The idea of a lute

My wife doesn’t often recommend books to me, but she did recently. The book is I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith, written in America during the war, but not published until 1949, after some years of anxious revisions.

I’ve only read about a dozen pages of the book and already know I’m going to love it. That sense is, admittedly, helped along a bit by knowing that the book was an instant hit on publication and has remained a word-of-mouth treasure ever since. But it’s more than that.

Here’s the opening sentence:

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

The narrator continues:

That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left.

Since we’re in the quotation mood, here are a couple more bits from those first few pages:

[My sister Rose] is a pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her, I know she is a beauty … I am no beauty, but have a neatish face.

[My stepmother Topaz] paused on the top step and said: ‘Ah, girls …’ with three velvety inflections on each word.

Now she [the stepmother] is in bed and is playing her lute. I like the idea of a lute, but not the noise it makes.

Now, quoting snippets isn’t really the best way to present a novel. A novel is the best way to present a novel. But I hope you feel that, even chopped up into morsels, there is something instantly seductive here. Instantly moreish.

And the question I want to ask is: how come? What’s the secret? What do you have to do on the first few pages to write a novel that will still be read with warmth and affection, seventy-five years after its creation?

Simple good writing is a part of it, of course. I talked a month or two back about Elizabeth Gilbert’s use of an ordinary-but-wide vocabulary in her book, The Signature of All Things. Dodie Smith does the same here.

So anyone might talk of someone’s complexion being pink and gold, but it takes a little flash of genius to add the word feathery. That suggests downy and soft and touchable, but also perhaps the hint of a caress or an artist’s brush. And at the same time the word works because it’s odd enough – controversial enough – to spark consideration of why it deserves its place.

Those velvety inflections work in roughly the same way. Can you yourself find a way to say ‘Ah, girls’ with three velvety inflections on each word? I doubt it – and yet the slight provocation somehow deepens the effectiveness of the phrase.

As for the idea of the lute versus the noise it makes – that’s just plain funny.

So, OK, we have on our check-list so far:

1. Write well
2. Be funny

In Dodie Smith’s case, we might add also:

3. Be warm

Clearly, that advice won’t work for every book, but it’s notable that there is a kindness to these opening pages, which is simply pleasant to be around. So the sister is pinkish gold and feathery. The stepmother is very kind and the narrator is very fond of her. Even the dog ‘gazes at me with love, reproach, confidence and humour.’

Yes, we go to fiction for things other than kindness and warmth, but if we happen to pick up a book and find ourselves in a warm bath of laughter and affection and gentle teasing, it’s not all that likely we’ll want to put it down.

But I think we get nearer to the mark if we throw in this:

4. Get personal

I Capture The Castle is narrated by seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. Her personality is alive in every sentence. You already have a sense of that personality from the bits I’ve quoted. If you’re writing third person, then you won’t be able to deploy your protagonist’s own voice in quite the same way, but you can still snuggle up as close as you can to that protagonist and get his or her personality blooming as soon and as vividly as you can.

There are, however, several further ingredients of the Smithian stew, I think.

One is certainly:

5. Be quotable

That first sentence about sitting in a sink is often seized on as a Famous First Sentence. And the thing about lutes & music is deliciously perfect too.

At the same time, and though quotability is a factor here, it’s not one I’d want to get too hung up on. A lot of newbie authors like to adorn their first pages with flashily quotable lines. Things like – oh, I don’t know – “Killing a man is easy. Keeping his blood off your shirt is hard.”

That has a strut, a look-at-me quality, that probably does do something to attract the reader’s interest. But if it doesn’t derive from real personality – if it’s written for that movie poster, and nothing else – it won’t have staying power. So, for me, the “get personal” message is always more powerful and more enduring than the “be quotable” one. It sticks longer in the memory.

One more of Smith’s ingredients is something like this:

6. Be curious

Cassandra Mortmain is live-writing a diary, reporting life very much as it happens. And she’s sweetly, naively excited to be writing at all. She looks forward to being able to talk about everything. She doesn’t attempt a full description of their crumbling castle home on page two, because ‘I won’t attempt to describe out peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now.’

She writes her book in a kitchen sink, then on the stairs, then in her bed (the remains of her only dressing gown wrapped around a hot brick.)

Because Cassandra is zestful about the act of writing and reporting, we become zestful about the act of reading. It’s as with my murder stories: my detective loves murder. All corpses please her, but good corpses delight her.

Delight is contagious. Infect your main character and you will infect your reader too.

So far, we seem to have collated a reasonably doable list of action points. That doesn’t make it simple, mind you. ‘Write well, be funny’: it’s not like those things are easily done. But still. They are, in principle, things you can work at.

But, being truthful, I think we have to throw one extra ingredient into the mix:

7. Be magical

Dodie Smith wrote other books, other plays. Apart from I Capture The Castle, only one of those works had enduring success … and you’re much less likely to have read Dodie Smith’s book than to have seen Walt Disney’s adaptation of it: One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Presumably, Smith didn’t suddenly get extra helpings of genius for her Capture The Castle book and lose them all for everything else. Equally, John Le Carre became a better novelist in the years after he wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but if you could only save one JLC novel from the inferno, then that would probably be the one.

The fact is that, as authors, we arrange our ideas on a table as we are deciding what to write next. When we find a configuration that feels right, we let rip. We spend a year or however long writing that damn novel. Then we edit it hard. Then we have what we have.

Sometimes that novel is a perfectly workmanlike, entertaining, decent read. And good. We’ve done our job; we’ve earned our crust. And other times, the same set of skills applied to other ingredients just product something of magic. A matter of chemistry, really.

And quite why does I Capture The Castle have that chemistry so abundantly when Smith’s other adult novels didn’t? Well, we don’t know. You can’t know until you’ve written the thing.

So write your book. See if it’s magical. If it’s not, write another.

That’s all from me. We have a skip in the garden and the children are currently inside it, having a picnic.