I'll Never Be Young Again

 
 
 

 
I'll Never Be Young Again

 

 
DAPHNE DU MAURIER

 
 
Hachette Digital

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 515

DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907-89) was born in London, the daughter of the famous actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and granddaughter of George du Maurier, the author and artist. A voracious reader, she was from an early age fascinated by imaginary worlds and even created a male alter ego for herself. Educated at home with her sisters and later in Paris, she began writing short stories and articles in 1928, and in 1931 her first novel,
The Loving Spirit
, was published. A biography of her father and three other novels followed, but it was the novel
Rebecca
that launched her into the literary stratosphere and made her one of the most popular authors of her day. In 1932, du Maurier married Major Frederick Browning, with whom she had three children.

Besides novels, du Maurier published short stories, plays and biographies. Many of her bestselling novels became award-winning films, and in 1969 du Maurier was herself awarded a DBE. She lived most of her life in Cornwall, the setting for many of her books, and when she died in 1989, Margaret Forster wrote in tribute: ‘No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied classification . . . She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of “real literature”, something very few novelists ever do’.

 

Fiction
The Loving Spirit
I’ll Never Be Young Again
Julius
Jamaica Inn
Rebecca
Frenchman’s Creek
The King’s General
The Parasites
My Cousin Rachel
The Birds and other stories
Mary Anne
The Scapegoat
Castle Dor
The Glass Blowers
The Flight of the Falcon
The House on the Strand
Rule Britannia
The Rendezvous and other stories

 

Non-fiction
Gerald: A Portrait
The Du Mauriers
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë
Golden Lads
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall
Myself When Young
The Rebecca Notebook

 
 
 

 
I'll Never Be Young Again

 

 
DAPHNE DU MAURIER

 
 
Hachette Digital

 
Published by Hachette Digital 2010

 
Copyright © The Estate of Daphne du Maurier 1932
Introduction copyright © Elaine Dundy 2005

 

 
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eISBN : 978 0 7481 1459 7

 

 
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Devotees of Daphne du Maurier will find in
I’ll Never Be Young Again
a rich source of self-revelatory material.This second novel with its world-weary title was completed in 1930, when the author was all of twenty-three years old. Young as she was, however, it is all there, yet at the same time none of it is. She is a beginner. Nevertheless, it contains the strengths that will make her one of the great monologists in twentieth-century fiction, most endearing are the twists, turns and shocks of her plots, which are done in such a way that the reader grows to accept them as reasonable. It also reminds us again what a strong influence James Joyce had on our writers in the 1920s and ’30s, with his stream of consciousness, a technique du Maurier uses to her great advantage.

Two decades later, about her novel in progress,
The Scapegoat
, she will write to her publisher Victor Gollancz describing her task as ‘simply to take a fantastically impossible situation and make it read with utter conviction’, a target which she hits bull’s-eye in most of her novels, including this second one.

In form the novel is episodic; if a film, it would be called a ‘road movie’, with the self-described male narrator, Dick, driven from crisis to crisis. Starting as a would-be suicide on a London bridge, he moves to a posh cruise of Scandinavia. From there, as a deck hand, we find him on a run-down tug boat about to sink. Having survived, he goes on to Paris. Settling into café life, he enters into a year-long love affair with an American girl, simultaneously embarking on becoming a writer, buoying himself up on hot dreams of fame and fortune. His bubble bursts when a noted publisher tells him he has no talent. Then, when he returns to Paris, his girlfriend walks out on him. In a surprise ending, he becomes happier than he has ever been in his life as a bank clerk in London, listening to a bird who seems to be singing over and over, ‘I’ll never be young again.’

True, Dick is rather unsympathetic. Du Maurier will rarely make that mistake again. At the same time she will magically retain the weaknesses, dishonesties and peccadilloes in her characters that are unsympathetic, as she does with Dick. Fifty-seven years later, in her novel
The House on the Strand
, there is also a narrator called Dick who is similarly unsympathetic. Coincidence? Subconscious? Provocative?

This early novel is a forerunner of the later ones in that, as with all prolific writers, du Maurier employs favourite words in it which she will use throughout her work. It’s fun to see which words here will become staples of her style. ‘Fool’, ‘child’ and ‘brandy’ are three. Her characters feel like fools, as often as they call other people the same. The word ‘child’ denotes everything from innocence to tantrums while brandy is, universally, the only drink characters swallow to pull themselves together. It is fascinating to see some phrases evolve: ‘I’ll never be young again’ progresses to the second Mrs de Winter’s ‘I’ll never be a child again’. Biting one’s nails under stress, which appears as early as her second novel, turns up again full force in the second Mrs de Winter, who says, ‘I didn’t like it. I began biting my nails. No, I did not like it.’ Nail-biting will apply throughout her oeuvre. In
The King’s General
, one person even gets around to biting his hands. Daphne herself bit her nails when growing up. A touch of reality.

Another reality in du Maurier’s books is that people die in them, sometimes in profusion! She kills them off with the brio of Dickens and Shakespeare. Babies, mothers and grandfathers fall dead just when we are becoming fond of them. Only two people die in
I’ll Never Be Young Again
, but they are the two most important to Dick. Reading her novels, we become alerted to the real and present dangers that threaten her characters every time they mount a horse, climb a hill, step into a car or carriage, scramble up a balcony - or even walk out of a front or back door.

Important also are du Maurier’s unhappy endings (which her husband teased her about). They leave us to ponder how invariably fate pays us back for our transgressions. Though her books were advertised as ‘romances’, boy rarely gets girl; in fact it is rare that two main characters go off together into the sunset. We realize she feels it would be
morally wrong
if they did. Du Maurier, schooled in the ways of the world, makes this sound sense, leaving a reverberation that haunts us; whereas a happy ending would merely signal closure.

After reading Margaret Forster’s biography documenting du Maurier’s hitherto unknown bisexuality, I confess that it sent me straight back to her novels sleuthing for clues of this interesting facet of her personality. And there are plenty. Nowhere is it more blatant and confusing than in
I’ll Never Be Young Again
, when narrator Dick explodes about how he wished his father had treated him like a boy: ‘I wanted to use my fists against the faces of boys,’ he says, ‘to fight with them, laughing, sprawling on the ground, and then run with them, catching at my breath, flinging a stone to the top of a tree.’ The confusion here is that the author has mixed up her real-life plight with that of Dick’s, and writes like a woman yearning to be a man. This kind of thing runs through her work. Often her heroines will declare they wished they were a man.

Looking for a context in which to place du Maurier in a literary and historic time frame, I suddenly came across a phenomenon I might otherwise have missed. Until recently, it seemed to me that all the full-drawn female characters such as Becky Sharp, Hedda Gabler and Scarlett O’Hara disappeared after the nineteenth century. I see now that the twentieth century, specifically the 1920s and 1930s, produced two other star woman writers, who created wonderful female characters as did du Maurier; I am talking about Virginia Woolf and the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, both of whom were also Sapphically inclined. In order of their appearance,Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), in whose
Orlando
the protagonist begins a three-hundred-year journey as a man, but metamorphoses into a woman and who, in another work, gives us the arresting psychological insight that ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’ (
A Room of One’s Own
)

As for Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950), whose wit, candour and genius made her the hottest ticket in the poets’ lecture circuit, unseating Robert Frost; when a college girl, she asked herself the question: What will a scholarship student several years older than the other girls at a top women’s college, Vassar, do to get noticed? The answer: use her attraction to and by women and fix on the same-sex spell they were all under. Her poem, ‘A Few Figs from Thistles’, containing the stanza
endeared her to females around the world and possibly gave rise to Dorothy Parker’s comment: ‘If the prettiest girls at Vassar were laid end to end, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

Bisexuality surely added to their originality, idiosyncrasies, imagination and talent.Yet of equal significance was their strong sense of reality which is manifest to anyone who begins to study their careers. There was nothing fey about them. In fact, they were noticeably grounded. All needed a special place to lay their heads and all got it: du Maurier at Menabilly, a mansion in Cornwall, Millay at Steepletop, a farmhouse in upstate New York - two houses set in impressive surroundings. Both women renovated them to suit their own will. With Woolf, it was simply
A Room of One’s Own
, yet I speculate it stirred up more emotion in women than the two other grander houses.

Another similarity: all three did a lot of suffering in their childhood, which seems to have stiffened their resolve to make up for it by working towards a kingdom, a power and a glory in their art.

As for husbands, each chose hers with a sense of practicality. We have all heard of Trophy Wives but not enough of Trophy Husbands.These three realists chose husbands that they loved and were proud of. Virginia married a publisher, Edna a Dutch businessman, Daphne a much-decorated war hero who masterminded an important wing of World War II Air Force and became a valued member of Queen Elizabeth’s and Prince Philip’s staff, for which he was knighted.

All three women on their own were powerful and entitled, yet desirous of what they saw fame could not purchase: respectability and acceptability. They married what seemed to them stable, non-participants in the arts, although appreciators of them. The men seemed the embodiment of what these women wanted - someone to lean upon, someone to guide them. Ironically, all three of the ladies became the breadwinners of the family.