Author, Author Page 6

  ‘I remember it,’ said Henry.

  ‘Do you?’ Du Maurier was gratified but surprised.

  ‘I told you I followed you from the beginning,’ said Henry. ‘If I remember rightly, there’s a rather overdressed, Jewish-looking photographer in his studio, and three young artists coming in through the door, smoking cigarettes, and he is telling them very pompously that they mustn’t.’

  ‘What a memory you have, James!’ exclaimed Du Maurier, and proceeded to quote the caption, with appropriate accents: ‘“Please to remember, Gentlemen, that this is not a common Hartist’s Studio.” Dick Tinto and his friends, who are Common Artists, feel shut up by this little aristocratic distinction, which had not yet occurred to them.’ Du Maurier chuckled, enjoying his own joke. ‘There was a lot of rot being talked then, of how photography would kill off the illustrator’s trade, so there was some personal feeling behind it. Also I was always a friend of tobacco, you know. Or I should say it has always been a friend to me, from my miserable days as a chemistry student. Gerald says they should name a brand of cigarettes after me, I roll so many of them.’

  Henry wondered privately whether the smoke in which his friend was so often wreathed might not be harmful to his one good eye. As if intuiting the unspoken thought, Du Maurier said: ‘I’ve tried to give up, but I just can’t work without the weed.’

  ‘I resort to the occasional gasper, myself,’ Henry confessed, ‘when inspiration seems to fail.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re a very moderate man, James,’ said Du Maurier, turning his head and regarding him with a smile.

  ‘Am I?’ he said, startled, and not altogether delighted by this characterisation: ‘moderate’ did not sound sufficiently different to his ear from ‘dull’.

  ‘As far as my observation goes, I’ve never met a man so moderate in all his appetites. You enjoy the good things of life, but never to excess. Food, drink, tobacco . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘I have immoderate ambition,’ said Henry.

  ‘Do you? For what?’

  ‘I want to be the Anglo-American Balzac,’ Henry said, and immediately added: ‘Please don’t tell anybody I told you that.’

  ‘My dear, chap, mum’s the word. But why not? It’s a perfectly honourable ambition.’

  ‘Because the literary world is full of journalists and gossip, and it would be sure to get into print somewhere and make me an object of ridicule.’

  ‘You can depend on me, of course. But I envy you, James. You have an ambition and still a hope of achieving it. You will achieve it, I’m sure. Whereas I wanted to be a great painter . . .’

  ‘You’re a great illustrator, and that’s no mean achievement. As I hope to demonstrate in my article.’

  ‘You’re very kind, very kind,’ Du Maurier murmured shyly. ‘Shall we move on? Or perhaps it’s time to return home for tea.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Henry. The two men rose to their feet, and Chang, having perhaps heard the familiar syllable ‘home’, led them off in the right direction without a further hint from Du Maurier. ‘But you haven’t told me,’ said Henry, as he fell into step beside him, ‘how you came to be married and a pillar of Punch. Which came first?’

  ‘Oh, marriage. Otherwise I should probably be dead long ago, or locked up in a lunatic asylum somewhere. You know that painting by Arthur Hughes, The Long Engagement? I believe it’s in the Birmingham Municipal Gallery now.’

  ‘I very rarely go to Birmingham,’ said Henry, ‘and then only to change trains on my way to somewhere else.’

  ‘Well, you must have seen engravings of it. There’s this chap leaning up against a tree in a rather autumnal-looking wood and his sweetheart is clasping his hand and trying to comfort him. He’s I suppose in his thirties, but looks prematurely aged. He’s grey and haggard with worry and frustration and has on his face an expression of utter hopelessness. The long engagement is obviously killing him. That was exactly me, in those days. Eventually I had a kind of breakdown, physical and mental – dreadful stomach pains and headaches, periods of total apathy and sudden fits of weeping. I went to see a doctor – he said ‘Get married, and take a holiday.’ Easier said than done – but we did it: persuaded Emma’s old man that we had enough to live on, even if it was short of the magic figure of two hundred, and that my prospects were sound. In fact of course they weren’t, far from it, but as soon as he caved in my health began to improve, and I did some of my best work just before and after the wedding. I began to be noticed and talked about, I got more work accepted by Punch . . . and then I had a stroke of luck at last – though I couldn’t call it that. Leech died.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Henry, who imagined in a flash the mixed emotions of the young Du Maurier on hearing the news. ‘And so there was a vacant seat at the Punch table.’

  ‘It was the strangest, awkwardest thing,’ said Du Maurier, ‘because I first got acquainted with Leech in the few months immediately before his death. Before that I knew him only by his work – I admired it enormously, of course, but with the arrogance of youth I thought I could do better, and I envied him his secure position. Then in the summer of ’64 I met him in person, quite by chance, in Whitby of all places. I’d just finished doing the illustrations for Sylvia’s Lovers, which is set there, you know, and Emma and I decided to take a holiday in the place, Elizabeth Gaskell had made it seem so pretty. And it is – perfectly charming. We’re going back next month, as it happens, for a family holiday. You should join us, James – Lowell will be there – he’s quite devoted to the place.’

  Henry had introduced James Russell Lowell, the versatile man of letters who was now the United States Ambassador in London, to Du Maurier a year or two ago, and they had since become great friends. ‘Thank you for the suggestion,’ Henry said. ‘It’s always a pleasure to see Lowell, but my plans for August are already settled. You were saying – about Leech . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, we met him on that first visit to Whitby – he happened to be staying there at the same time, trying to improve his health. He was in a bad way, worn out with financial worry and overwork – his wife was a fool, who insisted on living in a style above their means – but I liked him immensely. We went for walks together. He was a wonderful raconteur. But it was obvious that he was a sick man, and I couldn’t suppress the thought that if he were to peg out, it would be my great chance to get on to Punch and have a regular salary at last. There was no other artist on the staff who was likely to retire in the foreseeable future – Tenniel and Keene were still in the prime of life. It seemed despicable to be thinking such a thing, as if I were wishing the poor man dead—’

  ‘No, no,’ Henry murmured. ‘Anyone would have had the same thought in your situation.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Du Maurier sighed. ‘We all step into dead men’s shoes, whether we are aware of it or not. But I was painfully conscious. Poor Leech was hardly cold before the Punch board offered me his place – they needed someone urgently to work on the new Almanac, you see. I went to his funeral with that confidential information in my pocket. Imagine! It was a very emotional occasion – he was greatly loved, and it seemed like the end of an era. Millais broke down completely, poor old Mark Lemon the same. I shed some tears myself – but then I thought of the letter of appointment in my pocket and I had to struggle to stop myself grinning all over my face in the middle of the service! It was horrible.’

  ‘But you lived happily ever after,’ said Henry, smiling.

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,’ said Du Maurier. ‘I had hopes of being made editor when Taylor died in 1880, but the job went to Frank Burnand. He’s there for life. It’s an ambition I’ll never achieve.’

  ‘I understand your disappointment,’ said Henry, ‘but I venture to say that more people associate Punch with the name of Du Maurier than with the name Burnand.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to say so, James,’ said Du Maurier with a wan smile, ‘but there’s something else which makes my happiness less than perfect . . .�
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  ‘Oh?’ Henry prompted, as Du Maurier fell silent.

  ‘I live in perpetual fear of going blind. Not a day passes without the thought crossing my mind that my good eye might fail, as suddenly as the other one did years ago. And then all this’ – he extended an arm to take in the undulant expanse of green grass and the surface of the ponds winking between the trees, the walkers and their gambolling dogs, the pastel-coloured summer dresses and parasols of the women, the white smocks and sailor-suits of the children, the young men in shirtsleeves tossing a cricket ball between them, the whole animated multicoloured urban pastoral spread out before them under a canopy of pale blue sky – ‘all this would be snatched away from me for ever, and I would have to grope my way across the Heath in perpetual darkness, with the aid of a stick and Chang. I would never be able to draw again. My income would dry up immediately – God knows what would become of us. The children tease me about my economies, they complain because I work so many hours of the day, but they don’t know what it is like to lack money. I do.’ They walked on in silence for a while, Henry feeling slightly ashamed of his facile allusion to fairy tales, and Du Maurier evidently lost in melancholy reflections. ‘Vivre, ce n’est pas gai,’ he said at length, glancing at Henry with a wry smile.

  ‘My dear Du Maurier,’ said Henry, ‘I spoke idly. I find your – your – your plight deeply – indeed the whole history you have unfolded to me – deeply – inexpressibly – moving.’

  Henry’s appreciation of the precariousness of Du Maurier’s happiness – living always with the knowledge that his flourishing artistic career and the comfortable family life at New Grove House depended utterly for their continuation on the fragile connection of nerve and membrane in a single eye – this was certainly one of the foundations of their friendship. It made ‘little Du Maurier’ (as he used to refer to him early in their acquaintance) something of a hero in Henry’s eyes, and Du Maurier recognised and valued his esteem. In other respects they had much in common, and their differences were complementary. Both were expatriates, who felt occasional spasms of exasperation with aspects of the English society in which they had chosen to live, and viewed it with a certain irony sharpened by comparisons with life on the other side of the Channel. Du Maurier was by far the more thoroughly assimilated, and more anxious to affirm his Englishness, one amusing symptom of this being his insistence on speaking French, in which he was fluent, with a pronounced English accent; but an attachment to France and things French constituted a bond between the two men. Du Maurier was always harking back fondly to memories of his childhood in Passy, or his student days in the Latin Quarter, and Henry too was in a sense an exile from France as well as America: he had spent much time there, in boyhood, youth and adulthood, and had at one time seriously contemplated settling in Paris. He was still subject to fits of nostalgia for Parisian life – its elegance and sophistication, not to mention its cuisine (when he asked the maid at Bolton Street if the cook might fry the potatoes occasionally instead of always drearily boiling them, she replied: ‘Ooh, I don’t think so, sir – would that be French cooking, sir?’). One undeniable benefit of his father’s eccentric plan of education for his two eldest sons, which had entailed dragging or packing them off to the Continent every few years, and which had made it so difficult for either of them to settle on a career, was that Henry had learned to speak French fluently and correctly, and was frequently complimented by the natives on this accomplishment. It was a pleasure to both himself and Du Maurier to sprinkle French words and phrases into a conversation as a kind of verbal condiment, without being thought precious or required by blank looks to supply a gloss on their own remarks.

  Although Henry was ten years younger than Du Maurier, they might have been contemporaries as far as looks went, and in many ways Henry, with his bushy beard, balding pate and incipient paunch, appeared the older and more mature. Du Maurier always had a slightly boyish air about him, even when his hair began to turn grey, whereas Henry had cultivated a middle-aged persona as early in his life as he plausibly could. In literary matters a quasi-tutorial relationship developed between them. Du Maurier’s enthusiasms were intense, but personal and narrow. He adored Thackeray, and had been swept away by Swinburne’s heady rhythms and pagan sentiments. Otherwise, the availabilities of Mudie’s circulating library largely dictated his reading. But he was very willing to broaden his knowledge under Henry’s guidance, especially of contemporary French literature, and began to sample the work of writers like Flaubert, Daudet, De Maupassant, the Goncourts, and Zola, considered too daring by Mudie’s and downright disgusting by the English press.

  But it was the Du Mauriers’ family life, rather than conversation about the comparative merits of French and English culture and society, that drew Henry back to Hampstead again and again. He was a bachelor, a ‘confirmed bachelor’ as the saying went. He had made up his mind in his early thirties that he would never marry, and stated as much with increasing firmness to his disappointed mother until her death in 1882, and to other relatives and friends who were constantly teasing or goading him on the subject. The reasons were complex and he did not care to probe them too deeply even in self-communing. It was enough to tell himself that his pursuit of literary greatness was incompatible with the obligations of marriage. He needed to be free, free to be selfish – that is to say, selflessly committed to his art. Free to travel, free to seek new experiences, and free, when his muse beckoned, to shut himself up for hours and days at a time to write, without bothering about the needs, emotional and economic, of a wife and children. Du Maurier, admittedly, seemed to manage the trick of being an artist and a paterfamilias simultaneously, but at a cost: a certain limitation of horizons, both physical and mental. He was chained to his drawing board most of the year, and when he took a break it was always a family holiday, with all the human complication and material impedimenta inseparable from such excursions, in Whitby or Folkestone or some Anglicised resort on the Normandy coast. He had never been to Italy, a deprivation that Henry could hardly imagine.

  But by the same token Henry was able to enjoy vicariously, especially in the early years of his association with the Du Mauriers when their children were not yet grown up, something of the warmth and innocent fun of domestic life which he had renounced for the sake of his art. It would have astonished his sophisticated London friends to see him at New Grove House of a Sunday evening, joining in boisterous games like Blind Man’s Buff and Hunt the Thimble and Hide and Seek, performing forfeits and charades amid whoops of laughter, calling out ‘Bravo! Encore!’ when Du Maurier sang one of his favourite ditties in his pleasant tenor voice, ‘A wight went walking up and down’, Thackeray’s ballad of Little Billee, or ‘Mimi Pinson est une blonde’, and joining lustily in the chorus of ‘Vin à quatre sous’:

  Fi! de ces vins d’Espagne.

  Ils ne sont pas faits pour nous.

  C’est le vin à quatre sous

  Qui nous sert de champagne!

  Like all large families the Du Mauriers had their own private language of nicknames and sayings and allusions which Henry quickly learned. Beatrix, named after the heroine of Henry Esmond, was ‘Trixy’, Sylvia was known as the ‘Tornado’ because of her volatile temper, Marie Louise was abbreviated to ‘May’, while Du Maurier himself was ‘Kiki’ (derived from a Belgian nurse in infancy, who used to call him manneken), and he addressed Emma familiarly as ‘Pem’. The children, who took their comfortable middle-class existence for granted, complained mildly about his parsimony and teased their mother for her lack of sophistication. ‘Cup of tea’ and ‘hock bottle’ were two favourite expressions in the family argot, meaning dull, conventional, suburban – ‘Oh, that’s so cup of tea, Mamma!’ or ‘Don’t be so hock bottle, Papa.’ They were a good-looking and high-spirited brood. Beatrix, the eldest, was a real beauty, who had only just ‘come out’ when Henry met her, and being squeezed into a broom cupboard with her during some boisterous game of Hide and Seek, pressed up against her sweet-smell
ing, gently yielding form in the dark, had been one of the more remarkable sensations in his experience, and one which helped him to understand the ecstasy that lovers apparently derived from embracing. He watched with fascination as she opened like a flower to the warmth of a developing social life.

  Du Maurier himself was brazenly prejudiced in favour of beautiful women. He kept two plaster models of the Venus de Milo in the house – one on the mantelpiece of the studio-living-room, and another on a pedestal at the angle of the staircase – as icons of his devotion to the ideal female form. If Leech’s girls were ‘pretty’, Du Maurier’s were classically beautiful (and tall enough to have tucked the artist under their arms and walked off with him if they had been so inclined). He took unabashed pride in Trixy’s looks, and was cruelly critical of the flaws in Sylvia’s, though he was gracious enough to admit, as she grew out of adolescence, that she had become an unusually attractive young woman, with a bewitching, slightly crooked smile and huge, wide-spaced grey eyes.

  Before long, when she was still only nineteen, Trixy met and became engaged to a tall, handsome and well set-up young man of business, Charles Hoyer Millar. They were married in the summer of 1884, and Henry, who attended the wedding, declared they were the best-looking bride and groom of the year. Privately he thought that Du Maurier’s own idealising pen could not have drawn a handsomer couple. Beatrix was – for once the cliché could not be improved upon – radiant. As he watched her coming up the aisle of St George’s, Hanover Square, on her father’s arm, and returning on her husband’s thirty minutes later, as he observed her laughing and talking with the guests at the reception afterwards, with Charles’s strong possessive arm round her slim waist, so perfect in her youthful bloom, his novelist’s imagination could not help speculating on how she would react to the initiation that shortly awaited her into the mystery of sex. He grew quite hot, and slightly ashamed of himself, picturing her lying in the bridal bed with the sheets drawn up to her chin, waiting with quickened breath for her husband to emerge from his dressing room, or perhaps rising from her knees after saying her prayers and coming towards him in her white nightdress, like a lamb to the slaughter, putting her arms round his neck and hiding her blushes in his shoulder. Emma, presumably, like the dutiful mother she was, would have talked to her daughter about ‘that side’ of marriage, but probably, Henry surmised from his knowledge of her timid and conventional nature, with so much embarrassed euphemism and indirection as to leave the girl little the wiser. The thought crossed his mind that Charles might be equally unprepared for matrimony, but there was a kind of virile self-confidence about him that made it seem unlikely. Henry did not suspect him of dissipation, but he thought it probable that a handsome young Englishman who had been to public school and ’varsity and holidayed abroad with other young men would have found occasion to lose his virginity. It was perhaps because he had never relinquished his own that the plight of respectable young girls, brought up in innocence and ignorance of the sexual life, especially in the puritanical, hypocritical societies of England and America, and then thrown abruptly into the sea of marriage to sink or swim, stirred Henry’s imagination and sympathy so deeply.