Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Alger’s most enduring contribution to American folklore are his ‘Ragged Dick’ and ‘Tattered Tom’ series. Despite his reputation as ‘Holy Horatio’, Alger avoids the deadly piety of the tracts purveyed in the UK by the SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) and RTS (Religious Tract Society). A selection of his most successful works, whose contents are summed up in their titles, would include: Ragged Dick; or Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks (1867), Mark the Match Boy (1869), Tattered Tom; or, the Story of a Street Arab (1871), Tony the Hero; or, a Brave Boy’s Adventures with a Tramp (1880).

  Towards the end of his writing career, having glutted the market with improving tales, Alger turned out equally super-selling popular biographies such as Abraham Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy; or, How a Young Rail-splitter became President (1883). Alger spent his last years with his sister Augusta, who, on his instruction, destroyed all his personal papers.

  FN

  Horatio Alger Jr

  MRT

  Ragged Dick; or Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks

  Biog

  G. Scharnhorst and J. Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (1985)

  59. George du Maurier 1834–1896

  My head’s full of plots! I just wish I had your skill with words to tell ’em. George du Maurier to Henry James, in David Lodge’s novel, Author, Author

  The du Mauriers rank as Britain’s most distinguished literary, theatre and artistic dynasty: familial proof that genius is hereditary, although they began somewhat less than grand. The patriarch, George du Maurier (1834–96), was the grandson of a French glass blower, called ‘Busson’. He assumed the fine-sounding ‘du Maurier’ surname, propagating, at the same time, the Cartonesque fiction that the family were refugees from the revolutionary tumbrel. They weren’t – although the fact was not known, even to Busson’s direct descendants, until 1962. Two generations of du Mauriers lived and died, happily believing the family myth that if Madame Guillotine had had her way they wouldn’t exist.

  George went on to become the lead cartoonist on Punch in the mid-1860s and a distinguished illustrator of English fiction – notably Thackeray. The du Maurier pictorial style was detailed and theatrical in composition, and hit the high-Victorian taste. He had aimed even higher. While a twenty-three-year-old art student on the Continent, George had suddenly lost the sight of his left eye, a shocking experience he was later to use in his novel, The Martian (1897). It was this setback which turned him from painting to graphic work. In the early 1880s, du Maurier’s remaining eyesight began to fail. He was friendly at this period with Henry James, whose Washington Square (1881) he had sumptuously illustrated. It was du Maurier who suggested to James (who turned the idea down, although his career was flagging) the melodramatic ‘Svengali’ scenario that later became Trilby – this irony is central in David Lodge’s 2005 novel, Author, Author.

  On his side, it was James who suggested to du Maurier that, for the sake of his eyes, he should turn to fiction. It was a happy thought. Trilby (1894) was popular to the point of mania with the British and American reading publics. A romanticisation of his early days as an English art student in the Latin quarter of Paris, illustrated by du Maurier himself, the novel showcases a cross-dressing bohemian gamine, Trilby O’Ferrall, and her evil genius, Svengali. Du Maurier’s heavily sanitised vie bohème centres on three British art students: Taffy, Sandy and ‘Little Billee’. Trilby models for them, until persuaded – by the Anglo Saxon trio – that it is immoral. She takes up laundressing instead. She and Little Billee fall in love but any such indecent match is foiled by his virtuous mother. He goes on to become a famous artist, while she – although tone-deaf – is hypnotised into virtuosity by Svengali (who is also sexually abusing her, we deduce) and becomes a world-famous opera singer. But she can only perform under his mesmeric influence. In a grand London recital, he dies and she is reduced to tuneless bellowing. She dies, beautifully, and Little Billee soon follows her.

  Trilby, as du Maurier’s illustrations stress, affects male attire. But nowhere in the actual novel does she wear the famous hat named after her. That took off with the stage version of the novel, written by Paul Potter, which opened at the Haymarket Theatre in October 1895, earning the actor-manager Beerbohm Tree so much that he was able to build a new theatre for himself. Du Maurier, who was an innocent in such things, got a measly £75 for the rights. Tree played Svengali, to great effect, with no restraint on anti-Semitic excess. But the star of the piece was Dorothea Baird. Baird’s Trilby is, significantly unlike du Maurier’s conception of her in his illustrations. Baird’s gamine was barefooted – ‘Trilby Feet’ would become a catch-phrase for the fashionably shoeless – and a chain-smoker of cigarettes. She also sported a wide-brimmed, ‘trademark’ felt hat. The play triggered a secondary wave of mania. Toulouse Lautrec named his yacht Trilby. It became a brand name slapped on innumerable gimcrack products. The music hall stars, Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley, warbled out songs such as ‘Tricky Little Trilby’. Silent film versions followed. The mania eventually died away, but the play left behind it a permanent vogue for the Trilby hat.

  The author of Trilby did not live to reap the full success of his novel and its adaptations – dramatic, filmic, and sartorial. He died a year after the novel’s publication. His son, Gerald du Maurier (1873–1934), would go on to be one of the most successful actors of his time, making his debut, fittingly, in the Potter-Tree dramatisation of his father’s novel. Gerald’s on-stage style was famously suave. According to his daughter, Daphne: ‘If an actor approached a scene with too much enthusiasm, Gerald would ask, “Must you kiss her as though you were having steak and onions for lunch?”’ Gerald was knighted in 1922 for services to the stage. He was, alas, as blasé about paperwork as in his stage image. In 1929, harassed by the income tax people, du Maurier sold his name to be used as a brand for the new tipped cigarette, launched worldwide by Imperial Tobacco Canada. It was popular from the first and is still that country’s premier brand. Thus two of the three things which have kept the du Maurier ‘brand’ alive over the decades and century are a titfer and a gasper. The third thing follows.

  FN

  George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier

  MRT

  Trilby

  Biog

  L. Ormond, George du Maurier (1969)

  POSTSCRIPT

  60. Daphne du Maurier 1907–1989

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Regular winner of ‘best first lines in fiction’ contests, often misquoted

  Gerald married a rising star of the West End stage, Muriel Beaumont. Longing for a male heir to carry on the du Maurier name, he had three daughters – the second of whom was Daphne. Muriel’s bright career was sacrificed to her husband’s dynastic ambitions. A good wife, she tolerated his flagrant philandering. Daphne grew up, as she put it, with a ‘caged boy’ (the offspring her father really wanted) inside her. From school onwards – where she had a daring fling with the French mistress – Daphne would be drawn to other women – while, it should be added, enjoying more straight sex than all but the most adventurous of her generation. She saw herself as a sexual ‘half breed’. Three things were overridingly important in du Maurier’s life. For the first twenty years it was her father, Gerald. For ten years thereafter, it was coastal Cornwall around Fowey, which she discovered in her teens, when the family acquired a second home there. It provided the setting of her early, hugely bestselling, historical romances Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek. And, for the greater part of her later life, the important thing was her Cornish house, Menabilly, the original of Manderley. Du Maurier went so far as to assert, ‘I do believe I love Mena(billy) more than people.’

  Gerald loomed over her girlhood. She grew up with his smart metropolitan set of theatrical friends (J. M. Barrie was particularly close). Daphne would retain her paternal name, not her husband’s, on her title pages and her gravestone. It was engraved on her heart. One of her first books was a filial memoir
of Gerald. Observers of her life, with the prurience of hindsight, have perceived incestuous desires (passionately disputed by the surviving family) and, quite plausibly, acts on Gerald’s part. When Daphne announced her marriage, aged twenty-five, he is supposed to have burst into tears with the anguished cry, ‘It’s not fair.’ Du Maurier herself added fuel to the speculations. Her third novel, The Progress of Julius, published around the time of her marriage, has as its hero a man who kills his daughter Gabriel to keep her from being sexually possessed by another man. Lust is the motive.

  Young Daphne was brought up worldly, literate and a little wild. ‘Life’s no fun,’ she said, ‘unless there’s a danger in it.’ She resolved early on to write fiction – not dangerous, but unorthodox. Edgar Wallace (another friend of the family – Gerald had a huge hit with his dramatised thriller The Ringer) imbued her with a sense that if one wrote, one must work hard at it and aim at the largest possible readership – romance, if you were a woman, was the ticket. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), was a full-blooded romance about Cornish ship-builders. A modern young woman, Jennifer, brought up in London, uncovers her family roots and discovers ‘the freedom I desired, long sought for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander. Freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.’

  As she worked out her apprenticeship in fiction, du Maurier had flings and one long lasting affair with the future film director, Carol Reed (an illegitimate offspring of her father’s early patron, Beerbohm Tree – the West End has its own species of incest). At the eligible age of twenty-five she chose her husband, Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, a dashing Major in the Guards, a First World War hero, and an Olympic athlete (bobsleigh). She first laid eyes on him as he sailed into Fowey on his yacht, Ygdrasil (the tree of life). He, for his part, had come to that harbour drawn by a fascination with The Loving Spirit. Ruby M. Ayres could not have set things up more romantically. Boy was, Daphne told a friend, ‘the most charming man in the world’. Professionally he was a career soldier destined for the top. His most enduring mark on posterity is the role he played as one of the commanders of the Arnhem campaign in 1944. In the 1977 film, Browning is played by Dirk Bogarde, and given the resonant last words, ‘I always felt we tried to go a bridge too far.’

  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.

  FN

  Daphne du Maurier (‘Dame’, later Browning)

  MRT

  Rebecca

  Biog

  M. Forster, Daphne du Maurier (1993)

  61. Frank R. Stockton 1834–1902

  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.