How good was Du Maurier?

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books

Let's not get carried away about Du Maurier
John Mullan


May 11, 2007 4:18 PM

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/05/dont_get_carried_away_about_du.html
Don't look now: Daphne DuMaurier at her desk. Photograph: Hans Wild/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images


Should Daphne Du Maurier's literary status be higher? To coincide with her centenray on Sunday, Radio 4 is having a Daphne Du Maurier season and a film biography is to run on BBC TV. Sir Christopher Frayling has written a laudatory preface to a new Daphne du Maurier Companion and was on the Today programme this week with film director Nicholas Roeg to argue for her merits. "Can she be regarded as a great novelist?" asked interviewer Sarah Montague. Well, can she?
Her fiction makes for terrific films because she had the gift of tapping in to some of our peculiar fears. Hitchcock's The Birds and Roeg's Don't Look Now were both extrapolated from Du Maurier short stories that do touch this pulse. "There is no greater horror than the loss of a child," said Nicholas Roeg, and the idea of the story that he elaborated is a gripping one. Similarly, Rebecca is psychologically clever, a Cinderella tale that implies the sexual fears which undermine the romance.
"It's quite difficult to be taken seriously by the critics and be a bestseller," was Frayling's explanation of her status. But Du Maurier's bestsellers were not so by accident. Jamaica Inn was a "tale of adventure" set in Cornwall, with villainous smugglers and wreckers, and "atmospheric" scenes on Bodmin Moor. It has a sturdy, standard-issue romantic heroine who has to choose between glowering sub-Brontë Cornishmen. (Rochester/Heathcliff figures recur in her fiction.) Plenty of her output is efficient historical flummery. Only a care with natural description sets Frenchman's Creek apart from formula historical fiction.
Du Maurier is being celebrated because she had an undoubted Gothic tendency, and Gothic is nowadays much over-valued by critics. Like much Gothic fiction, Du Maurier's best work deals in visceral topics in a superficial way. She taps into things that matter to us, yet she is simply not much of a writer. Rebecca may be psychologically interesting, but its narrator's breathy prose is oddly witless and wordy. Take a sample piece of prose - the sometimes admired opening of this novel would do - and you will find the slightly jarring infelicities - unhappy repetitions of words, mixing of metaphors, inexact vocabulary - that define a limited literary talent.