Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Daphne was always more single-minded, hard-working and dedicated to the profession of writing than Angela, and finished writing The Loving Spirit at the beginning of the year. Within two months her agent Michael Joseph had sold it to Heinemann, the firm that she and Angela had decided, as girls, would be their first choice as publishers. She was delighted. This deal proved she could be an independent working woman. At last she had some kind of public validation for her sense, since childhood, that she was born to be a writer. She had been handed a cheque for £67fn4 as an advance on royalties and told her parents, somewhat to their surprise, that from now on she would support herself by writing and did not need their allowance. Throwing off all obligations and restraints, Daphne was truly free at last. The feeling was exhilarating and, energised by this new belief in her creative powers, in mid-May she plunged into her second novel, I’ll Never Be Young Again.

  This time Daphne did not need the isolation and inspiration of Ferryside but was able to write in London, using a room where their Aunt Billy worked as Gerald’s secretary in Orange Street in the heart of Theatreland. This was conveniently close to where Carol Reed was working so that snatched secret lunches with him were possible. Their relationship continued happily but with little real excitement, on her part at least. She did enjoy the long kissing sessions in the car on the occasions he ran her home to Cannon Hall in his Lagonda. There is little reason to believe that they ever got much beyond the petting stage in their relationship; Daphne admitted years later that she had always enjoyed most the foreplay in a sexual relationship and was not much bothered with the rest. Writing mattered much more to her than romance, and fortunately Carol was busy too. With intense concentration and relentless work, she finished her second novel well before her first was published.

  For a young woman of twenty-three still learning her craft, Daphne’s confidence and versatility was astonishing. I’ll Never Be Young Again was quite different from the more conventional family drama of her first book. Dick, her male narrator, the first of many, had a series of page-turning adventures before ending up in Paris with the woman who enabled him to fulfil his destiny as a writer. But his compulsion to write, and the almost sexual excitement and satisfaction it gave him, alienated his lover who eventually left him for a musician called Julio. It was perhaps significant that this erotic competitor shared the same unusual name as the grotesque sex mannequin in ‘The Doll’, the most original of Daphne’s earliest short stories. The doll Julio had also claimed the sexual interest of the woman whom the male narrator desired.

  This novel dramatised Daphne’s long-held opinion that uniting love and sex was fraught with difficulty in relationships between men and women; perhaps she believed it was even impossible. This cynicism most probably emerged from watching her beloved father’s behaviour towards a wife he obviously adored and without whom he could not function. Yet, this most important man in Daphne’s life had numerous affairs with his ‘actress loves’, discussed with his young daughters with ribald lack of respect, even ridicule. His influence was obvious in her third novel, The Progress of Julius, in the coruscating struggle between a father and the daughter he intends to possess, even to death. The more lovable side of Gerald popped up as Pappy Delaney in The Parasites, crying easily and protesting to his children, ‘You’re all going to leave me one by one.’ But all Daphne’s relationships in life were transmuted into her fiction, combining the force of lived experience with the alchemy of her imagination and visceral understanding of dramatic tension.

  In I’ll Never Be Young Again, the relationship between Dick and Hesta had something of the dynamic of that between herself and Carol Reed, where the dissatisfied lover accuses Dick (Daphne) of being selfish, caring more for writing than anything or anyone else, and upbraiding him for habitually shying away from seriousness. Through the medium of her male narrator, Daphne describes the pleasures of writing, and the almost orgasmic climax of finishing a novel at last:

  My heart was beating, and my hands were trembling for no reason. There had never been anything like the thrill of writing the last word, of drawing a line at the bottom, of blotting the page. The breaking up of tension, the culmination of excitement, the supreme effort of the final word.11

  Daphne also has Dick struggle, as she did, to separate herself from her famous father: ‘I wanted to win through on my own merits; I hated the idea of trading on my father’s name, of getting my things read just because I was his son.’12

  Daphne herself stalked through both novels. Janet Coombe, the central mast of The Loving Spirit, shares the same conflicts as her creator; she wishes she was born a man and longs to live unfettered, at one with the elements and in mystical symbiosis with the sea. Daphne drove the story forward with a terrific sense of narrative drama and a Brontëan belief in the animistic power of landscape. Colourful characters, improbable situations, high emotion, all made reading it a theatrical experience. Daphne revealed her provenance as the child of actors who had grown up on stage, never knowing quite what was true; be it at home with her father’s histrionics or in the theatre audience aware that real life and make-believe were confusingly blurred. She understood the dramatic propulsion of cliffhangers and shock denouement. Unsentimental about her characters, she was more than willing to have them betrayed, denied happy endings, and killed off without regret.

  The main idea of her favourite novel of her grandfather’s, Peter Ibbetson – that with imagination and will one could make things happen – excited Daphne as a girl and continued to fascinate her throughout her life where she found evidence in her own experience. She was disconcerted and yet strangely thrilled by what she saw as a connection between the fatal shipwreck she described in I’ll Never Be Young Again and the news that summer that a yacht had been wrecked on the rocks at Lantivet Bay in Cornwall and six people drowned. In her diary she wrote, ‘Another body has been found at Lantivet Bay. There is something queerly allied in all this to my story … Yet mine came first.’13

  With her longing to possess Menabilly, she was already practising the power she believed she had to conjure this desire into being. She wrote to its owner Dr Rashleigh to ask permission to walk in the grounds of the great house, so that she no longer had to trespass, and he had agreed. Though it would take quite a few more years before she would manage to complete the dream and move herself and her family into the house itself, the very effort of will demanded to do this would prove that she, like Peter Ibbetson, could achieve everything she wanted.

  Daphne had finished two novels by the summer of 1930 but, never one to ignore a friend’s invitation or the chance of a holiday abroad, Angela was still writing her first. While Daphne generally shunned society, Angela collected friends and acquaintances wherever she went. She threw herself with enthusiasm into having fun with her new pal, Angela Halliday: ‘It was a most exciting business getting to know each other, for we shared many interests and had even more in common than twin sisters.’14 Then, in July, she accepted an invitation to go and spend some time with the actress Faith Celli on the isle of Seil, just off the west coast of Scotland.

  Faith was almost old enough to be Angela’s mother, as were many of her closest women friends. Perhaps they offered some of the love and acceptance she had craved and never quite received from Muriel. Faith’s charm and beauty had won her a husband who was a war hero and heir to the Viscount of Elibank, Arthur Murray. Together, at their house at An Cala, they created a renowned coastal garden. Angela’s ecstatic discovery of this beautiful part of Western Scotland found its way into her novel, as did her other loves, Devon, Cornwall and Capri.

  Like Daphne, she employed in her writing their grandfather’s concept of ‘dreaming true’. The Little Less, however, was a very different book from her sister’s. This novel had little compelling adventure, much less narrative drive, and was instead an emotional voyage of discovery for a young woman growing up and finding her place in the world. Full of feeling, there is a great deal of internal musing about love and los
s and what it was to be a woman at the time she was writing. Strongly autobiographical, the main character of Vivian is a young woman so ignorant of life that at eighteen she asks a friend to explain what it is to be a virgin (as had Angela at the same age) and is put off men and sex by a rough attempt at seduction that gets as far as a ‘brutal kiss’ and some fumbling with her clothes. Nonplussed by the carefree behaviour of a bisexual woman friend and her louche circle, Vivian wonders, ‘I wish I could understand how people feel about these things … How can they call all this mucking about love? I thought love was just devotion, and wanting to be with a person. But all this funny business …’15 This was very close to Angela’s responses in her youthful diaries.

  In the novel, Vivian longs for ‘the little more’, to offer all of herself and live with her lover for ever as a protective, husbandly presence. Inspired by her feelings for Mary Newcomb who, like the love interest in the novel, is unhappily married, Angela and her heroine knew that if she wanted to remain in the orbit of the woman she loved, she had to keep her real self hidden. This sense of ecstatic but unfulfilled feeling, and the need for absolute secrecy, was an emotional state that Angela had come to know well, having lived in thrall to passion under the proscriptive and mocking gaze of her father.

  She may have employed the family concept of ‘dreaming true’ by making her heroine experience the ghastly premonition of her loved-one’s death, but Angela also managed, through fiction, to redress a little of the balance of power between herself and her middle sister in life. Her heroine, with whom she so closely identified, eventually marries a widower who loves her more than his first wife, a pretty young woman prematurely killed off by pneumonia, whom Angela decided to call Daphne.

  Of all three sisters, Angela was by nature the most nervous and conformist and yet here she had written something that potentially courted the world’s, her parents’ (and the aunts’), scorn. In its quiet if hyperbolic way it was also an emotional polemic for greater tolerance and understanding of homosexual love:

  Vivian said lifelessly, ‘How can there be wrong in the love I have for Clare, which is all the best of me, the most unselfish, the most beautiful? She’s everything that makes life beautiful, to me. These mountains, the sunsets, the lovely thrilling glory of an evening sea in winter, they’re Clare to me, not just water and rock and red sky. Are you going to tell me that’s all wrong? All beastly?’

  Sometime in early 1931, Angela finished her novel, knowing how exposing this would be of her inner feelings. This may have been one of the main reasons she did not show the manuscript to her family or even mention the fact she had completed her first book. Instead she sent The Little Less to a series of publishers. The timing was unfortunate. After the notorious case against Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, publishers were disinclined to take on an even more explicit book. Their letters of rejection variously mentioned that she could certainly write, but the subject was ‘too unpleasant’.16

  Angela recalled what a blow this was, all the more so as Daphne’s first book, launched on 23 February that year to extensive and enthusiastic reviews, had been immediately accepted by the publisher both sisters considered the best. The Times claimed: ‘The Loving Spirit is a fine, widely sweeping romance of family life over four generations, of strong sentiment, lively episodes, Cornish locality, sea-life, and domestic vicissitudes,’17 and it was soon reprinted. The American edition carried a selling quote from Rebecca West, already the most admired woman writer on either side of the Atlantic, ‘a whopper of a romantic novel in the vein of Emily Brontë’.

  None of this much impressed Daphne. ‘I couldn’t feel excited about it,’ she wrote, for her attention and creative energies were newly centred on the idea for her third book, ‘the life story of a French Jew’18 – The Progress of Julius. When Gerald rang, however, to say he had read The Loving Spirit and liked it very much, she was surprised and pleased: his low boredom threshold meant he rarely read a novel through to the end; and it was gratifying too to get a letter from Noël Coward congratulating her on her achievement.

  Angela’s first attempts to be published had been far less heartening and as a personality she was already easily discouraged. How grateful she would have been for a scintilla of the positive attention that Daphne so carelessly tossed aside:

  [the rejection of my book] was a great disappointment, for I had laboured long … all through life I have needed encouragement in whatever field I have striven, whether the end product be the role of Wendy, a game of tennis, the writing of a book, or a dish of Irish Stew. So when The Little Less came back from the third or fourth publisher I put it away and never really imagined I would write again.19

  In fact, she would not write again for nearly ten years, a gap that all but sunk her chance of momentum in her career. The Little Less was eventually published in 1941, somewhat pruned and modified, as her third novel, but by this time the only du Maurier who mattered in the literary world was Daphne. Angela’s book was dedicated rather boldly, ‘To MUMMIE With Dearest Love’. Years later a friend of Angela’s was reading the book on the lawn at Ferryside while Muriel reclined on a steamer chair in the sun. When the friend held out the book and asked if she had read it, Muriel, with a small shudder, admitted that she never read any of her daughters’ novels because she could recognise all the main characters, and it made her uneasy. She then avoided further conversation about a subject she found distasteful by pulling the fabric canopy on the chair down so that it covered her face, obscuring sight of the book affectionately dedicated to her.

  The city of Paris, combined with Mlle Yvon’s intellectual encouragement and tender care, still exerted its pull on Daphne. Since her schooldays, she had managed at least one extended stay each year with Ferdy, sometimes two. At the beginning of 1931 she and Jeanne set off to stay with Fernande and once again the distinctive combination of the city’s history and its evocative atmosphere and a kind of race memory set Daphne’s imagination alight. Always intrigued by existential debate, ideas for short stories kept surfacing in her mind and then suddenly Julius Lévy, her third novel’s protagonist, arrived like a genie, fully formed, to dominate her waking thoughts. ‘I saw him as an old man first, dying, and then as a child … Where on earth had he sprung from into my mind? I didn’t know. He was there. He was suddenly alive.’20

  Daphne returned to London fleetingly. She went to a grand evening party at the American embassy, thrown by Nelson Doubleday, her American publisher, and then with Angela to a party given by Micky Jacob, and was underwhelmed by both. Micky’s party was full of lesbians and pansies, Daphne reported, and she wondered what Ferdy and Foy, the two most important women in her life at the time, would have thought of them. Fernande was lesbian in her proclivities and practice but her position as schoolmistress and then directrice of her own school, and her devout Catholicism, made for a prim reticence. Foy Quiller-Couch, as the intellectual and eccentric daughter of the academic and unworldly Sir Arthur (who found Daphne’s second novel shocking enough), was unlikely to have been comfortable in, let alone comprehending of, the metropolitan milieu of Micky Jacob and her friends. The thought of these disparate aspects of her life colliding amused Daphne.

  Carol Reed was still on the scene but marriage seemed even more remote, while Cousin Geoffrey, once golden and glamorous, was ageing without grace and had completely lost his lustre. His spontaneity now seemed closer to fecklessness and his charm had turned tawdry: failure stared him reproachfully in the face. Daphne was irritated by him for the first time in her life when, at lunch, he was rude to the waiter in an attempt to impress her. By spring she had left London for Ferryside without a backward glance. She wrote to Tod that summer, before the family descended, about how she loved her life in Cornwall, filled with boating, gardening, walking and writing. She could keep herself and a cook for £2 a week and for intellectual enjoyment and adventure she had the Quiller-Couches across the river in Fowey. ‘I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life! Not a “crush”
on the horizon.’21

  As Daphne worked away in Cornwall on her third novel, free to pursue her own thoughts and interests, to come and go as she pleased, her thoughts turned to the constraints that relationships put on a woman. In Julius, she explored the damage done by possessive, controlling, perverted love, and it made her appreciate all the more her single carefree state. To the faithful Tod, who loved and never judged her, she could be honest about her true feelings:

  It’s all great fun – the sheer selfish joy of living alone and being dependent on no one, as I imagine you relish as well as me! Thank heaven I hav’nt got to cater for a grumbly husband who is snappy about the bacon at breakfast! When all is said and done one doesn’t miss much in that line. Sex may be very exciting, but so it is to sail a boat in a spanking breeze …22

  Little did she know that about the time she was writing her paean to the solitary creative life, a handsome youthful major in the Grenadier Guards was reading The Loving Spirit and, mad about boats and the sea, had thought it the best book he had read for years. He determined to set off from the Isle of Wight in his own boat, Ygdrasil, and head for Fowey and the coastline evoked so lyrically in the book. He asked his best friend, the Cornishman John Prescott, to come with him, and had a vague hope he might even meet the young author herself.

  The young major was not alone: everyone seemed to be converging on Fowey intent on invasion. The sisters descended on Ferryside at Easter with friends in tow, Angela bringing her special new friend Angela Halliday, in Shaw’s sporty little MG car, while Jeanne brought once more Elaine. Muriel and Aunt Billy joined them all a little later. The family gathered again in the summer with Gerald and the Cannon Hall maids too, and picnics and expeditions in boats and cars were in full swing.