I have made a Discovery! if you are interested in du Maurier-Rebecca Discoveries, you may skip down to the big HOWEVER. it’s pretty far down. as you may know, I like to take my time about these things.
I rode in the back of a car that had a Private Detective in the front of it, once. I listened to him talk in endless lazy ellipses, in his honeyed baritone, about a terrible affair in Richmond he was happy to be well out of and a subpoena he was under, all told through his headset to a succession of Marcias and Tinas whose names all bore the heady bouquet of the ‘60s or ‘70s, where my Investigator seemed equally to hail from. Once he broke off a Detecting phone call to be courtly and well-mannered to me, and ask where I was from, and talk wisely of things as they were in the District half a century before I got there. Didn’t he seem too young, somehow, as a hale and hearty middle-aged man, to remember half what he claimed to remember? Oh but he seemed as old as the hills.
He was using the ride-hailing service as a cover, I think, although he drove me where I wanted to go as well as anyone ever has, while indicating to Marcia that there was nothing to be seen in these parts and he was just going to drop “this young lady” (that was me) somewhere before going back to reconnoiter some more. Six times— “SIX TIMES” — he had seen a certain car where it shouldn’t have been, or not seen it where it should have been. “I personally think something’s amiss,” he said. “Something’s up.”
All this while I was testing my own undercover powers to the fullest by staring hard at Diana Vreeland’s awful memoirs, which I was then reading, and trying not to let my ears twitch too hard. Looking blank is a lot of work for me, so I retained but little of Vreeland’s instructions for pouring a gill of perfume over your body each and every hour, as Napoleon’s valet did for him; I remember only threads of her shoe-polishing maxims (a rhinoceros horn is the right tool, she says, although personally, me, having ethics, I wouldn’t try that unless the horn were attached to a live and willing rhinoceros.) I would read a sentence, send my mind up to the front seat to listen in on an interchange about skip tracing, back and forth again.
You can’t twitch your ears at a real detective for long without thinking of Jacques Silette, who would I think nod approvingly at my driver’s matter-of-fact belief in his own senses, his perception that some undefinable thing is amiss; the atunement to mystery and the openness to chaos and chance inherent in driving strangers to strange places for a nominal sum.
Silette, being a fictional Frenchman of an old and obscure school, might even get along with my detective’s romantic paean to women’s observational skills: women, my detective said to Marcia or to Tina, notice things differently from “us”. If I have to consult with someone, he said, it’s got to be a woman, every time. He (that is my own detective still, not Silette) said to Tina, or to Marcia, that whether it be a question of documents, "diagrams...even IDEAS"—he said with wonder & vehemence—a woman is sure to Notice things. [1]
and do you know, he was right, I noticed every word he murmured low and secretively into his headset.
if I were a real detective I would notice more than that; I would find some occult correspondence between his guarded case discussions and vignettes within the very book I was simultaneously reading. Vignettes such as:
Vreeland tells of attaching three-inch ostrich-feather false eyelashes before visiting a silent and newly legless Cole Porter, to divert and drag him from the slough of despond (Porter refused amputation at the time of his dreadful accident, when it was first indicated, and lived in agonies for full fifteen years before giving in and giving up the leg; not a merely fearful or a pointlessly self-punishing decision, as it turned out that he kept his genius in his right leg and was never able to write another song without it.) Would you think of gluing ostrich feathers to your eyelids before such a visit? Would I? Would it work? Is this useful knowledge, to the intuitive detective?
—and then Vreeland tells of the grand old men of Buda-Pest before the war, who put kohl around their eyes and enhanced the hollows of their clean and shining faces, as the Rumanians did, Vreeland says: if you haven’t seen men of such vanished glamour with your open eyes, you may close them and gaze into the past at your leisure. This nonsense too I packed away into my brain attic. The idea is not to store away knowledge that may someday be of use, but to slowly relax the mind as one slackens the muscles when fading into sleep, and let the knowledge use you, let it attach itself to other knowledge like two magnets meeting, guide you where it wishes to go.
Something is like something else: this is the principle at the bottom of alchemy, of homeopathy, of literary criticism, of Detection; to be skilled at any of these swindler’s arts you must know as many Somethings as you possibly can, so that when you relax absolutely, the likenesses will swim to you without any conscious work on your part. One can never be a really great charlatan without mastering the art of Comparison. Noticing is the mother of Comparison, which is the mother of Persuasion: as Ouranos to Kronos to Zeus. Is that an analogy, or only a list? A great detective will know.
—NOW, as regards literature, real mysteries are best left alone. For the most part, not knowing is better than knowing: this is why I have never tried to be a real critic, one who has to answer to editors and have “arguments;” this is why I say we are best detectives when we follow a chain of associations like an old salmon going the wrong way down a salmon ladder, not fighting but letting the current carry her where it will.
In particular the mystery of the narrator’s first name in du Maurier’s REBECCA is no mystery at all: or I should say, it is a Mystery, but it is not a puzzle. You are not meant to know it, and you are not supposed to guess at it, either, although no harm done if you do; but you miss the point if you treat it as a guessing game. The only use of assigning a name is to make her easier to talk about, and that is why to me she will always be Tedward.
HOWEVER,
the mystery of what du Maurier would have called her, if she had been so foolish as to call her anything, is no mystery. it is solved; it is known. it is known to a couple of auction houses and book dealers, anyway, and therefore it is known to me, because I look around for these things, and what I look for, I find. I am about to murder the mystery for you. brace yourselves:
(“I am afraid that I have been asked this question many times and although I did not give her a first name in the book, it was my first thought to call her Gabrielle - her husband, if you remember, made a reference to a lovely and unusual name and she herself remarked that it was 'unusual to have it spelled correctly' […] As for Mrs. Danvers, I originally wanted to call her Agnes or Bridget…”)
now. You may say: But didn’t she, du Maurier, refuse to ever tell? Didn’t she actually say she never had ANY name in mind? didn’t she etc.—
to my knowledge, yes, she did. or rather no, she never did. If anybody reads this far down, one of you will probably know better than me what exactly she did say about it; she was, as she says in this 1966 letter, asked the question many times. Maybe she made up a new answer every time? Maybe the sphinx-like refusal to answer played well, and she stuck with it. I would have. If “Gabrielle” is a familiar answer to you, if this is no news at all to anybody, please write or comment to let me know AT ONCE, so that I can stop being so superior about all this.
At all events, ‘Gabrielle’ is the answer she gave to “Ian,” and I will tell you why I believe it:
in another of du Maurier’s novels, THE PROGRESS OF JULIUS, a sadistic and self-centered man (named Julius!) rises to power and by the time he is middle-aged, he is bored with his first wife, Rachel, and takes a sudden passionate interest in his hitherto ignored, now teenage daughter: headstrong, boyish, musical, very like him in all ways, imperious and commanding, and named: Gabriel. (No -le.)
Rachel, the R-wife, dies at her own hand, miserable at realizing herself the third, ignored point in this wretched and unwholesome triangle; and Julius strangles poor bright young Gabriel to death on a boat to teach her a lesson about not having boyfriends when your father is a psychopath.
it is, as you see, REBECCA exactly inverted, or disemboweled, or some kind of thing like that. the remarkable thing to me is that JULIUS was published first, and REBECCA later: so it is REBECCA that does the inverting of the women’s positions; the young, timid, meek one is turned into the pliant daughter-figure of the self-loving older man; the dead R-wife is given all the brash cruel vibrancy of the earlier book’s world-eating but doomed Gabriel. and as long as you’re rearranging plots and character types, names will naturally recur as well. but you must take them out before you finish the new book (as I, with my fifteen thousand Julias, well know.)
So: if she had a name, it would be Gabrielle, par nécessité pronounced “Gabriel,” like the boy Tedward miserably wishes to be for her awful husband. and this is why Tedward, as I still call her, is struck by Maxim’s correct instinct to spell it with the feminine ending, which nobody else does, because she pronounces it like the other name.
there, I have crushed the ambiguity of life for you. or rather, du Maurier has. But she does also acknowledge that it is “for you, the reader” to decide on all these things as they may suit you; and obviously this is true, the narrator’s name isn’t “really” anything. If she had meant the narrator to be known to you and thought of by you as Gabrielle, she would have written it down in the book. This letter means nothing! Tedward she is, and Tedward she will always be.
(did you know Maxim was originally called Henry in drafts? terrible, terrible)
Why am I not getting into the Danvers revelations? oh I can’t stand it. “Agnes,” I mean “Bridget,” I mean. Come on now. Her first name is MRS. and there’s an end to it.
[1] I will say too that this idea of his—which you may scorn as sexist, because it is—was charmingly progressive in his expression of it. that is, progressive if you contrast it with the traditional kind of detective-story lore about women and our power of Noticing. Writers used to say that a lot, but they traditionally meant only that women notice other women’s clothing and know what colors and emotions are properly called. A man, now, a man knows about gun horsepower and car caliber, he knows how to put a hair across a doorframe to see if an intruder has been, he knows how to peep in at the windows across the way with his opera spectacles, he knows how to drink bad bourbon even if better is available; he knows plenty of things. But if you need a witness with the fine-tuned vocabulary to recognize to you “melancholy, “aubergine,” “discontent,” “basque;” “bias-cut;” “greige;” “abjection”— this was the professional jargon of the woman in such stories.
and so my detective had gone well beyond these stereotypes into new weird ones all his own. don’t think badly of him, please
[note: the image at the top is the heavily cropped cover of Anne Maybury’s I AM GABRIELLA! Image chosen for the book’s title; no relation to Tedward. as far as I know.]