Friday, June 13, 2008
America
Dodie Smith lived in America while she wrote this book. When I learned that I thought it made sense because there's a certain tone of nostalgia that's easy to associate with homesickness. Plus, she also seemed to have a kind of sympathy for the Americans that you'd only get from living among them. Did you feel that? The book came out after World War II, too, a time when the Brits maybe held Americans in a little more esteem.
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Interesting. I get what you're saying about the nostalgic tone. She does paint a very romantic picture of the English countryside and village. And it was also a pretty sympathetic view of Americans. I assume some English writers would portray Americans in such a situation as coarse, uncultured rubes.
The tone of the British-American relationship in this book reminded me a little of "84 Charing Cross Road." No war is mentioned in "Castle," but it came out right around the time that the "Charing Cross" correspondence began, in the late '40s. Simon, like Helen Hanff, is a bibliophile and an Anglophile (Cassandra calls Simon "the Henry James type of American, who falls in love with England," which is perfect for Hanff, too). Both Simon and Hanff provide for the destitute English (perhaps Hanff more lavishly because she was fairly destitute herself). And a lively relationship develops between them based on cultural curiosity, playful mockery and a bubbling mutual affection.
"Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England," Cassandra writes, and she could have said the reverse as well.
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