Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (33 page)

Yet financial crisis and personal tragedy continued to dog Oliphant. In 1864, her daughter died and at the same period she took charge of her widowed brother
Frank’s four children. Her own two boys went to Eton: both would be a source of infinite vexation and both predeceased her with the same disease that killed their father. She continued to write – fiction, travel books and an excellent house history of her publishers and lifelong friends, the Blackwoods (1897). A Trollope-inspired ‘Autobiography’ was, unusually for her, left unfinished. A pioneer of the Scottish ‘kailyard’ (‘cabbage patch’) school, she was a major inspiration for J. M. Barrie, whose ‘Thrums’ tales of village life in Scotland draw on her work. She was, it is recorded, Queen Victoria’s favourite novelist. Indomitably modest, she regarded herself as ‘rather a failure’. She chose to be buried alongside her sons near Eton.

Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks.
Nathanael West, author of the savage satire on Algerism,
A Cool Million

Horatio Alger was the author of a hundred or more ‘rags to riches’ tales for boys about boys, celebrating the ‘American Dream’ – the belief that any kid can ‘make it’ in God’s Own Country with the right mix of virtue, ‘spunk’, hard work and providential ‘lucky breaks’. Typically, the Alger stories are set in late nineteenth-century New York. Huge total circulation figures were claimed for them in their original dime (10c) form – as high as 200 million.

He was born in Massachusetts, the eldest son of a grandee, Horatio Alger Sr, in the Unitarian church. Horatio Jr, a precociously clever lad, was enrolled in Harvard’s Divinity School at the age of sixteen. On graduation he toured Europe, broadening his mind, and on his return he was ordained. In 1864, he took up a ministry in the small town of Brewster, on Cape Cod. So far, so good. But hardly had he arrived in his new parish, the brilliant young minister resigned. The reason was pederastic buggery. As his church’s confidential report described them, Alger’s offences were ‘heinous … of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with
boys
, which is too revolting to think of in the most brutal of our race’. Alger was, on the face of it, unrepentant. The report roundly recommended the death penalty, but the scandal was hushed up thanks to his father’s influence, the Church’s terror of bad publicity, and the hubbub over the breaking Civil War.
Alger escaped conscription on medical grounds, and his diminutive, ‘boy-like’, stature. His ‘crimes’ did not emerge into the public record until the 1970s.

Denied one pulpit, Alger chose another. His first improving tale,
Helen Ford
(1866), is unusual in having a girl heroine. Boys would thereafter be his sole interest. In the later 1860s, Alger became associated with the New York ‘Newsboys’ Lodging House’, as chaplain, visitor, and benefactor. This institution for homeless boys furnished him with valuable raw material. Was he reformed, as his apologists claim, and embarked on a lifelong act of contrition? Or was he still practising his ‘revolting crime’ with rather more discretion than earlier?

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.

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.

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.’