by David Lodge
‘It’s all right for Chang,’ Gerald grumbled when it was his turn to receive this reminiscence. ‘He didn’t have to go to school and get ragged silly because somebody found a picture of him as a tiddler in skirts in an old copy of Punch.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, smiling sympathetically through his beard, ‘I can see that might be an embarrassment. Schoolboys are not the most sensitive – the most tactful . . . But when you grow up, Gerald, you will appreciate what a fine thing it is to be immortalised in the pages of Punch, even as – what was that delightful expression? A “tiddler in skirts”.’ Later in the day he identified the cartoon the boy was probably referring to, framed and hanging in the entrance hall of New Grove House, which was a kind of private gallery of the artist’s work. Entitled ‘Delicate Consideration’, it depicted the Du Maurier children in the back garden, holding on to each other’s waists, one behind the other in graduated order of height and seniority, and Trixy was explaining to Mamma: ‘We’re playing at railway trains. I’m the engine and Guy’s a first class carriage and Sylvia’s a second class carriage, and May’s a third class carriage, and Gerald, he’s a third class carriage too – that is, he’s really only a truck you know, only you mustn’t tell him so, as he would be offended.’
Punch had always occupied a privileged place in Henry’s consciousness. His mental images of England and the English were first formed by the creased and dog-eared back numbers he and William pored over as boys in New York. When he was taken to England for the first time since infancy, at the age of twelve, and looked about him, his eye had already been trained by the woodcuts of Leech. By the time he returned as a young man, Punch, its pictorial range now extended by Keene and Du Maurier, was his guide, his Baedeker and Bradshaw, for the interpretation and negotiation of English social life. Experience soon revealed its limitations for this purpose, but Du Maurier’s cartoons – the drawings rather than the sometimes ponderous text beneath them – recorded a fine-grained satirical observation of social behaviour that Henry found helpful and suggestive as, shifting his base restlessly between America and Europe in the 1870s, he developed his own ‘international’ fiction of manners. When he visualised his English characters, when he dressed them and had them sit down and stand up and walk about and converse in various public and domestic settings, his mental images were often in black and white, as if one of Du Maurier’s tableaux had come to life. Du Maurier understood perfectly how dress and décor told you a person’s class or caste, while their features and posture gave you their individual characters. It was this tension between conformity and individuality, expressed in line and shading, that was the secret of Du Maurier’s art – and perhaps, Henry sometimes thought, of the man himself.
It wasn’t until 1878, two years after he had decided irrevocably to make his literary career in London, that they actually met, at one of the notorious one hundred and seven evening engagements he accepted that winter. Henry was amused to discover that the draughtsman whose figures – especially his upper-class beauties and their escorts – seemed to be growing taller and taller by the week in the pages of Punch, was himself quite short and slight in stature. He held himself straight and squared his shoulders to make the most of his inches, and in every other respect he was a good-looking man, with delicately chiselled features, flared nostrils, and a mop of soft wavy hair that the balding Henry could only envy. He wore a wispy moustache and imperial that seemed to fit his name and profession. His natural expression in repose was rather melancholy, but in company he was always smiling and animated. The two men took to each other, on that and subsequent occasions when they met. Du Maurier was commissioned, at Henry’s suggestion, to illustrate the magazine serialisation of Washington Square in 1880. The drawings were deemed disappointing by the publishers, and in truth by the novelist himself. But it had been a misconceived project – Du Maurier was out of his natural element with a story set in New York, which he had never seen. Henry felt partly responsible for the failure, and his anxiety to smooth the waters ruffled by this little contretemps only served to bring the two men closer together. He had long entertained the idea of writing an article for one of the magazines about Du Maurier’s work, and asked if he might call on the artist to discuss it with him, a proposal that elicited a prompt invitation to New Grove House. After a very agreeable summer’s day, spent looking through portfolios in the morning and rambling over the Heath in the afternoon, Henry was urged to call on any Sunday thereafter without formality. As the Du Mauriers lived so far out of town, they made themselves available to their friends in this way, and expected to feed them.
Sunday suited Henry very well for these excursions, a day when he could put his work aside without a guilty conscience, and the London streets were less crowded and noisy than on weekdays. It was a long walk, and entailed more walking later, but he needed the exercise to combat the effects of a sedentary occupation and a slightly alarming tendency to corpulence that manifested itself in early middle age. His route took him though Mayfair or Bayswater to Baker Street and St John’s Wood. From the Swiss Cottage he mounted the long unremitting incline of Fitzjohn’s Avenue, which had been almost a country road when he first trod it as a young man, but had since become hemmed with mostly hideous villas of raw red brick. It was always a pleasure to reach the quaint, crooked lanes of Hampstead village, and to thread one’s way through them for the last few steep furlongs to New Grove House, which like so many things in England called ‘new’ was actually quite old – about a hundred years old.
The house had been rather clumsily extended halfway through this lifespan, and consequently had an odd, piebald appearance, half Georgian cream stucco and half Victorian brown brick. Its exterior was more pretentious than the interior warranted, and it possessed virtually no grounds – just a walled backyard with a patch of grass that hardly deserved the name of garden. The open, breezy expanses of the Heath, however, were only ten minutes’ walk away. The great attraction of the house for Du Maurier was manifestly the large, light-saturated drawing room that he used as his studio. There was nothing selfish in this annexation because he liked to have his family around him as he worked. The children when they were young had romped and rolled around the floor under his feet as he stood at his drawing board, and thus found their way into his pictures. In the evenings after dinner Emma would read to him or play the piano as he put in a few more hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Visitors were received there. It was the social centre of the house.
Henry, having breakfasted well, and perhaps paused on his way for some light refreshment, would time his arrival at New Grove House for early afternoon, when it was Du Maurier’s custom to take his Sunday constitutional on the Heath. Off they would go together, perhaps with some of the children, perhaps with another visitor, certainly with a dog – Chang, or his diminutive successor the terrier, Don – down the hill and on to the Heath, past the ponds, past the place where in summer the donkeys waited patiently to give rides to children, and then wander as their inclination, or the dog’s wagging tail, took them, perhaps towards the Spaniards Road, where Du Maurier, in obedience to some superstitious private ritual, had to touch the last tree with his stick before turning home, or perhaps to Parliament Hill, where they would look down on the London plain, picking out the landmark buildings of Westminster and the City piercing the haze of coal smoke. Then, as their shadows lengthened, they returned to New Grove House for dinner, a classic English joint of beef or mutton which Emma ensured was big enough to feed casual visitors and which Du Maurier – always last to arrive in the dining room, announcing his approach with a distant fanfare on the piano – deftly carved at the head of the table. After the meal there would be conversation and music-making and parlour games in the studio-drawing-room. At about ten Henry would leave and Du Maurier invariably insisted on accompanying him. ‘I’ll see you on your way,’ he would say, ‘just to the top of Fitzjohn’s,’ and when they got to the Avenue, ‘just a little further,’ and usually he ended up keep
ing Henry company as far as the Swiss Cottage, and sometimes even on the Atlas omnibus to Baker Street (for he delighted like a child to ride on top of an omnibus) before turning back to climb the long hill home.
Their acquaintance began at a time when Henry’s social and artistic horizons were rapidly expanding. His second novel, The American, had made an impression on both sides of the Atlantic in 1877, and the novella Daisy Miller was a palpable ‘hit’ in 1879. The appearance of Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady a couple of years later consolidated his claim to be the coming man of the literary novel in the English-speaking world. His elegant, cosmopolitan essays appeared in the most prestigious reviews. Hostesses competed for his presence at their dinners and soirées. His diary was always full. Only by fleeing occasionally to France or Italy could he escape the relentless pressure of London social life. So, as he himself was aware, it was a cause of puzzlement and even jealousy on the part of some of his friends that he gave so much of his time to the Du Mauriers, who were neither rich nor ‘smart’ nor dazzlingly clever. Poor Emma was certainly none of those things, and aspired to be nothing more than a comely, caring wife and mother. Du Maurier himself was good for light repartee at a dinner table, or a musical evening at home, but he was not intellectual; indeed, he was something of a philistine in cultural matters, constantly sniping at the Aesthetes in his cartoons from the conservative ramparts of Punch. Henry knew all this, but didn’t care. He liked Du Maurier, he liked his family, and he liked spending Sundays with them.
On that first visit to Hampstead, during the leisurely walk they took on the Heath after lunch, with only Chang for company, Du Maurier related to Henry the principal events of his life, and a very interesting story it was, with elements of mystery, romance, pathos, and a precarious triumph over adversity. The mystery was mainly to do with his origins and name. His paternal grandfather had been a French gentilhomme verrier – that is, as his grandson was at pains to point out, a gentleman with a glassblowing business, not a mere artisan. His name was Busson, but at some stage of his life he attached to it the name of Du Maurier, which belonged to an aristocratic estate to which he had a never-realised claim. He had to flee to England at the time of the Revolution to escape the guillotine, but returned to France after the defeat of Napoleon. His son Louis-Mathurin, George’s father, met and married his English wife, Ellen Clarke, in Paris, though how her family came to be living there Henry never quite understood. George Du Maurier was brought up in the Parisian suburb of Passy, with frequent trips to visit relatives in England, and had happy memories of an idyllic early childhood. But Louis-Mathurin was an inventor and entrepreneur whose schemes never prospered, and he gradually frittered away his fortune. The development of a patent carbide lamp proved a particularly expensive and fruitless venture. He moved his operations to London, leaving his family in France for long periods, but had no better luck there.
‘It was maman who held the family together,’ said Du Maurier. ‘She had the stronger character. My father was charming and had a delightful voice – he could have been an opera singer – but he was no scientist and no businessman. Unfortunately he tried to pass his own misconceived ambitions on to me. When I failed my bachot at the Sorbonne – I was plucked in Latin – he sent me to University College London to study chemistry. Can you imagine me as a chemist?’
‘No,’ said Henry truthfully.
‘Well, my very first employment was testing samples for gold in a Cornish mine,’ said Du Maurier. ‘But it didn’t last long. There was no gold. You could say it was a sign, that I would never make my fortune in commerce, any more than my father had. What I really wanted to be was an artist. I was always sketching, even as a child, on scraps of paper, on the backs of letters, in the margins of my school books . . . any blank white space was an irresistible invitation to fill it with figures and faces. When Father died, in London – he died in my arms, murmuring the words of a drinking song, I’m sorry to say – we returned to Paris, and my mother agreed that I should study art there. It was the best possible place to do so, at the time. I’m not sure it is any more, with these slapdash Impressionists setting the fashion, but in those days the English academies were stuffy, reactionary places. You had to spend three years drawing plaster casts before you were allowed to draw and paint from life. Three whole years! And even then there were all kinds of prudish restrictions. In Paris it was quite different – they had the atelier system. You enrolled at an established artist’s studio – I went to Gleyre’s – and joined a crowd of other young hopefuls grouped around the model, drawing and painting for all they were worth, day in and day out. On Fridays old Gleyre himself came in and criticised your work, but basically you learned by doing it, or you discovered you didn’t have the stuff in you. There was rivalry, of course, and rough horseplay, and a fair amount of dissipation, but there was also tremendous comradeship. We were all poor as church mice, but wine was cheap and you could get a decent dinner for a franc. Some of the friends I met then made a name for themselves later – Tom Armstrong, Jimmy Whistler . . . A few of us got together and rented a studio of our own on Rue Notre Dame des Champs where we could live cheaply and paint all the hours God gave us.’
‘It sounds like Scènes de la Vie de Bohème,’ Henry remarked.
‘Exactly!’ said Du Maurier – then seemed to want to qualify his endorsement. ‘Murger exaggerated some things, of course. But he was pretty near the mark. Morals were loose in Montparnasse, it can’t be denied. But I kept in mainly with English chums – and the odd American, like Jimmy Whistler. We had higher standards than the French, and took more exercise. They thought we were very eccentric, exercising with dumbbells or swinging on the trapeze when they would rather be lounging in a café and flirting with the barmaids.’
‘The trapeze!’ Henry exclaimed.
‘Yes, we had one in the studio, hung from a beam in the ceiling . . . Anyway, after a year or so of this life, enjoyable as it was, I felt the need of a little more, what shall I say . . . discipline. So I enrolled in the Academy in Antwerp, which had a very fine reputation then. Alma-Tadema was a contemporary of mine there, and Felix Moscheles. At first all went swimmingly, and then . . . the great disaster happened. The worst thing that can happen to an artist – or the next to worst.’
‘My dear fellow,’ Henry said compassionately, grasping Du Maurier by the arm, and guiding him to a nearby bench, for the subject seemed too grave for an ambulant conversation. ‘I believe I know what you refer to. Someone told me of your dreadful – your cruel misfortune.’
Du Maurier nodded gloomily. An awful shadow had come across his face as he relived the moment. Even Chang, noticing that the two men had sat down, loped back from a thicket he was investigating and lay at his master’s feet, looking up at him with every appearance of sympathy. ‘I was drawing from a model one day. I glanced up from my board – and suddenly the girl’s head seemed to dwindle to the size of a walnut. I covered my left eye with my hand, and the head returned to normal size. Then I covered my right eye and realised that I’d lost the sight of the left one. It was a detached retina. An irreversible condition – and the eye doctor I consulted warned me that the same thing could happen to the other eye. You can imagine how cheerful I felt at that bit of news.’
‘My dear fellow,’ Henry murmured again.
Du Maurier took from his pocket a small enamel case in which he kept the rather disreputable-looking cigarettes that he rolled himself, extracted one, lit it with a safety match, and blew a plume of smoke into the air. ‘I’ll spare you the details of the next few years of my life, going from doctor to doctor, desperately anxious to preserve what sight I had as long as possible. I moved from Antwerp to Malines, from Malines to Düsseldorf, to be near the men who were most highly recommended. One of them nearly blinded me with his treatments. I tried to keep up my painting, but I was afraid to overstrain my good eye. I was idle a good deal of the time, I’m afraid, idle and depressed. There were times when I seriously contemplated suici
de. The only thing that saved me was meeting Emma, by chance, in Düsseldorf, when she was on holiday there. I’d first met her years before in London, when she was only twelve, a schoolfriend of my sister’s, but I’d been struck by her looks then. Now she was a blooming young woman. We fell in love – but it seemed a hopeless case. I had no money and no prospects. Then Tom Armstrong, bless him, paid me a visit in Düsseldorf and gave me some sound advice. “You’ll never be a first-rate painter with only one eye, Du Maurier,” he said, “but you could be a damn fine draughtsman in black and white, and there’s money to be made in that line in England, with all the illustrated magazines we have now.” He happened to have with him a copy of the Punch Almanac, and he showed it to me. That was in ’59 or ’60. It was full of fine things by Leech and Keene. I saw what could be done with the medium, and I thought I could learn to do it. So I went to London, bunked with Jimmy Whistler till I found a place of my own, and taught myself how to draw on a block. My one aim was to earn enough tin to marry on. Emma’s parents were not keen to allow the engagement – understandably, I suppose – and to persuade them I foolishly undertook to save a thousand pounds before we married. I soon realised I had set myself an impossible task. After a while my prospective beau-père lowered the threshold to two hundred, but that was still a huge sum to a beginner like me. I peddled my wares from one editorial office to another, got some work from Once a Week—’
‘Where I first saw it,’ James interpolated.
‘Yes, I did a good deal for them, mostly illustrations for the serials, but it wasn’t very well paid, certainly not at first. I had my sights set on Punch, and a salaried position on the staff. I got my foot in the door, but for a long time no further. A few initials – decorative capital letters, you know – at fifteen shillings a go. One cartoon – not very well drawn, though I have a soft spot for it now. “The Photographer’s Studio”.’
