Petrichor

Adolescence is a fantasy. For a while we enjoy it hugely, but then, almost overnight, feeling its narrow limits, we long desperately to escape. Strange children. Why the gloom, those ugly, frowning faces? Only fools want to leave paradise. In I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith puts the white coat on, grabs the stethoscope…and gives an answer to our puzzled question. 

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America or England? It is left open. Our heroine cannot decide. Clever Simon has fallen for beautiful Rose, who, after their affiance, is smitten with Neil, his handsome brother. What a shocker! Cassandra loves Simon, but refuses his offer of marriage: it is a rebound match, and she wants more than second-best; she wants him to love her; and she’ll wait to see if this is possible. America then? Rich, smart and exciting these Americans have intoxicated this bewitching family, who in turn enchant these Yanks. It’s a love-in. England advertises its delights. Little wonder that these characters cannot make up their minds. And so the spoils are divided, the game ending in an odd sort of draw. Rose crosses the Atlantic. Cassandra stays on English territory, worrying about the future. Will he? He must! He must! The promise of the 20th century stronger than the delights of the 19th, itself attracted to the Middle Ages. Although the pull of the past remains. It is not be pushed aside. The new against the ancient. Tomorrow fighting out with last week. Oh Cassandra, why won’t you choose!

Even when the American dons an English identity; Simon to return to England to act out the role of an archetypical squire. Though we suspect, with his literary interests - Camden Farebrother of Middlemarch is a mate -  he’ll turn into one of those country parson types whose intellectual interests outweigh their calling and the institution they putatively serve. England has spun its magic. Just think: an English Rose! in a late Victorian setting. This belletrist was bound to fall.

America is Neil’s home. He can’t take England seriously; it is cute, for sure, but it’s not modern, dynamic, manly; this is an old culture, turned feminine. And repulsive in its way, because it is so attractive, seducing, you, taking away your masculine essence. Shouldn’t this Rose be called Aphrodite… Neil beds England’s flower after months of pretending to dislike everything about her. Fraughted love, it is obvious: this man’s been sulking. Here we have the type of American who has to self-consciously resist England’s charms, the hard dynamism of the frontiersman tempted but ultimately repelled by the knowing loveliness of a sentimental idyll. It is too soft, too yielding. Characters like Neil acquire such beauty, they are not captured by it. Thus he picks his Rose and carries her across the Atlantic. And this flower is willing to be picked. Rose wants to leave this beautiful but exiguous life; for she is no bohemian who can live off the wonders of a circumscribed existence, be nourished upon its minutiae, quirky and curious. A typical young lady of the haute-bourgeois she wants lovely things, needs a luxurious life, desires the pleasures of the senses; her love is a meeting of bodies not minds. This English Rose cannot resist America’s call.

Of the novels of the 1940s and 50s this is the only one I’ve have read that directly describes the impact of America upon England. In the majority the influence is implied, usually obliquely, the foreigners European not American. All these novels have an atmosphere. The pervading sense of living in a closed room waiting for the door to open, mostly by some young mad thing; Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle a scintillating example. Then in the early 1960s, under the weight of this pressure, the house collapses, and the room exists no more.1 The origins of this claustrophobia begin in the 1930s; though at this time the room’s qualities - its furniture, its art, the characters that decorate it - offset that closed-in feeling. Only after the war, during Austerity, does a feeling of insularity emerge. Here there is tension, but it is a pleasurable one. The attractions of England have yet to turn stale, are not constricting the sensibility; England still a marvellously compelling place for the cultivated. Though these Americans cannot be ignored. They are new. They are modern. They are also a curiosity. They have lots and lots of money. Not even the British elite, soaked in the idea of British superiority, can resist them. Of course these Yanks are going to change things. Today we do not see this influence, they have transformed us completely, colonising even our language; so that we, as Cassandra reminds us, no longer speak of “scent” but “perfume”. It began in the 1930s, when decisions had to be made, our heroine deciding on the newer, more melodious nomenclature. Nevertheless, in this decade America and Britain were on the same cultural level; it was a tug-of-war that neither could win; albeit in a few years time… The two men return to the States with Rose; Cassandra staying in England, her heart lost to Simon (who promises to return)…  America is pulling the future towards itself. England, alluring but weak, lacks the muscles to hold it back much longer.

In the 1930s England was still a powerful culture. Simon and his mother worship Mortmain, the children’s father; for them he is a genius their duty to revive. There is the English countryside. And the glorious past, made attractive by age and ruin: Cassandra & Family live in a decaying castle turned tumbledown home. This combination - a country idyll mixed with bohemian eccentricity - has all the characteristics of Edwardian Gothic (whimsy has shooed off the horror) and is irresistible. These Americans have stepped into a novel.2 

Written in the late 1940s the author is looking nostalgically back to the 1930s. The atmosphere is that of the Depression, caused by Mortmain’s financial and literary collapse following his dazzling twenties. And as with Barbara Comyns’ Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which describes the same class during the same period, this novel too evokes the joys of poverty; the family living on the most meagre of rations but yet alive to the beauty and exoticism that envelopes them. Like that same author’s Sisters By a River, but funnier, and with greater depth and richer characterisation, this novel portrays the freedom that poverty brings, especially to children of high-class families; education and civilisation giving them the intellectual tools to make vital use of such liberty. These young adults are active and imaginative; in the morning they talk to Mrs Bloom, their mannequin; in the afternoon they conduct their own Midsummer Eve ritual… Forever inventing, always doing things; curious about the world, alive to its blandishments. A natural intelligence is at work, enormously stimulated by the surroundings; a civilisation going slightly to seed. They are fortunate. They have the odd and the obsessed in their immediate vicinity: it is their own father and Topaz, his young wife. The Gothic seclusion of the castle, mixed together with these eccentrics, provides these girls both with the means and the inspiration to create a fairy-tale existence. When you are this clever and this free all things can be made interesting. Do not misunderstand me. The poverty is felt - to eat meat is a drunken luxury - but the freedom transcends the paucity of their material goods.3 An active mind - grown by civilisation, cultivated in a highly intelligent family - will seek out invention and engender a world grounded, crucially, in a profound innocence, open to the peculiarities of life. This far more important that the amount of cash in a bank account. Although we must be very very careful here: these country roads are more dangerous than they appear. We need to take our time. Go slow around the bends. Check out the landscape, look for oncoming vehicles… We must qualify our generalisations. The family is helped out by the local squire and love-sick Stephen. They are not doing it entirely by themselves. Nor is this a difficult trek over decades.4 Mortmain has suffered a temporary eclipse, a brief drop into hard times, just short enough to enable these girls to enjoy an extraordinary childhood. This is a true bohemia, which, to prosper, will have a support network, always hidden in the background. Temperament too is important. These characters so wonderful that everybody is going to help them.5

Although written in America and set before the war this novel feels close to Rose Macauley’s The World My Wilderness and Elizabeth Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses. All three are “Austerity novels”; though here the “pinched” feeling comes less from morality - Mortmain and Topaz being natural bohemians there is no strain on their civility - than from a lack of money and intellectual stimulation: the expansions of wealth and lively company are denied them, until the Americans arrive. Mortmain himself is to blame; his eccentricity is too wild - only the strong constitution of an aristocrat can take it - while he has isolated himself from the kind of company that could make his books flow. All three novels capture a sense of a constriction close to breaking point; as well as the release when it blows apart, that sudden opening out to the world and its rich darkness. 

These three novels, each in a slightly different way, are also about the last days of adolescence; when the present becomes unbearable and the future - that unknown tomorrow - is the promise of a new start. There is first love. Stephen’s start in the movies. Topaz’s dalliance with the smart set. Mortmain’s return to salon society. After a decade of seclusion, of restraint, of drift, the world is coming back; and how! lights! camera! action! It is a moment of change, where the excitements of the new mingle with an elegiac tenderness for the hardly old, which has become a story from Hans Christian Andersen.

I keep closing my eyes and basking - that is, my body basks; my mind is restless. I go backward and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future - and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future. I remind myself of how often we were cold and hungry with barely a rag to our backs, and then I count the blessings that have descended on us; but I still seem to fancy the past most. This is ridiculous and it is ridiculous that I should have this dull, heavy, not exactly unhappy but - well, no kind of feeling when I ought to be blissfully happy.

Cassandra is suffering from unrequited love (and the conventional notion that the poor cannot be happy). Though the feeling goes deeper than this. For a certain sensibility the past is better than the present; its wealth of association clinging to the person, like petals to a jumper when its owner walks across the field. That field carried with you as you walk down the road… So rich this past. It rains into the soul, layering a thick subsoil of experience, of memory, of history, of art, which we draw upon during the dry days of adulthood and middle age.6 Metaphors are tumbling down the hill… Every gate, tree and pond its own melody. The castle and its land a jukebox awaiting our heroine’s coins… For some characters, Cassandra is one of them - thoughtful and introspective - their late adolescence is a time of regret: they know they are leaving the Garden of Childhood, a magical enclosure.7 

Dodie Smith, although living in the USA, has felt something of the austerities of the war and its aftermath, a time of collective purpose and communal closeness. But beware of the sociologists, and their addiction to crude concepts.8 We must not take this rich novel and squeeze it inside a poor idea. We’ll not push a pumpkin into a tea caddy. What are you talking about Schloss… My idea of micro-periods, short stretches of time that create their own atmosphere, some of which last mere months; think of that period between the two armistices, marvellously evoked by Muriel Spark in The Girls of Slender Means or that shift in the mood of the BBC wonderfully described in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices. I must be wary of my ideas, so wondrously inviting! Not all is due to shifts in social ambience. In exile from England, cut off from friends and family by a now dangerous Atlantic, it is the U-boats not creative sterility that generates that sense of isolation we see in Mortmain. Also that feel of incarceration which pervades this novel. Go slowly Schloss - I tell myself, I remind myself, I do a hundred lines: I will -  go slowly through these pages; take care with the sociological simplicities. General ideas distort, tell lies, they are con artists who mislead us with their sleights of hand. For have we not seen, by staying close to the ground, how economic deprivation can produce joy and liberty? Now we talk of prisons. But what is this talk… Living inside the castle, protected from the bourgeois world, these girls do not suffer the demands of this too demanding class, whose very presence - rarely simpatico - stultifies. A prison can set us free. How glorious to be alone! inside a castle with this mad family. Cassandra’s imagination, stimulated by her milieu these rare adults, grows like a wild orchard; and she tastes its rich fruit. But again we must be careful. Freedom is not an absolute good. It can be bad for us. Mortmain’s hermit-like existence gives his mind too much latitude, and he loses all creative discipline. To force him to write the girls lock him in Belmotte tower;9 the only way to find himself.10 The moral seems clear. We must leave the enchanted castle if we are to get things done. Cassandra feels this truth, but cannot abandon a life that’s been so supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. She waits. Hopes. Something amazing will, surely - it must it must - turn up.

The large decaying house is a period trope. It embodies the feeling of a class convinced its way of life is dying out; wonderfully evoked by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his Between the Water and the Woods. An ancient culture, now somewhat ramshackle, whose aristocrats  are tinged with bohemia and eccentricity, is facing sudden collapse, as the modern world rushes in. There is no better symbol than a country mansion inherited by Americans. (At war’s end, of course, it would be given to the National Trust.) A class and its culture is in decline. And that decline - and this needs emphasis - is part of its allure; the decline loosening it, relaxing it, creating a tolerance for the whimsical and the bizarre. It is why Mortmain, a writer, and Topaz, an artist’s model, are allowed to live in this ruin on the edge of the estate, even when their money runs out. Not pay the rent! To have such characters around is worth twice that… Here is the last of Olde England. And the beginnings of a new cultural set, the cosmopolitan chic of the film and art world.11 Mortmain, a genius atop the cliff edge of madness, belongs to the antique; Topaz, a society beauty who communes naked with nature, and who talks the worst kind of “artistic” bombast, attached to the fashionable. Today, with her the Cosmic Significant and the Form of the Infinite, she’d write the notices in the Tate or White Cube. Educated above her sensibility. Here it adds charm: clever Cassandra and the wise old man - they are the true aesthetes - laughing at her nonsense. A laissez-faire squire and this bunch of eccentrics. It is what remains of England’s once great aristocracy. After a thousand years the Normans are reduced to…a battered castle inhabited by lunatics. Simon falls in love with this scene because it beguiles and amuses him. No longer to be taken too seriously, because it is not quite real.

When the novel ends Simon will return to curate this world; England’s old elite no more than a museum where the past is preserved. The least dynamic of this new class, a man of letters not a businessman, Simon is an American anomaly. It is the others who will change things. The ferociously modern Leda Fox-Cotton lives in an avant-garde studio…

It was furnished as a sitting-room with great divans piled with cushions, Everything was black or white. On the walls were enlargements of photographs she had taken, including one of a magnificent, quite naked Negro, much larger than life. It reached from the floor to the ceiling…

This studio - an old stables - would not be out of place in the 1960s. Leda too belongs to this future decade: a photographer, a sexually-free woman and a member of the smart set with connections to the movies (we imagine her in bed with Antonioni). She steals and seduces the handsome and innocent Stephen. And we note the classical allusion, which the author cleverly and rightly overturns; for in this world it is the women have the power: Rose, Cassandra, Topaz, Mrs Cotton and Leda Fox-Cotton dominate; the men left to the interstices of their influence.12 The exception is Mortmain, an insanely charismatic force kept in the background by his creative barrenness.

Mortmain. The references to death (mort) and core (main) neatly sum up his personality. By choosing this ruined castle he has created the world inside which his family live. A foolish idea that has become a brilliant inspiration; for only in this place could the girls have led such an extraordinary life; despite the worries over food and bills and the inability of their father to write anything at all: Mortmain spends his days reading detective fiction. Does he have only one book in him? Was he undone by his time in prison (he hit a neighbour)? Has all vitality gone? We suspect that the difficulty of writing the second book, together with the prison sentence, has led, through his first wife’s death and Topaz’s powerful but uncomprehending personality, to a clinical depression, and a spiritual death. Topaz. Oh Topaz. Bohemian and beautiful, but completely lacking in creative insight and intellectual penetration, by worshipping your husband’s genius you increase his creative despondency; such outrageous expectation and hyperbole deadening the soul. Poor Mortmain. He retreats from the world, hiding from its demands, securing himself against its transformative changes. No books will be written here. Yet, while Mortmain suffers creative extinction, his children inhabit a glorious fantasy. The irony is pungent. Here in the castle art is in the life not the work…

…which the narrator “merely” transcribes (or so this fiction goes).

Cassandra is a granddaughter of Henry James: clever and well-read she is yet not old enough to divine these adults’ sensibilities. She misses so much! Of what is obvious to us - that Neil and Rose are in love - she has no inkling. Mortmain’s depression is way beyond the horizon of her understanding. While the libertine ways of the smart set - Leda’s lust for Stephen, the sexual tensions of Topaz and Mr Fox-Cotton - are discovered only after the event: a virgin aunt reads of a sex scandal in the newspapers. Cassandra, a very innocent young woman, is looking at highly sophisticated people through a veil thick with naivety. So thick she can hardly see them. In the early morning mist there are vague shapes and strange noises. The black night lightens into grey, into silver into a white canvas… Each morning the same until…one morning the mist clears, and a red palette paints the fields with oranges, purples, yellows; an English field is touched by Gauguin. A new landscape is emerging, bright with interest and loud with excitement - there are parties in the dell; dances, touches, kisses - and we are carried away to new exotic places. It is not all joy. There are long dark shadows, which obscure, hide, sometimes destroy, occasionally terrify. Old landmarks are changing. Some to be lost forever. A familiar space is becoming a strange land we tentatively explore. We love it. And hate it. And lose our way, time after time. Sex is ubiquitous. But - pace the Freudians - Cassandra is oblivious to its presence. Sex belongs on another continent;13 Rose to reach it only at the novel’s end; appropriately on the edge of England. Innocence is fighting it out with experience, and when the novel finishes we are uncertain which has won.

This is a novel about growing up. Specifically, it charts that narrow interstitial space between late adolescence and early adulthood, where we leave behind the remnants of our childhood home - this Midsummer Eve’s ritual is to be Cassandra’s last - but are not yet fluent in the language of the new country. Attracted by the new sights of this new age, whose glitter we do grasp, we fear and occasionally withdraw from its strangeness - those sexual seductions of Leda Fox-Cotton. Always we are discomforted by our confusion, the loss of control. We are attracted to love, that great destabiliser. It is the Malign Chaos! Cassandra falls for Simon, so losing her equanimity, the foundation of her youthful independence, with its natural happiness. Suddenly life is unsettling. There are shooting shocks of exquisite pains. While doubts litter each day. The morning begins so beautifully, the afternoons turn ugly, the evenings sink into a slow, lonely sadness. How did this happen? A question we are to repeat almost daily. Yesterday we were certain of everything. Today we know nothing at all. And tomorrow… What shall I do… Tell me! Tell Me! The paradise of a bourgeois childhood is coming to an end.14 The pull is tremendous. This idyll won’t let Cassandra go. She stands on the bridge. She hesitates… Come on Cassandra! Come on! She moves to…and then…steps back. I…I… She waits. She will wait. This decision is too big. It is too difficult. Impossible for her to decide. No, I will wait. The outside world must be as lovely as this castle, its gorgeous moat, the drawbridge I am standing upon. I will take this place with me; pack it in my bag, carry it to the railway station. She imagines herself in a sumptuous coach; the guard wearing the uniform of the imperial Persian guard; she curls his whiskers with her heating tongs. Only then will she leave; she has decided; thinks again; has second, third, she has fourth thoughts… Cassandra stands on the bridge, looking at a world which she must…surely, surely she will enter it one day. But now, in these last paragraphs, she resists. And waits. Oh, how she waits! And hopes…for a world that can never be as beautiful as this one; becoming evermore beautiful by the day, the hour, each passing rushing minute, it turns into seconds.

This Cassandra cannot foretell the future. Instead, she hopes for a spontaneous infatuation: Simon to fall on his own accord. Without the gift of prophecy she devises her own magic formula: I love you, I love you, I love you. It is hopeless. She has no control over Simon’s heart. The future remains a mystery. (Only we the reader to know what happens next.) So that opening question - America or England - what is it to be? For Rose the answer is a simple Yankee yes! Cassandra is less sure: she will choose America only if it turns English, an uncertain prospect. Here is a tension that the novel cannot resolve. Caught between two times and two cultures our heroine is left only with her dodgy spells.

Leda rapes a man… Another classical reference turned upside down. Why? A jumble of childhood mistakes; an adolescent’s reading all mixed up? Possibly. But our author is older and smarter than this. The children run the house (when Topaz goes to London). There is a writer who cannot write. An American with an English mind. A Cassandra blind to all signs. There is something more than a confused immaturity. A tradition and a style of life is being upended, to create a beautiful topsy-turvy interlude, a wild party between two acts. It’s a love-up! A joyful mess, that some day - sadly - will be sorted out; matron to come along in the 1980s… But those Greeks, Schloss; you shake my elbow, twist around to stare me in the face; will you tell about those Greeks! I mention young Yeats and old Yeats; how once they were thrown together into a vast vat, Cúchulainn stirring them into… Schloss! Ok. A friend of mine - I bow to Mr Viv Beeton - suggests the solution. It is the influence of the Edwardians, and especially its children’s literature, on a standard English education steeped in the stories of the Ancient Greeks. In Cassandra’s journal classical myth is being turned into fairy tale.

I slipped into the water again and it didn’t feel quite so bad; by the time we had swum back as far as the drawing-room I was beginning to enjoy it. Topaz and the Vicar, framed in the yellow square of the window, were looking down on us. There was no sign of Rose and Simon at the window high above; I hoped they were too engrossed to look out. We swam through a patch of moonlight - it was fun making silver ripples just in front of my eyes - and then to the steps of the corner tower…

After we turned the corner to the front of the castle there was no more golden light from the windows or the lantern, nothing but moonlight. We swam on our back, looking up at the sheer, unbroken walls - never had they seemed to me so high. The water made slapping, chuckling noises against them and they gave out a mysterious smell - as when thunder-rain starts on a hot day; but dank and weedy and very much of a night-time smell too…

Once we were round on the Belmotte stretch of the moat it was very dark, because the moon wasn’t high enough to shine over the house. Suddenly something white loomed ahead of us and there was a hiss and a beating of wings - we had collied with the sleeping swans. Neil enjoyed that, and I laughed myself but I was really quite frightened; swans can be very dangerous. Luckily ours bore no malice - they just got out of our way and flapped into the bulrushes.

The swans! It is almost as if we have entered an Edwardian children’s tale. Cassandra smiles, and pats me on the hand. Of course! I had forgotten; you are writing this book, and your journal is its central character. None of this is real; the castle, its grounds, all these crazy personalities are what your pages create, a child’s enchanted garden you do not intend to leave.

Put the book down dear, and come out to play… Cassandra is tempted. But the pen demands its due: to recreate this past even more beautiful than to have lived it (this young woman has read her Proust). Come on Cassandra! We’re waiting. The book screams out in pain: don't don’t leave me! Come on. Now! my dear. Cassandra…. Will she grow up and leave this fairy tale? Can she? Ah! if only we could write our heroine’s future! But surely Schloss you must have some idea. To take us this far, and then to leave us on a deserted beach… I suspect art will have its way. I predict Cassandra will never fully mature. She’ll be a writer. England to always keep its charm.15

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1.  For a brilliant portrayal of that background and a description of the collapse see An English Affair, by Richard Davenport-Hines. The same author’s The Macmillans also does a brilliant job on the period.

2.  Later Brits would have the same experience of New York: it is like walking into a film.

3.  Contrast with Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli; an account of an extremely poor part of Southern Italy, written about that same 1930s. There are different degrees of poverty. Here it creates discomfort. In Gagliano people lived on survival’s borderline.

4.  The working class novels of Anglo-Welsh literature describe very different lives. There is Jack Jones’ Black Parade…

5.  Think of Frances in A Wreath of Roses.

6.  We note this comment in Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church: after the triumph of Christianity the Roman aristocrats looked back to the pagan era with an aesthetic pleasure.

7.  The Italians are masters at describing this feeling. Think of that masterpiece of adolescent weltanschauung: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani.

8.  There is a wonderful passage in Christ Stopped at Eboli when the author records the incomprehension of his northern friends, who cannot see beyond their ideas to the truths he tells them about Gagliano. Like so many artists before (and after) him he has come to realise that the uniqueness of each individual existence has more reality than a general idea. He values these peasants so much because they are free of the preconceived opinions of the half-educated, those products of a modern education.

9.  It is also a Freudian reference: by reliving an old experience he is freed from his psychological malaise.

10.  There are extraordinary pages in Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation which emphasise just this point: to achieve self-transcendence one must imprison oneself - either in ritual or through a long hard discipline. The artist cannot afford to be free.

11.  Isabel Colegate’s A Man of Power describes what happens in the 1950s when the aristocrats, having lost all their culture, become merely play-girls and play-boys. Again the Italians are brilliant here: Fellini, Antonioni….

12.  Carlo Levi notes the same balance of power in his book. In the 1930s the women control the most important things: family, home, the local public spaces.

13.  I was going to comment on a teensy-weensy bit of Dodie Smith mischief, but I can’t find the scene (did I make it up?). But hey, you can do the work…

Cassandra is very excited and writes about doing something wrong. Later we are to learn she kissed Stephen. But isn’t this a game? Doesn’t Dodie want us to think of a young heroine’s finger on an ecstatic clitoris…

Help me out my friends, do tell me if I am a salacious fantasist.

14.  So much of a bourgeois youth’s rage comes from being forced out of Eden’s gate. Genesis, we are convinced, was written by a good middle class boy.

15.  According to Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England this is soon to disappear. This thought-provoking book was - alas - its own Trojan princess: the reviewers not grasping its message, oblivious to its prophecy… A people’s rage at the destruction of their culture had its revenge on June 23rd 2016.