Julius
DAPHNE DU MAURIER
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Table of Contents
VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 506
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Part One
Childhood (1860-1872)
Part Two
Youth (1875-1890)
Part Three
Manhood (1890-1910)
Part Four
The Middle Years (1910-1920)
Part Five
‘And After’ (1920-1932)
VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 506
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 classification . . . 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.’
By the same author
Novels
The Loving Spirit
I’ll Never Be Young Again
The Progress of Julius
Jamaica Inn
Rebecca
Frenchman’s Creek
The King’s General
The Parasites
My Cousin Rachel
The Birds and other stories
Mary Anne
The Scapegoat
Castle Dor
The Glass Blowers
The Flight of the Falcon
The House on the Strand
Rule Britannia
The Rendezvous and other stories
Non-fiction
Gerald: A Portrait
The Du Mauriers
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë
Golden Lads
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall
Myself When Young
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories
Julius
DAPHNE DU MAURIER
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Published by Hachette Digital 2010
Copyright © The Estate of Daphne du Maurier 1933
Introduction copyright © Julie Myerson 2004
Julie Myerson asserts her right to be identified as the author
of the Introduction to this Work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, without the prior permission in writing
of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7481 1460 3
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Introduction
I remember exactly who I was when I first read Julius. Winter of ’73 and a skinny, bookish thirteen-and-a-half-year-old is lying on the floor of her lilac-wallpapered bedroom in Nottingham. Last week she took Frenchman’s Creek out of the library, the week before that Jamaica Inn - she was transported by the pure Cornish romance and excitement of them. Now here’s another Daphne du Maurier, one she hasn’t even heard of, fat and promising in its yellow, polythene-wrapped Gollancz cover. She flings herself down on the prickly nylon carpet and opens it enthusiastically.
And is plunged straight into a harsh and remorseless world of Paris under siege, starving peasants, Algerian child prostitutes, ruthless sex, cold murder and emotional sadism. I was, by then, quite a mature reader, but I’d never alighted on a novel as psychologically savage and uncompromisingly sophisticated as this one.
Of course at thirteen, I was far too inexperienced to glean many of Julius’s deeper and darker meanings. I knew nothing of men-female sexuality, still less of money, class, deprivation and war. I am sure that back then in my adolescent bedroom, I read this singularly dramatic tale on a very superficial, one-note level. But the gist of it lingered - stayed with me right into adult-hood. All those years, at the back of my mind, I certainly remembered Julius - the uneasy flavour of him, his astounding capacity for money-making, his stark incapacity for anything approaching spontaneous human love. I think I knew even then that those pages contained the portrait of a monster, somehow all the more alarming for being emphatically, or at least, ambivalently, drawn.
There’s something calculated and frightening about this book. It’s intensely shocking in places. Its moments of violence and cruelty have, even today, more than fifty years on, an almost David Lynch-style kick to them. This is a tale of such emotional brutality and moral dislocation that it feels as if it’s been wrought by a master, someone who has seen, known and grappled with the world. Chilling, then, to discover that Daphne du Maurier was just twenty-six years old when she wrote it.
So what did this young woman believe she was writing? Is Julius a straightforward account of a monstrous sadist, a man whose feelings of possessive love for his daughter veer dangerously and desperately out of control? Or is it the tale of a life coming undone, the sad inevitability of a deprived child grown up to cold manhood and thankless, pointless prosperity - the story of a victim of poverty, circumstance and fate? And anyway, is Julius Levy the master of his own fate (and those around him) or is he in fact no more than face and bluster, no more in control than any of those people he destroys to get what he wants?
And, maybe most intriguingly of all, what exactly was in du Maurier’s mind when she chose to make him a Jew? A young twenty-something woman scribbling away at her desk in windy Cornwall in 1932 was still safely innocent of the hideous drama to be played out only a few years later in Europe, but the choice can only set our post-Holocaust teeth on edge.‘Jew,’ sneers Julius’s Catholic grandfather to his hapless son-in-law, ‘nothing but a miserable Jew.’
Even though the grandfather is portrayed far from sympathetically - at best a bestial, overbearing peasant - still there were mutterings, in du Maurier’s later years, that this possible whiff of anti-Semitism should be excised from the novel. Apparently du Maurier even took them seriously. But thank goodness she never succumbed. Not only would it have meant bowdlerising a novel that is absolutely and innocently (in the best sense of the word) of its time, but there’s a more important point. Rereading it in the twenty-first century, it seems to me that
it’s precisely Julius’s Jewishness - and other people’s attitudes to it - that redeems him, that makes him real and whole and fascinating. It’s his rediscovery of his religion, as he wanders into a temple by chance, that gives him his few moments of calm and happiness. He is not at odds with the world because of his Jewishness but in spite of it.
In fact, far from being a one-dimensional baddie, this spirituality and longing to belong makes du Maurier’s eponymous anti-hero so much grander: a questing, complex and, in many ways, touching man. Without this extra dimension, the novel would be far lighter and more brittle. As it is, it’s a tragedy - a vivid and profound exploration of what it feels to be an outsider, accepted as neither Christian nor Jew, neither aristocrat nor millionaire.
Julius begins and ends the novel with his hands stretched out to the sky, reaching for the clouds, searching, always searching. A mixed-up, lonely, starving child, he responds instinctively to the music in the temple, feels something warm take hold of his heart, realises he is among ‘his own people’. It is Julius’s particular tragedy that he spends the rest of the novel struggling to re-attain this fleeting emotion. If Julius has a benign side, a sensitive side, there’s no doubt that it’s the Jewish side.
Interestingly, du Maurier always avoids the easy racist cliché. Though Julius amasses incalculable wealth, she never portrays him as a money-grabber. He is no blinkered and greedy lover of cash and property - just a man who simply can’t help but work hard and do things well. His abiding code is ‘something for nothing’ but actually, it’s rarely for ‘nothing’ - Julius works and works and works, forgetting even to spend his money.When a friend persuades him to match his lodgings to his newly acquired wealth, it’s significant that Julius is uncomfortable. He’s ‘disturbed’ by his ‘first experience of luxury’. Julius is an ascetic, he’s pure in his soul. He works out of a sense of personal pride and for mental satisfaction, for the chance to take control of his life, rather than the chance to shirk it.
But though Julius will always survive he has, in the best tradition of tragedy, a single undoing flaw. He can’t love without wanting to possess and control. And if he can’t possess then he’d rather destroy - and he’s quite prepared to. As a young boy, forced to leave home and his beloved cat behind, he ties a stone around her neck and flings her in the Seine rather than leave her to an uncertain fate, or worse - to be cared for by someone else.
This act - an act of love in his eyes - is carried out unflinchingly, but it’s the start of a lifelong and sinister equating of love with destruction. When Julius discovers his mother committing adultery and tells his father, it seems painfully logical to him that his father should throttle her there and then. He knows he’ll miss his mother, but didn’t she deserve it, and won’t his father ultimately feel better if no one else can have her? Julius’s reaction to this crime quickly becomes its most disturbing aspect. Here is a boy with an almost autistic lack of sensibility. Where he should connect with others, there is an icy vacuum. He knows he ought to feel something, but he wonders what it should be.
But it’s precisely this vacuum that gives Julius his resilience and power. That’s what lies at the heart of this novel - a study of power and powerlessness, which has little or nothing to do with Jewishness.The helplessness that this young boy feels as a starving child in turn-of-the-century Paris turns him into a sadistic character - someone who discovers ‘a new thing, of hurting people he liked’. This destructive pattern - which ultimately bores him because it means he is always in control and life contains no surprises - continues until he finally meets his match.
His nemesis is his daughter Gabriel, his own flesh and blood, his alter-ego. At last Julius can take pleasure from the existence of another human being - even though the pleasure he feels is obsessive, a ‘voracious passion’ that gives him a ‘sensation in mind and body’ that is ‘shameful and unclean’. It is said that the character of Julius is based heavily on du Maurier’s own father, Gerald du Maurier, and the fact she was able to write it - such steady, concise prose - means she had come to terms with that intensely passionate relationship. It’s an idea I find comforting if baffling. Such candour and control? The author must have been an admirably sorted-out twenty-six year old.
I said at the beginning of this piece that I was far too young when I first read the novel to mine its deeper, darker meanings. Well, not quite. It’s true that I knew nothing of men and women, class, war and money. But I did know a little more than I’d have liked about the uneasy relations of fathers and daughters. The summer before, my mother had left my father and he - furious and unscrupulous - had begun a slow campaign to hurt me, to make me feel his pain. Fuelled by his own sense of powerlessness, it was his way of getting back; of punishing my mother for leaving, of punishing me, at almost fourteen, for looking and sounding more and more like her. I became increasingly afraid of my father - not so much of any single thing he did, more that I realised I did not know his limits. I did not know where he would stop.
I was seventeen when he decided not to see me any more. The rejection - signalling the end of so much pain and uncertainty - felt more like relief than trauma. It seems far too easy and unfair to brand my father a monster. I know now (more than a decade after his lonely suicide) that he wasn’t. I know now that he was a sick, sad man who needed help. But, very like Julius, he’d felt powerless as a child - deprived of love, shown only coldness and dislike. And like Julius, he’d discovered that inflicting pain on those he loved was as good a way as any to take control, to give his life value and momentum.
I see this now, but did I recognise any of it as I lay on the carpet of my room reading my Gollancz Julius? It’s hard to remember, impossible to know for sure. I used my novels back then as comfort and, yes, escape. And the best, most vividly exciting thing about great novels is the way you don’t always know what you’ve read until years later, when the sediment has drifted and settled. And you find what remains - what you really remembered - is the thing that most mattered. And what I remember is that I read a book about a hurt and hurtful man, a man who worked and strove for no purpose and ultimately was left bereft. I do not remember a book about a Jew.
Julie Myerson
London, October 2003
Part One
Childhood (1860-1872)
His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky.
The white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven.
They floated just above his head, they almost brushed his eyelids as they passed, and he had only to grasp the long curling fringe of them with his fingers and they would belong to him instead, becoming part of him for ever. Something within him whispered that he must clutch at the clouds and bring them down from the sky. So he held out his hands to them and they did not come. He cried out to them and they did not come. They passed away from him as though they had never been, indifferent and aloof; like wreaths of white smoke they were carried away by the wind, born of nothing, dissolving into nothing, a momentary breath that vanished in the air.
Nor yet did he understand, for a queer puzzled look crept into his eyes, and he would frown his ancient baby frown of an old man; while from the innermost part of his being came the long-drawn pitiful wail that can never be explained, the plaintive cry of a child born into the world who knows not what he wants, the eternal question of the earth to the skies - Who am I? Where from? Where to? The first cry and the last. The sigh of the baby, the sigh of the old man.
The white clouds had gone, and now others appeared over the rim of the world, coming into his little sphere of sight; so that the frown went from his face and the look of longing came upon it once more, and again he must stretch out his hands and call to them, the lesson unlearnt, the question in his eyes. A child newly born and he must know the answer - continuing from this first moment until the last for ever seeking, a bright spark rising in the cold air.
Juliu
s Lévy was born in Puteaux, at that time little more than a village on the banks of the Seine. The street and the house in which he lived - now demolished and built over by large factories, their tall chimneys belching smoke into the air - was in his childhood the Rue Jean-Jacques, a long twisting cobbled street leading downhill from the village towards the high road to Paris. The houses were grey-coloured and drab, leaning forward, nearly touching, the air coming with difficulty to the dark rooms.
The last house in the street, cramped and unhealthy like the rest, possessing two rooms and another space scarcely more than a cupboard, was owned by Jean Blançard, the grandfather of Julius. Here he lived with his daughter Louise and his son-in-law Paul Lévy. Beyond the house were rough uncultivated plots of ground, as yet unbuilt upon, where the people of the quarter threw their waste and rubbish. This waste was never removed, and here dogs and cats came to scavenge; lean, wretched animals who would prowl at night and disturb those who slept with their thin hungry cries.
In the daytime children played on the rubbish heap; squatting on their behind they delved amongst the filth and sewage for hidden treasure, and often they would find odds and ends of food, half an apple thrown away or a crust of bread, cheese rind and peelings, and these they would thrust in their mouths with squeals of delight, relishing the joy of forbidden food.
Once he was able to walk, Julius found his way here too, and he would batter open the lids of old tins and thrust his little nose inside, working with his tongue round the edges to catch the last lingering taste of what had been, and then, scratching his body with one hand, he would glance slyly out of the corner of one eye to find the whereabouts of the nearest child, who might, if he were not careful, snatch the tin from his grasp.