Cover

Catherine Carswell

OPEN THE DOOR!

Introduced by
John Carswell

Introduction

Although the latter part of Open The Door! is mainly set in London, and the clue to the book is an episode in Italy, the roots of the novel are in, and belong to, Glasgow.

One must think of those Victorian terraces and the monumental centre of the city as fairly new, offering a sense of enterprise and confidence in the middle of danger and poverty. It was an energetic city, with its waterways and its shipping, its chemical plants and its neighbouring hills and moors, its dramatic new Gothic university building beside the crevasse of the Kelvin. Gilbert Murray became Professor of Greek there just ten years after Catherine Macfarlane was born in 1879. He was twenty-three. It was one sign among many that Glasgow was on its way to becoming a cultural as well as a commercial metropolis. Soon its School of Art would burgeon under Charles Rennie Mackintosh. All her life Catherine felt herself to be “a citizen of no mean city”.

At one level, no doubt, the title of her novel suggests an escape from the world in which the author grew up – a world of Calvinist religiosity, oppressive conventions and smothering family life. She describes them, and her resistance to them vividly: but lovingly and with sympathy. Much of Victorian Glasgow is repudiated in the book, just as it was in her later life, but never with hatred. The clue to the title has much more to do with entering than with escape, and the “door” is “the little sunken door in the wall” which Joanna, the subject of the novel, sees in Italy and is told admitted a lover to the house of the Renaissance courtesan “La Porziuncola”.

Most novelists, if they decide on an attractive heroine, either describe her attractiveness or arrange that it shall be taken for granted. An unusual thing in Open The Door! is the heroine’s own knowledge of her attractiveness, mingled with senses of power, risk, guilt, misery, fear of failure, pleasure in success, and a measure of mischief: all set against the austere, deeply imprinted consciousness of the family life created by the Free Church of Scotland.

Open The Door! was a first and a mind-clearing book drawn from direct experience. Joanna’s family – especially her elder sister and her lovable but infuriating mother – are taken from life. So is Phemie, the baby-draper’s daughter, whose original, after many adventures, paired off with one of the author’s brothers. Joanna’s lover Louis is modelled on the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen, and Lawrence Urquhart, with whom the book ends, reflects my father Donald Carswell, whom Catherine married in 1915. Even the relative ages of the principal characters are preserved from their originals in real life.

But to what extent was Joanna Catherine? for this one must look at Catherine’s life and the genesis of the novel.