Heaven: March Book Group - I Capture The Castle
The new sparkling and shiny Ship of Fools Book Group pick for March 2018 is "I Capture The Castle" by Dodie Smith. Seventeen year old Cassandra Mortmain, described by J.K. Rowling as "one of the most charismatic characters I've ever met", hones her writing skills by telling her story and that of her family in their ramshackle English castle.
Happy reading to everyone - those who, like me, are revisiting a much-loved favourite and those who are discovering the Mortmains for the first time.
Happy reading to everyone - those who, like me, are revisiting a much-loved favourite and those who are discovering the Mortmains for the first time.
Comments
I also used to post very occasionally on ye olde shippe before tide and time meant I floated away. Hence book group - and this book in particular - will be a great opportunity to grab a deck chair and enjoy the view from the new shiny ship
Put my battered old copy next to the bed for March.
John (Not got a sig for the new forum sorted yet!)
Andras
Immersed in ICTC, can't believe how much I'd forgotten. The feyness...
Her name was Dodie Smith...
AG
A few years ago I picked up a biography of Dodie Smith at one of our local charity shops and was interested to read of her life, and of her feeding the rats in her garden and how she admired their care for their young. I've been trying to find the book to reread it for this discussion but I think I may have passed it on. I did find it very upsetting in a couple of places. One was describing how, following complaints from neighbours, she began to feed poison to the rats in her garden and one of them took the poisoned bread from her and "turned sadly away." Another was the way that she could never bring herself to take her real life dalmatians to the vet for that final, merciful visit so the poor things suffered far more than they should have.
I really need to get back in to a book club and reading so may follow this thread.
Me too
Sandemaniac, I owe you an apology about my reply to your post, above. I didn't intend for it to sound quite so negative...
Apology entirely unnecessary, Nenya - all adds to the picture.
Sadly, the garden isn't a patch on what it was - what was once a classic cottage garden is now mostly lawn:
https://goo.gl/images/8NTnq7
(I must work out how to link pics properly as per the old Ship)
AG
Below are some suggestions for discussion. Please feel free to use all, some, one or none - just make sure that you say what you want to say.
First published in 1949, ICTC continues to appeal to readers. Why is this? How might readers have responded differently to the novel at the time of publication?
Why did the author choose the form of a journal to tell the Mortmains' story?
The Mortmains are fascinated by the Cottons and their American mannerisms, traditions and expressions, just as the Cottons are fascinated by the English ways of the Mortmains. What does ICTC have to say about English perceptions of America and Americans, and vice versa?
ICTC has been described as the story of Cassandra's "coming of age." Is this a fair description of it and why, or why not?"
How does ICTC reflect society's changing views of women at the time? How do the women in it view their roles and opportunities? Consider, perhaps, Cassandra and Rose, Topaz, Mrs Cotton, Mrs Fox-Cotton, Miss Marcy, Cassandra's mother, Stephen's mother.
What do you think Mortmain's novel "Jacob Wrestling" might have been about?
Do you have a favourite passage from the book, or one you find particularly striking? Which passage, and why?
Go for it.
I think at heart it is because it gets the feel/ essence of family love so well.
As a young teen I hated that it did not end in "true love", but suspect that is partly why I still enjoy it.
It would be a completely different book, if not written as a teenage diary. How else could you get a 'non comic' voice to worry about the logistics and ethics of locking your father in a dungeon or the knowing, loving insight into the strengths and pretentions of a step mum like Topaz.
My favourite passage is her account of Midsummer Eve, alone at the castle and preparing for her rites. I don't fancy the meal of cold baked beans but apart from that the sunbathing, the gathering of the flowers, the extended time alone, is all marvellously atmospheric for me.
And the saddest part? When she weeps on Miss Blossom's bosom and then comes to the awareness that it's simply a dressmaker's dummy. She sees Miss Blossom clearly then, putting on her jacket, looking reproachful and leaving forever. More than anything else for me that symbolises the end of her childhood.
I'll come back to some of the other questions later.
Despite the fact it's encoded she still goes to great lengths to hide it, doesn't she? She describes where she hides it when she and Thomas are keeping their father imprisoned. During that episode we see Thomas as a particularly strong character; he becomes a worthy companion for Cassandra in Rose's absence and I like him a lot.
And the sudden 'discovery' of Stephen reminds me of Seth Starkadder's sudden elevation to Hollywood stardom in Cold Comfort Farm.
But even if some of the plotting is a tad derivative, the prose is magical. Cassandra's assertion that she and Topaz (wonderful name!) are 'women of the world,' unlike the librarian, or the comment that Cassandra had never thought of La Belle Dame Sans Merci as having a home life, are ample testimony to Dodie Smith's brilliance as a writer.
It's interesting that she makes so much of the Mortmain family; the only play for which she's remembered today - Dear Octopus - is also very strong on family. But I get the strong impression that Dodie Smith preferred her dogs to people - she certainly didn't want anything to do with children!
If it had a narrative, I have always assumed that this was subservient to the structure, and was about out struggle to understand, as indeed his second book would be as well. But that is a fascinating question, and one which I had never really thought about until now, despite having the book almost memorised!
Dodie Smith was in America during the Second World War and looking back at the 1920s and 1930s in England. The shadow of Bloomsbury is there: a generation of writers like Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound reinventing the novel and the epic poem.
The delightful Topaz who develops into one of the wisest and most 'maternal' characters in ICTC, begins as a Flapper become artist's model posing for a lecherous painter (MacMorris) who is a ringer for the dissolute Augustus John, a notorious sex pest by the 1920s.
Another infamous book features in the first visit to Scoatney hall. The predatory Leda Fox-Cotton (a Surrealist photographer) is keen to finish her calf-bound book. '...no book for little girls,' she tells Cassandra. Later the Vicar picks up the book and reads it, says to Cassandra that it is 'no book for little vicars'. What is this book? My guess would be DH Lawrence's banned Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Is Mortmain really suffering from almost terminal writers' block, or the equally common 'Do anything but write' syndrome? I suspect the latter!
I'm not quite sure that the episode with the 'bear' hunt works as well as the rest of the book. But when Cassandra ends up after midnight at Lyon's Corner House and realises too late that she hasn't got her purse - that's the sort of horrible heart-stopping moment that most of us have felt at one time or another. I'd guess that something like it had happened to Dodie Smith - she almost paints herself into that scene when she describes the theatre company waiting for the Notices after their First Night.
Rose herself of course draws the parallel between their situation and that of the Bennet sisters, near the beginning of the book. I did nearly put up a question about the parallels with Pride and Prejudice and we could discuss it if people would like to. I'm afraid I wouldn't have much to contribute. I did my entire English literature degree without reading an Austen novel. Not something I'm proud of. I find it quite funny that a bit later Cassandra observes that the Bennet sisters didn't give one thought to the real facts of marriage and worries that Rose isn't doing so either, although Rose also being a stepchild of Topaz will be as informed as Cassandra herself.
I'd love to have a go at the "mixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry" that was Jacob Wrestling . I presume Simon's description at the end of the book as "your father's whole work is only an extension of metaphor" includes Jacob Wrestling and it does sound fascinating.
I find the bear hunt episode a bit unsatisfactory too and to me it seems out of kilter with the rest of the book, only making proper sense at the end when we find out about Rose and Neil's kiss and Stephen being a witness to that.
I was always quite taken by Topaz's way of communing with nature and planned to try it myself one day. Have not yet got round to it, though I guess there's time.
The vicar reading Lady Chatterley's Lover. That's an inspired thought.
I've been puzzling over this question, as I don't think Smith intended it to be a book about women in society. I was imagining what it would be like set in the present day. I think Topaz would update well as would Mrs Cotton and Mrs Fox-Cotton. Miss Marcy wouldn't, I don't think and neither would Miss Blossom, whose 'voice' I love, even if it is very much a stock working class working woman's voice (I'm thinking of various thirties detective novels here).
As for Cassandra and Rose. I assume Cassandra would still be in sixth form and Rose would be lounging around having finished a degree in something nebulous vaguely hoping some sort of internship is going to turn up. I'm not sure that either of them would be assuming that only marriage would get them out of their poverty. I'm also sure that at the end Cassandra wouldn't be talking about not needing to go to college, but would be awaiting her Oxbridge interview.
I wondered while rereading if there wasn't a darker book in here trying to get out. The fey paganism reminded me at moments of Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willows, a great publishing success in the 1920s, but the rivalry between the sisters and the 'hardness' in Rose reminded me of another novel I read at about the same time, E Arnot Robinson's Ordinary Families, published 1933, with a much fiercer study of warring sisters.
And James Mortmain ( 'dead hand') is someone I don't find so charming, feckless and forgivable now. His violent outbursts, the 'attack' on his first wife, the plates flung at Cassandra and Thomas show him as a strange and even monstrous father, unlike the father figures of the avuncular vicar or even Aubrey Fox-Cotton -- I felt too that the pale withdrawn image of the dead mother haunted the book, although she does 'return' to help Cassandra find herself. It is a bildungsroman about the loss of innocence. With the disappearance of Miss Blossom (a clever trick of ventriloquism that took on a life of its own) and the last celebration of the pagan mid-summer's eve ritual, the old magic of the child Cassandra has gone, her farewell call on the mound (to the Wild Huntsman?) something final.
And the significance of the kisses is ambivalent too: at the time a test of true love, the swoony enchanted feeling and the certainty this is real love. Then a door opening to disillusionment. Great 'coming of age' writing.
There were, incidentally, many other things the girls could have done rather than just wait to get married. My own very rural-Welsh mother, who never really learned to speak proper English, nonetheless got herself work in London in the 1930s, first in a dairy and then as a sales assistant at John Lewis, and she was by no means atypical. She ended up working in a fairly senior job at the Air Ministry, so it was certainly possible for naive country lasses to 'go places.'
I tend to agree with you - well put!
Indeed. On rereading the book recently I felt quite irritated by the "board meeting" with Miss Marcy when everyone's earning capacity apart from Stephen's came out as "nil." I wanted to tell them to use some gumption and get themselves off to offer their services as maids or gardeners up at Scoatney Hall.
I've been thinking quite a lot about Cassandra's mother and her palpable presence in the book. Although Cassandra says she died "from perfectly natural causes" there must have been some, possibly distressing, illness as her youngest child was only seven when she died. She was clearly musical - Rose is described as playing on her old piano - and I can picture her being concerned about trespassing when they discover the castle, and staying with the young Thomas as he "woke and wept a little." I sense Mortmain gained inspiration from her (such as the idea for the title of his book) in a way that he doesn't from the more overtly artistic Topaz, who is also flamboyantly motherly in a way that Mother didn't seem to be. (I don't think we ever know her name, do we? She's simply "Mother.") And of course at the end she "speaks" clearly to Cassandra, who has inherited the ability to unlock something of her father's writer's block and whose understanding of his work her father hankers for.
I like the fact that we don't know anything that Cassandra doesn't. Other writers of the time might have been tempted to look at the 1930s from the point of view of WWII, but there is no hint of that on the horizon, one of the advantages of using the notebooks to tell the story. Cassandra's description of the cake knife incident is very much from a child's point of view, assuming that her father can do no wrong and it is the neighbour at fault. I'm also assuming that Topaz's early life was pretty horrible and not at all the sort of romantic bohemian one that Cassandra imagines. Marriage to Mortmain must have seemed very attractive, awful behaviour or no.
Does anyone else see Leda Fox-Cotton as a model from a Lempicka painting?
Quoting from memory, but didn't Rose at one point rather melodramatically declare that she would go on the streets - to be told by Cassandra that she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk!
Am I over-thinking this?
Perhaps - but do feel free to run with it. We could have a discussion about the significance of the names. Fox-Cotton, for example, makes Leda sound suitably predatory. And James Mortmain is a splendid name for an author. I always found the names of the three siblings quite an intriguing combination - a name with huge presence like Cassandra alongside a much more ordinary one like Rose, with a Thomas that I can never imagine was shortened to Tom and a Stephen who would never have been Steve; partly it wouldn't suit their characters and partly I don't suppose it would have been usual back then. Cassandra makes quite a thing about Topaz's name - "there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that" - but as far as I'm aware we never know Mother's name, or the vicar's, or Miss Marcy's first name.
Is anyone's name shortened? Neil at one point calls Thomas "Tommy" when he gives him the ham, and I have a feeling he calls Simon "Si" (can't find exactly where just at the moment) but it seems to be a particularly American thing in the book, apart from Miss Blossom calling Rose "Rosie" when she asks if she's keeping something up her sleeve after the bear episode.
But yes, Leda Fox-Cotton is a wonderful moniker, and as for Topaz Mortmain - that's a real delight to roll your tongue round.