Tag: Dear Dodie

The Life of Dodie Smith

Published on by Margaret4 Comments
dear-dodie

I’ve just finished reading Dear Dodie: the life of Dodie Smith by Valerie Grove. It has taken some time to read as at first I only read short sections at a sitting. This week I have spent more time on it – one reason being that it is a library book and I can’t renew it. I do like biographies and this is no exception. It is very readable and gives a very full picture of Dodie’s life, and it has an excellent index (always a plus for me).

I think the best way to sum up this book is to quote these extracts (some are very long, but I wanted to quote in full as I have to return the book):

Of the six plays and six novels that Dodie published between 1931 and 1967, at least one play and one novel will stand in a class of their own. Her life was essentially limited and, to a degree, pampered. Though she had to struggle in her actress days, even at her poorest she never cooked herself a meal, and even as a ‘shopgirl’ there was always someone to wake her and fetch her breakfast. After her mother’s death, she never had to look after anyone – husband, children or aged parents: and she was nannied by her husband for fifty years. A writer who has no family, no responsibility for other people, nobody to consider but himself and his own work (and there are legions of such writers, most of them men) lives a peculiarly privileged and self-indulgent life. But however self-absorbed, she was always curious about others, perceptive, incisive, extravagant, obsessively hard-working and oddly vulnerable. One cannot help liking Dodie for her spirit and humour. (page 323)

 She had a compelling presence; she talked precisely, listened intently; and her indomitable determination and diligence in the face of her own fading appeal were quite remarkable. (page 323)

From Dodie herself:

I am constantly trying to possess life, to save it up, to bring the then into now, and make it available for ever. (page 324)

Dodie Smith was born in 1896 and died in 1990. During her lifetime the world when through enormous changes and numerous wars. This biography not only relates Dodie’s life, but is also a record of those years, containing so much about the changing society, culture, values and recalling an unknown (to me at any rate) theatrical age.

She was the author of two classics – I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Those are the two works that I knew before reading this book. She was also an acclaimed playwright and her plays receiving most praise were Autumn Crocus and Dear Octopus. This book has triggered my interest in reading these plays and more of Dodie’s books. She wrote millions of words, mostly about herself – in her journals and five volumes of autobiography. She simply loved writing. But at times she became depressed and stuck:

The death of Hitler was announced on 2 May 1945, the eve of Dodie’s forty-ninth birthday. In the ensuing week, when the European war reached its end – the very thing she longed for – she found she had a terrifying case of writer’s nerves. ‘My inner ear – that faculty for hearing every word spoken in my head before I write it – suddenly went out of gear; or it had become impossible to pull it out of gear because it never stopped morning or night. It worked while I was writing, reading and even sleeping. Always I heard the words battering at me, trying to form their own satisfactory sentences. I became obsessed by rhythm. I have always fussed about the balance of my writing but in a very amatuer way. Only recently it dawned on me that every word of a novel ought to be as carefully balanced as every speech in a play. Since then, life has been quite nightmarish. I found I was trying to impose on sentences the rhythm of poetry. I heard every word that was said with exaggerated accents. Moreover I couldn’t get any relaxation in reading because my ear listened to the rhythm of everything I read and I couldn’t take in the sense. And nights have been almost more exhausting than the days for I dreamed in words as well as happenings.’ (pages 166 -7)

One touching note – Dodie’s last Dalmatian, Charley, slept on the floor by her side on guard, as it were, during her final days. Dodie left £2000 in her will for ‘the utmost care and protection of Charley’, but three weeks after her departure he died.

Teaser Tuesdays

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

The rules are:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) ‘œteaser’ sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’™re getting your ‘œteaser‘ from ‘¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’™ve given!
  • Please avoid spoilers!

    • Today’s teaser comes from Dear Dodie: the Life of Dodie Smith by Valerie Grove.

    ‘Just listen to the glorious silence,’ said Alec. ‘We are always happiest,’ wrote Dodie, to be on our own.’ (page 175)

    It is 1947 and Dodie and her husband Alec are living in America. She has nearly finished writing I Capture the Castle and Dodie’s friend Phyllis who had been staying, distracting Dodie from her writing, has just left.

    For more teasers see here.

    The Sunday Salon

    Published on by Margaret10 Comments

    This week I’ve been travelling in time and place in my reading.

    I’ve been in Pennsylvania and Connecticut with Gladys Taber and Barbara Webster reading their letters to each other from Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge over one year in the 1950s (the book was published in 1953; there’s been no mention of the Second World War so I’m guessing the letters were written in the late 1940s or early 1950s). Stillmead and Sugarbridge is a book to savour and read slowly. I’m limiting my reading to a few letters each time I pick up the book. Stillmeadow is the house in Southbury, Connecticut where Gladys Taber lived and Sugarbridge is the house where Barbara and her husband Edward Shenton lived in Pennsylvania. Edward’s drawings illustrate the letters. Between the letters and the illustrations I’m getting a good picture of their lives. Their letters are full of the love of the countryside and their families. When I’ve finished it I’ll write more fully about it. For now here is a quote from Barbara’s first letter in the book, writing in January about what she likes about living at Sugarbridge:

    A broken-up day is to me a lost day, and social and business dates, no matter how delightful or important, hang over me with a sense of doom. So I am particularly grateful for those long intervals of country peace when we see no one, nor stir from our studio except for an afternoon ramble over the hills. We no longer live by the clock, slaves to time; we make our own.

    She thought that this would not be everyone’s ideal. It sounds good to me.

    I first read about Gladys Taber on Nan’s blog and was really pleased when she sent me this book. I would like to know more about Gladys and Barbara and so far I’ve found these websites –  Stillmeadow Friends and also Stillmeadow, where I read that the farm was in danger from development. This was in 2002 and I can’t find out what happened – does anyone know? There is also a website for Edward Shenton, but I can’t find out how Gladys and Barbara met.

    Then I’ve jumped back in time to France in the 1820s with Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. I am only too glad that I don’t live in post revolutionary France. The Battle of Waterloo is now over and Jean Valjean has at last escaped from prison and rescued Cosette from her pitiful life with the cruel Thenardiers. Poor Cosette:

    Fear emanated from her so that she might be said to be enveloped in it. Fear caused her to draw her elbows in at her sides and her feet underneath her skirt, to take up as little room as possible and to draw no unnecessary breath; it had become so to speak, the habit of her body, impossible of alteration except that it must grow worse, In the depths of her eyes there was the haggard gleam of terror.

    Jean and Cosette are currently on their way to Paris and a better life I hope, but I don’t expect it will be as I still have about 800 pages left to read.

    Over next to Regency England in the early19th century with Georgette Heyer’s Friday’s Child. Dialogue makes up a large part of the book, full of 19th century slang. I mentioned this in my last post and in the comments Geranium Cat explained what a “Tiger” is and pointed me to this site – http://www.heyerlist.org/slang.html for more explanations. This book is a mixture of romance, a whirl of social events – balls, masquerades, theatre-going, duels and farce. I’m about halfway in the book and this morning read about the duel between George, Lord Wrotham and Sherry, Anthony Verelst, Viscount Sheringham after Sherry saw George kissing his wife, Hero.

    Last and my no means least I’ve popped over to America again. This time to New York with Dodie Smith in 1939 just before the start of World War Two as described in Dear Dodie by Valerie Grove. Dodie and Alec (who she marries) arrive with Pongo, the dalmatian who inspired her to write 101 Dalmatians after leaving England because Alec was a pacifist and a conscientious objector. Dodie was soon cast into gloom, unable to like America and forecasting

    years of exile, a world war in progress, losing her audience-sense by being away from England, and possibly also losing all her capital. On three out of four counts her forecast was absolutely correct.

    I knew very little about Dodie before and am learning a lot about England at the beginning of the 20th century and theatrical history as well as about Dodie herself – an unsuccessful actress, then a shop assistant at Heals furniture store and then a playwright. It’s fascinating reading about her relationship with people such as Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Gladys Coper, Jack Hawkins and Jessica Tandy, to name but a few.