Look Back With Gratitude

The final volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Gratitude, is the only one not available from the Athenaeum library, so I took the liberty of buying myself a copy as a Christmas present. Gratitude covers what might be called 'the American years.' Smith's partner, later husband, Alec Beesley, was a conscientious objector, and when World War II broke out, they decided to stay in the United States so that he would escape imprisonment (this became complicated later in the war, when the US joined the fight and Alec faced even more stringent rules around conscientious objection). This was not a decision taken lightly; Smith was horribly homesick and was tormented with guilt about missing out on her country's wartime sufferings. Then, when the war ended, neither could face the prospect of quarantining their three beloved Dalmatians for six months (journalists found this difficult to believe, but it was true!)

Smith's income was erratic; she earned huge chunks of money consulting on screenplays, but the last section of the book is largely concerned with the failure of her play, Letter From Paris, in London after the war. It sounds absolutely agonising, juggling cast, director, set designer, producer -- it made me realise how many elements need to gel to produce a theatrical hit and just how chancy it can be. 

It's been so odd reading these memoirs; my conception of Dodie Smith is as a fiction writer first and foremost (and Gratitude also deals with the writing of I Capture the Castle), but clearly she saw herself as principally a playwright. I have never seen or read a single one of her plays and have no idea if she was actually any good or not (I mean, she must have been, she was popular in her time and made a good living from it). Yet all those plays she fretted over and which so consumed her energies have largely vanished without a trace.

Gratitude ends with Dodie, Alec and the dogs returning to live in England in 1953, she says hopefully forever, and I think it was.