30 MAY 1969, Page 19

Out of the dark, into the dream

RODNEY ACKLAND

Peter Ibbelson George du Maurier (Gollancz 42s) Amongst the superabundance of variously fas- cinating reproductions in Leon& Ormond's George du Maurier are some of the drawings with which, prior to his signing up with Punch, Du Maurier illustrated the pop serials running in Once a Week. These remind one that what the mid-Victorians were addicted to was not violence and not sex—however widespread the habit of a secret life in which to indulge it—but death. Furthermore, it wasn't heroic death, nor romantic death, nor even death as self-sacrifice, but grim, dreary, gloomy, depressing, miser- able death-on-a-sick-bed.

Out of a half dozen or so of these serial . illustrations, four are on the favourite subject: there is a rich young woman on a costly death- bed beside which her husband (or father) and little ones (or siblings) mourn; there is a hard- up young woman in a poverty-stricken bed- room, dead on the floor beside an overturned chair, an empty poison bottle fallen from her hand; there is a middle-class young woman at death's door on the banks of a river from which she appears to have been dragged too late to be resuscitated; and there is a small masterpiece of draughtsmanship and misery uncompromis- ingly captioned 'On her deathbed,' a title which should have sent the sales of Once a Week wildly rocketing. But the picture above it is to our eyes so insupportably depressing that I defy anyone to take the overworked 'long cool look' at it without wanting to take the veil, or to the bottle, or a running jump out of the window.

In the three decades of his work on the staff of Punch Du Maurier was never in point of fact a comic artist: as Mrs Ormond points out, he was an illustrator of jokes. And the jokes themselves, often quite stupefying in their prolixity and heavy-handed underlining of the obvious, are seldom very funny. The most famous of all Punch jokes, however, the classic about the curate's egg, Du Maurier illustrates with another masterpiece of depres- sion-inducing, almost hallucinatory, power.

Every detail of the drawing contributes towards the claustrophobic atmosphere of the bishop's breakfast room: the four insufferable monsters round the table, the bishop himself, vulture-visaged, dreary, black hairs like wires sprouting from ears and nostrils (not drawn by Du Maurier but somehow they're implied), the pasty curate with his ineffable expression of anxious ecclesiastical arse-licking as he burbles in reply to his Right Reverend Host's 'I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones.' Oh no, My Lord, parts of it are excellent!'—the daunting, self-contained smugness of the two women at the table, their faces puffed up with immovable constipation and invincible ignorance; the suffocating sense of the dreadful load of eggs and bacon, buttered toast and kedgeree and kidneys and boiled eggs and tea and milk and Cooper's marmalade sitting so heavily on all four stomachs that the discom- fort of it is conveyed to one's own : the peremp- tory tone in which the lady of the house will shortly be ordering about the parlourmaid and which seems already to be battering at one's ears, the tight-drawn tension of too many belehes held too long in check, of an explosive

burden of far-from-spiritual afflatus kept back until the proper time and place for it to be unleashed; and over all a dead ton-weight 01 enervating boredom, of boredom unutterable and inescapable for ever and ever amen.

It is in this marvellous 'Curate's Egg' illus- tration that Du Maurier's talents as a satirist are seen at their best. It is a triumph of charac- ter drawing and implication rather than of design. But Du Maurier was, of course.

romantic and it was not until he took up novel. writing at the age of fifty-live that, with Peter Ibbetson, the unique qualities of imagination that were his as a writer and as an artist were revealed. And it is at this juncture that Mrs Ormond, whose evaluation of Du Maurier's work has up till now, during the period of his chronicling and satirising of the Victorian social scene, been elegantly cool and balanced, loses all sense of judgment.

'I have always liked Mr Du Maurier,' wrote Kate Greenaway after reading Peter Ibbetson, 'but to think there was all this and one didn't know it. I feel I have been doing him a great injustice—not to know it.' Du Maurier's present biographer is, I think, doing him a worse in- justice in that she had read the book refusing to admit 'all this' and she doesn't want to 'know it.' Her determination not to be taken in by 'Victorian melodrama' seems to have been responsible for her reading the novel not as it is but as, with her mind made up before- hand, she expected it to be.

In the history of the English novel during the last two hundred yews or so there is a small group of works—no more perhaps than a dozen—as varied in style, period, subject- matter and literary excellence as they might be expected to be if chosen at random from amongst the uncountable thousands published since Richardson's day, but which possess one quality in common which sets them in a class apart, a quality inherent in the stories that they tell rather than in the manner of their telling, in the bare bones; that is to say, in their plots, which, bringing into the light of day and for the first time giving shape to some hitherto unacknowledged knowledge in the human heart, or not-quite-formulated hope or desperate but unadmitted need or deeply buried fear, speak to the reader with his or her own inner voice and, as with certain airs and phrases of music (one thinks particularly of Bach), seem in their suchness to have existed always as independent of their creators as of the date on which they were given to the world.

Instant legends, the most powerful of these tales rapidly acquire the attributes of folklore- 1 would even say of myth—become ineradicably part of our habit of thought and of expres- sion, their titles, often with incredible swiftness, becoming assimilated into the English lan- guage and the common coin of everyday speech. Peter Ibbetson is one of these books. Du Maurier's fable of lovers parted by circumstance but meeting in their dreams, where they carry on an ideal existence un- touched by the mundane world, seems, on first acquaintance, so familiar, so personal to the reader, so in a way almost unremarkable, that it is difficult not to believe that Du Maurier isn't merely telling us his own version of a lovers' tale as old as that of Daphnis and Chloe or of Tristan and Iseult. Surely, one is inclined to ask oneself, other pairs of legendary lovers parted by fate have been re- united in a private world of dreams? Who, though? No answer. Mrs Ormond suggests a literary antecedent in Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia.

Poe's heroine, she says, also returns to her husband as Du Maurier's Mary Duchess of Towers returns to Peter Ibbetson from beyond the grave. But this is nonsense. There is no resemblance between the two works. The dead Ligeia, fanatically possessive, with ruthless determination forces the soul out of the body of her unfortunate living rival and moves in on the corpse, remains in it just long enough to scare her one-time husband out of his wits and dies for the second time. Mary Towers can scarcely be said to resurrect herself, as her reappearance after she has died is, of course, in Peter Ibbetson's subjective dream world.

And in any case a woman returning from the grave is not what the story is about. Neither does Wordsworth's metaphor of 'Shades of the prison house begin to close' sum up the whole theme of the novel,' as Mrs Ormond suggests. It is rather 'Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.' But Mrs Ormond's attitude to this most poetic book is wrong-headed : she discounts the poetry. She scorns the legend. She refuses to acknowledge Mary Towers as a goddess of mercy, dismisses her as `a pantomime fairy,' not recognising an occidental Kwan Yin. Even the way-out scene where Du Maurier, leading oup to his heroine's entrance as the Duchess of Towers, has Peter in a frenzy prostrating himself in an act of worship before the Venus de Milo, conveys no hint to Mrs Ormond of the sort of book this is. She should read it again.