In the family
A. L. Rowse
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories Daphne du Maurier (Gollancz pp. 173, £6.95)
This book of articles and occasional pieces from Daphne du Maurier's workshop is good to have: it is something of a continuation of her autobiography, Growing Pains, which she cut short with marriage. Many of her devoted readers must have wanted to know what came after. Here they will find some of the answers, and they will not be disappointed.
The title piece is the remarkable Notebook she kept when Rebecca was forming itself in her mind — the book that made her a world-wide best-seller and conquered both stage and films and, quite recently, television. A Notebook of this kind is a rarity and has the exceptional interest of letting us into the secrets of a writer's mind, how a story is sparked off, the characters that come together and develop their own life, the associations that cohere, atmosphere, lights and shadows. Still the most popular of her books, she says, with engaging candour — one of the irresistible qualities that come out of these memoirs — that she has never understood why. And I am not going to compete.
The other pieces are mainly autobiographical, but have no less variety than charm — that indefinable characteristic that comes from her famous actor-father, Gerald, of whom there is an endearing portrait here, and with whom she identified when young. What luck she has had with her ancestry on every side! The genius of her artist-novelist grandfather, George du Maurier, of Trilby; the spirit and courage of Mary Anne Clarke, a royal mistress (of George III's soldierly son, the Duke of York of the `Steps'); on the French side, again, an artist-inventor with a beautiful singing voice. Looks, gifts, writing, the stage, drama, melodrama — something ofall this has gone into her work. As she herself says, however, 'a familiar name on its own does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work — and, goodness how she has worked, as the list of her varied books — novels, stories, biographies, plays — indicates.
'The House of Secrets' gives us the germ of Rebecca, and the story of how she came gradually to discover Menabilly, the original of Manderley. The name means, in old Cornish, 'the hill of the rocks' — it proved to be rock-gold for her, with more than one book. Thence, after 26 years, `Moving House' tells us about the move to Kilmarth (with its view across the bay of Trenarren), which proved the inspiration for her most original book, incredibly ingenious, The House on the Strand. No less ingenious is The Scapegoat, French-inspired.
Actually I prefer her later books to those taken to the heart of the public, like Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, though, when I pass the motor coaches disgorging their hordes at that roadside inn on Bodmin Moor, I recall Byron saying to Tom Moore as they heard the Thames boatmen singing one of Moore's Irish Melodies 'There's real fame for you'.
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