a much younger, plainer (and I only mention this because Sartre mentions it repeatedly) woman, Ivich, who is the sister of one of his students, Bruno. Bruno in turn is having an undefined affair with a much older cabaret singer, Lola. Alongside Mathieu there is also his louche, handsome but troubled friend Daniel, who is also involved with Marcelle, although unbeknownst to Mathieu. The novel itself is set over two days- from the time Mathieu finds out that Marcelle is pregnant, to the resolution of Mathieu's predicament. As with Beloved in my previous post I don't want to give too much away about the plot needless to say that these characters interact with each other with the underlying duplicity and savagery of cats competing for territory.  

So what with Sartre's rendering of the atmosphere of Paris in the 1930s, where the prospect of war is rarely alluded to but hangs over the novel like a dark cloud (the novel itself was published in 1945), and the building existential crises that permeate every character of the story, the tone of the novel is unrelentingly oppressive. My penguin edition of the novel runs to 300 pages of small type which, when you consider that the novel is set over an almost uninterrupted two-day time period, makes for a very densely written story indeed. Having said this, Sartre's constant manoeuvring between the 'reality' of Mathieu's quest for money with his internal quest for resolution with regard to his feelings for Marcelle, Ivich and himself, is done with a clear and readable prose- no doubt helped by a very good translation, by Eric Sutton in my edition.

One of the main contributors to this feeling of oppressiveness  and indeed one of the main themes running throughout the novel is the notion of 'running out of time' and the consequences that procrastination and introspection have on Mathieu and by extension the characters around him. In the most basic sense, Mathieu is running against the clock to secure the abortion, which in turn has existential implications for Marcelle as a woman, a lover and, potentially a mother, as well as for the unborn baby. The potential resolutions of the situation, to obtain the money and have the 'safe' abortion; to risk the cheaper but deadlier, back-alley procedure; or to do nothing and have the baby all have seismic consequences for the characters' lives. Sartre makes his readers aware that Mathieu is being forced out of a world of stasis- where he project-managed his relationship with Marcelle in a seemingly eternal state of nothingness- into a world where whichever direction he chooses he will be entering into a new level of existence which he cannot control. The world cannot stay the same and, even though it initially appears that we are merely witness to a snap-shot of the characters lives, what we read not only fundamentally alters these lives- professionally, socially, mortally- but that these revelations will also continue to have consequences after the novel is finished.

Sartre is certainly, then, smartrer. Because throughout what could be perceived to be quite a melodramatic, self-indulgent story (and it is still that) the novel also takes on a greater significance. From his vantage point in 1945 Sartre knows that in the period of time he is writing about, Europe and the rest of the world is hurtling into a period of human disaster. 'By doing nothing' he seems to say, 'you, and the world, are nothing. By doing anything, you and the world, change'. Mathieu is 35 in the novel and is grappling with the notion that his youth is over, that he has purportedly reached the titular 'age of reason'. Whether this understanding that he has reached the age of reason translates into Mathieu's freedom to exist in a changed world is up for debate, and Sartre leaves it for us to decide. Nonetheless the novel certainly raises an important question about whether the notion of existence is a constant struggle against an ever-changing reality. Which is succinctly summed up for me in another Simpsons quote: D'oh.