November 24, 1990

The playwright career of Dodie Smith (May 3, 1896 to November 24, 1990) in 1930s England, recalls a forgotten part of literary history, and you will soon realize why she should NOT be forgotten, if you have not already realized whose name we mention. Here is an excerpt from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writeup, taking up where Smith takes a pedestrian job to pay the rent, like many artists must. She is working for a retail furniture operation:

running its art gallery. Here she embarked with determination upon an affair with the married chairman of the company, Ambrose Heal, who already had an established mistress, .... Ambrose gave her the Underwood typewriter on which she wrote, in 1929, her first play, Autumn Crocus. She had been to the Leipzig toy fair to buy goods for Heals, and while there dreamed up a plot about a spinster schoolmistress from Lancashire who falls in love with a married Tyrolean innkeeper. The play was bought by Basil Dean for £100. It made Dodie, who had been earning £4 a week, rich and famous overnight in 1931. 'Shopgirl writes play', proclaimed the billboards.

After an apparently disastrous first night, Autumn Crocus, starring Fay Compton and Francis Lederer, ran for a year in the West End, and was later filmed. It was followed by a succession of light comedies: Service (1932), Touch Wood (1934, the first to be written under her own name instead of the pseudonym C. L. Anthony), Call it a Day (1935), Bonnet over the Windmill (1937), and Dear Octopus (1938), which established Dodie Smith as the most consistently successful woman playwright of her time. She appeared to have a deft touch, knowing just what the 1930s West End audience wanted: well-crafted middlebrow comedies with a skein of sentiment. But with Dear Octopus, centred on a family reunion, and starring John Gielgud, Marie Tempest, and Leon Quartermaine, she achieved her biggest triumph. The play, catching the mood of the time exactly, ran for two years; and its moving 'grand toast' speech (originally delivered by Gielgud), a paean to the durability of the family, ensured its place in repertory for the next sixty years.

Let's skip a few decades. Dodie Smith wrote a book widely ignored, and so unjustly. Starlight Barking (1967) is a classic of metaphysical exploration, so good it makes me shiver. She had previously asked Walt Disney for a limousine. He said to her, you write me another Hundred and One Dalmations and I'll get you a fleet. Starlight Barking is better than The Hundred and One Dalmations. But that fact is not recognised, and the fleet just chatter.

As is that a cat named Pussy Willow appears in both The Hundred and One Dalmations and Starlight Barking.