Going CASTLE MODE: Castle dwelling attire, castle reading, the attitudes of castle owners, the rules of enchantment....

The Recipe for an ENCHANTED APRIL... four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to lead an enchanted life. I settled on a consumerist proposition: rent a castle, read about a castle, dress like you’re living in a castle. GO CASTLE MODE at home i.e. tiptoe to the toilet in the middle of the night with a candle in a leather overcoat over your pajamas. (Love this silly little blog on medieval fashion.)

The point of going to a castle is you need hilariously large numbers of people sleeping on every surface. The normal rules of having a party or spending a long weekend with friends don’t apply, because you have no neighbors (remember, you have a moat). You have space. (What’s fun about more than one staircase? Hard to find your friends. You spend half the time just looking for people who have paired off.) You can smoke inside. Spilled drinks don’t stain flagstones. (You don’t have to worry about “deposits.”) It’s about laziness and relaxation as the height of sophistication….

Most of the novels or stories that qualify as “castle literature,” aren’t set in castles. They’re stories about young men who have to leave the castle to do quests and save young women. Castles, therefore, are women spaces. (You’ll remember in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that the host goes out to hunt every day and Gawain stays behind and flirts with his wife.) Castle dwellers are ruled by magic, intrigue, poison—murder politics. It’s the setting for a gothic story, not an adventure story! It’s about drawing up the draw bridge, and delving into…doomed self-indulgence. (You might enter the mindset by reading The Mask of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe’s story about drinking and feasting while everyone dies of the Plague. It’s also an excellent Vincent Price film.)

Castle mode starter pack

• Stay in a castle or fort. 204 buildings.

• A good film about a couple of friends drinking in a castle? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Buy copies of the play for all your friends. Do a reading.

• Listen to Ancient FM. Commercial free medieval renaissance music that plays 24 hours with no talking.

• Check out the work of Joseph Dupre Studio. GOBLETS!

  

• The greatest late medieval film is Ken Russell’s The Devils (based on Aldous Huxley’s novel). Very erotic. It’s about the King of France knocking down all of the walls of the cities, in order to centralize power. Oliver Reed is the priest who is in his way. Vanessa Redgrave is the hunched redhead nun whose sexual obsession with Reed leads to her denouncing him, and collaborating with the inquisition and the crown to destroy him.

  

  A description of the tapestry in The Kindly Ones. You always want to be in a tapestry castle, not a deer-heads-on-the-wall castle, though a mixture of the two is acceptable. (Modern art is of course an abhorrent option.)

• The perfect party scene in an Anthony Powell novel: Friends dress up as the Seven Deadly Sins, as seen in a tapestry on the wall at Stourwater Castle, where they are weekending. Some thrive, some are the subject of great embarrassment.

• Pretend to be a castle librarian. Read Peveril of the Peak, Sir Walter Scott’s “longest novel,” also Castle Dangerous. The House of Cobwebs by George Gissing. Vittoria by George Meredith. Maybe Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Also The Amazing Marriage by George Meredith. (“The story revolves around the tumultuous life of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, particularly focusing on her elopement with the daring old buccaneer, Captain Kirby.”)

  

• Read TH White’s The Sword and the Stone—what the Disney movie is based off of! (It’s also somehow, says my husband, defining what conservative politics are in the 30s, as distinct from fascism. It’s about the young king Arthur being trained by Merlin to be the greatest king ever. (He encounters totalitarianism when he’s turned into an ant. And anarchism when he’s turned into a goose.)

• Earlier this year, Joe and I watched Merlin (1998), the TV show with Sam Neill. Puts the remake to SHAME. On Youtube!

• Medieval Party MixTape.

THE RECIPE FOR **AN ENCHANTED APRIL**? CASTLE TIME WITH YOUR GIRLFRIENDS.

I bought The Enchanted April (1922) because of the book jacket copy: “A recipe for happiness: four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed…a best-seller in both England and the United States, where it…set off a craze for tourism to Portofino.” I greatly desire to be crazed for an Italian vacation.