The Rebecca Notebook Read online

  Déjeuner is over. The little waiter wipes the last crumbs from our table, and when I have helped Henry to his feet we make our usual pilgrimage to the verandah. The sun has lost its morning brilliance and is streaking to the west, leaving an afterglow which is easier to bear. Henry draws the rug over his knees, throws away his cigarette, then closes his eyes. I fix my dark glasses, reach for my bag of knitting. And before us, long as the skein of wool I wind, stretches the vista of our afternoon.

  Memories

  Introduction to Memories

  The eleven prose pieces which follow are not articles in the strict sense of the word, for I have never been a journalist but a writer of novels, stories and biographies, including one book of childhood and adolescent memoirs.

  The fiction arose out of the unconscious, coupled with observation but above all with imagination. The pieces in the present section have nothing to do with my imagination, but with the conscious self, the person who is Me. This may sound, and probably is, conceited, but I make no apology for it; they were written at different times throughout my life because I felt strongly about the various subjects, and so was impelled to put my thoughts on paper.

  The first three are about my grandfather, my father and my cousins, and I place them at the beginning because my family counted tremendously when I was young and as I matured, and still does in the latter half of my life. The only apology here is that I have not, as yet, written about my own children and my seven grandchildren.

  The next three, again written at varying times throughout my professional career, express what I felt about three very different subjects, and here the reader may sense a certain cynicism of outlook which reflected my attitude to those matters at that particular moment. It is possible that my outlook has changed, perhaps developed, but this is not for me to say, because I cannot be sure.

  ‘Death and Widowhood’ was written with deep sincerity and emotion, coupled with a desire to help others who have suffered in similar fashion.

  The last four follow in chronological order, the first of them describing how I found the house which was the setting for Rebecca. They bring the reader and myself up to date. Have I changed, matured, or sunk into senility? It is for the reader, not for myself, to judge!

  The Young George du Maurier

  [1951]

  When George du Maurier died in October 1896, at the age of sixty-two, he was mourned not only by his family and his friends but by a wide circle of people who had come to know him through his drawings and his novels, and who felt, although they had never met him, that here was an artist and a writer who had expressed for many years all the graces of the world they knew. If the characters that he drew and wrote about were a little larger than life—the men almost too tall, the women more than beautiful—this was seen not as a fault but as a virtue; for du Maurier was a man who worshipped beauty and was not ashamed to put his ideals upon paper, which was something that his generation understood.

  To him, as to his contemporaries, beauty was an end in itself. Whether it was the turn of a woman’s head, her smooth dark hair parted in the centre with the low knot behind, and the curve of her shoulder; or the way a man stood, the way his shoulders were set; the sudden smile of a child, and the quiet, grave patience of old people—these were things to be revered and loved, and later reproduced with tenderness. Even when pulling jokes and poking fun—and as a humorous draughtsman for nearly thirty years he had full measure of this—du Maurier was never malicious or unkind. He mocked at many, but with a twinkle in the eye. Never from him the sneer, the acid half-truth behind an innuendo, the damning Judas-thrust that passes for modern wit. He laughed at people because he loved them, because he understood and shared their little weaknesses, their foibles; their snobbery was his snobbery, their sudden social gaffes and faux pas were misfortunes committed all too often by himself, a bohemian at heart on the fringe of high society. The mistress of the house caught unexpectedly in disarray by unwelcome callers; the precocious child who faces a visitor with great innocent eyes and lets fall a blast of candour; the odd man out at a dinner party far above his milieu, the one cricketer among musicians, the one musician among cricketers, the bore who talks too much, the dullard who talks too little, the woman who laughs too loudly and too long—all these were targets for his pencil in those pages of Punch some sixty and seventy years ago, and no one appreciated the fact more than the delighted butts who recognised themselves.

  It was the fashion once to decry the late Victorians, their pictures and their novels. They seemed hidebound and intolerant to a later age that promised freedom. Not so today. We have learnt our lesson. Looking back, separated from them by more than half a century, the years they graced and the world they delighted in appear to us now as things lovely and precious, lost by our own fault. I do not mean the mere picture postcard charm of crinolines and carriages, which du Maurier drew with his pencil and saw with his own eyes. Nor the lamplight that he knew, and the unbusy streets. Nor the houses new-painted for a London season, the window boxes gay, and the water cart that came early on a June morning to sprinkle the fresh sand. Not the croquet that he played on a summer afternoon, nor the leisurely lawn tennis. Not the young man that he sketched who would be leaning on his croquet mallet asking a question of someone whose muslin dress swept the ground, and who smiled for one brief moment under her sunshade and then turned away. Nor the small boys in sailor suits, nor the little long-haired girls in pinafores, nor the husband and wife reading aloud in turn, upon a winter’s evening. Nor the grandmother and the unmarried sister living in the same house, or written to each day and visited; nor the new baby that came every spring. These things were as natural to du Maurier and to his contemporaries as the air they breathed and the ground they walked upon. But with them went deference and courtesy, fidelity and faith, a belief in a man’s work and the pride that goes hand in hand with that belief. These fundamental standards wove the pattern of a Victorian day, and the writers and artists of that day became part of the pattern and echoed it in print or upon canvas, stamping it with their individuality, their own genius, creating an era that was at once warm and colourful and prosperous, an age away from our present world of meagre mediocrity.

  We who are offered today a so-called wealth of literature from the bookstalls of stations and airports, pulpy pages known as digests or potted shorts, find it hard to understand the part played by Punch in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It stood alone, the only weekly paper of its kind. A gibe at the government from Punch in 1870, and worried members of Parliament would be discussing the fact in the lobbies the same day. A cool criticism of a picture or a poem, and the luckless author hung his head in shame. Only the best draughtsmen of the day contributed to Punch, and with them the wittiest writers, the ablest critics. A successful future was assured to whoever was lucky enough to obtain a permanent place on the Punch staff. And George du Maurier was so lucky. When the well-known illustrator Leech died in 1865 he succeeded to his place, although only thirty-one years old. His weekly drawing on the left-hand side, beside the cartoon on the right, soon became the most talked-of page in Punch, and had he ended his days as a draughtsman only, he would long have been remembered and loved for this work alone.

  But in late middle age he wrote two novels, Peter Ibbetson and Trilby, which somehow found their way into the hearts of his contemporaries in a way few novels have done before or since. The word ‘hearts’ is used intentionally, because the critical mind cannot admit that George du Maurier was a great novelist, in the sense of a Dickens or a Thackeray. As a writer he was careless, and knew little of style or form, and the plots of his novels can be called fantastic, melodramatic, even absurd. Yet these two stories sounded such an echo in the emotions of the men and women of his day, both in this country and throughout the United States of America, that they were read, and reread, and thumbed again, year after year, down to our own time; and not only read, but in some inexplicable fashion deeply loved. When a novel can affect
the human heart in such a way it seems to mean one thing only: not that the tale is exceptional in itself, but that the writer has so projected his personality on to the printed page that the reader either identifies with that personality or becomes fascinated by it, and in a sense near hypnotised.

  It so happened that the personality of George du Maurier, though never forceful in a strong or domineering way, held great attraction. He radiated a kind of warmth that made people turn to him on sight with sympathy, and as they came to know him better this quality of warmth caught at their hearts, just as his novels caught at his readers’. It is true to say he had no enemies. He was a man well loved. His charm—most wretched word, too often overdone—was never forced, and never insincere. It was a gift from God.

  His feeling for family was deep and strong and very French. Not only his affection for his wife and his five children: to him the ties of blood stretched far beyond, to nephews, nieces, cousins and second cousins, so that any who needed help were not afraid to come to him. Ancestors, long buried in French soil and never known, were dear to him; and dearer still the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren he did not live to see.

  He was a man of very simple tastes. He loved his home. He had no wish to travel, except to France, or to the Yorkshire fishing port of Whitby, and when his novels made him famous he found himself embarrassed by his fame. ‘Perhaps Papa will now put electric light in the lumber room,’ said Gerald, his younger son, when success burst upon his father; but the lumber room remained unlit. George du Maurier saw no reason to change his way of living because he received hundreds of letters every week from perfect strangers. He smiled to himself, and thought it all very peculiar, and went for a long walk on Hampstead Heath: and when he returned he rolled a cigarette and went to his easel in the studio, and continued drawing, or writing, with the continual clatter about him of his family or his friends.

  If the fortune he received from Trilby remained unspent upon himself, it was because he had the forethought to set it all aside for those who came after him. He remembered his own early days, in Paris and in London, and he saw no reason why his descendants should suffer want if, by the success of his own efforts, he could make provision for them. His own father, Louis-Maturin Busson du Maurier, had not been able to make provision for him, or for his mother, brother and sister, and they had suffered much in consequence. His father had been a delightful, engaging man of many talents, with a beautiful singing voice which his son inherited. Although he was a scientist by profession his inventions always failed, in spite of which he lived with unfailing confidence and good humour until the day of his death.

  He married Ellen Clarke, the daughter of the notorious Mary Anne Clarke whose liaison with the Duke of York at the beginning of the century had caused so much scandal. Possibly the memory of those early days had left a permanent strain upon the daughter, because she possessed a more difficult character than her husband Louis-Maturin. She was by nature nervy, anxious and highly strung. Disappointed in the ability of her husband to make a success of life, she concentrated upon her elder son, loving him fiercely and possessively, a love which he returned with real feeling, but fortunately for himself without a sense of strain.

  There were three children born of the marriage. George, who was never known as George but always as Kicky, a nickname which he carried to the end of his days, was the eldest, and was born in Paris in 1834. He was brought up there, with his younger brother Eugene, nicknamed Gyggy, and his sister Isobel. His happy childhood and his schooldays he described in Peter Ibbetson and in his third, not so successful, novel, The Martian.

  In spite of his later fame, and his real contentment with his life in Hampstead, he looked back upon those early Paris days with deep nostalgia and almost passionate regret, as though in the depths of him there was a seed of melancholy, a creature unfulfilled, who, longing wistfully for what-was-once and cannot-be-again, comes to the surface with the written word and vanishes, unseen.

  That happy childhood was a memory he clung to all his life, all the more so because his adolescence and early manhood were not so blest. The reason for this was that his father, still seeking the fortune that eluded him, left Paris with his family and settled in London, in Pentonville, and for the next few years, until his father died in 1856, young Kicky, to please him, studied chemistry, a subject which he detested and for which he had no aptitude. The younger boy, Gyggy, neglected and misunderstood, had the sense to run away and return to France, where he joined the French army; but his character was lighter and more irresponsible than his brother’s, and he never had the energy to rise above the rank of corporal, to the shame of his parents and the indifference of himself.

  When Louis-Maturin died, Kicky persuaded his mother to let him return to Paris and study art in the studios of the Quartier Latin. He and his brother and sister had drawn brilliantly from an early age, and Kicky felt strongly that unless he could develop this gift freely, without restriction, in the city he loved so well, he would never make anything of his life, but would drift into failure, like his father before him. His mother understood him well enough to know that this was true, so Kicky, her first-born and best-beloved, was given her blessing to follow the career he had chosen for himself.

  Back in the Paris he loved, young George du Maurier spent eighteen happy months amongst his fellow students, living the life that Little Billee lived in Trilby. His appearance at that time was afterwards described by his great friend Tom Armstrong, in Reminiscences of du Maurier. ‘It is curious,’ wrote Armstrong, ‘that my recollection of our first meeting should be so vivid, but I suppose his personality from the beginning attracted me… I can revive the picture of him in my mind’s eye sitting astride one of the Utrecht velvet chairs, with his elbows on the back, pale almost to sallowness, square-shouldered and very lean, with no hair on his face except a slight moustache… he certainly was very attractive and sympathetic, and the other young fellows with whom I was living felt much as I did. We admired his coats with square shoulders and long skirts after the fashion of the day, and we admired his voice and his singing, his power of drawing portraits and caricatures from memory, his strength and skill with his fists, and above all we were attracted by his very sympathetic manner. I think this certainty of finding sympathy was one of his greatest and most abiding charms. His personality was a very engaging one, and evoked confidence in those who knew him very little. Music was a powerful influence in du Maurier’s life. He used to say that literature, painting and sculpture evoked no emotion which could be compared with that felt by a sensitive person on hearing a well-trained voice or a violin… in those days he spent much more time at our hired piano than he did before an easel.’

  The Little Billee existence might have continued much longer, or at least long enough for Kicky to become a great painter, but this was not to be. For suddenly, in the summer of 1858, the tragedy of his life occurred. He lost the sight of his left eye. And for a time it was feared he might lose the sight of both. The agony and misery of the months that followed he described many years later in The Martian.

  He moved from Antwerp, where he had been sharing a studio with a fellow student, Felix Moschelles, to the little town of Malines. For a while he felt he would never recover from the blow; he even had dark thoughts of suicide. His mother, who came out to be with him, could not comfort him; for though he made light of the tragedy in public, and laughed and joked about it when his friends came to Malines to see him, showing them his dark glasses and saying he was an aveugle, she knew, and they suspected, what his inner suffering must be.

  Money was scarce. They had nothing to live upon but the annuity his mother had inherited from Mary Anne Clarke, the original hush money from the Duke of York. His brother Gyggy was a constant source of worry, always in debt as his father had been, and his sister Isobel, now a pretty girl of nineteen, must also be supported, for although she played the piano beautifully she could hardly earn her living by doing so, nor was she likely to find herself a
rich husband. It seemed to Kicky at that time that he, who had hoped to be the main prop of the family, had become, in a few short months, its greatest liability. It would be better if they were rid of him altogether.

  And then Isobel wrote from London, where she was staying with a school friend, Emma Wightwick, to say that Mrs Wightwick had heard of an oculist at Grafrath, near Düsseldorf, who had cured hundreds of people near to blindness, and who was said in fact to be the finest oculist in Europe. What was more, there was a school for painting in Düsseldorf itself. Why did not Kicky and her mother leave Malines, and try their luck in Germany? This suggestion saved her brother from suicide, and in the spring of 1859 young George du Maurier and his mother moved to Düsseldorf, the charm and gaiety of which went to the young artist’s head immediately, and life seemed once more possible.

  The oculist could not restore the sight of his left eye, but he did promise that, with care, the right one would remain sound to the end of his days; and so Kicky’s natural optimism returned and he began to draw again—he even drew a flattering likeness of the oculist himself—and he and his mother plunged into the lighthearted society of Düsseldorf, where life was bohemian and manners easy, and money did not matter too much because it went so far.

  His sister Isobel came out to join them, flirting happily with all the impecunious German counts and princekins, and Kicky did the same with a Miss Lewis, who was the beauty of that particular season. Artist friends drifted down from Paris and Antwerp to join in the fun, and in the work too, which was rather haphazard and not very steady. There were plenty of sketches lying about in the studio which du Maurier shared with a young Swiss friend, all showing promise but few of them finished; and it was not until his closest friend, Tom Armstrong, came to stay in the spring of 1860, and told him frankly that he was doing no good and was allowing himself to drift, that Kicky took stock of himself. Tom was perfectly right. He was doing no good. He was living on his mother, he was selling no pictures, and he was getting himself entangled with girls he could not possibly afford to marry.