What follows is an account of some odd coincidences between Nabokov’s and George du Maurier’s novels. Some similarities are so striking that it could be that Nabokov knew du Maurier's work and borrowed from it. It seems however that these are only coincidences, which do not have subtextual significance for Nabokov's novels.
Trilby
In Pale Fire Kinbote hopes that the “trilby,” the hat Gradus lost on his way to kill the Zemblan king, will be found and help to trace the assassin’s tracks. Du Maurier’s heroine, Trilby, is a Parisian artist model who “becomes an international singing wonder under the hypnotic spell of her mentor, the evil genius Svengali” (Johnson, “Ada’s ‘Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre,’” Nabokov at the Limits. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999, [3-20]14. Johnson mentions two instances in du Maurier’s novel Trilby [1895] that coincide, probably fortuitous, with some features of Nabokov’s Ada).
When Svengali dies the spell is broken, Trilby refuses to sing anymore, and she soon expires. Trilby sold so well that it was thought of as “the best-selling novel ever” (David Lodge, Author, Author. A Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, 326). It was dramatized by Herbert Beerbohm and the hat of the actor playing Trilby’s admirer, a soft felt hat with indented crown, was immediately dubbed “trilby.”
The name Trilby is used for the first time in Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail (Trilby, the Fairy of Argyle) by Charles Nodier, a “follower of Lord Byron” according to Nabokov (Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin. Princeton: PUP, 1975, 3, 287). Pushkin mentions Nodier’s romance Jean Sbogar as one of the books that disturb Tatiana in her sleep. In the introduction to his Trilby Nodier mentions the novels of Walter Scott as his source of inspiration, but none of Scott’s 2836 characters is called “Trilby.” Despite the fact that Nodier’s Trilby is a male imp, the name is used by du Maurier for his most attractive young heroine. She is of Scottish origin and her “astonishingly beautiful feet ... a true inspiration of shape and color ... innocent young pink and white,” are as much bewitching as the feet of Russian beauties that haunt Pushkin’s stanzas I, XXX- XXXIV (Trilby. London: Pan Books, 15).
Lolita
A few years before Trilby, du Maurier published his first novel, Peter Ibbetson, a novel shaped as a memoir by the eponymous hero. Like Humbert Humbert, Peter writes the story of his life while imprisoned for murder (in a “Criminal Lunatic Asylum”; Humbert was a captive of a “psychopathic ward” [Peter Ibbetson. London: James R. Osgood & McIlvaine, 1892, 1; Lolita 308]). It is, however, not Peter Ibbetson but Trilby that closely resembles Lolita: both novels tell the story of an eloquent villain who exploits his protégée. The likeness increases when one learns that Trilby appears to have an autobiographical original: in du Maurier’s student years he and a friend used to hypnotize “a pretty 17-year-old girl’ with intent to abuse her “good graces” (Piers Dudgeon, Captivated. J. M. Barrie, Daphne du Maurier & The Dark Side of Neverland. London: Vintage, 2009, 51-2). The oppression of Trilby is effected by hypnosis and in this respect du Maurier’s novel differs from Lolita, although Humbert Humbert, who had “two hypnotic eyes,” toyed with other pseudonyms like “Mesmer Mesmer” (3; 308. Gradus, who donned the trilby hat, also possesses a “mesmeric organ of vision” [277]).
Ecstasies
Peter Ibbetson has been so happy in his childhood that, when an adult, he wishes to return to the past, and see whether it has more (“etiolated by disuse”) in store for him than the past he knew (200). This he achieves by “dreaming true,” a sort of “trick of [his] own brain,” which enables him to enter a “transcendental life once more – a very ecstasy of remembrance made actual” (184; 177; 201). Piers Dudgeon has discussed in some detail du Maurier’s trances, induced by mesmerism, and calls these ecstasies “peak experiences” (54). Ecstasy is, according to John Ferguson, “a state of temporal mental alienation, associated with a feeling of timelessness” (An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mysticism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976, 51). Such an experience is described by Nabokov in Speak, Memory, when he recalls his childhood explorations “around 1910” of the marshland beyond the Vyra park, which end with some sort of vision of Longs Peak (a high mountain in the Rocky Mountains, visited by Nabokov in 1947): “I confess I do not believe in time. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, ...” (137; 139). Nabokov presents three of such elevated raptures in his autobiography, at the end of chapters three, six and ten. Ecstasies can be aroused in many ways as for example by intense religious emotions, by poetic contemplation, nature, “a work of fiction” and even by epilepsy (“On a Book Entitled Lolita,”Lolita 314. (For epilepsy see Lectures on Russian Literature [London: Picador, 1983] 107). In Speak, Memory,, as in Peter Ibbetson the ecstasies discussed are all associated with recollections from early childhood.
Wheelbarrows
Like “Pale Fire,” the poem, the main story told in Peter Ibbetson is edited after the death of its authors (by Kinbote and Peter’s cousin respectively). Shade’s poem and Peter’s memoir remain unfinished due to their sudden death. The very last image Shade and Peter record is that of a wheelbarrow. Shade sees the wheelbarrow in his line 999, while Peter’s last act is the sketching of a “small boy wheeling a toy wheelbarrow” (380). In both novels the wheelbarrow carries the promise of an “eternal afterlife,” a “lá-bas” (Peter Ibbetson 189, 357) or, in John Shade’s phrases, the “eternity” or “Life Everlasting” (Pale Fire 53, 62). This expectation is most explicitly related in Peter Ibbetson. At the age of five, Peter moves with his parents from “a dingy house” in London to a suburb of Paris to a house with a superb garden (8). The very first day he spends in this park becomes “the happiest day of all [his] outer life” because he finds “a small toy wheelbarrow” in an old shed, which affords him unparalleled pleasure, “the extremity of [...] bliss” (11). The next day, however, “though the weather was as fine,” and the wheelbarrow was there, his “rapture was not to be caught again” (11-12). He then “discover[s]” that a “fourth dimension is required” to turn his “earthly bliss” into an everlasting one. It is after many years that he regains his “unspeakable elation” by means of his hypnotic dreams, and it is during his first ecstasy that he is reminded of his “wheelbarrow” (189). John Shade is eleven when, while watching a “toy” “wheelbarrow,” “a sudden sunburst” in his head (“a mild form of epilepsy” according to Kinbote) transports him into a “sublime” existence where “space and time” have lost their habitual meaning (38, 147). (The “attack” or “fit” Shade had in the Crashaw Club brings him also in a “trance” [58].)
Even more specific a connection is that in the two novels the wheelbarrow episodes are presented in a Virgilian context. Peter says that “he happiest day” of his life when he found the wheelbarrow, was “never to be reached by me on this side of the ivory gate” (11; 13). In Virgil’s Aeneid the “ivory gate” separates earthly life from eternal life (trans. C. Day Lewis. Oxford: OUP, 1986, 187). And Shade’s view of the wheelbarrow during the last minutes of his life belongs to a setting that corresponds in most of its details with the description Virgil gives of Aeneas entering the world where the souls of the dead abide (see my “Pale Fire’s ‘The Land Beyond the Veil’ and The Aeneid’s ‘The Land Which Earth Conceals’” The Nabokovian 72 [2014] 4-11). The emblematic and semantic meaning of Shade’s wheelbarrow agrees with the du Maurier drawing that adorns the hard cover of the first edition of Peter Ibbetson: the moving of a wheelbarrow along a gate with opened railings, the first one named “Passé,” the second one “Avenir” which denotes here the afterlife.
Conclusion
The du Maurier novels discussed here are highly allusive: numerous names of authors, artists and composers are mentioned, often with special reference to their individual works. The first quotation in Peter Ibbetson comes from Chateaubriand: “Combien j’ai douce souvenance/ Du joli lieu de ma naissance” the opening lines of a poem in his Le dernier Abercénage, the very poem that provided Nabokov “one of the leitmotivs” of Ada (Peter Ibbetson 7; Ada 596). Notwithstanding these erudite interruptions the stories by du Maurier are told with so much ease that their composition seems unpremeditated. (See also David Lodge whose novel’s principal, Henry James finds du Maurier’s narrative style “was not written very well” and notices “authorial insouciances” in some of the passages in Trilby [222-225].) The contrast with Nabokov’s extremely soigné prose in which everything fits as in an intarsia, cannot be greater.
The inferior quality of a novel was no reason for Nabokov not to borrow from it, as he says that “you may derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at things” than the author of “second-rate” books does (Lectures on Russian Literature 105).
The coincidences are quite pertinent ones. Dieter Zimmer suggests three features – “similarity, specificity, substantiality” - to assess whether similarities are chance coincidences or rather intended correspondences: are the coincidences similar in a meaningful way; is the similarity marked with some specificity; has the coincidence some importance within the story? (“The Lichberg Myth” www.d-e-zimmer.de ). The incidents of the wheelbarrow in the novels mentioned, meet these criteria amply. It seems however unlikely that these coincidences, if they are actually borrowings, imply more than a superficial connection.
I gratefully acknowledge the suggestions I have received from Priscilla Meyer to improve the earlier version of this note.
--Gerard de Vries, Voorschoten