Don't Look Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is a long short story (some 60 pages), originally published in 1970, thirty-two years after the publication of our previous selection, Rebecca, which speaks to Ms. Du Maurier’s long career. It was first published in Great Britain under a different title, Not After Midnight. The edition I’m reading is a short story collection of Ms. Du Maurier’s work entitled Don’t Look Now, published by The New York Review of Books. A famous film version was adapted from the story by Nicholas Roeg. (Highly recommended).

To begin, I’d like to note again that Ms. Du Maurier has often been dismissed by the literary establishment who regarded her work as “atmospheric, feminine romance that was escapist rather than artistic.” She has been condemned for writing romances and simple horror stories. As I’ve said, I think some of this animosity is due to the way her writing was marketed and some of it due to sexism. Another possibility is that Ms. Du Maurier had early success as a writer and was wealthy; in a sense, her life was easy compared to other writers who had to contend with poverty and neglect of their work. Perhaps there was some jealousy toward Ms. Du Maurier. While her peers experimented with innovative writing techniques, like stream-of-consciousness and an emphasis on war and poverty, her writing remained more conventional.

As was true with Rebecca, Don’t Look Now seems to have been written without reference to real historic or cultural events. We might suspect that a story written in 1970 would mention the women’s movement, the war in Vietnam, or the powerful social changes that began in the 1960’s, but it does not. In fact, there is a lack of referents that would place the story in any particular time period. It could occur in the 60s; it could occur in the thirties. (As it mentions cars and planes, it couldn’t be much earlier).

Don’t Look Now unfolds over a twenty-four-hour period. It is written in close third-person narration strictly through the perspective of John, who is on vacation in Venice with his wife, Laura. The couple has just suffered a major loss; their young daughter, who died of illness. They have a son who is in boarding school in England and who will play an important part in the story.

The first scene shows the couple having lunch in a restaurant. Here is the first line: “Don’t look now,” John said to his wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotize me.”

This beginning captures a central theme of the story—others gaining undue influence over oneself and one’s loved ones through unconventional measures. Here, though, in the first line, the theme is introduced as a joke. John and Laura see two elderly ladies sitting nearby who seem to be watching them and they—John and Laura—hide any discomfort by joking. We the readers have access to John’s internal thinking. He is concerned about his wife and glad she is joking; he hopes the vacation is good for her. It is not till well into this scene that we learn the reason: “The holiday could yet turn into the cure she needed, blotting out, if only temporarily, the numb despair that had seized her since the child died.”

John’s own grief at the death of his young daughter seems to be denied and expressed through his focus on his wife. In a flashback, John remembers how the doctor told him, rather patronizingly, that Laura would get over the loss, that they had another child, a son named Johnnie, and that they might have other children. John, reflecting on this memory thinks, “So easy to talk…how replace the life of a loved lost child with a dream!” thereby showing some of his own despair, a despair which he usually projects onto his wife.

The story’s inciting incident occurs when one of the old women (who are twin sisters) tells Laura that her sister is psychic and blind and can see Laura’s deceased daughter sitting with she and John. The girl, or ghost, is worried that something bad is going to happen to them. Laura tells John this, and he is horrified, thinking that the old women have preyed on his wife’s grief. But Laura seems happier.

That night, after a pleasant afternoon of site-seeing and lovemaking (!), John and Laura receive a call from their son’s boarding school saying that he is ill and may require surgery. Due to complexities that defy description, the couple agrees that Laura will return to England the next morning.

In the morning, John drops his wife off at the airport and returns to Venice to check out of their hotel, intending to drive their car home. But as he returns to the airport where the car is, he sees his wife in a boat along with the two sisters, headed back toward the city.

“Then he saw her, Laura, in her scarlet coat, the twin sisters by her side…He stared, astounded, too astonished to shout…”

John can think of no reason why Laura would return from the airport and be accompanied by the sisters. Later in the story, we learn that at the time he “saw” her in Venice, Laura was on a plane headed to England.

This incident is one of several in the book that could be called, well, spooky. The realists among us might say, “my dear, it was simply a sort of hallucination experienced by someone under stress.”

I believe it’s more accurate to say that a prime rule of the story is that supernatural things can occur without explanation. The story describes a protagonist who is experiencing events which cannot be easily explained in scientific terms—however, the story merely shows this; it does not make meaning of it. It does not say, Oh, supernatural events are real. Spooky premonitions, visions, and ghosts are real. The story just presents these phenomena, leaving it to the reader to explain them.

So, the first example of this, and the first cue to the reader that this will be a story about “spooky” things, is when the sisters tell Laura that her dead daughter is sitting with her and that the ghost is concerned that something bad will happen to her parents. Now, I don’t happen to believe that the dead persist and that certain individuals have the sensitivity to “see” them. However, I can suspend this judgement and be intrigued (or seduced, to use Ross Chamber’s terminology) by the story.

Is Don’t Look Back a ghost story? I don’t know, best B. The ghost of their daughter is never presented as anything but something the blind sister “sees,” and this sister’s reliability is repeatedly called into question. John believes she is trying to manipulate a grieving Laura. There is never a sense of the ghost haunting John and Laura in a frightening way. Frightening things do occur—and we’ll get to that—but they are not presented as spookiness.

Let’s stop there and resume next time.

Till then.

#Don'tLookNow #DaphneDuMaurier #AlanBray