‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s one of the most well-known first lines ever written in a novel. Certainly the most memorable; I used it myself as an epigram in my novel Bag of Bones. Daphne du Maurier also wrote what may be the best first line in a tale of the uncanny and outre. Her classic story The Birds opens with this: “On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.” Short, chilly and to the point. It could almost be a weather report.
It works so well at the outset of the gripping tale that follows, in which every species of bird attacks humankind, because it’s flat, declarative and realistic. Du Maurier can gin up horror when she wants – see The Doll, The Blue Lenses and the shocking final two pages of Don’t Look Now – but knows that what’s wanted here to instil belief (and suspense) is a tone that’s closer to reportage than narration.
The film version of The Birds, overloaded with a love match between Hollywood pretty people (Rod Taylor as Mitch, Tippi Hedren as Melanie) to go with the bird attacks, bears almost no resemblance to Du Maurier’s story. The setting is California’s sunny Bodega Bay instead of cold and overcast Cornwall, England, and the number of characters has been expanded. The only real similarity between the story and the movie lies in their endings. In the film, Mitch and Melanie escape while thousands of roosting birds are resting between attacks. What happens later is up to the viewer to guess. The conclusion of the Du Maurier story is even more chilling in its flat narration. After smoking his last cigarette, Nat tries the wireless and finds it silent. “He threw the empty packet on the fire, and watched it burn.”
This final line is as quietly terrible, yet as matter-of-fact, as the one that opens the story. What happens to Nat, his wife and his children? We don’t know. Du Maurier doesn’t care, and she’s right not to care. What she gives us is that last cigarette, which carries its own freight of firing-squad symbolism, and the burning packet. She tells us, in effect, decide for yourself. This is the essence of her unsettling genius.
I am impatient with the idea of “spoilers”, a term that’s come into vogue along with other unpleasant side-effects of the internet in general and social media in particular. I find “You spoiled it!” to be, typically, the cry of spoilt people. I’d argue you can rarely spoil a good story, because the joy is in the journey rather than the arrival. Du Maurier’s stories are a notable exception to that rule. To talk about any of them at length would destroy their effect. Suffice it to say that you are in the hands of a master storyteller. A diabolical one, at that.
The line-by-line quality of Du Maurier’s writing is astonishing, given how prolific she was: 17 novels, six biographies, three plays and dozens of short stories. She is particularly good at quick-sketch characterisation. Midge, from The Apple Tree, is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive behaviour, a woman whose chief talent seems to be making her husband’s life miserable. Not in any big way – she’s not a thief, drug addict or adulterer – but in a series of small nips that draw trickles of blood. She may or may not be aware of what she’s doing. Either way, consciously or unconsciously, she is exerting control.
The narrator of The Apple Tree (unnamed, like so many of Du Maurier’s characters, including the second Mrs de Winter of Rebecca) is a gentleman who gives his wife the newspaper first. She returns it crumpled and folded and out of order. The birth of a child to mutual friends is noted by Midge with dismay, whether a boy or a girl; she sees the drawbacks to both sexes. Although the couple have a maid, Midge “would labour past him, stooping under the weight of the laden tray”.
The sighing, martyred Midge passes away, but her widowed husband remains in her thrall, associating an ugly apple tree with “poor Midge”, and the smaller, more shapely apple tree in its shadow with a laughing, cheerful farm girl named May, who Midge’s husband once kissed (and who died in a motorbike accident). Du Maurier describes the “Midge-tree” this way: “The moon shone upon the withered branches, and they looked like skeleton’s arms raised in supplication. Frozen arms, stiff and numb with pain.”
Poor Midge, indeed!
Is the ugly apple tree, with its sour, mealy fruit, a kind of revenant, or does the narrator – a bit of a fussbudget, far from perfect himself – simply find it psychologically impossible to escape his dead wife’s influence? Du Maurier doesn’t say. She is deft enough to have it both ways, which is the case with many of her stories.
A few, like Monte Verità, feature doomed romance; at least one (The Breakthrough) deals with telepathy, telekinesis and even envisions our current fixation with AI; the best of them inhabit a murky borderland between what may be supernatural or could be no more than overactive imaginations stressed into malignancy. In The Blue Lenses, following an eye operation, Marda West begins seeing people with the heads of animals that reflect the personalities of the people to whom those heads belong; the revelation that her husband has the head of a vulture is especially creepy. In The Pool, a young girl believes she sees a whole other plane of existence, guarded by a woman commanding a turnstile at the bottom of a scummy woodland pool.
I love Du Maurier’s stories. I love their clarity, I love their often grim view of human nature, I love her prodigious talent and narrative ability. There is a reason why collections of short stories are, as a rule, less popular than novels. With a novel, you settle in with a cast of characters for what may be a day or two (if you’re a fast reader, like my wife) or a week or more (if you’re a slow reader, like me). When it comes to short stories, the reader has to create a fictional world in his or her imagination, then disassemble it, move on to the next fictional world and build that one. That can be hard work. It’s not with these stories.
Entering these worlds is a pleasure rather than an effort. Sometimes the buildup can be slow, but “there are violins”, as some critic or other said about Robert Bloch’s Psycho. (That is certainly true of Bernard Herrmann’s music for the film version, which is almost all violins.) Meaning that even when things seem relatively innocuous, you sense the shadows gathering. This is a gift few writers have.
Some stories have a sexual tingle. The most overtly sexual is The Doll, where a woman named Rebecca (that Rebecca? Who is to say it’s not?) fascinates another of Du Maurier’s unnamed narrators. Rebecca is frightening, with her “great wide fanatical eyes like a saint, the narrow mouth that hid [her] teeth, sharp and white as ivory, and [her] halo of savage hair, electric, dark, uncontrolled”. I am particularly taken with that halo of savage hair, which should not work (hair cannot be savage, any more than waves can be angry) but somehow does.
Rebecca has a secret lover named Julio. The narrator describes Julio, who seems to be about 16, this way: “His face was the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved. The nose was thin … the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow, and curiously still. They seemed to stare right through one – the eyes of a hawk.” Du Maurier doesn’t come right out and say that Rebecca is having a sexual relationship with Julio, but it’s strongly implied … and the narrator clearly believes it. What makes this particularly perverse is the fact that Julio is not human (at least probably not), but a mannequin.
There. I have given away, at least in this story, a secret that should have been Du Maurier’s to impart, but only because the title allows the reader to see it coming. Written in 1928, The Doll was for many years presumed lost. Because of the subject matter, Du Maurier, then just 21 years old, may have been persuaded to hold it back, lest it damage her reputation at a time when sexual matters were best left sub rosa. Although it had been published in 1937, in a book of previously rejected stories aptly titled The Editor Regrets, it was not rediscovered until 2011.
I have said quite enough. It’s time for you to take Daphne du Maurier’s hand and let her lead you into the dark. Her talent is a bright light that will guide you. Her remarkable stories await. I envy your discoveries. And your discomfort.