Valerie GroveBesprekingen

A fascinating and very readable biography.

Only just scrapes 3* from me, because of my memories of classic 1970s Puffins, and Puffin Club magazines. I just didn't find the biography very compelling.

Dodie Smith was born in 1896 and died in 1990. During her lifetime the world when through enormous changes and numerous wars. This biography not only relates Dodie’s life, but is also a record of those years, containing so much about the changing society, culture, values and recalling an unknown (to me at any rate) theatrical age.

She was the author of two classics - I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Those are the two works that I knew before reading this book. She was also an acclaimed playwright and her plays receiving most praise were Autumn Crocus and Dear Octopus. This book has triggered my interest in reading these plays and more of Dodie’s books. She wrote millions of words, mostly about herself - in her journals and five volumes of autobiography. She simply loved writing. But at times she became depressed.

One touching note - Dodie’s last Dalmatian, Charley, slept on the floor by her side on guard, as it were, during her final days. Dodie left £2000 in her will for ‘the utmost care and protection of Charley’, but three weeks after her departure he died.½

Valerie Grove's exploration of the life of a writer widely-known and loved in the UK for his novel-cum-memoir 'Cider with Rosie' holds some surprises, not all of them welcome. Lee's output was surprisingly small, and achieved only with much agonising; his reputation rests on a relatively modest handful of semi-autobiographical fiction and poetry. The portrait Grove presents is of a magnetic, spellbinding young man - a carefree Pied Piper figure - who became self-centred, morose and often tyrannical as youth, health and good looks deserted him, and whose interpretation of 'truth' in his memoirs became the subject of much debate amongst those who had shared his experiences, for example, in the Spanish Civil War. His lifelong attraction to very young girls, compulsive extra-marital activities and behaviour towards his lovers and long-suffering wife (who was very considerably his junior) casts a shadowy, and at times (for this reader, anyway) unappealing light on his character. Perhaps sometimes we're better off not knowing the facts behind the lives of writers - I came away from this book feeling that Laurie Lee was not someone I warmed to. For me, a fascinating but ultimately very saddening biography.