BOOKS

Queen of the Wild Mullions

By RONALD BRYDEN

LATE in 1956, when the capitals of Western Europe were flooding with dark-faced, leather-jacketed youths who had fought through tile streets of Budapest, hanged secret policemen upside-down and crawled across. barbed wire into Austria, a number' of Oxford and Cam- bridge colleges generously offered to make places for some of those who had left university courses unfinished. Early in January, the first contingent reached the fens, and were conducted through the courts of Tudor brick and Victorian Gothic which were to complete their educations. It is said that as they gazed at the shaven lawns, the bowler-hatted porters. the dons ballooning past and undergraduates returning pink and starved from the river, they broke into incredulous, hysterical laughter, finding it impossible to

explain why they laughed. .

For too long now, a rising generation of readers have reacted in much the same way to the work of Miss Daphne du Maurier, and con- sidered it an adequate critical response. It is surely adequate no longer. Penguin Books have recognised, by giving her the same full, regal re- printing* previously awarded Lawrence, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, that Miss du Maurier is one of the world's great.liteAtry pheriomena. It is about time someone did. 'MISS du Maurier's novels have been read by millions of people ,in: scores of languages. The films made from, have been seen by millions more. In France her works rank with Durrell's and Charles Mor- gan's, in the US they are automatic book-club choices. Largely by her efforts, Britain still leads the world in romantic fiction, and if this' were Japan she would long since have been pro- claimed a National Treasure. Not that she is wholly without honour in her own country: the British hard-cover editions of Rebecca alone have sold nearly 900,000 copies—the equivalent, if you average it out, of 720 every week since the novel appeared in 1938. Yet a new du Mauder is perfunctorily noticed, her work is little discussed even in those critical circles which have taken to threshing the sociological content oft music-hall ballads and television serials. Surely such a portent demands at least study and analysis? What deeps of imagination has she touched, what universal instincts played on with what skills, that in Persia, Brazil, Siam, there must be people to whom England means little or nothing save a ring of brooding man- sions about its coasts, from whose mullioned windows restless, enigmatic wives stare out to the sea over lawns dappled with rhododendrons and spaniels, straining for some low bird-call which signals a lover waiting on the shore?

Well, for a start, Miss du Maurier has relied in her greatest successes on themes of proven, even mythical, appeal. Her first best-seller, Jamaica Inn, is a more or less wholesale trans- position to Bodmin Moor—ponies, brandy, demonic vicar and all—of Russell Thorndyke's

* REBECCA (4s.). JAMAICA INN, FRENCHMAN'S CREEK

and M.s4 COUSIN RAMBL. (3s. 6d. exit), .•• popular' tale of Romney Marsh smuggling, Doctor Syn. Rebecca, beneath its daring pre- war gimmicks (that nameless heroine, the hints of lesbianism, the middle-aged couple mysteri- ously exiled on the Riviera, so like the Wind- sors), is a Cornish Gothic resetting of Jane Eyre, even to the fire necessary to liberate the gloomy hero and his mousy beloved from the dead hand of the wife in the west wing. French- man's Creek, lush blossom of the rationed years, can be recognised under its periwigs and Jeffery Farnol exchanges as an A-certificate version of Lady Chatterley, down to the pirate-hero's penchant for bird-watching and cooking out of doors. As for My Cousin Rachel, with its final, tumultuous consummation of the teasing, filial- fraternal relationship between its orphaned nar- rator and the widow of the gruff young guardian who was both father and mother to him—readers may unravel for themselves the iEschylian satis- factions of that tangle of surrogates.

But plots are nothing without execution. Miss du Maurier shows in developing her stories the same splendid courage which made Walter Scott God's gift to Italian opera, for charging head- long at those scenes-à-Mire a modern realist would dodge, as unmakable. N9 fashionable in- articulacy fc.1 . her, none of the tight=iipped understatement by which Rattigan protagonists evade tearing each other's vitals in full, Racinian confrontation. When, in Frenchman's Creek, the jealous' Rockingham lurches forward to assault the honour of Dona St. Columb, there is no door to slam, no butler to summon; she has to hurl her wine-glass' in his face, grapple with him as the last candle gutters to darkness, then, struggling up the stairs in fitful moonlight, wrest from the wall some huge, ancient shield, which falls and squashes him.

But Miss du Maurier offers some:hing more than. the articulation of subliminal. longings and aggressions. She gratifies one's most secret social ambitions. Each novel, is a country-house week- end in fancy dress, in which you are ushered understandingly into the world of crenellated façades and minstrel galleries. Gently, you ,are initiated and calmed: shown that the servants will not bite, told where to go after breakfast (the morning-room, to write letters), tutored in ordering meals or firing housemaids, warned who in the county hunts or has mad aunts. Mildly, the aristocratic discomforts and for- malities of the house are mocked, together with the gaffes that they may lead to—you are instructed while made at home and equal.

But as you learn, you are also being tested. Continually, unobtrusively, you are invited to share tastes, discriminat:ons. Surely you, too, care for dogs, the Field, discreet service, large' bowls of roses? Surely you, too, dislike cock- tails, jazz, trippers, Americans? You are being vetted for some elite of superior spirits, re- cruited for some struggle against an unnamed enemy. You can get a clue to the nature of the winnowing if you read carefully the opening chapters of Rebecca, and Frenchman4 .Creek.

Both describe great houses, Manderley and Navron, derelict and overrun by invaders. Where Navron once stood in solitary grandeur,

the pleasure steamers come and go, leaving a churning wake, and yachtsmen visit one another, and even the day-tripper, his dull eye surfeited with undigested beauty, ploughs in and out among the shallows, a prawning net in hand.

Manderley has sunk even further: The rhododendrons . . . had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor bastard things that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origins.

. Nettles were everywhere ... they sprawled about the paths. they leant,, vulgar and lanky, against the windows of the house.

The invasion wears vegetable disguise, but the meaning is clear. What Miss du Maurier is talk- ing about is us: Lis in our grubby Aertex shirts, with our two-and-sixes. And what she holds out is social redemption, forgiveness even for our prawning nets and spurious origins, if we will recognise our own vulgarity and change sides. She has hit, with the tiara'd old lady in the New Yorker cartoon, bending down the long dining-table toward her pearl-studded spouse, on the counter-revolutionary brainwave of our time: `Couldn't we win them over to our way of life?'

Heaven knows, she makes it all so easy; so flattering: once you have mastered the formS, learned how 'to snub a presuming housekeeper or send back an ill-sliced piece of meat, you can forget your lessons. You are in, a member of an aristocracy which has nothing to do with class (the heroine of Rebecca is very severe about `superficial snobbery): a kind of cousinage of nature's monarchs. You are allowed, like Dona St. Columb, to jeer at society's hollow rituals and to go scampering barefoot through the woods 'in an old gown long laid aside to be bestowed upon a cottager'; to eat grilled fish in your fingers with a Breton pirate on the shore. You are able to propose marriage, like Max ,de Winter, with your mouth full of toast, as casually as saying, `Tennis, anyone?'

For really your initiation has been into the Past, the true source of all grace and value. It is the' mana of old time which sanctifies the great house and its ways, conferring on its resi- dents nobility and freedom. 'I don't think I should care for Palm Beach,' says Max de Winter drily, and with a rush of adoration Re- becca's nameless successor sees that his face is `medieval in some strange inexplicable way' and knows he is the only man for her. Miss du Maurier must have found a congenial task in completing Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's un- finished novel Castle Dor,t for it cherishes as strongly as her own work the belief that the breath of antiquity ennobles. The young wife of a Cornish innkeeper becomes enamoured of a Breton sailor, and gradually the local doctor, an amateur antiquary, realises that they are re- enacting the passion of Tristan and Yseult. Not only does the reincarnate past invest the pair with their archetypes' royalty and wilfulness; it haloes them with an added glamour of- being, somehow, living antiques. It is difficult not to regard Max de Winter in the same light, as a piece of walking Chippendale.

The evocation of the past in all its precious- ness imposes a particular style on Miss du Maurier. A kind of awed vagueness is proper to its magic: `a century now forgotten, in a time that has left few memories,' means, you discover, the age of Charles II. It must be re-created delicately, by incantation of certain words of power: `pommel,' posset,"ringlet,"casement,' t CASTLE DOR. By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Mauricr. (Dent, 16s.) 'mullion'—we come close to the heart of Miss du Maurier's sensibility in that word 'mullion,' so rich in overtones of Gothic windows and old Cornish seaports, faintly suggestive of mulled galleons.

But if the Past imposes verbal strictness, it offers beguiling mental liberties. History must always be a tenuous, foreshortened fabric in our minds,lull of holes, loose ends, gaps in sequence and causality. The rules of plausibility which operate in the present break down there, for the continuum is too flimsy. Improbabilities creep in, pseudo-connections indulged for the sake of tidiness, which in present life would glare forth as irrational and superstitious. Coin- cidences, affinities, premonitions; love at first sight, predestination, hauntings: all the laziest modes of slatternly thinking which a sense of reality forbids in our own time run riot in the Past, and Miss du Maurier revels in them with her following. For them fiction is a holiday from reason. It needn't even be a convincing holiday —if you accept the superstition that the Past has power, charms will summon it as well as relics. A Churchill toby-jug has as much 'atmosphere' as a Regency one, a replica Jacobean table can evoke cavaliers so soon as the real thing. A mock-classic, bright with swords, postillions and prose which sounds like blank verse, offers as much escape as Dickens, Trollope or Tolstoy....

No. The argument begins to turn, pointing its blade at us. When you have rent Miss du Maurier's fiction with your critical rapier, it bends itself on a huge stony reality behind them Which we cannot comfort ourselves by calling Philistinism. It is the simple fact that for the enormous majority of people in the world literature and art are marginal to life, and unimportant. Miss du Maurier has never con- fused the tuppence coloured with the real thing, any more than did her father, the suave creator of Raffles, or her grandfather, begetter of Trilby and seven-foot Punch duchesses. Her family have purveyed for a century a glossy brand of entertaining nonsense, because that is all they and their huge audiences have ever found literature to be. And confronted with their hard disbelief that literature can ever be as serious as life, we are forced to take stock of all our standards, our whole culture. How much of it is really different in kind from Miss du Maurier, or even tries to be? As serious as life? Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, bits of Middlenturch—Miss du Maurier tells us what Dr. Leavis has been saying for thirty years, and why the Hungarians laughed at Cambridge.