Books to the Ceiling

“‘No one got the better of her, never, never….'” – discussing Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca

March 16, 2011 at 3:24 am (Book clubs, Book review, books)

[The following post contains spoilers.]

Last Tuesday night, the Usual Suspects hit the ground running and never slowed down until the end. Ellen, our leader, provided background on the life of Daphne Du Maurier. Fascinating material, but when it came  time to talk about the novel itself, we were bursting with comments, observations, and questions. To begin with, just about everyone felt profoundly frustrated with the young heroine’s behavior at Manderley. Far from asserting herself as the head of the household, she continually deferred to the servants. As a result, they regarded her with contempt. Mrs. Danvers, with her idolatry of Rebecca, could probably never have been entirely won over, but she might have been brought to heel if the second Mrs. de Winter had had the backbone to put her in her place. But instead, the opposite happened: Mrs. Danvers used every arrow in her considerable arsenal to wound the new mistress of Manderley and make her feel hopelessly inadequate and inferior. It did not have to be this way! Or at least, that is what we all thought.

Mrs. Danvers was not the only villain in the piece. Maxim de Winter came in for considerable criticism. He drops his vulnerable young bride into this fraught domestic situation, hedged about as it is with rules of protocol and propriety, and leaves her to fend for herself, knowing full well that she’s had absolutely no experience of living in this manner (or perhaps I should say, this manor). He is secretive and remote, absenting himself from the house for long periods of time and grudging his new wife the barest amount of help, let alone companionship. 

When Maxim finally acknowledges his need for his young wife – in other words, when Rebecca’s body has been found and he knows he’s in deep trouble – he admits that he’s  been “…the worst sort of husband for you.” She cries out “No!” But we Suspects cried out “You got that right!” Up until that time , he had confined his expression of affection to patting her hair and kissing her on top of her head. At one point, I exclaimed in exasperation, “It’s as though he wanted a daughter, not a wife.” But Frances responded perceptively: “He wanted an innocent.” And that, it seems to me, is the key to her attraction for him. She was as far from the worldly, superficially glamorous, corrupt Rebecca as a female of the species could possibly be. Her mistake was in thinking that Maxim wanted her to emulate this famous first wife, whereas he actually desired just the opposite. Frank Crawley, the estate manager, tries to point this out to her:

‘…I should say that kindliness, and sincerity, and if I may say so–modesty–are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.’

A word here about Frank Crawley. I think other readers will agree with me that he is the unsung hero of this novel. In fact, his many gestures of unforced friendship toward the second Mrs. de Winter made me wonder how she could not come to prefer him to the distant and aloof Maxim.

Everything changes when the divers discover that Rebecca had never escaped from the wreckage of the sailboat she loved to take out in all kinds of weather, a boat ironically named Je Reviens (I will return).  Maxim had already identified the body of another woman, an unknown drowning victim, as being that of his deceased wife. A farrago of lies and deceptions was  about to be exposed. Finally – finally! – he comes clean with his young bride: He had never loved Rebecca, never known a moment’s happiness with her. They had put on a good show for the smart set in which they moved, but when the parties were over and the celebrations at an end, they were miserable. Or rather, Maxim was miserable. Rebecca seems to have hugely enjoyed herself at his expense – literally and figuratively. She seems to have triumphed even in death, having goaded her hapless husband into shooting her.

Once Maxim has bared his soul to his new wife, he becomes positively ravenous for her love. Now, there’s nothing paternal or indulgent in his feelings for her. There’s adult passion, the real thing. As for the second Mrs. de Winter, she is so thrilled to know that Maxim had never loved Rebecca that she too feels utterly liberated. Some in our group were surprised that she didn’t recoil from the knowledge that she was married to a man who had murdered her predecessor. But no – instead, she becomes his staunchest defender, determined to help him slog through this morass of his own making, so that  they can be together blissfully as man and wife.

The relationship between Maxim de Winter and his bride is central to this novel, but the shadow of Rebecca, demon or goddess, falls across them in virtually all that they do. And Mrs. Danvers, a somewhat demonic presence herself, hovers within that shadow as well, invoking her adored mistress at every opportunity and engineering the disastrous gaffe committed by the naive bride on the evening of the fancy dress ball.  From the standpoint of the present time, it seems fairly evident that the relationship between Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers possessed an erotic component – at least, where the housekeeper is concerned. (For information on a related aspect of Du Maurier’s own life, see the article “Daphne Du Maurier: Venetian Tendencies,” by Cathy Pryor, from The Independent in 2007.)

We considered the situation of servants in England’s great estates.  They led difficult, restricted lives, working very long hours and reaping relatively little from their labors. But they made it possible for the privileged classes to live in almost unimaginable luxury and idleness. And what, we wondered, did these people do with all that free time? The second Mrs. de Winter keeps being asked: Do you hunt? Do you play bridge? In the evenings there was a seemingly endless round of dinner parties and balls. They changed clothes multiple times in the course of a single day. And why not? Just drop your gloves and other items on the bed or the floor; a servant will collect them and return them to their proper place. One could almost say that it’s not surprising that English country houses became such popular settings for crime  fiction. Perhaps murders were committed simply in order to while away the time! (And yes, I’m being facetious.)

Then there is Manderley, the estate that looms like a malevolent force over the novel’s characters. In a previous post I discussed Manderley’s origins in the imagination and life experience of Daphne Du Maurier. It is this large – and largely vacant – domicile that gives the novel its heavily Gothic atmosphere. Rebecca is part of the great literary tradition in which young unworldly women find themselves, for all intents and purposes, alone as they fight to overcome the threat posed by a house full of sinister secrets. Sometimes the house itself must be destroyed in order to liberate the heroine and her beloved. Think Rebecca and Jane Eyre (Thornfield Hall). Sometimes the house (Bly) wins, as in Henry James’s terrifying masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw. (In an article entitled “Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca,’ a Worthy ‘Eyre’ Apparent,” critic Jonathan Yardley examines the novel and its place in the Gothic literary tradition.)

It had been suggested that we view the 1940 film before our meeting date. Most of us did that, and knowledge of this cinema masterwork – Alfred Hitchcock’s first film for an American studio and an American producer, the notoriously controlling David O. Selznick – greatly enriched the discussion. In some cases, whole sections of dialog from the book were used in the film; in other cases, however, significant changes were made. The most notable of these concerns Rebecca’s death: in the film, her demise is the result of an accident, albeit one that follows an angry confrontation between her and Maxim. (According to the Wikipedia entry, this alteration was in keeping with the Motion Picture Production Code that was in force at the time.)

I strongly recommend viewing “The Making of Rebecca,” a feature included with the DVD. One of the most interesting revelations has to do with Maxim’s recounting of what happened in the cottage between him and Rebecca on the night of her death. It’s rather a lengthy expository passage, and the filmmakers had to decide whether or not to present it by means of flashback. This, of course, would have necessitated the appearance of Rebecca herself. They decided, I think wisely, to let Maxim tell the story with no additional visuals. Thus Rebecca – tall, darkhaired commanding Rebecca – retains her ghostly powers.

Ellen presented us with a very astute list of discussion questions. One of my favorites had to do with the second Mrs. de Winter. This was formulated with the help of a quote from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die: : “One of Du Maurier’s achievements is to secure readers’ loyalty to this jealous, insecure narrator.” We were then asked if we did in fact feel this loyalty? Then we were queried about our reaction to the destruction of Manderley. Now I already knew that Manderley burned; yet when I saw the film version of the fire, I gasped aloud in shock. It seemed such a violent conflagration . (I wonder what materials they used to construct that table top model….)  (Images from the film courtesy of Hooked on Houses.)

I want to say something about my personal experience of reading Rebecca. I mentioned in a previous post that the book surprised me in a number of ways. First of all, it was quite a bit longer – 386 pages – than I had expected it to be. Hitchcock’s film is so tightly wound, I had thought the novel’s plot would proceed at a similar pace. I was mistaken in this assumption, especially as regards the first half.  I listened to the narrated version until I was about two thirds of the way along, when I switched to the print version. The reader of the recorded book was Alexandra O’Karma, an actress with whom I was not familiar. Her voice initially struck me as not being very expressive; gradually, however, it gained a sort of hypnotic hold over me and began to seem well suited to the material. Nevertheless, I found the story of the young bride’s early tenure at Manderley to be very slow going, at times almost tedious. (At this moment I’m thinking of that phrase from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – “a tedious argument of insidious intent.”) Granted it was tedium punctuated by attacks of acute anxiety. It may just have been my own perception, but the pace seemed to quicken when I switched from the recording to the actual book. This I did shortly after the disastrous scene that occurred just before the fancy dress ball. The heroine accuses Mrs. Danvers – correctly – of having deliberately set her up. It was a relief to see her finally standing up for herself. I wanted to shout, “That’s the spirit!” This is just before the explosion that heralds the shipwreck and forces the stunning revelations from Maxim. From that point on, the novel hurtles toward the final cataclysm. I could scarcely put it down.

I was particularly affected by a scene, about half way through the novel, in which the young bride – oh, it is awkward not having a name for her! – and Maxim’s sister Beatrice pay a visit to Maxim’s grandmother. This scene does virtually nothing to advance the plot and hence was entirely omitted from Hitchcock’s film. But it has really stuck with me. For one thing, it is so emblematic of the strangeness of English country life in those days. Here is an old woman, surrounded by servants, living out her remaining few years in a huge and nearly empty house. Indeed, her waning existence might stand for a way of life that was itself waning, that would be dealt a death blow by war and a changing world.

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Two more things I’d like to mention before concluding this post:

Ellen herself had neither seen the movie nor read the novel before embarking on her task as discussion leader. Pauline commented  that that was probably the best way to approach the subject. It certainly gave her a uniquely fresh perspective with which to approach the material.

Carol told us of the time when she was touring Cornwall with a group when they passed the home of Daphne Du Maurier’s son. This gentleman happened to be outside at the time. The tour leader introduced herself, and he spoke to the group for a while. (I hope I’m recalling this anecdote correctly.) I was reminded of our encounter, while on tour some four years ago, with an elderly gentleman who claimed to have been a  gardener at Greenway, Agatha Christie’s nearby home in Devon. He had such a pronounced West Country accent that we had some difficulty understanding him (though I am sure our Blue Badge Guide, the fantastic Roz Hutchinson, had no such trouble.) 

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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley….”

March 12, 2011 at 7:34 pm (Book clubs, Book review, books)

There was never any question in my mind as to what the title of this post would be.

Ever since it was announced that the Usual Suspects would be discussing Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, the lines spoken at the start of the Hitchcock film had been resonating in my mind:

There is something hypnotic and haunting here that goes beyond the  actual story to which the famous opening sequence is a preface. It has to do, I think, with memory, with loss, and with the inexorable passage of time.

I’ve seen this film several times in the past, but not recently. I had never actually read  the book. And so there were surprises in store, right from the beginning. For instance, the  descriptive passage at the novel’s beginning is far more extensive than the segment from the film would indicate. And oh, the writing!

The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkempt, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realised what had happened. Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers. The  woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The beeches with white naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognise, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.

Rarely if ever has the menace of untamed nature been so vividly evoked. It reminds one of nothing so much as Dante “In a dark wood wandering,” preparing for his descent into the infernal regions. (Toward the end of our discussion, Anne commented on Du Maurier’s exceptional knowledge of the natural world and her use of flowers and trees to convey states of mind.)

At length the narrator – the oddly unnamed narrator – catches sight of the house itself:

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.

Manderley was for the most part modeled on Menabilly, the house Du Maurier lived in with her family from 1943 to 1969. An essay entitled “The House of Secrets” is included in my edition of the novel (Harper, 2006). In it, Du Maurier describes how, when her family first came to spend the summer in Cornwall, she and her sister Angela took their dog and went out walking in search of Menabilly:

The trees grew taller and the shrubs more menacing. Yet still the drive led on, and never a house at the end of it. Suddenly Angela said, “It’s after four…and the sun’s gone.” The pekinese watched her, pink tongue lolling. And then he stated into the bushes, pricking his ears at nothing….

“I don’t like it,” said Angela firmly. “Let’s go home.”

“But the house,” I said with longing, “we haven’t seen the house.” She hesitated, and I dragged her on. But in an instant the day was gone from us. The drive was a muddied path, leading nowhere, green no longer but a shrouding black, turned to fantastic shapes and sizes. There was not one owl  now, but twenty. And through the dark trees, with a pale grin upon his face, came the first glimmer of the livid hunter’s moon.

They were forced to turn back before reaching the house.. The family soon returned to London for the winter. But they came again to Cornwall the following spring, and with that return came Du Maurier’s determination to see Menabilly. This time, setting out at daybreak instead of dusk, she took a slightly different route:

I followed the path to the summit of the hill and then, emerging from the woods, turned left, and found myself upon a high grass walk, with all the bay stretched out below me and the Gribben head beyond.

I paused, stung by the beauty of that first pink glow of sunrise on the water, but the path led on, and I would not be deterred. Then I saw them for the first time–the scarlet rhododendrons. Massive and high they reared above my head, shielding the entrance to a long smooth lawn. I was hard upon it now, the place I sought. Some instinct made me crouch upon my belly and crawl softly to the wet grass at the foot of the shrubs. The morning mist was lifting, and the sun was coming up above the trees even as the moon had done last autumn. This time there was no owl, but blackbird, thrush and robin greeting the summer day.

I edged my way  on to the lawn, and there she stood. My house of secrets. My elusive Menabilly…

I’ve been continually revisiting this essay and getting chills every time I read it. One is grateful for the chance to draw  close to the wellspring of an artist’s creativity. But there is more here than just that. In her search for Menabilly, Du Maurier gives voice to an indeterminate longing felt by all too many of us, to penetrate to the heart of a mystery, to gain access to the sublime – in short to discover some fundamental truth of our existence. At times, we attain the place of our dreams and find only a charred ruin in a desolate place. Ultimately, this is what happens to the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca. Innocent and unworldly, she is swept up in a whirlwind romance by a handsome but enigmatic Prince Charming in the form of Maxim de Winter. After a hasty marriage and blissful honeymoon, Maxim installs his new bride in Manderley, the ancestral home of his family. She is assured by all that the place is glorious, a kind of paradise. And so it would seem to be, at first glance. But it’s a paradise with a sinister underbelly – and a particularly venomous snake nestled at its heart, just waiting to strike.

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Menabilly was owned by the Rashleigh family, whose considerable wealth and ancient lineage were well known in Cornwall. Eventually, Daphne Du Maurier secured from them the lease of the house. At thetime, it was unoccupied and had fallen into a state of decrepitude . She set about restoring it and was finally able to move in with her children in 1943. (Her husband, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick “Boy” Browning, was away at war.) She lived there until 1969.

Slowly, in a dream, I walk towards the house. “It’s wrong,” I think, to love a block of stone like this, as one loves a person. It cannot last. It cannot endure. Perhaps it is the very insecurity of the love that makes the passion strong. Because she is not mine by right. The house is still entailed, and one day will belong to another….”

I brush the thought aside. For this, and for this night, she is mine.

And at midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in a strange and eerie fashion we are one, the house and I.

In this film clip, Du Maurier and her children are seen in the grounds of Menabilly. The author is wearing her “Marlene Dietrich” suit:

[Wikipedia defines the law of entail as “…an estate of inheritance in real property which cannot be sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the owner, but which passes by operation of law to the owner’s heirs upon his death.” Click here for further information.]

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Daphne Du Maurier

This edition of Rebecca also contains an Author’s Note written more than forty years after the initial publication of the novel. In it, Du Maurier tries to answer some of the questions that have continued to be asked about her most celebrated work of fiction. One of the most recurrent concerns the protagonist’s Christian name, or rather, lack of one. Why is this most basic piece of information never divulged? The author’s response: she could not think of a name, by which I assume she means, she could not decide upon one. It then, she says, became “a challenge in technique,” made workable by the fact of the novel’s being written in the first person.

As to the plot, the inspiration came from several sources. In the early years of the war, Du Maurier and her children were with her husband while he was stationed  in the Middle East. She was deeply homesick for Cornwall and had decided to set her next novel there. She was friendly with Foy Quiller-Couch, daughter of the distinguished author and editor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. With Foy as her guide, she had visited several of the great houses of Cornwall: “Houses with extensive grounds, with woods, near to the sea, with family portraits on the walls….” She was also thinking of Milton, an estate in Northamptonshire where she had stayed for a time as a child. She and Foy also visited Menabilly, and Du Maurier recalls, or seems to recall, that the Quiller-Couches had told her that the owner of the home had divorced his beautiful wife and soon married again,  a much younger woman:

I wondered if she had been jealous of the first wife, as I would have been jealous if my Tommy had  been married before he married me. He had been engaged once, that I knew, and the engagement had been broken off–perhaps she would have been better at dinners and cocktail parties than I could ever be.

Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home…a first wife…jealousy…a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house, as there had been at Pridmouth once near Menabilly. But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what…I paced up and down the living room in Alexandria, notebook in hand, nibbling first my nails, and then my pencil.

Thus did the story of Rebecca de Winter and Maxim and the nameless heroine and the great landed estate to which they are all three inextricably bound begin to take shape in the mind of Daphne Du Maurier.

Daphne Du Maurier and her children at Menabilly

Manderley: according to an article in Architectural Digest: "The one exterior view of the house was actually a miniature built on a table and then blown up to appear as an imposing mansion."

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More on the discussion will follow in another post.

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