Look Back With Astonishment

This third volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Astonishment, picks up exactly where volume two left off, with Smith walking through the doors of Heal's furniture store (still going strong today) to take up a position as a shop girl, running the Little Gallery (toys and pictures), a job she would keep for the next decade after giving up on her acting career. She did not, however, give up on the theatre, because this book also covers her years as a tremendously successful playwright.

Anyone who has worked a day job while simultaneously pursuing a creative life will bristle at the headlines Smith attracted with her first successful script: 'Shop Girl Writes Play' -- as if she were a monkey playing with a typewriter! Gradually Smith's hours at Heal's taper off as she devotes more time to writing. She is very coy about her affair with 'Oliver,' who the attentive reader will immediately guess was in fact Ambrose Heal, her boss, but this affair seems to taper off in similar fashion as she grows more attached to Alec Beesley, her eventual husband. I had no idea that Smith had such a stellar playwriting career, extremely commercially successful and fortunately for her, extremely lucrative.

Look Back With Astonishment ends as war is about to break out, with Smith and Beesley embarking for America, ostensibly to help cast one of her plays in New York, but with an eye to the safety of Beesley, an avowed pacifist (in fact, as a conscientious objector, he probably would have been fine).

The Athenaeum Library doesn't have the fourth volume, Look Back With Gratitude -- to judge from the state of the other three books, it probably fell apart -- but I have ordered it for myself for Christmas. A fifth volume was apparently planned, but never finished, which is a shame. LBWG I think will cover their seven years in the US and the writing of I Capture the Castle, so I'm looking forward to that.