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The Guardian (05/May/2007) - Mistress of menace

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Mistress of menace

Daphne du Maurier has often been dismissed as a writer of popular romances, yet her work is infused with hidden violence. To mark the centenary of her birth this month, Patrick McGrath relishes the dark side of her short stories

Apparently Daphne du Maurier hated Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of her story "The Birds". She was baffled as to why the great director had distorted it as he had. The difference between the story and the film is striking, though less in the depiction of the birds' inexplicably aggressive behaviour than in the characters who confront it, and where it all happens. At the centre of du Maurier's narrative is a part-time farm worker called Nat Hocken, and in the story his struggle to protect his family from the birds is set against a wild Cornish coastline where gales sweep across stark hills and fields and isolated farmhouses. The combination of bleak landscape and rustic characters lends an appropriately elemental tone to the tale, and this is missing from Hitchcock's version, with its placid northern California setting and the urbane city folk he casts as his protagonists. This may explain the author's dislike of the film.

Du Maurier was born, on May 13 1907, into a distinguished London theatrical family but lived in Cornwall for most of her life, in a rambling romantic house near the sea called Menabilly. Although she never owned it, she adored Menabilly and raised her family there. It inspired several of her novels. She knew early success as a writer and commanded a wide readership throughout her career, with bestsellers such as The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand and, of course, Rebecca, which Hitchcock also filmed. (This adaptation, according to her biographer Margaret Forster, "delighted her".) A complex woman, she loved the simple writerly existence she created for herself in the West Country - she wrote once to a friend that she was only really happy "in the middle of Dartmoor in a hail storm within an hour of sundown of a late November afternoon" - but she also lived an intense, unorthodox personal life, and sustained for several years a deep, loving relationship with the great Noël Coward actress Gertrude Lawrence. A prolific writer who published more than three dozen works of fiction, history and biography, du Maurier despaired if ideas would not come, and when her imagination was finally exhausted she saw little point in going on. She died in 1989.

Of all the many short stories she wrote, "The Birds" is the masterpiece, in part, at least, because it provides no real explanation for the apocalyptic violence it depicts. Written in the winter of 1951, it was part of a collection called The Apple Tree, in which the theme of a natural world mysteriously antagonistic to humanity represented a new development in her work, and a somewhat pessimistic departure from what had come before. Previously she had been associated with romances, particularly historical romances such as Frenchman's Creek, Jamaica Inn and The King's General; her debut as a writer 20 years earlier had been with a novel called The Loving Spirit, which told the story of several generations of a Cornish seafaring family. But "The Birds" was not inspired by the past. It seemed instead to anticipate, with no little prescience, imminent large-scale environmental catastrophe. Some suggestion is made that Arctic winds are the cause of the birds' attacks, but the power of the story resides to an extent in the reader's suspicion that there exist other, less narrowly scientific explanations, rooted perhaps in cosmic punishment for humanity's sins. So the very indeterminacy of the cause of the birds' aggression contributes to the story's disturbing potency. Arguably it is the starting point for an entire genre devoted to environmental disaster narratives.

"The Apple Tree" story was written in that same winter of 1951, and while it lacks the menace of "The Birds", it does represent an expression of the same theme. It concerns a man who comes to resent the unspoken reproaches of "poor Midge", his long-suffering wife. To what extent he bears responsibility for Midge's long suffering, the story only hints at. But when she suddenly dies and he is free of her, he begins to project on to an apple tree in his garden those traits of Midge's that most irritated him when she was alive. This hostility comes, perhaps, from guilt: he feels responsible for Midge's unhappy life. And eager though he is to destroy the apple tree, eventually the tree destroys him, and we understand that it is through his own bad faith towards Midge that he has brought this end upon himself. If "The Birds" suggests that punishment by beak and talon is the inexorable destiny of fallen humanity, here we see the same story in miniature, a microcosmic instance in which one guilty man is made to suffer by root and branch.

Nature in du Maurier's stories is no romantic corrective to the ills of civilisation, and exerts no benign influence, other than in a coming-of-age story called "The Pool". In this tale, it is high summer in the English countryside. By a woodland pool, a girl finds a "secret world", a mystical underwater place peopled by fantastic beings. What she in fact discovers is the intense transformative power of her own imagination. This is nature as experienced by a child: magical, enchanting, and unreal. With the end of childhood - and this is a story that closes with the girl's first period - the secret world is "out of her reach for ever".

In a fine, powerful story called "The Chamois", in which the author's gift for evocation of place is magnificently on display, we follow a husband and wife as they go up a mountain in northern Greece. The unspoken tensions in the marriage have been established, as has the man's obsession with hunting the elusive chamois. Having reached the top of a mountain pass, they will be guided into the high regions by a goatherd. This rough, illiterate man exerts a strange fascination on the wife. What follows will reveal the truth of each character's nature, in a manner not unlike that of a Hemingway hunting story - "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", for example, whose climax also involves man, wife, guide, beast and gun. Most surprising here, as in the Hemingway story, is the response of the woman, who feels strong, complicated, unconscious sexual emotions, and it is on to the wild man, the natural man - the goatherd - that she projects them.

A more tame and precious expression of the theme - an encounter with a wild man on the island of Crete - is found in the story "Not After Midnight". The Aegean seascape is vividly depicted, although it cannot approach the craggy magnificence and romantic grandeur of the high mountains where the climax of "The Chamois" is played out. The story involves a timid English schoolmaster, unmarried, who becomes obsessed with a large, florid, bibulous American boor of distinctly Dionysian tendencies, a man possessing some of the characteristics of a cloven-hoofed god of dissolute antiquity. The schoolmaster survives the encounter, but only just.

The relentless exploration of the human and the animal finds its most dramatic expression in the extraordinary story "The Blue Lenses". This was originally published in a 1959 collection called The Breaking Point, which included the two stories set in Greece and "The Pool", and it gathers up the various preoccupations of those stories and finds a bold, simple and fantastic idea with which to bind them together. A woman is recovering in hospital after eye surgery. Lenses have been implanted. The day comes for the removal of the bandages. To the woman's astonishment, and then her growing horror, everyone she sees has the head of an animal: cow, dog, kitten, weasel, snake ...

The reader recognises that this woman has gained the ability to discern the true nature of those around her, and that the peculiar manifestation of this clairvoyance resides in their each assuming the animal identity that best expresses their qualities: a kind of reverse anthropomorphism. The terrified woman yearns for her husband to come and take her away from this hellish menagerie. At last he appears ... and his head is not that of a man. We are not done. There is to be further eye surgery. The woman is to have new lenses. Again the bandages are removed from her eyes - and we move to the brilliantly grim denouement of the tale, an instance of perfect narrative ingenuity from this most gifted of storytellers.

"Kiss Me Again, Stranger" is a strange, dark tale, part noir and part gothic. It is narrated by a young single man living in London who one night goes to the cinema and is powerfully attracted to the usherette: "I'd never been taken so much with a girl in my life." He follows her on to a late-night bus and sits with her. She asks him to wake her before they get to the cemetery. A little later he tells her they haven't passed it.

'"Oh, there'll be others," she said. "I'm not particular."'

There is a lovely macabre humour here. The reader is intrigued as to what sort of cemetery-loving femme fatale this is. By the end of the story we know. She is a killer, and that night she will claim her third victim. We are also given a glimpse of her pathology: no mere lust for blood is at work here; there is a twisted rationale driving her murderous activity. The story was written in 1951, and it is hard to think of a single insane female serial killer operating in British fiction before du Maurier's coolly sexy cinema usherette.

Du Maurier's lover, Gertie Lawrence, died of hepatitis at the age of 54. This caused the writer intense grief. She later wrote to her friend Ellen Doubleday that the words Gertie spoke when she left her for the last time - "Go from me, and don't look back, like a person walking in their sleep" - she later used, in slightly altered form, for the usherette's farewell in "Kiss Me Again, Stranger".

Finally, "Don't Look Now". This was later made into a film by Nicolas Roeg, and du Maurier thoroughly approved of this adaptation. It is not hard to see why. Where Hitchcock shifted the action of "The Birds" to Sonoma County and developed a sophisticated plot involving a couple from San Francisco caught in a kind of Oedipal struggle with a controlling mother, Roeg stayed close to the original characters and setting of "Don't Look Now". That setting is Venice, in whose sinister, echoing labyrinth of alleys, piazzas, churches and canals the unwary visitor will quickly be lost.

As in "The Blue Lenses", blindness and clairvoyance are central themes. An English couple, John and Laura, are on holiday in Venice. They have recently lost their young daughter to meningitis. In a restaurant Laura is told by a blind woman with psychic powers that while she and John were eating, their dead daughter was sitting between them. This chilly piece of supernatural information is the first in a string of eerie developments that propel the hapless couple towards their tragic end. It is a horror story driven by coincidence, mistaken identity, clairvoyance and murder. It contains the uncanny scene in which John sees his wife in a vaporetto on the Grand Canal when she is supposed to be on a plane on her way back to England.

Only later do we learn that this was a glimpse into the future, at which point we understand the terrible reason for Laura's "return". "Don't Look Now" is a deeply unsettling story. Its power arises in part from its few supernatural effects, but is more a function of the slow, inexorable accumulation of incident and feeling that almost imperceptibly acquire a kind of critical mass, to the point that tragedy inevitably occurs - and when it does, it leaves the reader both shocked and relieved, for an intolerable tension has at last been relaxed. This is narrative control of a very high order.

Du Maurier's work has enjoyed great popular success over the years, but during her lifetime she received comparatively little critical esteem. "I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller," she once said, and she cared deeply that she was not regarded as the serious writer she took herself to be. It is true that she wrote fast and sometimes carelessly, but even her best work was treated with condescension. Rebecca, for example, was described as a "novelette", "melodrama" and "romance in the grand tradition". What the reviewers overlooked was the astute and subtle psychological dynamic in much of her work, and also the passion with which she wrote.

At her best, in a story such as "The Birds", there is an intense and exhilarating fusion of feeling, landscape, climate, character and story. She wrote exciting plots, she was highly skilled at arousing suspense, and she was, too, a writer of fearless originality.

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