I, Dynamo

A Review

The Novels Of George Du Maurier

Peter Ibbetson, Trilby, The Martian

Part IV

Peter Ibbetson

Singers and Dancers and Fine Romancers

What do they know?

What do they know?

-Larry Hosford

Review by R.E. Prindle

Table of Contents

I.  Introduction

II Review of Trilby

III.  Review of The Martian

IV.  Review of Peter Ibbetson

     Peter Ibbetson is the first of the three novels of George Du Maurier.  As elements of the later two novels are contained in embryo in Ibbetson it would seem that Du Maurier had the three novels at least crudely plotted while a fourth dealing with politics but never realized is hinted at.  Actually Du Maurier has Ibbetson who writes this ‘autobiography’ write several world changing novels from inside the insane asylum to which he had been committed.  In the Martian Barty Josselin wrote several world changing books while ‘possessed’ by an alien intelligence, in a way, not too dissimilar to the situation of Ibbetson.  Du Maurier himself comes across, as I have said, as either a half demented lunatic or a stone genius.

     He has Ibbetson and the heroine, The Duchess of Towers write in code while they read encrypted books.  Du Maurier says that Ibbetson and hence the two following books deal with weighty subjects but in a coded manner that requires attention to understand.

     On page 362 of the Modern Library edition he says:

     …but more expecially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that may haunt your fever sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best to couch it in the obscurest and most unitelligible phraseology, I could invent.  If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense, mere common-sense- it is the fault of my half French and wholly imperfect education.

          So, as Bob Dylan said of the audiences of his Christian tour:  Those who were meant to get it, got it, for all others the story is merely a pretty story or perhaps fairy tale.  The fairy tale motif is prominent in the form of the fee Tarapatapoum and Prince Charming of the story.  Mary, the Duchess of Towers is Tarapatapoum and Peter is Prince Charming.  It might be appropriate here to mention that Du Maurier was highly influenced by Charles Nodier the teller of fairy tales of the Romantic period.  Interestingly Nodier wrote a story called Trilby.  Du Maurier borrowed the name for his novel Trilby while he took the name Little Billee from a poem by Thackeray.  A little background that makes that story a little more intelligible.

     Those that watch for certain phobias such as anti-Semitism and Eugenics will find this story of Du Maurier’s spolied for them as was Trilby and probably The Martian.  One is forced to concede that Du Maurier deals with those problems in a coded way.  Whether his meaning is derogatory or not lies with your perception of the problems not with his.

     Thus on page 361 just above the previous quote Du Maurier steps from concealment to deliver a fairly open mention of Eugenics.  After warning those with qualities and attributes to perpetuate those qualities by marrying wisely, i.e. eugenically, he breaks out with this:

     Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall clubfooted retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn.

          Here we have a premonition of Lothrop Stoddards Overman and Underman.   The best multiply slowly while the worst rear large families.  Why anyone would find fault with the natural inclination to marry well if one’s handsome and intelligent with a similar person is beyond me.  Not only is this natural it has little to do with the Eugenics Movement.  Where Eugenics falls foul, and rightly so, is in the laws passed to castrate those someone/whoever deemed unworthy to reproduce.  This is where the fault of the Eugenics Movement lies.  Who is worthy to pass such judgment?  Certainly there are obvious cases where neutering would be appropriate and beneficial for society but in my home town, for instance, no different than yours I’m sure, the elite given the opportunity would have had people neutered out of enmity and vindictiveness.  that is where the danger lies.  There is nothing wrong with handsome and intelligent marrying handsome and intelligent.  How may people want a stupid, ugly partner?

     Du Maurier had other opinions that have proved more dangerous to society.  One was his belief in the virtues of Bohemians, that is say, singers and dancers and fine romancers.  On page 284 he says:

     There is another society in London and elsewhere, a freemasonry of intellect and culture and hard work- la haute Ashene du talent- men and women whose names are or ought to be household words all over the world; many of them are good friends of ine, both here and abroad; and that society, which was good enough for my mother and father, is quite good enough for me.

     Of course, the upper Bohemia of proven talent. But still singers and dancers and fine romancers.  And what do they know?  Trilby was of the upper Bohemia as was Svengali but Trilby was hypnotized and Svengali but a talented criminal.  What can a painter contribute but a pretty picture, what can a singer do but sing his song, I can’t think of the dancing Isadora Duncan or the woman without breaking into laughter.  And as for fine romancers, what evil hath Jack Kerouac wrought.

     I passed part of my younger years in Bohemia, Beat or Hippie circles, and sincerely regret that Bohemian attitudes have been accepted as the norm for society.  Bohemia is fine for Bohemians but fatal for society which requires more discipline and stability.  Singers and dancers and fine romancers, wonderful people in their own way, but not builders of empires.

     In that sense, the promotion of Bohemianism, Du Maurier was subversive.

     But the rules of romancing are in the romance and we’re talking about Du Maurier’s romance of Peter Ibbetson.

     Many of the reasons for criticizing Du Maurier are political.  The  man whether opposed to C0mmunist doctrine or not adimired the Bourgeois State.  He admired Louis-Philippe as the Beourgeois king of France.  This may sound odd as he also considered himself a Bohemian but then Bohemians are called into existence by a reaction to the Bourgeoisie.  Perhaps not so odd.  He was able to reconcile such contradictions.  Indeed he is accused of having a split personality although I think this is false.  Having grown up in both France and England he developed a dual national identity and his problem seems to be reconciling his French identity with his English identity thus his concentration on memory.

     In this novel he carefully builds up a set of sacred memories of his childhood.  He very carefully introduces us to the people of his childhood.  Mimsy Seraskier his little childhood sweetheart.  All the sights and sounds and smells.  In light of the quote I used telling how he disguises his deeper meaning one has to believe that he is giving us serious theories he has worked out from science and philosophy.

     Having recreated his French life for us Peter’s  parents die and Ibbetson’s Uncle Ibbetson from England adopts him and takes him back to the Sceptered Isle.  Thus he ceases to be the French child Pasquier and becomes the English child Peter Ibbetson.  A rather clean and complete break.  From this point on his childhood expectations are disappointed with the usual psychological results.  He develops a depressed psychology.  The cultural displacement prevents him from making friends easily or at all.  His Uncle who has a difficult boorish personality is unable to relate to a sensitive boy with a Bohemian artistic temperament.  Hence he constantly demeans the boy for not being like himself and has no use for him.

     This is all very skillfully handled.  We have intimations that bode no good for Peter.   The spectre is prison.  The hint of a crime enters into the story without anything actually being said.  But the sense of foreboding enters Peter’s mind and hence the reader’s.  This is done extremely well.  It’s a shame the Communists are in control of the media so that they can successfully denigrate any work of art that contradicts or ignores their beliefs.  For instance the term bourgeois itself.  The word is used universally as a contemptuous epithet even though the Bourgeois State was one of the finest created.  Why then contempt?  Simply because the Communists must destroy or denigrate any success that they canot hope to surpass.  I was raised believing that what was Bourgeois was contemptible without ever knowing what Bourgeois actually meant.  It is only through Du Maurier at this late stage in life that I begin to realize what the argument really was and how I came to accept the Communist characterization.  I’m ashamed of myself.

     Hence all Du Maurier criticism is unjust being simply because it is the antithesis of Communist beliefs.  The man as a writer is very skillful, as I have said, a genius.  If I were read these novels another couple of times who knows what riches might float up from the pages.

     Colonel Ibbetson apprentices Peter to an architect, a Mr Lintot, which, while not unhappy, is well below Peter’s expectations for his fairy Prince Charming self.  As a lowly architect he is placed in a position of designing huts for the workers of the very wealthy.  The contrast depresses him even further.  He has been disappointed in love and friendship and then he is compelled by business exigencies to attend a ball given by a wealthy client.  He definitely feels out of place.  Psychologically incapable of mixing he stands in a corner.

     At this ball the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, The Duchess of Towers, is in attendance.  From across the room she seems to give him an interested glance.  Peter can only hope, hopelessly.  As a reader we have an intimation that something will happen but we can’t be sure how.  I couldn’t see.  Then he sees her in her carriage parading Rotten Row in Hyde Park.  She sees him and once again it seems that she gives him a questioning look.

     Then he takes a vacation in France where he encounter her again.  After talking for a while he discovers that she is a grown up Mimsey Seraskier, his childhood sweetheart.  Thus his French childhood and English adulthood are reunited in her.  Wow!  There was a surprise the reader should have seen coming.  I didn’t.  I had no trouble recognizing her from childhood in France but Du Maurier has handled this so skillfully that I am as surprised as was Peter.  I tipped my imaginary hat to Du Maurier here.

     Perhaps I entered into Du Maurier’s dream world here but now I began to have flashbacks, a notion that I had read this long ago, most likely in high school or some other phantasy existence.  I can’t shake the notion but I can’t remember reading the book then at all.  Don’t know where I might have come across it.  Of course that doesn’t mean an awful lot.  If asked if I had ever read a Charles King novel I would have said no but when George McWhorter loaned me a couple to read that he had in Louisville I realized I had read one of them before.  Eighth grade.  I could put a handle on that but not Peter Ibbetson.  Perhaps Du Marurier has hypnotized me.  Anyway certain images seem to stick in my mind from a distant past.

     It was at this time that Mary, the Duchess if  Towers, formerly Mimsy, enters Peter’s dream, in an actual real life way.  This is all well done, Peter dreamt he was walking toward an arch when two gnomish people tried to herd him into prison.  Mary appears and orders the gnomes to vanish which they do.  ‘That’s how you have to handle that.’  She says.  And that is very good advice for dreams that Du Maurier gives.  As we’ll see Du Maurier has some pretensions to be a psychologist.

     She then instructs Peter in the process of  ‘dreaming true.’  In such a manner they can actually be together for real in a shared dream.  Now, Trilby, while seemingly frivolous, actually displays a good knowledge of hypnotism.  More than that it puts Du Maurier in the van of certain psychological knowledge.  Hypnotism and psychology go together.  Without an understanding of hypnotism one can’t be a good psychologist.  If he wasn’t ahead of Freud at this time he was certainly even with him.  Remember this is 1891 while Freud didnt’ surface until 1895 and then few would have learned of him.  He wrote in German anyway. 

     Freud was never too developed on auto-suggestion.  Emile Coue is usually attributed to be the originator of auto-suggestion yet the technique that Mary gives to Peter is the exact idea of auto-suggestion that Coue is said to have developed twenty or twenty-five years on.

     Du Maurier speaks of the sub-conscious which is more correct than the unconscious.  He misunderstands the nature of the subconscious giving it almost divine powers but in many ways he is ahead of the game.  Now, Ibbetson was published in 1891 which means that Du Maurier was in possession of his knowledge no later than say 1889 while working on it from perhaps 1880 or so on.  It will be remembered that Lou Sweetser, Edgar Rice Burroughs mentor in Idaho, was also knowledgable in psychology in 1891 but having just graduated a couple of years earlier from Yale.  So Freud is very probably given too much credit for originating what was actually going around.  This earlier development of which Du Maurier was part has either been suppressed in Freud’s favor or has been passed over by all psychological historians.

     So, Mary gives Peter psychologically accurate information on auto-suggestion so that he can ‘dream true.’  I don’t mean to say that anyone can share another’s dreams which is just about a step too far but by auto-suggestion one can direct and control one’s dreams.  Auto-suggestion goes way back anyway.  The Poimandre of Hermes c. 300 AD is an actual course in auto-suggestion.

     Peter is becoming more mentally disturbed now that his denied expectations have returned to haunt him in the person of Tarapatapoum/Mimsey/Mary.  Once again this is masterfully done.  The clouding of his mind is almost visible.  Over the years he has generated a deep seated hatred for Colonel Ibbetson even though the Colonel, given his lights, has done relatively well by him.  Much of Peter’s discontent is internally generated by his disappointed expectations.  The Colonel has hinted that he might be Peter’s father rather than his Uncle.  This completely outrages Peter’s cherished understanding of his mother and father.  The Colonel according to Peter was one of those guys who claimed to have made every woman he’d ever met.  One must bear in mind that Peter is telling the story while the reader is seeing him become increasingly unstable.

     While Peter doesn’t admit it to himself he confronts the Colonel with the intention of murdering him.  He claims self-defense but the court doesn’t believe it nor does the reader.  It’s quite clear the guy was psycho but, once again, Du Maurier handles this so skillfully that one still wonders.  Given the death penalty his friends and supporters, the influential Duchess of Towers, get the sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

     Then begins Peter’s double life in prison that goes on for twenty years.  By day a convict, at night Peter projects hemself into a luxurious dream existence with his love, Mary, the Duchess of Towers.  Quite insane but he has now realized his expections if only in fantasy.  Now, this novel as well as Du Maurier’s other novels is textually rich.  The style is dense while as Du Maurier tells us it is written in more than one key, has encoded messages, so I’m concentrating on only the main thread here.  That concerns memory.

     While it is possible to subconsciously manage one’s dreams, I do it to a minor extent, of course it is impossible for two people to dream toether and share that dream.  This is to venture into the supernatural.  Spiritualism and Theosophy both dealing with the supernatural as does all religion including Christianity, were at their peak at this time.  Du Maurier has obviously studied them.  Just because one utilizes one’s knowledge in certain ways to tell a story doesn’t mean one believes what one writes.  Ibbetson is written so well that the writer seems to have fused himself with the character.  If I say Du Maurier believes that may not be true but as the same themes are carried through  all his novels without a demurrer it seems likely.

     Du Maurier seems to be pleading a certain understanding of the subconscious giving it as many or more supernatural powers as Freud himself will later.  This might be the appropriate  place to speculate on Du Maurier’s influence on Mark Twain.  We know Twain was an influence on Burroughs so perhaps both were.

     Before he died Twain wrote a book titled the Mysterious Stranger.  This was twenty-five years after Peter Ibbetson.  Operator 44, the Mysterious Stranger, is a time time traveler who has some sort of backstair connecting years as  a sort of memory monitor.  Peter and Mary over the years work out a system that allows them to travel back through times even to prehistoric times.  Thus Peter is able to sketch from life stone age man hunting mastodons, or Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.  They are present at these events but as sort of ghost presences without substance.  they have no substance hence cannot affect reality.

     This would be a major them in fifties science fiction in which, for instance, a time traveler steps on a grub, then comes back to his present time finding everyone talking a different language.  Change one item and you change all others.  Du Maurier avoids this problem that he very likely thought of in this clever way.

     We can clearly see the future of twentieth century imaginiative writing taking form here.  One can probably trace several twentieth century sci-fi themes back to Du Maurier.

     Peter and Mary have a magic window through they can call up any scene within their memories.  In their dream existence they are dependent on memory they can only re-experience, they cannot generate new experiences.  The memory extends back genetically although Du Maurier speaks in terms of reincarnation.  Peter hears Mary humming a tune he has never heard before.  Mary explains that the tune is a family melody written by an ancestress hundreds of years before.  Thus one has this genetic memory persisting through generations.  This gives Du Maurier room to expatiate on the persistence of memory through past, present and future.

     Du Maurier has worked out an elaborate scheme in which memory unites past, present and future, into a form of immortality.  This is actually a religious concept but a very beautiful concept, very attractive in its way.

     Peter and Mary had elected to stay at one age- twenty-six to twenty-eight- so for twenty years they retained their youthful form and beauty.  Then one night Peter enters the mansion of his dreams through a lumber room to find the way blocked.  He knows immediately that Mary has died.  He then learns that in attempting to save a child from a train she was herself killed.

     Peter goes into an insane rage attacking the prison guards while calling each Colonel Ibbetson.  Clearly insane and that’s where the send him.  The mad house.  Originally he continues to rage so they put him in a straight jacket where he remains until his mind calms enough to allow him to dream.  In his dream he returns to a stream in France.  Here he believes he can commit suicide in his dream which should be shock enough to stop his heart in real life.  Something worth thinking about.  Filling his pockets with stones he means to walk in over his head.  Then, just ahead he spies the back of a woman sitting on a log.  Who else but Mary.  She has done what has never been done before, what even Houdini hasn’t been able to do, make it to back to this side.

     Now outside their mansion, they are no longer young, but show their age.  This is nicely done stuff.  Of course I can’t replicate the atmosphere and feel but the Du Maurier feeling is ethereal.  As I say I thought he was talking to me and I entered his fantasy without reserve.

     Here’s a lot of chat about the happiness on the otherside.  When Peter awakes back in the asylum he is calm and sane.  He convinces the doctors and is restored to full inmate rights.  Once himself again he begins to write those wonderful books that right the world.

     One gets the impression that Du Maurier believes he himself is writing those immortal books that will change the world. Time and fashions change.  Today he is thought a semi-evil anti- Semite, right wing Bourgeois writer.  I don’t know if he’s banned from college reading lists but I’m sure his works are not used in the curriculum.  I think he’s probably considered oneof those Dead White Men.  Thus a great writer becomes irrelevant.

      It’s a pity because from Peter Ibbetson through Trilby to The Martian he has a lot to offer.  The Three States of Mind he records are thrilling in themselves, as Burroughs would say, as pure entertainment while on a more thoughtful read there is plenty of nourishment.   Taken to another level his psychology is very penetrating.  His thought is part of the mind of the times.  Rider Haggard shares some of the mystical qualities.  The World’s Desire is comparable which can be complemented by his Heart Of The World.  The latter may turn out to be prophetic shortly.  H.G. Wells’ In The Days Of The Comet fits into this genre also.  Another very good book.  Of course Burroughs’ The Eternal Lover and Kipling and Haggard’s collaboration of Love Eternal.  Kipling’s Finest Story In The World might also fit in as well, I’m sure there are many others of the period of which I’m not aware.  I haven’t read Marie Corelli but she is often mentioned in this context.  You can actually slip Conan Doyle in their also.

     Well, heck, you can slip the whole Wold Newton Universe, French and Farmerian in there.  While there is small chance any Wold Newton meteor had anything to do with it yet as Farmer notes at about that time a style of writing arose concerned with a certain outlook that was worked by many writers each contributing his bit while feeding off the others as time went by.

     I don’t know that Du Maurier is included in the Wold Newton Universe (actually I know he isn’t) but he should be.  He was as influential on the group as any other or more so.  He originated many of the themes.

     Was Burroughs influenced by him?  I think so.  There was no way ERB could have missed Trilby.  No possible way.  If he read Trilby and the other two only once which is probable any influence was probably subliminable.  ERB was not of the opinion that a book could change the world, so he disguised his more serious thoughts just as Du Maurier did his.  He liked to talk about things though. 

     Singers and dancers.  What do they know?  What do they know?  In the end does it really matter what they know.  Time moves on, generations change, as they change the same ideas come around expressed in a different manner.  They have their day then are replaced.  The footprint in the concrete does remain.   Genius will out.