Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (34 page)

All this was far in the future in 1932. Boy – actually ten years older than Daphne – did, however, trail some heavy baggage into the marriage. He had never recovered inwardly from the horrors of the first Great War and his dashing image was fragile. If Daphne had a caged boy inside her, he had a shell-shocked warrior. The woman, Jan Ricardo, he was engaged to before Daphne, committed suicide (Ricardo, it is plausibly assumed, contributed something to Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter). None the less, the first few years of the Browning marriage went smoothly enough. As an army wife, with children – two girls and a boy – Daphne followed her husband in his postings around the Empire. Du Maurier wrote
Rebecca
in Alexandria in 1937. Nostalgia for Manderley is the author’s yearning for Menabilly. The novel is her masterpiece – subtle, teasing (what
is
the second Mrs de Winter’s name?) and sinister. Most sinister is the implied ‘corrupt’ relationship between the housekeeper ‘Danny’ and the former mistress of Manderley:

‘Now you are here, let me show you everything,’ she said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey, horrible, false … ‘That was her bed. It’s a beautiful bed, isn’t it? I keep the golden coverlet on it always, it was her favourite. Here is her nightdress inside the case. You’ve been touching it, haven’t you?’

Daphne hated the ‘Colonel’s lady’ life; nor was she one to devote herself to family duties. ‘I am not,’ she informed one of her close friends, ‘one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time.’

Marketed brilliantly by Victor Gollancz in 1938,
Rebecca
sold hugely as the book of the day, and as the book of the film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, three years later. Buoyed up by the golden stream of royalties and rights, du Maurier was well enough off to take Menabilly on long lease in 1943, and devote herself over the next quarter of a century to its restoration. It was much more rewarding than brats or King’s Birthday parades. Her love affair with the house, and its long history, was consummated in a romance about its Civil War adventures,
The King’s General
(1946), when it had been violated by Roundhead intruders. During the war Daphne consoled herself with evangelising for moral rearmament and by taking a lover, in whose handsome house the family was billeted. ‘Boy’, now a General, in charge of airborne forces, served his country gallantly. She was, by now, out-earning her husband ten to one. In 1942 she paid enough income tax, she reckoned, to buy her own Lancaster bomber.

Du Maurier’s stories have always filmed well. A couple of her shorter narratives have supplied two classics of the genre, Hitchcock’s
The Birds
(1963), and Nicolas Roeg’s
Don’t Look Now
(1973).
Jamaica Inn
(1936), a rollicking tale of Cornish wreckers; and
Frenchman’s Creek
, a Sabatiniesque ‘Pirate and the Lady’ romance, were filmed during the war as full-blooded costume drama and packed out cinemas with audiences desperate for a couple of hours of escapism. Insights into du Maurier’s complex psychology can be found even in these romps. In
Frenchman’s Creek
, the heroine, Dona, Lady St Columb, a married woman with children, dresses as a boy to join the pirate crew. Part of Daphne, it would seem, yearned to be where the fighting was – or, more likely, fantasised about it.

Boy returned from the fighting laden with medals – and a haunting sense of having royally cocked up Arnhem – to a marriage gone very cold. On demobilisation, he landed a senior admin post at Buckingham Palace as comptroller of the Household – a job he held until he drank and philandered his way out of it, five years on. Daphne meanwhile prosecuted her career with icy resolution. In 1951, she published the psychological thriller,
My Cousin Rachel
. It plays with the idea of uxoricide – a wife killing a husband (something going through the author’s mind, apparently). The twist is that we never quite know if Rachel did murder Ambrose. Du Maurier claimed not to know herself: ‘I just couldn’t make up my mind.’ Nor could she make up her mind about sexual preferences. On her first visit to America, in 1948, she embarked on a shipboard romance with the wife of her American publisher, Ellen Doubleday. It was not fully reciprocated. But a subsequent relationship with the actress Gertrude Lawrence (seduced in her youth by Gerald) was: which of the du Mauriers ‘Gertie’ found the more satisfying is not recorded.

After a series of catastrophic alcoholic breakdowns, Boy died in 1965. Daphne
became ever grander – an upward progress crowned by damehood in 1969. By now reviews were dismissive. Her readers, vintage
Frenchman’s Creek
, were growing old with her, she lamented to Victor Gollancz, himself long in the tooth nowadays. But the old read more than the young and her sales were never less than respectable.

The most interesting of her later novels is
The Scapegoat
(1957), filmed with Alec Guinness in the lead at the author’s insistence – because he reminded her of her father. A mild thirty-eight-year-old academic, John, meets his exact double on holiday in France and finds himself tricked into being the malevolent (as it turns out) Jacques De Guè. It’s half
Return of Martin Guerre
, half
Prisoner of Zenda
. Du Maurier recorded that she put more into the novel than anything since
Rebecca
: ‘It is my story … Every one of us has his, or her, dark side.’

Du Maurier’s last novel of any worth,
The House on the Strand
(1969) – successfully filmed, inevitably – was inspired by having, finally, to return Menabilly to its family owners and remove to the nearby dower house. As she said, bricks and mortar always got her creative juices flowing.

The Lady or the Tiger?

Stockton is memorable as the author of
The Adventures of Captain Horn
, the top American bestseller of 1895 – the first year that any such list existed. Stockton, who is also claimed by some as the first American science fiction novelist (dubious, with Poe in the running) was born in Philadelphia, the son of a strict Methodist and superintendent of a community of almshouses in the city. He disapproved of fiction.

The Stockton family suffered two disasters in 1844. The first occurred when a cousin, Robert Field Stockton, accidentally blew up the American Secretary of State and Secretary of the US Navy, while displaying a lamentably inefficient new cannon. As Wellington would have said, ‘I don’t know what it does for the enemy, but it damn well frightens me.’ The second family disaster occurred when Frank’s father was dismissed for alleged mismanagement and suspected embezzlement. He never worked again, dying in 1860. It was a sad comedown for a family who could
trace their ancestry back to a signatory on the Declaration of Independence. Frank took over as the family breadwinner – living, as he later claimed, on a dime-a-day to do so.

Frank was frail and disabled, which precluded most professions and, more happily, spared him from service in the Civil War, in which – despite his Northern origins – he favoured the South. In his early twenties he began publishing short pieces for magazines and papers, principally aimed at the juvenile market. He married in 1860 and his career took off when in 1867 he became associated editorially with the children’s magazine,
Hearth and Home
. He worked as an editor until 1878, when he retired with permanently impaired eyesight. Thereafter he largely supported himself by his pen.

By the end of his career Stockton had published some twenty-one novels. His famous and much-reprinted fable, ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’, was first published in
The Century Magazine
in 1882, and made his name – in his own day and posthumously. It is still widely read and discussed (by philosophers, among others). The story is one of the great teases of literature. A commoner falls in love with a princess and is subjected to trial by ordeal. He must choose one of two doors. Behind the one, lies a ravening tiger. Behind the other, a beautiful lady in waiting (not his Princess), whom he must marry, if that is the door he happens to choose. In the watching crowd is the Princess who, discreetly, nods to the door he must choose. At this tantalising point, the story ends.

Stockton – who was prosperous in his later years (no more dime-a-day meals) – achieved mass popularity with the
Adventures of Captain Horn
in 1895, a ‘gold-fever’ story which coincided historically with the current gold-rush to the Yukon. Captain Horn, an American mariner, discovers the fabulous treasure of the Incas, valued at $200 million. He doggedly persists in his ‘reasonable’ belief that, as the discoverer of this gold, a precise 20 per cent ($40 million) is due to him, and he will not take a dollar more or less than his fair share. Others are less scrupulous. Horn’s second mate, George Burke, is destroyed by man-killing traps in the Inca mound, when he secretly returns to plunder the treasure. Another sailor, Andy McLeish, is slowed down by all the gold he is carrying about him and is staked out by savage Indians to be eaten alive by ants. A corrupt Peruvian government tries to appropriate the booty and shyster lawyers exploit the laws of salvage to steal Horn’s portion. The honest hero finally contrives to secure his legitimate $40 million share and forces the Peruvian authorities to use the $160 million balance for the welfare of the descendants of the Incas, building schools and hospitals and doing good work.

In 1899 Stockton was voted fifth place among the ‘best living American writers’
by the readers of the magazine
Literature
. He died of a stroke in 1902. Mark Twain, among other literary dignitaries, paid their respects at his funeral.

I have in fact become a connoisseur in cunts.
Walter on himself

The longest continuous novel of the Victorian period is also the most aggressively anti-Victorian:
My Secret Life
, by ‘Walter’. One says ‘novel’, although it may be what it purports to be: a sexual athlete’s frank memoirs from devirgination to (justified) exhaustion, some 1,200 partners later. But, carefully read, most readers will reckon it a life-history no more factual than those of Baron Munchausen, or James Frey. Fiction, that is, through and through. More specifically,
My Secret Life
is a Victorian
Bildungsroman
of the
Great Expectations
kind. ‘Great Ejaculations’, perhaps.

The likeliest candidate for ‘Walter’ is nowadays thought to be Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900). Born in south London, Ashbee was, by profession, a trader in cloths and textiles. His line of work involved travel and encouraged a worldly, not to say underworldly, view of the human condition. Ashbee, as cultivated as he was randy, collected books – notably Cervantes and erotica. He wrote on the latter under the pen-names ‘Fraxinus’ (Latin for ‘Ash’), ‘Apis’ (‘Bee’), and the bawdily punning ‘Pisanus Fraxi’, under which he wrote his classic three-volume bibliography of ‘Prohibited Books’. Ashbee left both his Cervantes and pornographic collections to the British Museum with the provision that neither should be destroyed or sold on. He never confessed, or directly alluded to, his authorship of
My Secret Life
– it remained his secret.

My Secret Life
was published between 1888 and 1894 in eleven volumes in Amsterdam, under the imprint of the Belgian publisher Auguste Brancart. Only twenty-five sets were printed, at a cost of £60 apiece. At 2.5 million words, it rivals Proust in length and is longer than any other single-title fictional composition in the British nineteenth-century catalogue of books. The very hugeness of the thing is a measure of what was conventionally left out of the above-ground Victorian novel: namely, sex – or, where in the later decades it made a shy entrance, explicit anatomical description of the act with the vulgar terminology used by the mass of the male population and, specifically, by ‘gentlemen’ in the smoking room.

My Secret Life
is nothing if not explicit and vulgar. Page after page records, in minute detail, couplings and sexual experimentation, with partners from every station in life. Words are not minced: as the word-count facility of the electronic text calculates, the word ‘cunt’ occurs 5,357 times, ‘fuck’ 4,032 times, ‘prick’ 3,756 times. ‘Clit(oris)’ clocks a measly 434. Walter records, in wearisome anatomical detail, using the unbuttoned terminology of the men’s smoking room, the ins and outs (ad nauseam) of Victorian sex. In passing, however, he also offers an unblinkered view of much of what the Victorian novel routinely averts its – and our – eyes from. This filling in of background is its peculiar value to the reader of – say –
Middlemarch
. To choose one example from thousands – lavatories. It was not, for example, until 1884 that the Ladies Lavatory Company opened its first ‘convenience’ near Oxford Circus. What did a lady – all those ladies in Victorian fiction – do before that? Read Walter.

A still virginal, but testosterone-maddened, lad, he liked to wander, voyeuristically, in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace. In summer the park seethed with sightseers. One day young Walter was there with his pal Fred, and his family: