Mine’s a Double, or What’s in a Name?

February’s book group choice was The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, written and set in the 1950’s. John, a lonely and depressed English academic, is on holiday in France (he is fluent in French and teaches French history), when he meets a man who is his double in appearance and voice. The two have dinner together, John’s new acquaintance drugs him, and steals his identity. John awakes the following afternoon, mistaken for his doppelganger, the Comte Jean de Gué, a rakish and decadent aristocrat whose family and business have degenerated, largely through the fault of the Comte. John fills the place of the Comte and might be said to turn round both the business and the family in the short space of a week. There are too many threads of plot running through the book to summarise here, but it is an interesting take on the doppelganger story, and one of the points the reader draws from it is that neither character is justified in his discontent. Both have much to be thankful for.

Mind you, if you are depressed, it is of no help whatever to be told that others are less fortunate than you. If you have fallen off a boat into deep water, there is no comfort in the knowledge that others have fallen into deeper. Anyway, the book is a fascinating one, with descriptions of an old French family and its family business in decline which have a very strong ring of truth. The book’s theme of identity is a recurrent one with Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and The Flight of the Falcon.

Daphne du Maurier was an impressive woman and a brilliant writer. In the middle years of the twentieth century, she produced an enviable body of fictional work. Her short stories in particular are extremely impressive, and it is difficult to think of her without thinking of The Birds, and Don’t Look Now, which were both made into powerful and highly influential films. The first was directed with consummate skill by Hitchcock, of course, and clearly influenced the next generation of film-makers. John Carpenter’s The Fog definitely owes much to The Birds. Don’t Look Now is a story of deeply moving grief and stomach-turning terror. The film was directed by Nicolas Roeg, and although it is terrific piece of film-making and sticks to the original narrative, the written story is even more frightening than the movie.

Posthumous theories abound as to du Maurier’s private life: she was a grumpy recluse; she was a sex addict; she was a lesbian; she was both a lesbian and a sex addict… What is clear is that in a man’s world, she was her own person, a writer with a distinctive voice, and a formidable character.

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The theme of identical characters and mistaken identity has a long history in literature. In Dopey Dawson’s Latin classes at school, I remember us reading some of the farces of Plautus and at least one of them had a storyline involving identical twins being continually mistaken for one another. There is a lot of this sort of thing in Shakespeare too. Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, an eighteenth century Commedia dell’Arte farce, had what was at the time a highly innovative variation on the theme of doubles. A woman disguises herself as her dead brother, and a servant does indeed work for two rival Venetian bourgeois at the same time. The twenty-first century theatre blockbuster One Man, Two Guvnors, is an adaptation of this.

There is a darker side to the doppelganger theme, in which the hero has an evil double, often turning out to be the hero himself. One would obviously think of Jekyll and Hyde, but there is an earlier Scottish variation on the theme, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg. This story explores the issue of predestination, and the notion that if you are one of those chosen for salvation, you can do what you like. The book is unsettling, unwholesome and arguably perverted, but has considerable power. It reminds me of what JB Priestley said about JM Barrie: ‘Like all good Scots writers, and unlike all the English, he was haunted by the devil.’

I think much of the literature involving doubles and mistaken identity relates to the authors’ perceptions that we are not homogeneous entities. Put at its most simple, we can be good one day and bad the next, or astute on Monday and naïve on Tuesday. And not just in doppelganger stories either. It occurred to me a few years ago that perhaps Charlotte Brontë saw the clear-thinking Jane Eyre and the mad woman upstairs, Bertha Rochester, as two sides of the same coin. I’m sure that thought didn’t originate with me, however.

Incidentally, my old pal from Cowdenbeath, Harry Campbell, had a doppelganger in the neighbouring town of Dunfermline in the 1970’s. Friends would say to Harry that they had seen him last night in the Belleville Hotel or the East Port Bar and he had not so much as acknowledged them. Harry would protest that he had an alibi, but this was met with scepticism. Actually, I once saw Harry’s doppelganger in the Cartwheel, a Dunfermline boozer which is now called Tappie Toories, whatever the hell that means. He did bear a striking resemblance, but was by no means identical, to Harry. If anything, he looked more like Harry’s younger brother Paul. So there you are.

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To make up for the fact that there are no jokes above, let me tell you a story on the theme of What’s in a Name. Do you know the Scots word totie, meaning tiny? Some years ago, my sister had a partner called Shorty, a lovely chap whose nickname derives from his full name, Alan Short, nothing to do with being of short stature, which he isn’t. Anyway, shortly after Marian and Shorty became an item, my late mother (she wasn’t late at that time) said to me, ‘Do you know, when I met him, I was expecting him to be a wee totie man.’