BEST OF HER BREED
BOTTUM, J.
BEST OF HER BREED The Unlikely Author ofThe 101 Dalmatians' By J. Bottum You've known girls just like her: tiny, pretty, flirty young women—energetic, talented, bright, and brittle. The kind who...
...Presiding over the household is the father, James, once upon a time a famous novelist who wrote a modernist classic that American graduate students still bombard him with notes about...
...Her father James is either going mad or beginning to write again...
...After prison, James had rented an estate from an admirer...
...Godsend"— pronounced either God's-end or God-send, depending on the speaker—contains a Norman battlement, an unheated Stuart house raised above the ruins of a Tudor castle, and a surrounding moat...
...her eccentric family is more finely drawn than it had to be...
...But he has shrunk from his former wild, vivacious self, ever since he was briefly sent to prison for threatening his first wife with a cake knife, and he has impoverished the family by spending years doing nothing but reading detective novels and bemoaning his writer's block...
...The story is narrated by entries in the diary of the seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink," she begins...
...The kind who inevitably compels clichés—smart as a whip, cute as a button, snug as a bug— and so filled with razor ambition it makes your teeth ache...
...But the book is so much better than it needs to be...
...But Dodie Smith was the best of her ambitious, miniature breed, and when her play-writing career abruptly crashed after World War II, she sat down and J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard...
...The kind who makes old men long to pat her hand and middle-aged men buy sports cars...
...The genre of children's stories about talking animals is just as stern as the genre of romance novels...
...Her twenty-one-year-old sister Rose longs to escape the family's poverty by capturing a husband, her fifteen-year-old brother Thomas longs for enough money to go to school, and the family's eighteen-year-old unpaid handyman Stephen longs for the budding Cassandra to notice him...
...There are books that transcend their genre not because they go outside them, but because they fulfill them so perfectly, and I Capture the Castle is such a book: The classic elements of eccentric English family life, a comically ruined castle, and a girl coming to adult awareness mesh the way romantic novels always promise they will and rarely do...
...and the novel proves much more fun than the reader has any right to expect...
...The kind who always wants to be an actress...
...The family's initial encounter with the Americans proves endlessly embarrassing...
...But those who only know the movie versions of The Hundred and One Dalmatians have missed the surprise of the sharply written book: It has its perfect animal plot and its necessary children's-novel ending, but along the way, it has as well a sparkle that no one could have predicted...
...She belonged to a well-marked type—smart as a whip, cute as a button, and riven with ambi-tion—and she fulfilled her type well...
...The handsome, tongue-tied Stephen finds work as an artist's model and a potential Hollywood star...
...proved that she had something more than just a talented little woman's drive for fame...
...And Rose, wrapped in an inherited fur coat, is mistaken by the brothers for an escaped bear and narrowly avoids being shot...
...But I Capture the Castle—a perennial reader's favorite and one of the best small romantic novels ever written— has been unavailable for years, and its reprinting by St...
...But on the other hand, no one's ever known anyone exactly like Dodie Smith—the petite and plucky failed actress turned playwright, who seduced her way up the London fashion and West End theater worlds until she had a string of six now utterly ignored stage successes, from Autumn Crocus in 1931 to Dear Octopus in 1939...
...In many ways, the story in I Capture the Castle is entirely predictable—^proceeding with inevitable logic through the necessary heartbreak to Cassandra's dawning knowledge of herself as a writer and a woman...
...Martin's Press offers a wonderful opportunity for new readers to discover the book...
...Something of the same thing is true of The Hundred and One Dalmatians...
...Cassandra is wiser, sharper, and more observant than strictly necessary...
...Living on what they can raise in their garden and what little money they manage to bring in from odd jobs, the family is desperately concerned when their admiring landlord—who never bothered to collect the rent—dies and leaves his property to his American nephews, the wisecracking Neil Cotton and his serious older brother Simon...
...But she had as well a glint of humor, an unearned sparkle of wisdom, and a real prose talent...
...Together, they made her so much better than she had to be...
...Over the next six months, Cassandra relates in her diary the complications that ensue...
...The same is true of Dodie Smith herself...
...And Rose—seeing at last a way out of poverty—succeeds in trapping Simon into an engagement...
...When she died in 1990 at the age of ninety-four (leaving $3,000 to her dog), she was mostly forgotten, and even the fascinating new biography Dear Dodie by Valerie Grove is unlikely to resurrect her...
...However much the author herself has faded, she left behind two books that still live: I Capture the Castle, a 1948 novel of young love, and the 1956 children's classic, The Hundred and One Dalmatians...
...Neil and Simon first meet a green-toned Cassandra bathing in the kitchen vat used to dye clothes...
...Disney has filmed The Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961 as a cartoon feature and again in 1996 as a live-action film starring Glenn Close as the wicked Cruella de Vil who wants to slaughter ninety-seven Dalmatian puppies to make a fur coat...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 40
