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On baths she has this to say: ‘ I believe it is customary to get one’s washing over first in baths and bask afterwards personally I bask first.
#I capture the castle full#
Way beyond the first line Cassandra is full of helpful nuggets that you will stay with you for life. ‘ I wondered if Stephen was haunted by the ghosts of ancient hens.’ says Cassandra. Stephen looks like a Greek god but is rejected by Cassandra because of a distinctly ‘ daft‘ look that sometimes overcomes him.
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The final beauty is Stephen, the son of the Mortmain’s late housekeeper who still lives with them in a dingy cell. Rose is given to melodramatic outbursts and showy displays.‘ There were moments when my deep and loving pity for her merged into a desire to kick her fairly hard.’ She’s depressed by the family situation and her prospects for pulling them all out of poverty through marriage. Her sister, a beauty called Rose, also strikes a particular figure ‘ early Victorian‘ as Cassandra wryly observes.
#I capture the castle skin#
It is rather like her imperviousness to cold Father once said she had a plush-lined skin and there are times when I think she has plush-lined feelings.’ ‘ Topaz was wonderfully patient-but I sometimes wonder if it is not only patience, but also a faint resemblance to cows. My favourite is Topaz, the proto-hippy stepmother. And they are all targets for Cassandra’s wonderfully cutting wit. From minor characters, like the vicar and the tailor’s dummy Miss Blossom, to Cassandra’s immediate family, they all feel like people you’ve met. Maybe it is because I have satisfied the creative urge… or it may be the thought of eggs for tea.’Ĭassandra wouldn’t be half as effective had Dodie not taken so much care over her supporting cast. Cassandra’s outstanding feature though is her wit. In Cassandra Dodie invents the prototype for a thousand ‘Young Adult’ heroines, a girl whose drive threatens to tip over into self obsession, uncompromising on matters of the heart but privately insecure. The always perceptive vicar describes her as ‘ the insidious type – Jane Eyre with a touch of Becky Sharp. Not that you’d know about this turmoil from reading the book which is written in the deceptively easy hand of Cassandra, through whom Dodie channels the voice of her teenage self. her analysis of Mortmain and his writer’s block for instance is like a psychological or neurological case study.’ She would type each page over and over until she felt quite dizzy…. The concentration of effort caused blood to rush to her head. Valerie Grove writes that ‘ she got stuck again and again at the page mentioning James Joyce.
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Surrounded by her highly literary (and snobbishly bitchy) circle she found herself hung up on Mortmain and the world he represented. Mortmain is unable to complete, or even begin a second book.
#I capture the castle driver#
The driver for the plot is, not uncoincidentally, the writer’s block of Cassandra’s father Mortmain, a tortured genius who achieved literary success some years before with an unfathomable but influential Modernist novel called Jacob’s Wrestling. Always I heard words battering at me, trying to form their own satisfactory sentences.’ She writes in her notes (a separate book running to over 100,000 words) that her natural ability for writing speech had suddenly malfunctioned. ‘ My inner ear – that faculty for hearing each and every word spoken in my head before I write it – suddenly went out of gear. It was a process that would take four years and bring her close to a breakdown. So, several years in, failing to make inroads into Hollywood and living in splendid isolation, Dodie endeavoured to write her first novel. She and her husband, a conscientious objector, had moved there at the beginning of the war – at the height of Dodie’s career in the theatre – and remained there for the next fourteen years, fearful of the reception they would face in their longed for homeland. Dodie wrote the story whilst she was living in exile in California, in what biographer Valerie Grove calls ‘ a fever of nostalgia for England‘. The circumstances of the creation of I Capture the Castle are almost as compelling as the story itself. Both deal with I Capture the Castle’s major theme, the telling of stories – something that is always in the mind of the narrator, Cassandra Mortmain and ever present in the diaries of the writer Dodie Smith. In its own way it’s just as perfect as ‘ I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’. So I thought I’d start with the last one. It’s customary to begin any piece about Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle by quoting its famous opening line.