I first encountered The Parasites in the Nottingham Library, summer of ’76. A fat, yellow Gollancz hardback wrapped in thick, cloudy polythene and date-stamped inside, it would have been one of six novels I borrowed that week from the tall Gothic building on Shakespeare Street. It was the summer I finished my O Levels—a long, parched scorching heatwave of a summer. Every day you thought it couldn’t get any hotter but it did. I was a tense, nail-chewing teenager who shunned boys and wrote “novels” in exercise books. To me that city library was a sanctuary, the safest place in all the world—and icy cool to boot.
I haunted it like a ghost. I knew its opening hours, where its toilet was, and which of its haughty librarians was most likely to let me lurk in peace. I learned to dodge its furthest aisles, where the tramps punctured the air with their snores and musty urine smells. Instead, breath held, I loitered in Fiction, fingering every single, grubby spine on those shelves as I looked—for what? A way into a secret world? Dispatches from the front line of personal experience—a place I had yet to get to myself?
Probably both. But most of all I remember searching for novels that might in any way touch on my pet obsessions: dance, writing, painting, theater, ghosts, Cornwall, sex—especially sex. I can see now that The Parasites—a strange, ambiguous love story set in a world of dark, Lutyens houses, Morny soap and brittle, fading theatrical glamour—would, in its sly way, have satisfied quite a few of these criteria.
I do know that I thought it was a very grown-up novel. Infinitely dark and sexy and weary—in the very most attractive sense of the word. Weary and worldly. Here was a world of cocktails and dinners, of matinées and debutante’s feathers, of virginities lost in Paris apartments. In fact the precise flavor of weary-worldliness I sensed lurking in those pages made me feel reckless, daring, chaotic—everything a romantic, provincial sixteen-year-old fantasized that grown-up life might one day be.
What I didn’t see then—probably because I was too wrapped up in my adolescent self to get it—was how mischievously comic a novel it is, how successfully and enjoyably it sends up the upper classes, actors, theatrical types, the rich by birth, the terminally self-absorbed. I think at that age I would have completely missed the savage and satirical anger that lies at its dark heart—a ferocious, sometimes surprising fury which keeps it bubbling, never lets it become glossy, camp or self-indulgent in the way that novels about theatricals and show business so often are.
But that’s not all. Another aspect struck me even more forcefully when I picked the novel up again, now, in 2005. I found myself moved and shocked by its central relationship and I experienced a sense of déjà vu I couldn’t shake off. What did it remind me of? Where had I come across this kind of bond before?
This is the story of a strange and powerful, quasi-incestuous love. Here are a girl and a boy who grow up as siblings but are not blood related—whose bond is intense, passionate, unstoppable. They understand each other intuitively, like twins, but the love itself is immature, hopeless and selfish, irresponsible even, leaving no room for others. It’s the story of two people who spend their whole lives both in thrall to and in denial of, this central passionate relationship—because however hard they try to pull apart, whatever other relationship (or marriage) each tries to forge, they always spring back together again, helpless. Who else does this remind you of? Doesn’t another English novel spring immediately to mind?
Of course there are many differences between Maria and Niall and Cathy and Heathcliff, but still I find the similarities curiously impossible to ignore. These are harsh and possessive loves, devastating at times. There is a darkness here that seems to blot out the possibility of any kind of future. Both Maria and Niall are perplexed to find that now and then they want to hit the other “very very hard.” Except to think it’s a relationship of violence is to misunderstand it—the hitting never happens. It’s about frustration, sexual and logistical: how else to get sufficiently inside each other’s skins? When Maria is on the stage, Niall can’t watch but has to leave, so closely and painfully does he identify with her terror. Maria is the only person who always knows what Niall is thinking—sometimes even before he does. And yet, just like Cathy and Heathcliff, Maria and Niall sometimes don’t seem separate enough to be able to form a normal, useful adult relationship. Indeed, if family servant Truda is Nellie Dean’s counterpart, then you can almost hear Maria declaring to her, “Truda, I am Niall!”
I also see more to link Brontë and du Maurier. Both authors use landscape to invoke passion—and libido. Both have an inherently and fascinatingly queasy relationship with their characters. Du Maurier apparently admitted that all three Delaneys were probably facets of her own personality—and she is certainly rare among women novelists in that she seems to inhabit her male characters at least as fully as her female ones and with absolute authenticity and ferocity. The same could certainly be said of Brontë. Not only that, but it’s undeniable to anyone who knows their work that a prime strength of both Brontë and du Maurier is their ability and willingness to imagine and mine the darkest reaches of the human mind, of passion and sexuality (the male and the female side) and of life and death. These are brave writers, unafraid to look over the edge into the abyss.
But there the similarities end, because there’s certainly no comedy in Wuthering Heights. And yet some of the most unsettling scenes in du Maurier’s novel are also its funniest. My favorite is the one where Maria, who has married the Hon. Charles Wyndham (for reasons very similar, by the way, to those that drive Cathy into a marriage with Edgar Linton) and given birth to a daughter, Caroline, finds herself left alone with that baby one afternoon. Spoiled, immature and inexperienced, she is quite unable to cope. Without even thinking twice about it, she calls Niall who, also without a thought, drops everything and comes running to help.
But it’s no good. Here are two children in charge of a child. When Caroline won’t stop crying they stop the car and, in desperation, ask a passing woman what they should do. Unsurprisingly, she gives them short shrift and threatens to call a policeman. They drive on. Maria remarks that she can see now why mothers leave their babies in shops. “They can’t stand the strain.” Only half joking, Niall suggests they leave Caroline in a shop. Both agree that no one would miss her. Eventually Maria has an idea and asks Niall to stop at Woolworths so she can buy a comforter. “You know, those awful rubber things that common babies have stuck in their mouths.”
They get the comforter and it works. Caroline stops crying.
“How easy it would be,” said Niall, “if every time one felt on edge one could just go to Woolworths and buy a comforter. There must be something psychological about it. I think I shall get one for myself. It’s probably what I’ve wanted all my life.”
It’s a laugh-out-loud scene—and rather novel and startling suddenly to be reading du Maurier on childcare and the oral comforting of babies—but it’s also a very damning one. Nowhere else in the novel is the parasitical nature of du Maurier’s protagonists better expressed. These are selfish creatures who are reluctant to fulfill anyone’s needs but their own. But take away the comedy and you begin to wonder, what does du Maurier herself feel about all of this? What does she want us to think, and whose side is she on anyway?
A tricky question because, more than anything, The Parasites is stylistically on the edge, an exercise in narrative sleight of hand. The clue lies in that very first sentence: “It was Charles who called us the parasites.” Called who? Well, the three Delaneys: Maria, Niall and Celia, obviously. But which Delaney is talking? You read on, expecting to have the question answered, to have it all made clear—and very quickly realize it’s impossible to tell.
Because this is a tale told by three people and therefore, in a sense, never really told by anyone. Just when you think you’re getting close, the invisible narrator swerves away and disappears. You can almost hear du Maurier laughing. And, though we spend time in the heads of all three Delaneys in turn, there is never a single moment when that bold, all-encompassing “We” turns into “I.” So who, ultimately, does the author sympathize with most? Brittle, fragile Maria? Dogged, lonely Niall? Unfulfilled, put-upon Celia? Whose skin is she in? And does it matter if we never find out? It’s a tribute to the complexity and breadth of this strange, unnerving novel that I’m still trying to decide.
Julie Myerson
London
January 2005