"If God is so wonderful..."

N'est-pas un interlude

In another scene in David Lodge's novel about Henry James (Author, Author!), George Du Maurier talks about his religious beliefs:

Du Maurier...had hardly any beliefs at all. "I think I was born a sceptic," he told Henry when they were seated one day on the Bench of Confidences. He had been brought up a Protestant, since his father was of Huguenot ancestry, and his mother's family Anglican, but their attitude to religion was more pragmatic than dogmatic. "My brother Eugene was baptised in a Catholic church to please an aristocratic friend of the family he was named for. I think they would have made him a Hindoo if it would have improved his prospects." Du Maurier laughed a little shamefacedly at his own joke. "No, that's not fair—they were Christians of a kind, but not devout. My father had a loathing for priests and pastors—'les corbeaux' he used to call them because of their black cassocks. He and Maman seldom went to church. They taught me to say my prayers—but even as a young boy I couldn't see the point of praying. If God was so wonderful, why did he need me to tell him so? And what was the point of asking him for favours, since if he existed he knew what I wanted already?" [p. 89]

Have things changed much?

Encore un autre interlude

In September 1893, the fictional Henry James portrayed in David Lodge's hugely entertaining novel Author, Author! stopped for dinner with his friend George Du Maurier at the Cod and Lobster Inn in Staithes on the east coast of England.

Perhaps the ale was unusually strong, for Du Maurier was particularly loquacious over the meal. He reverted to the subject of his dealings with Harper. It seemed that [his second novel] Trilby contained a passage of authorial polemic in favor of nudity, which the publishers wanted to cut out.

"I have a theory, you see, Henry, that if only our climate allowed it, we should be much happier going around without clothes. There is nothing inherently shameful or indecent about the human body."

"The weather in North Yorkshire certainly precludes the experiment," said Henry, as he cracked open a lobster claw. "But even in Samoa—where I understand from Louis Stevenson the natives make do with very little raiment—even there I don't think I would care to meet my friends in a state of nature. Most of us are simply not beautiful enough."

"Ah, but that's because we neglect our bodies. And we neglect them because we cover them up with layers of cloth—and in the case of women, distort their natural shapes with whalebone and bustles and lacing and suchlike. Now if we saw each other habitually in a state of nature, as you call it, as a matter of course, we should take pains to exercise and diet to make our bodies strong and healthy and attractive."

"What about those who are irredeemably ugly or misshapen?" Henry objected.

"They wouldn't reproduce, because nobody would marry them," said Du Maurier triumphantly, evidently seeing this as a knockdown argument. "By Darwin's law of natural selection we would—in the course of a few generations—eliminate ugliness from the human race. We would also get rid of all the sniggering smut and furtive lust that surrounds the mere mention of the human body in polite society, and corrupts relations between men and women." [pp. 190-191]

Ladies and gentlemen

N'est pas un interlude

In David Lodge's novel about Henry James (Author, Author!), the author recounts an anecdote told by James's friend George Du Maurier:

It was a fine but very cold Sunday just before Christmas, and Henry had made the effort to walk up to Hampstead and take Du Maurier for his constitutional on the Heath, according to custom. They were alone, apart from the terrier Don, who nosed about on the frost-hardened ground looking frustrated at the scarcity of interesting smells. It was too cold to sit on their favorite bench—cold enough for people to be skating on the ponds. Watching them, Du Maurier recalled an occasion long ago when a dog fell through the ice on the Whitestone Pond and got into difficulties, and he had plunged into the icy water to rescue the creature. "The grateful owner tried to tip me half-a-crown, upon which I'm afraid I was rather short with him. 'I beg your pardon,' he said, 'I didn't realize you were a gentleman.'" [pp. 143-144]

Men and women—gentlemen and ladies in their God-blessed freedom—should not require the promise of heaven (or the hope of avoiding hell) to do what is right.

The apparent benefit of embracing

Un interlude

George Du Maurier, the Punch illustrator (1865-1896), was a Frenchman who, like his younger friend Henry James, settled in England. As Henry James became a fictional character in Colm Tóibín's novel The Master, so he becomes again in David Lodge's novel Author, Author! Lodge describes James's friendship with Du Maurier, including James's frequent visits with Du Maurier's family:

[Du Maurier's children] were a good-looking and high-spirited brood. Beatrix, the eldest, was a real beauty, who had only just "come out" when Henry met her, and being squeezed into a broom cupboard with her during some boisterous game of Hide and Seek, pressed up against her sweet-smelling, gently yeilding form in the dark, had been one of the more remarkable sensations in his experience, and one which helped him to understand the ecstasy that lovers apparently derived from embracing. He watched with fascination as she opened like a flower to the warmth of a developing social life.

Du Maurier himself was brazenly prejudiced in favour of beautiful women. He kept two plaster models of the Venus de Milo in the house—one on the mantlepiece of the studio-living-room, and another on a pedestal at the angle of the staircase—as icons of his devotion to the ideal female form....