Daphne Du Maurier's Ordinary People

by Joel Van Valin

I would enter the moods of these people, share their troubles, love their friends, act in some way as a faithful servant ...
- Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

Books change, before our very eyes. Different people have various interpretations about the same work, of course--based on their nationality, gender, education and so on--but everyone will agree that Angela's Ashes is brilliant and horrible and Irish, and only literary theorists could be fooled into thinking otherwise. What really makes books shape-shift is when you add delta, that little triangular element of time, into the equation. Take something like Paula Fox's highly lauded Desperate Characters. It was written in the 1970s and those who remember that decade can doubtless read between the lines of cocktail party chatter and find some meaning in the story of New York lawyers living in a slum-decaying neighborhood; they would probably say the book is about the decline of Western civilization, the return to the animal, something like that. But to readers such as myself who don't remember the '70s all that well, the book is about a woman who gets bitten by a cat and freaks out. That is, it's more or less pointless.

Now let's apply our delta to another writer, Daphne du Maurier, who in the guise of a best-selling author published a couple of dozen novels and short story collections between the late 1920s and her death in 1989. Her books are filled with ordinary people rather than desperate characters, and though the narrative may be powered by history, romance, murder or some Twilight Zone weirdness, the world they inhabit is ordinary too. They aren't Hemingway's war heroes or Lawrence's colliers or Fitzgerald's rich. They live quiet lives; they think and act like us. If and when they get bitten by cats, their lives don't crumble. They do, however, become jealous, bicker, think wistfully of youth and (occasionally) feel intense love.

Seen from the distance of fifty odd years, the casually sketched characters we meet in The Loving Spirit, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and du Maurier's other early novels begin to stand out as emblems of their own place and time, even as the creations of more accomplished "literary" writers fade. Consider Elizabeth Bowen's "Mysterious Kôr", as compared to du Maurier's story "Kiss Me Again, Stranger". Both take place at night, in London, in the 1940s. Bowen's Arthur and Pepita are shadowy characters, belonging more to their imaginary Kôr than the Blitz, while du Maurier's nameless strangers go to the pictures, ride buses, visit graveyards, act like any young couple might in a haunted, restless post-war Britain:


  "Used to lying in the rain?" I said.
  "Brought up to it," she answered. "They gave us a name in the shelters. The dead-end kids, 
they used to call us in the war days."
  "Weren't you never evacuated?" I asked.
  "Not me," she said. "I never could stop anyplace. I always came back."
  "Parents living?"
  "No. Both of them killed by the bomb that smashed my home." She didn't speak tragic-like.
Just ordinary.

Du Maurier's main characters are typically young dreamers, and they often act foolishly. They are all normal, likable, and British (even the Americans, such as Mrs. Hopper in Rebecca, are very English). They are also quite often from the upper classes, as was Daphne herself. Her grandfather was the noted poet George du Maurier, and her father Gerald a successful actor who even had a brand of cigarettes named after him. She also had an uncle in the magazine business, who helped her find a publisher for her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1929). Set in her native Cornwall, the story follows the Coombe family through four generations, with a historical perspective that was to figure largely in subsequent books (Jamaica Inn, The Glass-Blowers, The House on the Strand). Her second novel, however, was entirely contemporary. I'll Never Be Young Again (1932) begins with the protagonist, Dick, a young man from a well-to-do family that he hates, about to jump off of a bridge. The suicide attempt is aborted when a passer-by, Jake, tells him how stupid he's being. Jake, it turns out, has just gotten out of prison, where he had more than enough time to discover what the Dicks of the world take for granted:


  "Being young," he said, "is something you won't understand until it's gone from you, 
and then it will come in a flash, leaving you a little wiser than before.

As Dick roams about with Jake he also travels emotionally, trying on different personas and alternating between elation, passion and self-disgust. In other words, he's your ordinary twenty-one-year-old:


  "It's mediocrity I hate. Little days and little nights. Moving around in a small circle, 
knowing you don't matter."
  "Rot, Dick. Think of the million mediocre people who go to make up a world. They eat and 
sleep and marry and have children, and do their job and die."
  "I don't want to be like that," I said. "I don't care a damn about the rest of the world."
  "You belong to it. You'll have to care."

I'll Never Be Young Again is, contrary to its title, a book about being young. Du Maurier was only twenty five when she wrote it, and it is probably her most open, soulful work, capturing the rootless wanderings of Britain's own Lost Generation. It didn't garner her a large audience, though, or glowing reviews. That came with Rebecca in 1938, a novel she started in Egypt, where her husband, lieutenant general Tommy Browning, was posted. When Daphne was a girl the family had lived for a time in Fowey, Cornwall, and she had often trespassed on an abandoned estate nearby called Menabilly. Menabilly was to become du Maurier's Manderley, the ancestral home of Max de Winter in Rebecca. The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where the young narrator meets and falls in love with Max, a recent widower; he marries and brings her back to Manderley, where she must confront the specter of his first wife, and her loyal housekeeper--the unnerving Mrs. Danvers. Rebecca is called by some a romance and by others the first modern gothic novel, but in point of fact it contains neither sex nor ghosts. What holds the reader in rapt attention is the character of the second Mrs. de Winter (we never learn her name, just as we never see Rebecca) a character du Maurier is said to have modeled after herself. She is an ordinary young woman--quiet, sincere, very unsure. She hasn't a clue how to command servants or entertain Max and his upper crust friends, and her mind is prone to imagination. She's introspective too, at some points almost existential:


  When I opened my eyes we were by a bend in the road, and a peasant girl in a black shawl 
waved to us; I can see her now, her dusty skirt, her gleaming, friendly smile, and in a 
second we had passed the bend and could see her no more. Already she belonged to the past, 
she was only a memory...
  "If only there could be an invention," I said impulsively, "that bottled up a memory, 
like a scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, 
the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again."  
I looked up at him, to see what he would say. He did not turn to me, he went on watching 
he road ahead.

I'm sure a Virginia Woolf character would say it better--but this is how ordinary people express such things. And would a Virginia Woolf character ever "look up at him, to see what he would say"?

Rebecca is about exorcising the ghosts of our past. The House on the Strand, on the other hand, is about visiting them. The narrator possesses a hallucinogenic drug that allows him--mentally--to time travel to the 14th century. The manners, dress and living conditions in du Maurier's medieval England are faithful to the time period, but the people are still ordinary:


  The wimple that framed her features was adornment enough, enhancing the charms of any 
woman, plain or beautiful. She was neither the one nor the other, but it did not surprise 
me that her fidelity to her conjugal vows had been in question. I had seen eyes like hers 
in women of my own world, full and sensual:  one flick of the male head, and she'd be game.

Published in 1969, The House on the Strand lacks the invigorating freshness of du Maurier's earlier novels. By then her children had grown, and Tommy had passed away (after he died, it was said, she dressed in his clothes to feel closer to him). Although her life was by no means ordinary, she lived it conventionally. She strove not to make a personalty of herself--"writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard," she once remarked--and her fiction contains no sweeping truths or manifestos. If du Maurier wrote anything like a coda, it would be "The Way of the Cross", a novella that appeared in her collection Don't Look Now (1966). A mock-heroic narrative of a British tourist group's adventures in Jerusalem, "The Way of the Cross" illustrates the faults and foibles of commonplace humanity. On their way down the Via Dolorosa, the pilgrims engage in petty rivalry, contemplate adultery, and remember old crimes. Indeed, all seven deadly sins appear to be represented, but in the end du Maurier seems less to revile humanity than sympathize with it. Reverend Babcock, for example, in leading his flock to the Middle East has gotten himself a bad case of indigestion:


The Church of the Holy Sepulchre enveloped him. He was aware of darkness, scaffolding, 
steps, the smell of many bodies and much incense. What can I do, he asked himself in agony, 
where can I go, the lingering taste of last night's chicken ragout rising from his belly to 
confound him, and as he stumbled up the steps to the Chapel of Golgotha in the wake of the nuns, with altars to the right and left of him, candles, lights, crosses, votive offerings in 
profusion all about him, he saw nothing, heard nothing, he could only feel the pressure 
within his body, the compelling summons of his bowels, which no prayer, no will-power, 
or divine mercy from on high could overcome.

Du Maurier never tried to make her characters heroes or heroines. They are friendly and decent enough but they are not crusaders, they don't live by grand principles or high ideas; things happen to them, and they react. These are ordinary people. And in many ways, she was an ordinary writer. "The Way of the Cross" aside, her work shows no discernment of higher forces at work in civilization, and the writing, though decent, is not particularly beautiful or progressive--du Maurier was too much the R.L. Stevenson tell-me-a-good-yarn sort of writer to let aesthetics get in her way. It's only with the accidental intrusion of time that the casual, almost Greek simplicity of her characters has fossilized into something like the hard substance of art.

When Rebecca was first published, V.S. Pritchett's review in the Christian Science Monitor questioned what all the fuss was about--it was a typical best-seller he said, here today and gone tomorrow. But the novel is still available in bookstores, after innumerable printings and one memorable Alfred Hitchcock film. So is Jamaica Inn, and "The Birds" is still widely anthologized. Whether Daphne du Maurier will be thought of as a modern classic or a guilty pleasure is up in the air at this point, and really not my concern. At least we owe her this: she gave the 20th century its Everyman and Everywoman; she did enter into its common moods, act as its faithful servant, and for this reason her characters still ring true.

Joel Van Valin is the publisher of Whistling Shade and the author of the novel The Fantasy of Clear Burning.