The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier

I’m sneaking into the final hours of Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week to write about her third novel – The Progress of Julius (1933). My edition is simply called Julius – I don’t know when or why this change was made (unless perhaps it was to capitalise on the single-name success of Rebecca), but I prefer to go by the original title.

I picked this one up from my pile of unread DdMs because it had a name in the title, and thus qualified for my #ProjectNames informal reading challenge – it wasn’t one of her novels that I had heard discussed very often. Having read it, I can sort of see why…

It traces the life of Julius Levy from his birth right to the end – and his earliest days are spent in poverty in France. He has a loud and passionate mother and matching grandfather. Rather more negligible is Paul, his father, who is disparaged by everybody else in the household. He is an almost cartoonishly weak figure, good only for sitting in the corner and observing.

But Paul has a moment where he is not weak, or at least shows strength in the eyes of the world, and it leads to he and his young son escaping France – sneaking onto a train and travelling to Algeria. Here, as Julius grows, he begins to lift himself out of poverty through some legitimate projects – and lots of illegitimate ones. From stealing horses and selling them to tricking a tutor into educating him, du Maurier shows us a portrait of immoral ambition – and constant disguise. Julius only ever shows the face that is likely to win him the most reward.

Next stop – London. He has heard that this is the place to make his fortune – and make it he does, though he has been followed by the teenage prostitute whose room he frequented in Algiers. Elsa has disguised herself as a boy to sneak onto the boat with him, apparently unable to be without him. (One of the less successful plot elements, particularly towards the beginning, is how Julius is apparently an irresistible personality to all – when, to the reader’s eye, he seems to have very little to recommend him.)

With Elsa, Julius’s selfishness tips over into a sort of sadism:

The shoulders of Elsa began to shake, and her head bent lower and lower. Julius had to cover his mouth with his hand to prevent himself from laughing. He had discovered a new thing, of hurting the people he liked. It gave him an extraordinary sensation to see Elsa cry after she had been smiling, and to know that he had caused her tears. He was aware of power, strange and exciting.

And so it continues throughout his life. At each stage, he is ruthless and selfish – he’s what we would now call a sociopath. His financial success is the only thing that motivates him (at least until another figure comes into his life, in the final third of the book). He is, frankly, vile.

Du Maurier tells her narrative well and engagingly, but it is very straightforward. There is nothing like the twists in Rebecca or the moral ambiguity in My Cousin Rachel. And it was a bit conflicting – the novel is well written, but it is deeply uncomfortable to read.

On the one hand, plenty of the characters are anti-Semitic – initially to Paul and, later, to Julius. Despite having a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, and thus technically not be ethnically Jewish himself, it is taken for granted by all characters and the narrator that Julius is Jewish. And though the narrative does not endorse these insults, you have to ask yourself what Daphne du Maurier was doing in writing this novel.

Nowhere does it suggest that Julius’s behaviour is technical of all Jewish people, or that he is intended to represent anything more than a single character – but it certainly didn’t sit well to have a Jewish character whose life is motivated solely by financial greed. This was, of course, a stereotype around in the 1930s – one being used, even as this novel was published, to stir up hatred against Jewish people in Germany. It is hard not to feel disgusted at the portrait du Maurier has painted, and at the author for painting it.

I don’t need characters to be likeable – but, even if he hadn’t been Jewish, with everything that suggests about du Maurier’s intention, he is so relentlessly terrible that it isn’t all that interesting. He has no nuanced character, nor does he especially develop. We just see him being appalling to person after person, never learning from his actions, or reflecting on his behaviour. It is a uniform and stylistically well written novel, but – as well as being almost certainly anti-Semitic – it feels perhaps a pointless novel too.