duMaurier

I usually try to join in Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work with finishing a book a day in May, since none of the candidates on my shelves were very short. Then I had a brainwave – I could finish an audiobook one day in the car, and spread reading a Daphne du Maurier out over two days.

So, which to choose? Eventually I alighted upon Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father – published in 1934, the year that Gerald du Maurier died. Daphne du Maurier was only 27 – she’d published three novels, but none of them are the ones that would make her name as a writer of fiction. According to the not-too-subtle cover of my 1950 reprint, it was apparently Gerald that initially brought her fame as a writer.

And it really is a marvellous book. It has been sitting on my shelves for a very long time and I had never been particularly tempted by it, but it is an exceptionally good read. It is not a biography in any traditional sense of the word – certainly she does not treat Gerald du Maurier with any criticism, which is unsurprising from a grieving daughter. But this is not even a hagiography – it is a novel, based heavily on fact, in which Gerald is the flawless hero. And because it is a fantasy of a person, it doesn’t matter that we only see one side. There is something in the tone that goes even past novel. It is a fairy tale of a person’s life, and enveloping in that way that only a fairy tale can be.

Daphne du Maurier starts even before Gerald is born, and we see scenes of their childhood – anecdotes that were clearly passed down through the generations are turned into stories told by an omniscient narrator. This continues as Gerald gets older – his unsuccessful engagements and his eventual courtship with Muriel (‘Mo’) are shown with a novelist’s detail. Woven into the narrative are letters that may well have been preserved, but they sit alongside full conversations that du Maurier must have made up. Here, she pictures her only parents in their early days of romance (where ‘Mummie’ is Daphne du Maurier’s grandmother):

Up to the present they had been in rooms, and during the early part of the summer had taken a cottage at Walton-on-Thames, which was a happy refuge from the from the hot weather. “When I’m not picking green-fly off rose heads, I’m picking the black fly off dwarf beans,” Gerald gravely wrote to Mummie. “Everything is doing very well except Japanese iris and parsley. I haven’t been outside the estate yet, but Muriel manages both indoor and outdoor servants with marvellous tact, and even the stable-boys worship here.” (The cottage really had about three rooms, and a tiny square of garden.) Mummie nodded her head an smiled. Darling Gerald was so funny. And it was a wonderful thing to see him happy like this.

Dear Muriel was obviously taking great care of him. She had not seen him looking so well for years. He had got quite brown, too, not that horrid washed-out colour she was used to. Her never took his eyes off Muriel.

The bulk of Gerald, though, is about his acting and theatre producing career. I had always thought of him as primarily a theatre manager, and hadn’t realised how much he had acted – and how influential he had been in this world. But Daphne du Maurier takes us through his ascent to fame, and then his triumphs and failures, each considered as though she had seen the play in question – even when that would be impossible. His big break-through was playing a villain in Raffles in 1906.

And yet there were those who believed that because Gerald did not hump his back, cover his face with hair, wear tights, and speak blank verse, he was therefore no actor. How many times, then and afterwards, did people exclaim, “But du Maurier, he does not act; he is always himself.” To act is to portray an emotion; to show the feelings aroused by some sensation, whether joyous or traffic; to make the man in the audience feel, either uncomfortably or happily, “That might have been me.” This is what Gerald, who started the so-called naturalistic school of acting, tried to do.

There are some famous names in du Maurier’s milieu, and it’s entertaining to read about how J.M. Barrie’s plays went over – and, indeed, how the adaptation of Trilby by George du Maurier (Gerald’s father) became such a sensation. Other of the plays mentioned were already fading from popularity by 1934, and have disappeared altogether now. Similarly, some actors mentioned would still ring bells – Gracie Fields, Gladys Cooper, Irene Vanbrugh, Celia Johnson – while others are no loner discussed. But to be still well-known a century and more later is quite the feat!

I love anything about the theatre, fact or fiction, so lapped up all of this. The brief interlude when Gerald becomes a soldier in the First World War is, indeed, brief. Partly because he didn’t enlist until 1918 and never left England, but also because it doesn’t seem like part of the life that Daphne du Maurier wants to focus on. For her, and for her implied reader, Gerald is a brilliant theatre impresario – and she also wants to show the great man at home. This does mean we get slightly curious, but still delightful, sections where Daphne du Maurier refers to herself in the third person:

As they grew from babies into children, and occasionally the little nursery storms came to his ears, he would settle disputes in strange, amusing ways, turning a scolding into a game. There was the famous time when Daphne pulled Angela’s hair and trod on her face, Angela replying with her peculiar death-grip like a bear’s hug. The joint shrieks of rage reaching Gerald in the drawing-room, he had them brought downstairs, and, dressing up as a judge, staged a court of law with the children as prisoners at the bar and witnesses in one. It lasted until past bedtime, and, when the nurse came to fetch them, the original quarrel had been long forgotten.

These sweet stories are enjoyable fluff – but there is a definite poignancy as she writes about her father when she is a bit older. A tell-all memoir wouldn’t reach the same level of emotion as this:

There is, alas, a world of difference between the girl of eighteen and the man of fifty, especially when they are father and daughter. The one is resentful of the other. The girl mocks at experience and detests the voice of authority; the man yearns for companionship and does not know how to attain it. They stand side by side, with the barrier of years between them, and both are too shy to break it down; both are too diffident, too self-conscious. They chant about superficialities, and avoid each other’s eyes, while all the time they are aware that the moments are passing, and the years will not bring them nearer to one another. Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy/ They could not admit him into their confidence, and they drew back like snails into their shells.

It was not only Gerald’s tragedy. It is the tragedy of every father and every daughter since the world began.

What really sets the book apart, alongside Daphne du Maurier’s unique perspective, is her exceptional writing. That’s one of many things that make it feel more like novel than biography. From an objective biographer, these sorts of passages might be struck out as purple prose – in the world that Daphne du Maurier has created for us to enter, they are beautiful:

Gerald belonged to Wyndham’s; he was as much a part of it as the boards, the curtain, the heavy swing door, the row of stalls shrouded in their white and grimy covers, the cat in the dress circle, the backcloth and the false movable walls that were not walls, the dust in the passages, the intimate, indescribable, musty, fusty smell that was the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms and the front of the house in one.

Much of his personality is embedded in those walls. His laughter is still in the passage, his footstep on the stairs, and his voice calling for Tommy Lovell when the curtain falls. For all their passing away and the coming of other sounds – new voices, new laughter, other men and other memories – something of himself remains for ever amidst the dust and silence of that theatre; a breath, a whisper, the echo of a song.

I don’t know if anybody else has written a biography of Gerald du Maurier. There was definitely a vogue for a while of writing enormous biographies that didn’t spare the subject, and the more invasive and unpleasant the more they were considered to be authentic. The tide, thankfully, seems to have turned a bit. Since it is impossible to entirely know a person through a book anyway, I would rather we get this subjective, overly generous, loving portrait than anything more callous. Gerald is a wonderful book by a sublime storyteller.

When I was looking at how to double up Novella a Day in May with Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, there weren’t a lot of options my shelves. If du Maurier wrote any novellas, then I don’t have them. But The Rebecca Notebook and other memories does come in at novella length, and has been waiting on my shelves since 2009.

I’m sure every one of you has read Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier’s runaway bestseller of 1938, and also (I would argue) her best novel. It’s been adapted for stage and screen many times, and has certainly reached classic status. That was also true in 1983, when du Maurier was in her mid-70s and The Rebecca Notebook was published. “Why, I have never understood!” claims du Maurier in the introduction – not so much that she can’t believe it has been popular, one suspects, than that she thinks it no better and no worse than all the rest of her output.

Anyway, its popularity is sufficient to sell this collection of non-fiction pieces – though the notebook itself accounts for only about 20 pages. It is an outline of the novel, though as she details later chapter it becomes rather more fleshed out with scenes and dialogue that she wanted to note. The survival of the notebook is owed to a plagiarism legal case, brought by Edwina MacDonald for a novel called Blind Windows, which du Maurier had never heard of. Du Maurier’s notes were thus used in her defence.

My only memory of the plagiarism suit was that the notebook was produced in court, and after cross-questioning the judge dismissed the case. I gave the notebook to dear Ellen Doubleday as a memento, and all I can recollect, after that first visit to the States, was being seasick all the way home in the Queen Mary.

When, after many more visits to the Doubledays, dearest Ellen died, she left the notebook to her daughter Puckie. Puckie returned it to me. And I reread it, for the first time in thirty years, when I received it.

It is a curio, and I did find it interesting to see how much du Maurier kept the same and how much she changed from this 20-page outline. The ending changes, and Mrs Danvers becomes creepier. That famous opening section is introduced – or, rather, moulded from the original epilogue (which is also included, after the notebook). All of this is only interesting if you love Rebecca – which I do, so it was.

The rest of the book is essays written at various times across du Maurier’s long career. The first concerns her famous writer grandfather, the next her famous actor/director father. The ones I found most interesting related to Menabilly (the model for Manderley in Rebecca) – I hadn’t realised that du Maurier wrote Rebecca simply on the strength of trespassing in the grounds of the abandoned house, and it wasn’t until years later that she managed to negotiate a lease and live there for a couple of decades.

Other essays are less convincing – I can’t imagine anybody is interested in du Maurier’s idiosyncratic and somewhat naïve takes on religion, and certainly you won’t be by the time you come across them for the third time – but there is enough of interest in parts of this collection to make it very much worth tracking down.

I’ve read quite a few of Daphne du Maurier’s novels, but I don’t think I’d previously read any of her short stories – some of which are, of course, very famous from the film adaptations that were made of them. Last year I was toying between reading Not After Midnight and Other Stories and Don’t Look Now and other stories – both of which I owned – before I opened them and discovered they were the same collection under different names. One went to a charity shop and I read neither – but now I’ve finally read it.

In this collection, Daphne du Maurier’s tackles what I think is the hardest form: the long short story. I’m not usually a fan of short stories that go beyond 20 or so pages, because it feels like they are wasting the unique attributes of the form. But in Not After Midnight, du Maurier writes five long short stories – and I may as well take them in turn.

Don’t Look Now

The famous one! I’ve never seen the film, but I’m certainly aware of it – but we’ll be considering the story, of course. It opens:

“Don’t look now,” John said to this wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.”

It’s a good start. John and Laura are on holiday in Venice, grieving the loss of their young daughter Christine – she has recently died of meningitis. The holiday is marred a little by news of seemingly random murders – somebody is roaming the streets with a knife. The couple get talking to this ‘couple of old girls’, one of whom tells John that he has second sight. When he sees a small girl wearing a pixie hood running in fear down a street, the lady tells him that Christine is trying to warn of danger in Venice.

When their son is taken ill at school, Laura flies home. John is going to drive home, but a mysterious incident makes him remain – and leads to a very dramatic and spooky ending.

This is an excellent story, deservedly renowned for its tension and creepiness, as well as a very good depiction of a British holiday in Italy. My main reservation with it is that du Maurier seems to think grieving a dead child is something only a mother would do. John tends to his wife, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered that Christine has died. But, that detail aside, a marvellous story.

Not After Midnight

Timothy Grey is a schoolteacher on holiday on Crete, suffering from some unspecified illness – possibly a nervous breakdown. He demands a chalet near the sea, because he intends to paint – the hotel staff are reluctant, because somebody staying there recently died…

The other notable guests are the Stolls – Mr Stoll is rude, loud, and drunk; his wife is silent and possibly deaf.

The title of this story is excellent, and for much of it du Maurier sustains the same tension and intrigue as ‘Don’t Look Now’ – but I found the ending rather unsatisfying and quite plebian.

A Border-Line Case

Shelagh is an aspiring actor who finds impelled to go off to Ireland to find a man called Nick, once close friends with her father. On her father’s deathbed, he has reminisced about Nick – and, in his dying moment, looks at Shelagh with fear and horror. Shelagh hopes for answers, or at least some attempt of posthumous reconciliation, by finding Nick. But when she identifies where he lives, she is ambushed and kidnapped by Nick’s accomplices, and forced to stay on his island.

Rather unsettlingly, they start that of charming, flirty conversation that sometimes happens between kidnappers and kidnappees in films, and presumably never in real life. This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome; it is instant.

There are a couple of revelatory twists in this story – one of which is to do with contemporary politics, and one of which is pretty horrifying. More something from Greek myth than life. Anyway, this was another story that started really interestingly and couldn’t sustain that intrigue satisfactorily, in my opinion.

The Way of the Cross

The only story in the collection without any sort of horror element, this is another tale of Brits abroad – in this case, Jerusalem. A group led by a stand-in vicar are touring the Holy Land, each with their own anxieties and reasons for being there. Perhaps the most memorable of the group is nine-year-old Robin – the only person there who seems to have read the gospels – who leads them in a chaotic attempt to find the Garden of Gethsemane.

This is a really good and unusual story, though one that doesn’t fit the feel of the collection at all. It is quite poignant, as the group face humiliations and failures – realising the trip is not the once-in-a-lifetime experience they’d hoped for, and finding out things about themselves and others that they’d rather not know. As I say, this isn’t horror – there is nothing creepy about it – but there is an underlying sense of lives being sadly changed, which is perhaps more horrifying than the jump scares of the earlier stories.

The Breakthrough

Some sci-fi thing about capturing essences that I didn’t enjoy at all, but that’s probably because I find sci-fi rather tedious at the best of times.

Ok, overall rather a mixed reception from me. ‘Don’t Look Now’ is brilliant, and ‘The Way of the Cross’ is great in a very different way. The other stories are largely readable, but all could have done with some rethinking and editing. Du Maurier is exceptional at premises and settings, but doesn’t always know how to keep those things going for the length of a long short story.

We’re in the last few days of Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, run by Ali, and I am glad I managed to sneak in under the line with The Scapegoat from 1957. I did a poll on Twitter to see whether I should read this, short stories, The Parasites, or I’ll Never Be Young Again, which account for all the unread books I have by her – and I’m glad that this one topped the poll, because it’s rather brilliant. Truth be told, it tied with the short stories – but the people cheering on The Scapegoat were very convincing.

I didn’t know anything at all about it when I started, which was quite an exciting way to read the novel. But I can’t just stop writing then – so read on to have the premise of the novel spoiled. And it really does happen in the first handful of pages.

John is the first-person narrator – he is a university history lecturer from England, visiting France. In Le Mans, he happens upon his doppelgänger. Not just somebody who looks a bit like him, but somebody exactly like him. They even have the same voice, and John’s French is so good that this other man – Jean de Gué – didn’t realise John was English. They start drinking together… and eventually so drunk, or perhaps drugged, that John passes out in Jean’s hotel room.

When John wakes up – Jean has taken all of John’s possessions and gone. He is left with Jean’s clothes, luggage, identity documents – and none of his own. Left with little option, he decides to go to Jean’s house.

If you swallow the far-fetched concept of doppelgängers so identical that nobody at all can tell them apart, then this is a premise rife with possibility. And, look, it isn’t possible. I speak as someone with a literal clone, and very few people would think we were the same person. No matter – let’s go on with the show.

John-as-Jean arrives at his chateau. His earlier attempts to explain what has happened are taken as poor joke, and he takes the path of least resistance. It’s rather an ingenious way to introduce the new cast to us – because John, narrating, is as clueless as the reader as to who they are. There are several women, a child, an older woman, a man. Gradually, he works out how Jean relates to all of them – sussing out the histories and relationships without being able to ask outright. Why does he have bad blood with one of the woman, and apparently secrets with another? Which is his wife??

In their brief encounter, it was clear that Jean was a more ruthless, less pleasant man that John. As he stays there, it becomes increasingly obvious how this had affected things – and how Jean has set John up to be the scapegoat of the title. John is no saint himself – though motivated by much purer morals than his doppelgänger, he is weak and often foolish. And blindingly naive at times. For all that, he is very sympathetic, and du Maurier does a great job of making us feel his frustrations, fear, and dawning attempts to make the best of it.

If Daphne du Maurier had written this twenty years earlier, around the time she was writing Rebecca, this would be a brilliant set-up for something gothic, something in the mould of a thriller. Well, The Scapegoat is not that. It is a much more sophisticated take on the genre, if I can use the word ‘sophisticated’ as a value-free term: I still adore Rebecca; it’s still my favourite of her novels. But The Scapegoat is more of a character piece – after the fantastic premise, everything is believable and even likely. It’s a poignant unfurling of one man’s psyche, while he is similarly on the track of Jean’s. There are dramatic moments, but this isn’t really a dramatic novel. It’s all about personality and relationships and family, and gentle attempts to change things.

It’s also beautifully written. I’ve never seen du Maurier better at the incidental metaphor, descriptions of people and places, and above all subtle and precise descriptions of how John feels and responds.

As I say, Rebecca is still in a league of its own as a complete tour de force – but this is a clever, engaging, and unexpectedly nuance competitor.

It’s Historical Fiction week over at Vulpes Libris, and I’m throwing some fat on the fire with a post about why I don’t like historical fiction… and (because I MULTI-TASK, y’all) it’s also a review of The House on the Strand (1969) by Daphne du Maurier.

Which sounds like I hated the novel – whereas in fact I had quite a confusing relationship with it, given that half of it is in present day (yay!) and half in the 14th century (boo!). Read all about it over at Vulpes Libris…