The Loving Spirit Part 1

The Loving Spirit.

DAPHNE DU MAURIER.

VIRAGO MODERN CLa.s.sICS 497.

Daphne du Maurier.

DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907-89) was born in London, the daughter of the famous actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and granddaughter of George du Maurier, the author and artist. A voracious reader, she was from an early age fascinated by imaginary worlds and even created a male alter ego for herself. Educated at home with her sisters and later in Paris, she began writing short stories and articles in 1928, and in 1931 her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published. A biography of her father and three other novels followed, but it was the novel Rebecca that launched her into the literary stratosphere and made her one of the most popular authors of her day. In 1932, du Maurier married Major Frederick Browning, with whom she had three children.

Besides novels, du Maurier published short stories, plays and biographies. Many of her bestselling novels became award-winning films, and in 1969 du Maurier was herself awarded a DBE. She lived most of her life in Cornwall, the setting for many of her books, and when she died in 1989, Margaret Forster wrote in tribute: 'No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied cla.s.sification . . . She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of 'real literature', something very few novelists ever do'.

Introduction.

Daphne du Maurier takes her t.i.tle from a poem by Emily Bront:.

Alas - the countless links are strong.

That bind us to our clay,

The loving spirit lingers long,

And would not pa.s.s away.

Emily Bront seems to be talking about how hard it can be to find the freedom of death if we are at all frightened of dying, how the beauties of the world can exert their pull on us right up to the end. Daphne du Maurier's lushly written novel, on the other hand, salutes the necessity of death as a conduit between the generations through which the loving spirit can be poured. While it is a rapturous celebration of the beauties of the Cornish landscape, in particular, it is also about the drive towards abandoning the cares and duties of the daily, material world in order to pin your faith on a transcendent symbol and a love so intense it approaches the taboo, even the perverse.

First published in 1931, The Loving Spirit is both a romance and a family saga, a novel about thresholds and changes. It begins with one marriage and ends, three generations later, with another one.The heroines who brace the story, like book-ends, are linked by their semi-mystical appreciation of the power of love to inspire, save and heal. The presiding G.o.ddess of this intense emotional landscape is Janet Coombe, whom we meet, in the opening chapter, on her wedding morning. She is about to marry her sober, G.o.d-fearing cousin Thomas, a boat-builder, and has fled up to the cliffs above Plyn, her village, and the harbour it shelters, to say goodbye to her old life and begin looking towards her new one.

Part of Janet fears her soul is 'sinful and wayward' for drifting off in daydreams: 'her heart would travel out across the sunbeams to the silent hills'. She is chided by all the village gossips for loving to play truant, for running and jumping, for answering back, for envying male freedoms. Her mother scolds her and beats her, but Janet insists on becoming a woman in her own way. Her beauty and strength attract all the local boys and from them she chooses Thomas.

She is doubtful about marriage, at first: 'No more could she lift her skirts and run about the rocks, nor wander among the sheep on the hills. It was a home now to be tended, and a man of her own, and later maybe, and G.o.d willing, the child that came with being wed.' So far, so mapped out. But then: At this thought there was something that laid its finger on her soul, like the remembrance of a dream, or some dim forgotten thing: a ray of knowledge that is hidden from folk in their wakeful moments, and then comes to them queerly at strange times. This came to Janet now, fainter than a call; like a soft still whisper.

So Janet recognises her conflicted desires and destiny: ... and it seemed that there were two sides of her; one that wanted to be the wife of a man, and to care for him and love him tenderly, and one that asked only to be part of a s.h.i.+p, part of the seas and the skies above, with the glad free ways of a gull.

This opening chapter, having thus introduced the main themes and symbols of the entire novel, closes on an epiphanic note: 'she knew in her soul that there was something waiting for her greater than this love for Thomas. Something strong and primitive, lit with everlasting beauty. One day it would come, but not yet.' Of course I'm not going to spoil the story for the first-time reader by telling you what that is. Suffice it to say that it's the fuel for the entire book and drives it unflaggingly, through episodes of cruelty, treachery, war and loss, towards its peaceful and triumphant end.

How does du Maurier achieve her effects? To begin with, she's an accomplished storyteller, keeping the narrative racing along with plenty of colourful characters, dramatic incident, cliff-hanging chapter endings, mystery and suspense. More importantly, I think, she relies on the Gothic and Romantic elements of personage, narrative and landscape employed by Emily Bront in Wuthering Heights. Her entire novel is a homage to that of her great precursor. Janet Coombe is a free spirit like Bront's Cathy, and her wild, rebellious son Joseph has a lot in common with Bront's anti-hero, Heathcliff. The great love between Janet and Joseph defies death, dest.i.tution, and wretchedness to the point of madness, just as Cathy's for Heathcliff does. Wuthering Heights could in no sense be described as a family saga, but it shares with The Loving Spirit the inbuilt necessity for the plot to be worked out over more than one generation. Du Maurier is conscious and proud of her debt to Bront. At the beginning of Book One, her story of Janet, it's no accident that she quotes one of Emily Bront's greatest poems: No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:

I see heaven's glories s.h.i.+ne,

And faith s.h.i.+nes equal, arming me from fear.

As in Wuthering Heights, the weather plays a crucial part. The Romantic Fallacy is in full swing. Storms at sea mirror storms in the human heart. Plants and creatures feel just as we do. Du Maurier invokes 'the glad tossing of the leaves in autumn, and the shy fluttering wings of a bird . . . a pale forgotten primrose that grew wistfully near the water's edge'. Imagining that flowers can share our wistfulness, or birds our shyness, is consoling, of course. This is what we might call the ba.n.a.l side of the Romantic Fallacy. But Bront turned it around into a profound statement of mysticism, in which people dissolve into the universe to become one with it, and du Maurier follows her: ... the spirit of Janet was free and unfettered, waiting to rise from its self-enforced seclusion to mix with intangible things, like the wind, the sea, and the skies hand in hand with the one for whom she waited. Then she, too, would become part of these things forever, abstract and immortal.

Only Bront, I think, would not have said 'hand in hand': much too tame. Indeed, du Maurier is a much more sentimental writer.

Bront's use of Gothic in Wuthering Heights allowed her savagely to satirise the genteel bourgeois world she despised, to dream of a hero brutal enough to overturn the established order, and to hint at some of the secrets festering underneath the placid surface of normal domestic life. Women writers have tended to take up the Gothic with enthusiasm, since it allows them to peer down the cellar stairs and up into the third-floor attic and reveal some of the bad things that go on in seemingly respectable houses. Du Maurier employs Gothic hyperbole and excess to permit her decent, hard-working, artisan characters to express their turbulent emotions in dramatic and even violent language, accuse each other of evil and madness, and knock each other down. No point fretting she's hamming it up; she's in a tradition as much theatrical as literary. To emphasise her novel's reach towards the timeless and the sublime she mixes in biblical phrases, cadences and rhythms, lots of archaisms, repet.i.tions and inversions: And she strove to banish these thoughts . . . the cold rain shut outside and the damp misty hills, and the sound of the wild harbour water coming not to her mind ... And Joseph looked down on Christopher, and stifled the nigh-overmastering impulse to kneel beside the boy and ask him to place all faith and trust into his keeping, but it came to him that the boy might feel shy and embarra.s.sed to see his father act in such a way.

Like other Gothic-influenced novelists, du Maurier uses the motifs of the form to conceal secrets as much as to expose them. Gothic circles around repression and may succ.u.mb to it. Du Maurier's rhapsodic descriptions of the love between Janet and her son Joseph hint at an incestuous element: She longed for the other one to be with her tonight, he who was part of her, with his dark hair and his dark eyes so like her own. He who had not come yet, but who stared at her out of the future, and walked with her in her dreams.

On one level this son-lover is an animus-figure like those found in Jungian interpretations of fairytales, he who helps make a bridge for the woman into the wider world. On the level of modern psychobabble, poor Janet would be characterised as a dangerously possessive mother. Feminists might think the male principle is being over-valued and might want to deprecate a mother placing all her desires, potency and ardour in the lap of her son. But the Gothic romance can soar away from this sort of questioning, which is of course part of its charm. It is not necessarily a subversive form; it all depends on what you do with it. And to turn the question around: perhaps a forbidden love may be deftly imaged by separating the lovers into different generations and time-frames; or, perhaps, the enforced separation and ecstatic reunion of mother and son depicted here by du Maurier is simply a powerful image for the losses that afflict us all and for our longing to repair them.

Michele Roberts.

2003.

Book One.

Janet Coombe (1830-1863).

No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:

I see heaven's glories s.h.i.+ne,

And faith s.h.i.+nes equal, arming me from fear.

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;

Worthless as withered weeds,

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thine infinity;

So surely anch.o.r.ed on

The steadfast rock of immortality.

E. BRONT.

1.

Janet Coombe stood on the hill above Plyn, looking down upon the harbour. Although the sun was already high in the heavens, the little town was still wrapped in an early morning mist. It clung to Plyn like a thin pale blanket, lending to the place a faint whisper of unreality as if the whole had been blessed by the touch of ghostly fingers.The tide was ebbing, the quiet waters escaped silently from the harbour and became one with the sea, unruffled and undisturbed. No straggling cloud, no hollow wind broke the calm beauty of the still white sky. For one instant a gull hovered in the air, stretching his wide wings to the sun, then cried suddenly and dived, losing itself in the mist below. It seemed to Janet that this hillside was her own world, a small planet of strange clarity and understanding; where all troublous thoughts and queer wonderings of the heart became soothed and at rest.

The white mist buried the cares and doubts of daily life, and with them all vexatious duties and the dull ways of natural folk. Here on the hilltop was no mist, no place of shadows, but the warm comfort of the noon-day sun.

There was a freedom here belonging not to Plyn, a freedom that was part of the air and the sea; like the glad tossing of the leaves in autumn, and the shy fluttering wings of a bird. In Plyn it was needful to run at another's bidding, and from morn till night there were the cares and necessities of household work - helping here, helping there, encouraging those around you with a kindly word, and sinful it was to expect one in return. And now she was to become a woman, and step on to the threshold of a new life, so the preacher had told her. Maybe it would change her, and sorrow would come her way and joy also for that matter, but if she held an everlasting faith in G.o.d who is the Father of us all, in the end she would know peace and the sight of Heaven itself. It was best to follow these righteous words though it seemed that the road to Heaven was a hard long road, and there were many who fell by the way and perished for their sins.

The preacher spoke truth indeed, but with never a word of the lovable things that clung about the heart. G.o.d alone is worthy of great love. Here on the hill the solemn sheep slept alongside of one another in the chill nights, the mother protected her young ones from the stealthy fox who steals in the shadow of the hedge - even the tall trees drew together in the evening for comfort's sake.

Yet none of these things know the love for G.o.d, said the preacher.

It might happen that he did not know the truth of every bird, beast, and flower, and that they too were immortal as well as human kind.

Janet knelt beside the stream, and touched a pale forgotten primrose that grew wistfully near the water's edge.A blackbird called from the branch above her head, and flew away, scattering the white blossom on her hair. The flaming gorse bushes breathed in the sun, filling the air with a rich sweet scent, a medley of honey and fresh dew.

It was Janet Coombe's wedding day. Even now her mother would be preparing the feast for the guests that were to come and her sisters laying her fine wedding gown upon the bed with longing awesome hands.

Soon the bells would peal over to Lanoc Church, and she and Cousin Thomas, her dear husband that was to be, would stand before the altar and be made one in the eyes of G.o.d.

Thomas's eyes would be lowered with beseeming reverence, and he would hearken to the good words of the preacher; but Janet knew her eyes would escape to the glint of pure light that shone through the church window, and her heart would travel out across the sunbeam to the silent hills.

The wedding service would seem dim and unreal, like the town of Plyn in the morning mist, and try as she could, she would not be able to listen when she herself was elsewhere. It was the sinful soul in her that came not at the preacher's bidding; sinful and wayward as it had always been, since the days when she had been no more than a mite of a child, way back at her mother's knee.

For her sisters had attended school good and proper, and had learnt to sew and to read, but Janet was forever playing truant, away on the beach beyond the harbour. She would stand on the high crumbling cliffs, inside the ruin of the old Castle, and watch the brown sails of the Penlivy luggers that glittered on the far horizon.

'Please G.o.d, make me a lad afore I'm grown,' she would pray, and her no larger than a boot, with curls hanging round her neck. Her mother would scold her and beat her, and chide her for a great lump of a boy with heathenish ways, but it was all of no avail. Her mother might have spared the rod for the good it did her.

Like a lad she grew, tall and straight, with steady hands and fearless eyes, and a love of the sea in her blood. For all that she was a girl at heart, with her tenderness for animals and weak, helpless things, and it was this that made her have a care to her dress later, and pin a flower to her bodice, and comb her black curls off her forehead. The men would wait for her outside the gate of her father's house, and ask her to walk up the cliff path on Sundays; they'd stand with awkward hands and silly sheep's eyes, as if their tongues were too large for their mouths, but Janet gave them a laugh for an answer, and a toss of her head.

She would go with the lads if she could run with them, and climb the hedges, and have them admire her for her skill; but not to walk side by side with hands touching, for all the world like a pair of lovers.The time would come soon enough when she'd be wed, and have a husband and home to look after, and a bothering long skirt around her ankles, and a cap on her head, tidy and respectable.

It would be a man she'd want though, and not a great hulking boy with never a word to say for himself, and nothing better to do than to hang around in hopes of a soft look or a gentle word. So reasoned Janet when she was eighteen past, and when her sisters were all for tying ribbons in their hair, and watching the men in church over their hymn books.

But Janet scorned their ways, though she was not better than them for listening to the preacher's words, for her thoughts travelled away across the sea, where the s.h.i.+ps sailed into strange lands and distant countries.

Often she would wander down to the s.h.i.+pbuilding yard, at the bottom of Plyn hill by the harbour slip. The business was owned by her uncle, and though it was only small as yet, it was thriving steadily, and was growing larger every year. Besides, her uncle was helped by his hard-working nephew, young Thomas Coombe, Janet's second cousin.

Cousin Thomas was serious and steady, he had been to Plymouth to study, and he had a quiet way about him that impressed his uncle, and also the lazy good-for-nothing men who worked in the yard.

Soon, maybe, the firm would tackle heavier and harder work than the building of fis.h.i.+ng luggers.Young Thomas would become a partner; on his uncle's death the business would be his.

He was a brave man, was Cousin Thomas, well-spoken and handsome enough, if you came to think of it. He had no time for love-making and walking up the cliff path on Sundays, but for all that he had his eye on Janet, and he thought to himself what a splendid wife she'd make, a worthy life partner for any man.

So it happened that young Thomas fell to calling at the house of an evening, and chatting to the father and mother, with his mind to Janet the while.

He pictured the house half-way up Plyn hill, ivy-covered and with a view of the harbour, and Janet waiting for him when the day's work was done, her children at her knee.

He waited a year before speaking his mind to Janet, he waited until she had come to know him as well as one of her own family, and trusted him and respected him the same.

Soon after her nineteenth birthday he told her father and mother that he wished to make Janet his wife. They were pleased, for Thomas was making his way in Plyn, and was as sober and honest as any parent could hope.

One evening he called at the house, and asked if he could see Janet alone.

She came running down the stairs, dressed neat and tidy, her locket pinned to her breast, and her dark hair parted smoothly in the middle.