by David Lodge
The answer was, nothing, except that it was a poignant index of Kiki’s physical and mental decline in the last two years. He would not be the only reader to think so: the chapters published in Harper’s had already provoked some cruel comments in the press, and several friends had spoken privately to him of their disappointment at the new book – what would they make of Martia when they came to her? The traders in reputations in the literary marketplace who were, as Kiki himself had prophesied, hoping he would take a fall after the success of Trilby, would enjoy sneering at The Martian. He had no wish to give them encouragement, but he could not in honesty defend the book either. It was impossible to cancel his agreement to write the article since he had rashly told Emma about it; so he put off writing the piece, but continued to brood on its subject.
A memoir of Du Maurier by Felix Moscheles, In Bohemia with Du Maurier, published not long after his death, contained much food for thought. He knew of Moscheles, though he had never met him – he was a moderately successful artist and the son of a famous musician, a friend of Browning’s (whose portrait he had painted), a British citizen of European Jewish descent and cosmopolitan education. He had been a fellow student of Du Maurier’s at the Academy of Art in Antwerp, and a close friend in the difficult years that followed. Du Maurier had not cultivated the relationship in later life, and his occasional allusions to Moscheles in Henry’s hearing were somewhat dismissive. In his book, however, Moscheles presented himself, in slightly cloying fashion, as a devoted friend. In a brief prefatory note he described how he received the news of Du Maurier’s death while correcting the proofs of his book in Venice. ‘My world, resplendent with sunshine, was suddenly lost in darkness. The most loveable of men, whose presence alone sufficed to make life worth living to all those near and dear to him, was gone from amongst us.’ A whiff of insincerity seemed to rise from this bouquet of clichés. It was a very short book, lavishly illustrated with slapdash humorous pen-and-ink sketches and holograph poems by Du Maurier, recording episodes from their years together in Flanders. Moscheles had evidently preserved these papers, together with letters from Du Maurier, and one could not avoid a suspicion of his ‘cashing in’ on the Trilby boom by publishing this material at the present time. As the title of his book implied, he maintained that the atmosphere of the early chapters of Du Maurier’s novel, and the character of Trilby herself, derived from Du Maurier’s experiences in Belgium as well as Paris, and his own style mimicked that of Trilby with its lyrical nostalgia, local colour, facetious nicknames and arch humour. Moscheles claimed in his preface that Du Maurier had ‘cordially endorsed’ the project, and even assisted him in correcting the proofs, but Henry wondered if Kiki had in fact been less than enchanted with it, and whether the correcting of proofs hadn’t entailed some argument, for it was in many ways a compromising document. He had heard indirectly that the Du Maurier family were displeased by its publication, and was not surprised.
The most interesting revelation in the book concerned a young girl called Octavie, whom the youthful Du Maurier and Moscheles nicknamed ‘Carry’, and who Moscheles strongly hinted was the model for Trilby. They met her in Malines, where Du Maurier was living after suffering his detached retina. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a tobacconist who had just died and she ran the shop with her mother. She was pretty, blue-eyed, with abundant brown curly hair and ‘a figure of peculiar elasticity’; and ‘her soul was steeped in the very essence of Trilbyism’, by which Moscheles seemed to mean the unconventional, unselfconscious freedom of manners exhibited by Du Maurier’s young heroine. The two young men found her very attractive, and they formed a kind of flirtatious threesome, with Du Maurier and Moscheles pretending, or perhaps not altogether pretending, to be rivals for her affections. Moscheles noted that he was at a disadvantage in this competition because he was still continuing his studies in Antwerp, and could only spend the weekends in Malines, whereas Du Maurier had Carry all to himself in the intervening weekdays. What particularly interested Henry was that the sketches depicted Moscheles as having a black beard, long black hair and a prominent hooked nose, and often playing the piano con brio to entertain Du Maurier and Carry; also that Moscheles admitted to having experimented successfully with mesmerism at that period of his life.
The idyll ended when Du Maurier moved on to Düsseldorf and Moscheles went back to England. The later story of Carry was a sad one. After several unsatisfactory liaisons with other men she met a doctor who married her and took her to Paris, but he died shortly after giving her a son. ‘What can have become of Carry once more cast adrift in Paris to fight the battle of life in this hard ever-love-making world?’ Moscheles asked rhetorically. He added: ‘We never knew,’ but the hint in ‘ever-love-making’ was obvious. Henry began to form a theory about the genesis of Trilby. Du Maurier might well have felt guilty in later life about the way he and Moscheles had exploited the seventeen-year-old Carry’s innocent availability and later left her to fend for herself. Suppose she had become Du Maurier’s mistress during those weekdays when Moscheles was out of the way, perhaps with the collusion of her widowed mother (which was how Trilby had first ‘fallen’), perhaps through his persuading her to sit for him in the nude. Might he not have projected his guilt on to a demonised version of his Jewish friend, Svengali, while idealising Carry as Trilby, and portraying himself as the chaste and chivalrous Little Billee? Might Kiki’s hints about George Lee being the model for Svengali have been merely a device for concealing the true source of the novel?
There was something else of interest in Moscheles’ book, which pertained to Du Maurier’s astonishing boom late in life. The young men had a third friend at the Antwerp Academy whose initials were T.A.G., leading them to adopt the soubriquets ‘Rag’, ‘Tag’, and ‘Bobtail’. There was a poem addressed ‘To Bobtail’ (Moscheles) by ‘Rag’ (Du Maurier) reflecting on the unpredictability of their respective futures, which ended:
Yet who shall be lucky, and who shall be rich?
Whether both, neither, one or all three;
Is a mystery which, Dame Fortune the witch,
Tells neither Tag, Bobtail, or me!
Moscheles returned to this verse later in his book, and modified it:
Who was to be lucky and who to be rich,
Who’d get to the top of the tree;
Was a mystery which
Dame Fortune the witch,
Was to tell Du Maurier and me.
It seemed to Henry that, underlying Moscheles’ protestations of friendship, there was running through the whole memoir a strain of envy provoked by Du Maurier’s eventual success, and perhaps resentment at having been ‘used’ as the model for Svengali. There was no way by which he could verify these theories, and even if they were true there was no way he could expound them in his article, but they helped to keep his thoughts about Du Maurier simmering at the back of his mind while he worked on other things.
The other things were mainly his London Letters for Harper’s Weekly – reviews of the latest books, plays and exhibitions – well-paid hack work, essentially. He couldn’t settle to anything more substantial while the quest for some permanent refuge from London remained unresolved through the spring and summer. The public hysteria and disruptions to life in the capital caused by the preparations for the Queen’s Jubilee made him all the more eager to get away, if only temporarily. He thought of going back to Rye, but neither the cottage at Point Hill nor the Vicarage was available, and he couldn’t face the bother of looking for an alternative and probably being disappointed with what he found. He went to Torquay briefly, and the Osborne was as agreeable as ever; but it had nothing new to offer, and neither did Norris’s conversation. He escaped the Jubilee at the last moment by going down to Bournemouth, taking MacAlpine and the Remington with him, and had a tolerably pleasant time there, tinged with melancholy memories of two dear departed invalids whom he associated with the resort, Alice and Louis. He cycled a lot, and bought a machine for MacAlpine so that he could h
ave company (if one could call that silent presence company) on his rides. Then came a pleasant and intriguing surprise: a letter from Elly Emmett, née Temple, Minny’s sister, who was spending the summer in Dunwich on the Suffolk coast with her three daughters, and invited him to visit them there. The idea of meeting these American cousins, in a part of England he had never visited before, was an enticing one, and he accepted promptly, asking Elly to find accommodation for himself and MacAlpine for the month of August.
It was a poignant experience to see Elly again after so many years, and to reflect that Minny might also have turned into a thick-waisted, heavy-hipped, grey-haired matron if she had lived as long. Her three daughters, all in their early twenties, were however dazzlingly beautiful and, in spite of some defects of education and manners, irresistibly charming – to all, that is, except MacAlpine, who retained his granite impassivity in the face of their girlish efforts to tease and flirt with him. They reminded Henry of Minny in their fearless curiosity and appetite for life, and sometimes they seemed like modern reincarnations of Daisy Miller in their cheerful disregard for conventional proprieties and lack of awe for their elders and betters. They had bicycles too, and accompanied him and MacAlpine on long explorations of the flat unpaved roads of Suffolk. He deplored their slovenly American speech and took it upon himself to correct them. Once he overheard them mimicking him, ‘Not “jool”, Edith – “jew-el”. Not “Yeah” – “Yes”,’ and giggling hysterically together; but in his presence they pretended to be mortified by his criticisms – ‘Oh, cousin Henry, you’re so crool’ – ‘Cru-el, Rosina’ – and he derived a certain subtle pleasure from admonishing them.
He found the Suffolk countryside, with its sleepy villages and old watermills and bird-haunted estuaries, attractive in a quiet, unostentatious way, and it was certainly good cycling country in dry weather. For a while he toyed with the idea of looking for a cottage in the area, but decided that without the stimulating company of the cousins it would be almost too quiet to bear, and it was inconveniently distant from London, with poor communications. His dream of finding a nesting place somewhere in the country remained unfulfilled. But his temporary residence in Suffolk was so refreshing and restorative that he felt at last able to address himself to the article about George Du Maurier.
It was time. The Martian had finished running in Harper’s, and had been published as a book, to almost universally unfavourable reviews (Du Maurier’s premature death had at least spared him the distress of reading them). He could pass over it lightly, taking his readers’ knowledge of it for granted, and concentrate on the aspect of his subject that really interested him: the paradox that Du Maurier’s astonishing success with Trilby had seemed to cause him more distress than joy, and what the whole phenomenon implied about contemporary culture and society. In the little parlour of their rooms at the Dunwich inn he dictated to MacAlpine a long article in which he surveyed Du Maurier’s life and evoked his character, throwing in personal reminiscences where appropriate, but emphasising that no one could hope to equal the man’s evocation of these things in his own novels. ‘I have read with even more reflection than the author perhaps desired to provoke the volume devoted by Mr Felix Moscheles to their common experience in Flanders and Germany,’ he said, in a passage intended to make the memoirist feel uneasy, and to give the Du Mauriers some comfort, ‘as to which what most strikes me is the way in which our friend himself has been beforehand with any gleaner.’ After paying tribute in a general, impressionistic way to the charm of Du Maurier’s novels, he suggested that the success of Trilby constituted a uniquely interesting case. ‘The charm was one thing, and the success quite another, and the number of links missing between the two was greater than his tired spirit could cast about for. The case remains, however; it is one of the most curious of our time; and there might be some profit in carrying on an inquiry which could only lead him, at the last, in silence, to turn his face to the wall.’ In that last phrase he felt he seized and held his theme: it was Trilby that had killed Du Maurier – or, rather, the monstrous explosion of ‘publicity’ which the novel had provoked. The passage that followed was the apocalyptic climax of his article, and cost him most effort – a whole morning’s dictation, and further polishing by hand that evening. The following day he dictated the revised version to MacAlpine:
‘What I see certainly is that no such violence of publicity can leave untroubled and unadulterated the sources of the production in which it may have found its pretext. The whole phenomenon grew and grew till it became, at any rate for this particular victim, a fountain of gloom and a portent of woe; it darkened all his sky with a hugeness of vulgarity. It became a mere immensity of sound, the senseless hum of a million newspapers and the irresponsible chatter of ten millions of gossips. The pleasant sense of having done well was deprived of all sweetness, all privacy, all sanctity. The American frenzy was naturally the loudest and seemed to reveal monstrosities of organization; it appeared to present him, to a continent peopled with seventy millions, as an object of such homage as no genius had yet elicited. The demonstrations and revelations encircled him like a ronde infernale. He found himself sunk in a landslide of obsessions, of inane, incongruous letters, of interviewers, intruders, invaders, some of them innocent enough, but only the more maddening, others with axes to grind that might have made him call at once, to have it over, for the headsman and the block. Was it only a chance that reverberation had come too late, come, in its perverse way, as if the maleficent fairy of nursery-tales had said, in the far past, at his cradle: “Oh yes, you shall have it to the full, you shall have it till you stop your ears; but you shall have it long after it will bring you any joy, you shall have it when your spirits have left you and your nerves are exposed, you shall have it in a form from which you will turn for refuge – where?” He appears to me to have turned for refuge to the only quarter where peace is deep, for if the fact, so presented, sounds overstated, the element of the portentous was not less a reality.’
MacAlpine tapped out the last words, and looked enquiringly at Henry.
‘That’s all for the time being, MacAlpine,’ he said.
‘It’s powerful stuff,’ said MacAlpine.
Henry stared, then turned his back and smiled to himself. It was the first time the man had ever vouchsafed a comment on anything he had dictated. He was pleased, but it was not a habit he wished to encourage.
Reading the finished article through for the last time, before sending it off to Harper’s, he realised that it was as much about himself as about Du Maurier – about confronting, defining and refining his own literary ambitions, and finally exorcising the demon of envy which had threatened in the last two years to mar his pleasure in their long friendship. In that, at least, he had succeeded, and he only hoped that others would see it as a worthy tribute to Du Maurier, and find in it evidence of the tenderness and affection he had always felt for him. It was reassuring that Edward Warren thought so. He came over to Dunwich one day from Felixstowe, where he was renting a house for the summer, and Henry showed him the carbon copy. Warren was particularly moved by a passage near the end about his last visits to Du Maurier in Hampstead and ‘the gradual shrinkage, half tacit, half discussed, of his old friendly custom of seeing me down the hill. The hill, for our parting, was long enough to make a series of stages that became a sort of deprecated register of what he could do no more; and it was inveterate enough that I wanted to re-ascend with him rather than go my way and let him pass alone into the night.’
‘Wonderful, James,’ Warren said, after reading this aloud. ‘A wonderful image – Du Maurier passing into the night. It will make his wife cry, but they will be healing tears.’
‘I hope so,’ he said.
It was almost the end of his stay in Dunwich. He had extended it into September, and the countryside was touched with the first signs of autumn, which seemed appropriate to his elegiac mood. Warren had brought his bike with him from Felixstowe and together they bumped over the rutte
d, dusty tracks between fields of amber corn waiting to be harvested, and orchards heavy with ripening apples. They discussed the pros and cons of Suffolk as a place to acquire a country retreat, agreeing that the balance went against it, and Henry wistfully recalled the tantalising attractions of Lamb House.
Two days later he returned to London, and found waiting for him a letter from the ironmonger in Rye:
Dear Mr James,
If you are still interested in Lamb House I wd. advise you to come down here as soon as possible as it is to let on a long lease. Old Mr Bellingham died last winter and Mrs Bellingham likewise in June and young Mr Bellingham is going to Canada to make his fortune in the gold rush. Hoping this finds you well,
Yrs sincerely,
The signature was illegible. Henry gave a hoot of incredulous laughter as he read this missive, at the sheer implausibility of its contents, the novelistic contrivance to which Fate had been reduced, killing off the senior Bellinghams in quick succession and dispatching the son to join the Klondike gold rush, in order to offer him the house of his dreams, whose presumed unattainability he had been lamenting only a few days ago. He felt both excited and afraid at this singular turn of events. He had a lively premonition of all the financial and legal liabilities, the problems and distractions, that acquiring the house would entail, but he saw also the impossibility of not accepting such a gift from the gods, unless it turned out to have some insuperable and catastrophic flaw. His destiny could hardly have been more clearly indicated if a giant hand had come out of the clouds with a finger pointing peremptorily to East Sussex. He immediately wrote to Warren asking if on his return to London the following week he would accompany him to Rye to survey the house and advise him. But two days later he was overcome with panic at the thought of losing the house in the meantime, and wired Warren that he was going down to see it on his own.
