Tag: Daphne du Maurier

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Now on the Air: Charles Dickens, E. F. Benson, and Daphne du Maurier

Well, this is one for the minisodes generation: my weekend’s literary line-up, the CliffsNotes edition. Radio, like television and the movies, has often been accused of serving condensed milk from prize-winning cash cows grazing in the public domain, of chopping up the meat of literature into bite-sized morsels for ready consumption. There’s still plenty of that going on, even though far more than chopping and condensing is involved in the process of adaptation, an art of translation too often dismissed as mere hackwork.

I’ve been scanning the Radio Times for dramatic radio series now or soon playing on BBC Radio 4. As usual, I am woefully late to catch up. Since BBC radio programs are available online for seven days after their original broadcast, I’ve only got a few hours to take in the second and final instalment of the Classic Serial “Down and Out in Paris and London,” based on the autobiographical writings of George Orwell. I missed the first part; but the second one promises to take me to London in the 1920s, with a young Orwell as guide.

Also about to be removed from the archives are the first chapters of Mapp and Lucia, a serial based on E. F. Benson’s 1931 novel, which contains this peculiar exchange about mastering the difficulty of being hard of hearing:

“Mrs. Antrobus’s got a wonderful new apparatus. Not an ear-trumpet at all. She just bites on a small leather pad, and hears everything perfectly. Then she takes it out of her mouth and answers you, and puts it back again to listen.” 

“No!” said Lucia excitedly. “All wet?” 

“Quite dry. Just between her teeth. No wetter anyhow than a pen you put in your mouth, I assure you.”

Then there is Dickens Confidential, a series of six plays fictionalizing the life of the author in his “role of a campaigning newspaper editor.”

Upcoming this weekend is the first of a two-part adaptation of My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (whose “Birds,” migrated to the wireless, I observed here a while ago). The motion picture version of du Maurier’s 1951 thriller was subsequently soundstaged in the Lux Radio Theater and broadcast on 7 September 1953. The author’s 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. She is currently the subject of several radio documentaries in which the settings of her stories are revisited in today’s Cornwall (to which I devoted a few posts last year).

That’s what I’ve got earmarked for the weekend. Time now to trade in the gems of literature for the gams of Betty Grable, whose Pin Up Girl I’m screening tonight. “Don’t Carry Tales Out of School,” indeed.

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Up Frenchman’s Creek; or, How (Not) to Prepare for a Vacation

Well, I’ve been home barely twenty-four hours and already I am packing my suitcase again. After a weekend up north in Manchester, I’ll be off tomorrow on a weeklong trip down south to Cornwall. Instead of flicking through my travel guides this morning, I started reading Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. Now, there’s a description of scenery you wouldn’t get from your travel agent:

[There] was a lashing, pitiless rain that stung the windows of the coach, and it soaked into a hard and barren soil. No trees here, save one or two that stretched bare branches to the four winds, bent and twisted from centuries of storm, and so black were they by time and tempest that, even if spring did breathe on such a place, no buds would dare to come to leaf for fear the late frost should kill them. It was a scrubby land, without hedgerow or meadow; a country of stones, black heather, and stunted broom. 

There would never be a gentle season here. [. . .] 

Not much more hospitable is the seascape depicted in the opening chapter of du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek:

When the east wind blows up Helford river the shining waters become troubled and disturbed and the little waves beat angrily upon the sandy shores [. . .].

The long rollers of the Channel, travelling from beyond Lizard point, follow hard upon the steep seas at the river mouth, and mingling with the surge and wash of deep sea water comes the brown tide, swollen with the last rains and brackish from the mud, bearing upon its face dead twigs and straws, and strange forgotten things, leaves too early fallen, young birds, and the buds of flowers.

Perhaps reading du Maurier’s Cornish romances is not such an ideal way to get into the spirit of things, especially not when one is hoping for spring and renewal. At least their author was familiar with the locations described. Listening to the 10 February 1947 Lux Radio Theatre version of Frenchman’s Creek, I got no sense of the locale at all; nor, for that matter, much sense of the story. There was too little of it left to suggest the illicit passion of a married woman for a dashing pirate.

The radio version is not so much an adaptation of the novel, but of radio dramatist Talbot Jennings’s screenplay for Paramount’s 1944 technicolor production, which cleaned up du Maurier’s act in accordance with Hollywood’s production code. Mitchell Leisen’s film, of course, was not shot in Cornwall either, but in Jenner, California, which also stood in as Devon in The Uninvited, an old-fashioned ghost story featuring the novelty of a sun rising in the west.

I don’t suppose Alfred Hitchcock’s reworking of Jamaica Inn is any more useful as an introduction to Cornwall; I’ve always confused it with Under Capricorn, another one of Hitchcock’s misguided forays into period piece froufrou (although I confess having enjoyed his Waltzes from Vienna). And since there is little time to dip into the poetry of John Betjeman, I think I’d better get back to my travel guide after all—and finish packing. I will try to relate my impressions upon my return next Wednesday—provided I can find a radio drama angle.

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Avian Flu Threats and “The Birds” on the Wireless

“What’s on the wireless?” he said. “About the birds,” she said. “It’s not only here, it’s everywhere. In London, all over the country. Something has happened to the birds.”—Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds” (1952).

Lately I have been eyeing our bird feeder with considerable apprehension. Not because I am anticipating some sort of Tippi Hedren incident while taking care of my feathered charge, but because of the recent news about the deadly avian flu that has been spreading in the east. Some time ago, a UN health official warned that a pandemic “could happen at any time” and might “kill between 5 and 150 million people.” Today, the EU decided to “ban all Turkish live bird and feather imports,” after as many as sixty people had succumbed to the disease in Turkey and Romania. Should I banish the feeder from its prominent spot to some remote corner of the garden? Should I stop treating the local tits and finches to their daily allowance of choice peanuts? Back when Daphne du Maurier conjured up ornithological horrors with her short story “The Birds,” at least, the threat was posed by bills and beaks instead of bacteria.

Long before Alfred Hitchcock trained them for his big-screen spectacular, “The Birds” came to US radio in two noteworthy productions by the Lux Radio Theater (20 July 1953) and Escape (10 July 1954). Unlike Hitchcock’s thriller, both radio versions were remarkably faithful to du Maurier’s simple tale of (wo)man versus nature. The 1953 production, starring Herbert Marshall, was probably one of the most imaginatively soundstaged melodramas ever to be presented on the Lux program. The terror generated by an imaginary army of shrieking birds was a veritable tour de fowl in sound effects engineering. Even Marshall had to admit that he was “scarcely the star of the piece when you consider the gulls and the gannets. Villains that they were, they ran the whole show.”

The story of a family under attack in an avian air raid on a remote farmhouse was rendered more intense by the fact that the terrorized characters, like the listener at home, had only the radio to keep them updated to the minute about the world around them. In du Maurier’s “Birds,” tuning in became disquieting, the wireless a source of anxiety to a public dependent on and attuned to the comforting predictability of the precisely timed broadcast schedule:

. . . they’d been giving directions on the wireless.  People would be told what to do.  And now, in the midst of many problems, he realized that it was dance music only coming over the air.  Not Children’s Hour, as it should have been.  He glanced at the dial. Yes, they were on the Home Service all right.  Dance records.  He switched to the Light programme.  He knew the reason.  The usual programmes had been abandoned.  This only happened at exceptional times.  Elections, and such. . . .

At six o’clock the records ceased.  The time signal was given. . . .  Then the announcer spoke.  His voice was solemn, grave. . . .

“This is London,” he said, “A national Emergency was proclaimed at four o’clock this afternoon.  Measures are being taken to safeguard the lives and property of the population, but it must be understood that these are not easy to effect immediately, owing to the unforeseen and unparalleled nature of the present crisis. . . .  The population is asked to remain calm, and not to panic.  Owing to the exceptional nature of the emergency, there will be no further transmission from any broadcasting station until seven a.m. tomorrow.” 

They played the National Anthem.  Nothing more happened. . . .

Here, as in “The War of the Worlds” (the fictional account of a war won by airborne bacteria, no less), the silencing of the relied-upon media is even more alarming than the tumult and the shouting it carries into our homes. . . .