Daphne Du Maurier, page 49
Menabilly, the house Daphne rented for twenty-five years and restored, which was the inspiration for several of her novels.
Daphne with her three children, Kits, Flavia and Tessa, c. 1943
Daphne teaching her daughters (Flavia, centre, and Tessa) in the nursery at Menabilly during the war. Kits is on the rocking horse.
In the afternoons, when she’d finished her morning’s writing, Daphne liked to take her children, Kits, Flavia and Tessa, for walks through the Menabilly woods.
Ellen Doubleday (wife of Daphne’s American publisher) who was the inspiration for September Tide and My Cousin Rachel.
Daphne c. 1949, working in the garden hut she had had erected in the grounds of Menabilly. (Note the dictionary, of which she was in frequent need.)
Gertrude Lawrence, whose talent for enjoyment endeared her to Daphne – she relaxed with her as she did with no one else.
Daphne at a Doubleday party in America, entering into the spirit of things.
Daphne with Frank Price, who worked for Doubleday, and with whom she had a strange friendship.
Daphne looking apprehensive on board Jeanne d’Arc in 1959 with her husband who tended to be dictatorial when sailing.
Daphne and Tommy walking down the lawn at Menabilly.
Kits at the wheel of his first car with his mother (who in 1939 gave up driving for almost 30 years).
Daphne with Tessa on her left and Flavia.
Olive White, Miss Eire 1961, who married Kits Browning (inset with her a few years later) in 1964.
Daphne playing cricket with her grandson Rupert outside Menabilly. As a child she had loved to play, when she pretended to be ‘Eric Avon’.
Daphne in 1946, walking up from Pridmouth beach with her children.
The same scene, 30 years on, with Kits and his family.
Daphne on the rocks below Kilmarth in the ’70s, wearing the clothes and cap which became almost a uniform.
Daphne 3 years before her death, suddenly fragile and wistful.
Afterword
Daphne Du Maurier’s children warned me, when I began this biography, that I would find their mother ‘a chameleon’, an opinion constantly repeated by those who knew her well. Everyone described to me how, the moment she met new people, she would try and adapt to them.
This desire, and willingness, to adapt herself to others is to a considerable extent reflected in her letters. The tone changes, sometimes quite dramatically, according to the recipient, even when she is imparting the same information or relating the same anecdotes. She liked to make each correspondent seem especially favoured and drew them into a little conspiracy against everyone else. Not a single member of her family or any of her closest friends was safe from caustic comments and ridicule. She gave people what she thought they wanted and was untroubled by the idea that this might amount to calculated double-dealing and hypocrisy.
Yet she emerges from her letters as more consistent in her attitudes and opinions than this description might suggest. Her outward behaviour might vary but her inner self remained the same. Often, she felt she was outside her bodily self, describing how she looked down from above and saw herself laughing and chatting in a way her inner self found quite extraordinary. Her whole life seemed to her an act, except when she was totally alone.
This was why writing was so important to her. The gap between reality and fantasy was often narrow, and when the two became confused so did she. In the case of Ellen Doubleday, fantasy came to take over at times and brought Daphne nearer to that schizophrenic state she feared. What was going on in her head spilled over into her life and she could, and did, cast real people as the creatures of her fantasies. Then she wrote about them.
Only once in her life did this work the other way. Gertrude Lawrence began as a fantasy creature in September Tide and then stepped from Daphne’s fantasy into her life. Daphne found that when she was with Gertie she did not need fantasies because, for a very short while, Gertie fulfilled them. She could be her inner self with Gertie as she could with no one else, however much she loved them. She found that ‘something’ for which she had been searching as a child. When Gertie died, she lost it forever.
This ‘something’ was undoubtedly partly sexual. As she admitted to Ellen, her relationship with Gertie became physical and this made a difference. But she was ambivalent, even then, about her own sexuality. The fury she felt at being thought a lesbian was because she truly did not see herself as such: she thought of herself as ‘a half-breed’, attracted to both men and women, as she told Frank Price, bisexual himself.
In many ways, she reflected the sexual judgements of her era. During the twenties and thirties, when she was growing up, women who were lesbians were thought of as women who should have been born men. If two women were in a lesbian relationship there was always speculation from outsiders as to ‘who plays the man’. Today a lesbian would define her sexuality differently; a man is precisely what she would not wish to be. A lesbian is now simply a woman who loves women, and to whom intimacy with a man is abhorrent.
How abhorrent it was to Daphne is difficult to judge. All her pronouncements on this subject were made in late middle and old age. But there is some evidence that she disliked the final consummation of the heterosexual act. What she preferred was ‘spinning’ which, put plainly, meant foreplay. After the death of Gertrude Lawrence sex and ‘spinning’ both stopped. The significance for her work was immense: post-1952, after Gertrude Lawrence died, fantasies took over as a substitute for life, and the fantasies themselves revealed deep emotional disturbance.
What was distressing for her children was to discover, as a result of letters to Ellen Doubleday (made available after this biography was originally completed), that their mother had not told them the truth about Gertrude Lawrence. She spoke freely to them, when they were adults, about Christopher Puxley, but never explained her devastation when Gertie died. So far as they could judge, her attitude to homosexuality was tolerant but, at the same time, she did not approve of it. Told that some man she admired was gay, she would say regretfully, ‘Oh, he isn’t is he?’
This attitude sprang from her father’s detestation of homosexuality. Daphne could never have admitted to him any ‘Venetian tendencies’, which made denying and concealing them vitally important. Gerald, in his poem to her, told Daphne she should indeed have been a boy. If he hated homosexuality, where did that leave a girl who knew she had ‘Venetian tendencies’? Condemned, more than most, to subterfuge.
The success with which Daphne maintained this subterfuge was striking. To her children, she was a mother who seemed happy and content. The revelation that she was so tortured for much of her life has been a shock. They cannot quite believe in such deception and are tempted to wonder if perhaps this is another instance of fantasy, that perhaps their mother was merely inventing and dramatizing, and none of this inner life need be taken seriously.
I think it should be taken very seriously indeed. The controlling of her ‘No. 2’ persona, of the boy-in-the-box, was no fantasy. Daphne battled with it all her life and the result is seen in her work. It may have tortured her to feel she was two distinct people, but it also fuelled her creative powers: without ‘No. 2’, that boy-in-the-box, there would have been nothing. In the letter she wrote in 1957 to Maureen Baker-Munton, which is printed in full in the Appendix following, Daphne herself stresses how her work gave her release from thoughts, images and ideas which disturbed her. Her great fear, she acknowledges, was ‘a fear of reality’. Her whole life’s work was an attempt to defy reality and create for herself a world far more exciting and true than the one in which she lived. We have her own word for it that when her ability to do this left her, and reality at last confronted her, her life was not worth living; the death of the writer was indeed the death of the self.
Appendix
This letter has been quoted from in the text but is of such significance that I feel it should be made fully available.
It is to be remembered that it was written shortly after Daphne’s husband, referred to as ‘Moper’, had had a nervous breakdown and while Daphne herself was in a state of shock and struggling to avert her own breakdown.
Mena.
July 4th, 1957
Dearest Maureen,
I would have written before, but have been going through such a turmoil of psychological politics since the weekend, and trying to get at the understanding of all these troubles that I have not been able to write to anyone, or pay a bill, or do damn all, except swim to keep the health stable, and sit with Gran to keep the mind stable. First, I do thank you from the bottom of my heart and Bimfn1 too, for being such bricks of friends to go up and cope as you did, and to start to help unravelling the knot. It was like being faced with a great jigsaw puzzle, or a pack of cards, and trying to fit the right bits into the right squares, and get the suits of cards straight. I think if we, every one of us, have patience – and watch our dreams (!) – and apply the dreams to the waking day, the business will get straight and everyone will be the better and the more understanding for the blow-up of the boiler. I did what you advised, and did rather an Oxford Groupy sort of thing, and wrote a great long letter to Moper,fn2 saying how to blame I had been for so much of his unhappiness during the past years, and came clean about the Puxley man, and then tried to explain in easy language for him to grasp how my obsessions – you can only call them that – for poor old Ellen D and Gertrude – were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality. This fear of reality came to the fore twice, once with the horror of going into the witness-box for that Rebecca case, and the fear mainly because I had written Rebecca about my feelings of jealousy re him and Jan Ricardo, and I was so terrified of that coming up in the Box and making publicity that I was nearly off my rocker. I did, I am sure, break down in Ellen’s house once the case was over (though if you remember, its outcome was still undecided), but because I wanted someone to understand and to love at that moment, I turned bang to Ellen, who was suddenly a symbol for the terrific reliance and love I had had as a kid of 18 for that French Ferdie [sic] person. (For the understanding of that relationship, read again The Parasites, and Bing’sfn3 three inner selves, Maria, Niall, Celia, were the three people I know myself to have been. Niall, the boy, was the one who turned to Ferdie, and later to Ellen and Gertrude.)
So, during all those years from ’47 to ’52, I was neglecting Moper because I was trying to work out the problem of Niall. I had let him swim out to sea once, but the book did not say if he was drowned, and I did not know either. He was not drowned. He came to life again as Philip Ashley in My Cousin Rachel, and here I was identifying myself with my boyish love for my father, and my boyish affection for old Nelson Doubleday, and suddenly was overwhelmed with an obsessional passion for the last of Daddy’s actress loves – Gertrude – and the wife of Nelson, Ellen.fn4 They merged to make the single figure of Rachel, and I did not know if this figure was killing me or not, or if it had killed my father and Nelson. The symbol behind the living woman can either be the Healer, or the Destroyer. In the book I killed both, and Philip Ashley was left to his solitude in his Mena. The only thing to do was then to write out the many problems in yet a different way, and the short stories were written. Monte Verita is myself and Moper, and myself going to the mountains to learn the truth, and Moper waiting for me, and finally dying without ever having learnt that the person who had gone to the mountains had not the perfect beauty of mind and body he wanted in his wife, but had a leprous face (learning the truth can give a person the appearance of disease, and leprosy can eat away the body and the mind. If you try to reach the gods you can destroy the body – leprosy).
The Old Man was Moper’s jealousy of Boo,fn5 and his unconscious wish to destroy him. In the end he kills his son, and possesses his mate again. But that is not the whole significance of the story. The real significance is that Moper must not kill his own begotten son, but kill the petty jealous self which is his hidden nature, and so rise again. This is the truth behind Christianity, and all the religions.
All those stories have inner significance for problems of that time. The Apple Tree is what that Puxley person went through with his wife, though she did not die. Kiss Me Again, Stranger, is the warning I had about poor Gertrude’s death. And so on, and so on.
Then we get this urge to go to Greece by me, and I would think it chimed in with Moper’s first urge towards—.fn6 (Me in the meantime having done Mary Anne, once again a try-out of the basic problem. Here, I and Gertrude, identify ourselves together, although I am the centre character which she could have acted. I found, on research, that Mary Anne’s life could have been mine in reverse. Married to a drunkard (Puxley) and then meeting the C-in-C Duke of York (Moper), etc, etc. But in that life Mary Anne ruins the Duke, and gets him to resign from being C-in-C by witnessing against him in the House of Commons. Tie-up here once more. I could have witnessed against Moper in the Case in America, but did not. End, they parted resentful and hating each other, he died full of dropsey never having really achieved the top, and she ended in France, with her children married and bored with her. Not our answer!)
And so to Greece. My fearful urge to consult the Delphi oracle, that has not given answers for two thousand years! Went to Delphi, but of course no answer, only the Greek words over the temple door ‘Know Thyself’. For the past four years have been trying to do this! Read every Greek thing under the sun, and found, to my great interest, that the original Daphne had two myths. First myth was that, afraid of men, she was chased by Apollo and to save herself from waxing,fn7 called to her father – a river god – to turn her into a tree. Could be my story. Daddy-complex, and don’t forget that the tree of life in Norse mythology is Ygdrasil!fn8
Second myth: Daphne not a nymph, but a priestess of the original oracle which was held by Gee, the Earth Mother. (Gee. Odd, this.) To save the oracle – matriarchal and devoted to goddess worship – from being seized by a man and turned over to patriarch society, she called on Gee, the Earth goddess, to turn her into a laurel. Another tree. And after that, the oracle was held by Apollo and by Gee, and worshipped by the devotees of each until patriarchal society overwhelmed the matriarchal society, Gee was suppressed and forgotten, and finally, as history tells us, even the wise Know Thyself Apollo was chucked for later religions.
OK. This established. I knew I had to write something, nothing to do with Greece. But if I waited, just as Daphne, the priestess, waited until she was in a trance and the goddess prophesised [sic] through her, something would emerge. In the meanwhile, the torments of hell because I felt no one I had ever loved was real (except the family). In other words, the tribe, the original social group were real, nobody else. Then the urge to go to France, to find out about forebears, and take Jeanne (Moper backing out.–fn9). Went, and found the verrerie, and forebears, and at the same time began The Scapegoat seed. Came back, and began to write it, not knowing what it was about, or what I was doing. It is my story, and it is Moper’s also. We are both doubles. So is everyone. Every one of us has his, or her, dark side. Which is to overcome the other? This is the purpose of the book. And it ends, as you know, with the problem unsolved, except that the suggestion there, when I finished it, was that the two sides of that man’s nature had to fuse together to give birth to a third, well balanced. Know Thyself. The one man went back home having been given a hint that his family, in future, would be different, would be adjusted; the other man went to the monastery, for a space of time, to learn ‘what to do with love’.
Can Moper, and can I, learn from this? I think we can. What Moper learns in Weymouth Street now may be his turning-point, just as what I went to Delphi to discover, four years ago, was mine. But the dark side is not yet destroyed. We must be patient. And though I have worked out, these last few days, all the characters in Scapegoat and what they represent, I don’t want to resurrect Rebecca in reverse. What is past is also future. I wrote as the second Mrs de W. twenty-one years ago, with Rebecca a symbol of Jan. It could also be that the Sixpencefn10 in Fowey is the second Mrs de W. and I – in Moper’s dark mind – can be the symbol of Rebecca. The cottage on the beach could be my hut. Rebecca’s lovers could be my books. Mrs Danvers, devoted, could be Tod, the old devotee. And Moper, in a blind rage, shoot me as Maxim shot Rebecca, and put my body in Yggie, and take Yggie out to sea, and then the old tragedy be re-enacted, and when he married, as he would in time, some younger Sixpence, be haunted by my ghost. Or, the present Sixpence, a symbol of Jan, be taken out to sea and killed, because what has happened is that some old ghost of Jan is resurrected that had been buried, just as Rebecca’s body was discovered in the boat and brought to the surface. The evil in us comes to the surface. Unless we recognise it in time, accept it, understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in The Birds were destroyed.
I haven’t been able to explain this to Moper, of course, he simply could not take it in, and may never take it in. But I want you and Bim to keep this letter, as a witness of my belief, and if you have a typewriter, some time make copies for future family reference. Also, it might help you both in your own lives. I believe that I have got myself adjusted now with the family, all of whom, even Peter, is coming up to scratch. Flave and A are back. I have prepared Flave, who seized the situation in a moment, with her rather deep insight, whereas Tess is more practical. Boo is also prepared, but of course not fully yet. We have all got to cope in future, but so must Moper, eventually too, and not just be the man who takes, and takes, and takes. His sweet good side must come and balance him.
