Quite Mesmerizing

While still relatively young, the brilliant cartoonist and illustrator George du Maurier went blind in one eye, probably as the result of a detached retina. This didn’t prevent him from joining the staff of Punch and doing wonderful work for it until his death in 1896. His best-known cartoon shows a chinless young curate taking the top off a boiled egg at breakfast with his bishop, and their exchange has entered the language: ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones.’ ‘Oh no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!’

But a turn for the worse in late middle age led him to put down his potent pen and dictate three distinctly odd novels to his wife and children: Peter Ibbetson (1891), with telepathy as its central theme; The Martian (1897), dealing with life after death and rather fittingly published posthumously; and Trilby (1894), about the wicked hypnotist Svengali. As a youth, du Maurier had been an art student in Paris, where he lived in the shabby rue de Paradis near the Trinité church – it was still shabby a hundred years later when I first moved to Paris and lived in a romantically run-down pension there. A fellow-student of his, incidentally, was James McNeill Whistler, who was later to recognize himself as Joe Sibley in Trilby, and threaten the author with a libel suit unless the character was removed. (It was – Joe being replaced by a rather wishy-washy Swiss chap called Anthony.) Du Maurier put all his fond memories of his student days into the first half of Trilby, which deals with the happy comings and goings, gravy dinners and nuits blanches of three young English painters who share a studio in the Latin Quarter. Actually Taffy, the Laird and Little Billee aren’t so much men as boys in men’s bodies, forever ragging each other, breaking into song, going a few rounds with the gloves (there’s a boxing ring in one corner of the studio) or whirling a pair of Indian clubs around by way of letting off steam. Far and away the most childlike of the three is Little Billee, whose delicate frame, slender limbs, soulful eyes and interesting pallor seem to make him more than a little androgynous, if not downright effeminate. Billee is also far and away the most talented of the trio, and the one most likely to captivate the tomboyish artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall when she walks in on their lives. It’s in the studio too that Trilby first meets the sinister Svengali, a Polish-German musician who appears from time to time to borrow a few sous or play Chopin on a Broadwood grand that lives in another corner. Combined with his own vivid line drawings which illustrate the book, du Maurier’s affectionate portrait of his student days is as blithe and merry as anything in nineteenth-century fiction. It’s all gone, of course: to find le vieux Paris now you have to know where to go, and venture into some pretty unsavoury districts. The Left Bank is barely a shadow of its former self. In 1984 we counted ourselves extremely lucky when we managed to buy a seventeenth-century garret on the sixth floor under the leads, just like Trilby’s little home, right down to its tiny wood-fired cooking stove. There were other excitements too, like the 5-centime piece dated L’an Cinq (1796) that had long ago been hidden on top of a dusty oak beam and had lain there ever since, the whole apartment virtually unaltered since the French Revolution. The place was magical, and we lived la vie de bohème there happily for years, keeping body and soul together by opening a fish-and-chip shop round the corner. Thankfully our lives remained untouched by ghastly tragedies like those which overtake Trilby’s protagonists. For quite suddenly, in the middle of all the painting, carousing, jollity and horseplay, George du Maurier chops his story in half with all the force of a butcher’s cleaver gripped by a hairy arm. On Christmas Night, at the end of a riotous feast, Trilby finally accepts Little Billee’s twentieth proposal of marriage. Within a few days his outraged mother arrives and confronts the girl, who accedes to her snobbish demands and agrees to disappear, never to see her weedy little lover again. Now innocent Little Billee’s not just wet behind the ears, he’s sopping wet all through; for when he learns about this, does he get off his precious little bottom and do something about it? No, he succumbs to brain fever. Numb with grief, once physically recovered the marvellous boy becomes an immensely successful painter in England and years pass, as they say. When he returns to pick up with his old chums in Paris, all three go to hear the most famous singer in the world at a concert: she has recently taken musical circles by storm, and her name is La Svengali. Now you and I know exactly who this is going to be, although it doesn’t occur to the pea-sized brains of the three companions. Trilby has been mesmerized by the horrible Fagin-like Svengali and sings like an angel, unaware of who or where she is. Some days later, making her London début, she emerges from her trance and is laughed off the platform for her dreadful voice, since Svengali has died melodramatically in his box at the side of the stage and can no more work his evil influence upon her. As Oscar Wilde famously said of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,’ and the dénouement of Trilby runs it a close second. ‘I feel this is getting to be quite a sad story, and that it is high time to cut this part of it short,’ remarks the author at one point, and in this he was not mistaken. If only he’d heeded his own advice! But the enduring charm of du Maurier’s Trilby lies not in its overwrought plot. It is a hotchpotch of a book, written by a man with his head in a whirl. It owes its enormous success to its sharply observed characterization, especially of the adorable free-loving Trilby herself, and its matchless recreation of carefree bohemian life in Paris. Parts of it are excellent, just like the curate said.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Clive Unger-Hamilton 2005