I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
I read this line from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) squirreled up on a twin bed in my grandmother’s nineteenth-century mountainside house. The one window is so tiny it allows only a smokey, persistent dusk. In a castle, it would be called a loophole.
Hours before, my mother had retreated, saying, “I hate this room. It’s so dark.” That’s when my eye landed on the only bookcase in the house I hadn’t yet breached. Old dust, brittle book covers, crisp empty envelopes; outside, the sounds of footsteps plodding down the hallway and voices wondering if I wanted dessert. I was sneaking and I knew it. In the bookcase, I found snapshots of Nagasaki secretly taken a few days after the blast, a black-and-white photo of a bald woman my family had never mentioned, a dance card from a prom two-and-a-half decades before—my mother’s name was on it, and some guy named Joe appeared in four out of the ten slots. And I found books. Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie (1940), Ernest K. Gann’s The High and the Mighty (1953), a copy of Best Loved American Poems, and Smith’s I Capture the Castle.
That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board.
In the novel, Cassandra Mortmain lives and writes in a castle without electricity or a reliable source of heat long after both were invented. Her father is a writer and may be daft; her biological mother is dead. Cassandra is seventeen.
I am ten. I don’t live here in the Poconos, where my nana harvests bushels of tomatoes and apples and still uses the term icebox. I live in a suburb. My father is a dentist with an explosive personality worthy of clinical diagnosis, but no one mentions this. I would live here if I could. I don’t mind the dark room.
***
Now, as a writer and precocious kid grown old, I reread I Capture the Castle with more awe than I had when I packed it in my suitcase and stole it from dear Nana. I’m better armed for awe now—by education and by experience.
Luckily, two degrees in literature and one in writing have given me half a chance to catch some of Smith’s literary references. For instance, I now know why the narrator’s name is Cassandra (an allusion to Homer), why her father’s masterpiece is called Jacob Wrestling (an allusion to Genesis), and why the fashionable photographer who seduces the farm boy is named Leda (a deft poke at both Ovid, who tells of Leda’s rape by a swan, and D.H. Lawrence, who celebrates the sexual dominance of rural men). Also, I manage to catch the Shakespeare.
He [Stephen] is how I imagine Silvius in As You Like It.
But occasionally I still have to look stuff up, such as the poet that Cassandra’s suitor plagiarizes; it turns out to be Robert Herrick.
My life experience helps me to read more deeply, too. A life lived among women twisting themselves into marriageable avatars and men striding through the world over-certain of their places in the world has given me a grown-up’s perspective, the same perspective Dodie Smith clearly had. A successful playwright and the author of The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, she spent the 1920s and 30s as an ever-single woman and only married at the age of 43. Castle was written a few years later, in a period of homesickness.
In Dodie’s novel, Cassandra chronicles and sometimes helps her big sister Rose’s efforts to contort herself into a bride for someone she doesn’t love. The economics are clear: Cassandra guesses, and Rose eventually admits, that Rose is selling herself. Naturally, Cassandra knows the literary precedents here.
“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!” [says Rose].
I said I’d rather be in a Charlotte Brontë.
Meaning, Cassandra would rather love deeply and wildly outside her class and haunt the moors for eternity than marry for money.
I’m going to forgive myself for not understanding this foreshadowing at age ten. I didn’t read Pride and Prejudice for another seven years, and the very word wuthering deterred me from Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece until I was out of college. While I’m at it, I’ll also forgive myself for not knowing that I would not marry Jim or Manuel or Mark—despite the offers—would not marry at all until I was forty-four; and for not knowing that my first book would contemplate the nature of the marriage promise in little girls’ lives.
While I’m forgiving myself for not seeing the future, I have to wonder: Can I forgive my ten-year old self for disliking the last third of the book? The last third flows seamlessly from the first two-thirds—it romps, it dances—but my impatience with it is a keen memory. It’s also somewhat mystifying. There was lots for a tomboy me to like. Cassandra swims in the moat in the dark of night and conducts magic on Midsummer’ss eve. She fights with her sister—something I should have been able to relate to. And she locks her father in a tower—a concept that should have had some appeal at this time in my life. But tree-climbing me is antsy. I don’t care whether Rose gets a beautiful bathroom or what her fiancé’s brother is up to. I don’t care about Cassandra’s newfound passion for Simon. Maybe this is because there’s too much kissing, slow dancing, and fancy verbiage like trousseau in this last third. Or maybe it’s because I want Cassandra to be a female Peter Pan, forever dissonant to the ways of grownups.
Ten-year old me hated the ending—and then I kept the book for fifty-five years.
***
So what did I actually understand, squirreled up in Nana’s dark room, trying to read by candlelight? Certainly not the references to Herrick or goodness, Edmund Waller, another poet I’ve had to look up this week. What did I love so much that I had to steal the book, and then take that mortal sin to Confession the next Saturday?
I loved Cassandra’s voice.
“That’ll do, Rose,” I told her [after she prayed too long]. “It’s enough just to mention things. Long prayers are like nagging.”
And I envied Cassandra’s role as observer and truthteller. Whenever someone calls her a child, I bristled. As a little sister, I knew what Cassandra’s elders don’t know: she has a child’s superpower, a keen eye for contradiction and falseness. Underestimated as a kid, Cassandra is funny, sharp-eyed, clarion. I want to be her, the girl with her feet in the sink, safe in her family and her voice, watching lives unfold.
I like seeing people when they can’t see me. I have often looked at our family through lighted windows and they seem quite different, a bit the way rooms seen in looking glasses do. I can’t get the feeling into words—it slipped away when I tried to capture it.
And there’s Cassandra’s struggle with writing.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
For ten-year-old me, it had been two years since my big sister gave me my first journal, and I failed miserably. Didn’t keep it up, couldn’t convey the surges of thought and fear. The page wasn’t big enough for my mind or the truth about my dad, which was a dangerous subject. Now I was watching someone else writing, even as her father is struggling with writing. There’s comfort here. Writing is hard. But Cassandra does it.
Is that why I’ve carried her book from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to California to Maryland to Virginia to Illinois to Maine? I’ve packed this book, shelved this book, dusted this book, opened it just to read that first line, and packed it again. Is it the writing struggle Cassandra describes that keeps me attached? Her addiction to trying, again, again? Or have I secretly taken to heart the fact that she turns down the man she loves because he doesn’t love her? Maybe.
But I think there’s more. All those miles and degrees, all those family truths told and punished, the late marriage, the manuscripts written and rewritten, and now I’ve come to this second reading. And finally, I see what Dodie Smith probably knew as she wrote I Capture the Castle.
We are who we are long before we know who we are.
As for me, I am Cassandra.
Lee Reilly writes about women, marriage, and the intricacies of family, identity, and care, and is at work on a novel-in-flash about her grandmother. Her writing has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Hippocampus, London Independent Story Prize, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and elsewhere, and she’s earned support from Barbara Deming Fund, Ragdale, and other arts organizations. The author of Women Living Single and Teaching Maggie, she hosts Shannaghe, a residency for writers in Maine.