by Jane Dunn
The surge of hormones in pregnancy temporarily slowed Daphne down and took the edge off her ambition to write. The Progress of Julius had been published during this time to respectable reviews but, like her second novel, it did not sell as well as The Loving Spirit. This was demoralising as Daphne thought her subsequent novels better than her first, and Angela thought Julius ‘a brilliant affair’.9 If the hormones of pregnancy dulled Daphne’s disappointment at the becalming of her reputation as an exciting new novelist, they also made her more keen ‘to wax’, her code for making love.
She made few concessions to her state and, at a time when heavily pregnant women tended to hide themselves away, she continued to stride over Hampstead Heath and, even well past her due date, attended the annual ritual of the Eton and Harrow cricket match with the family. This was a century-old institution and had become part of the Season, along with Wimbledon and Henley. Current and past Etonian men and boys watched the two-day match in their customary top hat and tails. The du Maurier family had always rooted for Gerald’s school, but now, in 1933, an old Etonian, in the handsome guise of Tommy, had arrived on the scene. On 14 July, Harrow won the toss and elected to bat. At the end of the day’s play, Daphne went into labour.
Daphne was naturally physically courageous and not easily scared. Contemptuous of conventional female squeamishness and any show of weakness, Daphne had approached her impending labour in a gung-ho spirit. But even she was shocked and humiliated by the visceral power of childbirth. This was one process she could not control through willpower alone. Her body took over and in the process reminded her of its primitive, ruthless femaleness, even though she liked to think her heart and mind were male.
The labour continued into the second day, and Tommy and Gerald duly went off together to watch the conclusion of the cricket match. While the contest ended with an unsatisfactory draw, Daphne’s baby came into the world: not the expected son but a daughter – a similarly disappointing outcome. They decided to call her Tessa after the heroine in The Constant Nymph, the play with which Daphne had identified so closely as a girl. A month later Daphne wrote to Tod:
All the old wives’ tales about ‘childbirth’ are true! Of all the hellish performances – so beastly degrading too, lying on a bed with legs spread eagled and feeling exactly as though one’s entire inside plus intestines and bowels were being torn from me! Pheugh! It makes me sweat to think back on it.10
Daphne managed to feed her baby herself and, although she had some pride in the fact, denied it gave her any pleasure or sense of intimacy. She did, however, feel some protective impulse towards her child for, when Tommy wanted her to go boating with him in Fowey, she felt that at a month old Tessa was too young to be left with a nurse. Any sign of tenderness and soft-heartedness she tended to label sentimental, a characteristic she recognised in Angela but, from very young, rejected in herself. (‘I never was sentimental!’11 she reminded Tod.) And quite quickly the baby was handed over pretty much full time to Nanny, while Daphne went back to her preferred life of writing and the imagination.
If she was underwhelmed by the whole experience of new motherhood, Daphne, not yet married a year, also soon became disillusioned with sex, telling her old governess, half in jest, that it was ‘grossly overrated as a form of amusement’, and certainly the resultant childbirth and baby was an exorbitant price to pay ‘for a momentary flash in the pan’.12 She was deeply disappointed that she had produced a girl, having never really rated the female sex, and vowed she would put off any further attempt to conjure herself a son for at least two and a half years. Was Tessa’s birth not just a disappointment but also a challenge to Daphne’s long-held belief in her power to ‘dream true’? Perhaps the birth of a daughter rather than the much-willed son made her question her power to control everything in her own universe, as she did in her fiction, and led to a momentary loss of confidence. This was the first time in her life that Daphne had not achieved what she had set out to do.
Angela, who had inherited much of the sentiment that Daphne felt she lacked, was enchanted by her new niece and thought her ‘an adorable baby and a most amusing little girl’,13 and most importantly, for a du Maurier, very pretty. Jeanne was never to show much interest in children and even less in babies; animals were where her sympathies found expression and she did not relish being an aunt as much as Angela. Daphne chose as godmothers not her doting elder sister but the other Angela, her sister’s best friend Shaw, possibly because being so masculine she seemed unlikely to marry and have children of her own. Tessa’s other godmother was Countess Atalanta Mercati, a glamorous woman the same age as her sister Angela, and married to the celebrity author Michael Arlen, made famous by his novel, The Green Hat, that became both a play and a film.
Just as motherhood and conjugal love disappointed Daphne, so too did the kind of socialising that her new husband occasionally enjoyed. Weekends away in country houses filled her with dread and a certain amused scorn. She had few if any domestic or maternal duties, care for the house and her baby being undertaken by paid staff, but she longed for solitude and time to herself and even the presence of a husband and baby and having to consider them in this new life was intrusive on her need for imaginative space. Daphne had married with the hope that she would be entering into a richer, less selfish way of living, but the constraints dismayed her and she began longing for her former life of self-centred freedoms. Her new nanny was taken aback at how little interest Daphne had in Tessa and how detached she was both mentally and emotionally. This was more complicated perhaps than post-natal depression, as Daphne’s lack of empathy for her young daughters remained throughout their childhood and even the beloved son, when he eventually arrived, could be ignored when his needs clashed with her own, to write and be alone.
The family had long been aware that Gerald was losing his zest for life. He no longer had a theatre of his own, the triumphs of the Wyndham’s days were long behind him; he was still acting but in rather nondescript plays. Having not toured since he was a young man, he decided to take to the road again with The Ware Case, a rather improbable murder-drama with which he had had such success at Wyndham’s in the mid-twenties. This last tour was a modest success, but wearying to body and spirit. For quite a while he had been complaining of not feeling very well and went from doctor to doctor, none of whom appeared to know what was ailing him. Then suddenly there was the shocking news that he had to have an operation. The family’s history of operations was rather a morbid one: they feared that any du Maurier who went under the knife would somehow fail to recover, although both Angela and Daphne had survived having their appendix removed. In fact in du Maurier parlance hospitals were known as ‘slaughterhouses’. Certainly the sisters’ first sight of their father in his hospital bed after a ‘successful’ operation was alarming. His pale and haggard face filled them with foreboding.
Gerald was operated on to remove cancerous cells from his colon; it had seemed to go well but his health declined further, despite the care of a top-flight nursing home. In less than two weeks he was dead. He was barely sixty-one when he died on 11 April 1934, his thirty-first wedding anniversary. Muriel was so prostrated with grief that Daphne felt an unaccustomed pity for her and for the first time was able to comfort her physically, without fear of rejection. Angela declared it ‘the saddest and most horrible [day] I had ever known’.14 Still shocked and grieving she, as his firstborn, stepped into the role of spokesperson for the family, answering the phone and speaking to the press.
Daphne just could not believe it. She was cavalier at killing off the characters in her novels and short stories, and actually enjoyed the frisson it added to the narrative, but, as she admitted many years later, ‘it is only when death touches the writer in real life that he, or she, realised the full impact of its meaning. The deathbed scene … becomes suddenly true. The shock is profound.’15 Even in her memoir of Gerald, written at speed soon after he died in an attempt to keep him alive to her, she did not deal with his death. I
nstead she ended the book with her father, on the eve of his trip to hospital, gazing out on the Hampstead night seeking to draw consolation from his long-mourned dead brother and fond memories of his family.
Daphne refused to attend Gerald’s funeral and instead took a basket of caged pigeons up to Hampstead Heath and set them free. From her father’s belongings she claimed the camel-hair trousers and jacket that, ‘poor darling Daddy wore in the nursing home before he died’, and by wearing them kept something of him close. She wore these clothes for years. ‘There’s sentiment for you,’16 was her wry comment to a friend, as she changed into them for the umpteenth time, a decade and a half later.
Gerald’s sudden death altered everything. He had always lived beyond his means and when his debts threatened to catch up with him just worked harder or organised another tour. He had made little provision for the future and long-term security of his family, so pretty soon it was clear that Cannon Hall would have to be sold. Muriel and her two unmarried daughters would move into the pair of Queen Anne cottages at the bottom of the garden, one of which had been occupied by Daphne, Tommy and baby Tessa and Nanny. Tommy had been given a new posting as second in command of 2nd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards, stationed at Aldershot, and the Browning family had moved to the Old Rectory at Frimley in Surrey.
Muriel’s talent for house renovation was once more in action and she turned both cottages into one charming house which they named Providence Corner. Unlike Daphne and their father, who loved large houses and theatrically proportioned rooms, Angela was always drawn to more modest affairs and admitted the house their mother created ‘stole my heart from the moment it became our home’.17
Gerald’s death brought fundamental emotional changes too in his daughters. From black-and-white drawings that had echoed her grandfather’s iconic work for Punch, Jeanne’s growing freedom of artistic expression meant she began to experiment more with colour and paint and allow the influence of the modern artists her father deplored to infiltrate her work. Angela recalled that Jeanne only really started to use paint after Gerald’s death. With much less surveillance and intrusion into her private life, she could discover her own path in the world.
Having not engaged in any substantial writing during her first year of marriage, Daphne was energised by her need to keep Gerald alive still and close to her, and decided almost immediately to write a biography of him. Within a month of his death she had signed a contract with a new and dynamic publisher, Victor Gollancz, that began a remarkably affectionate and fruitful relationship with Victor himself, lasting his lifetime. After four intensive months of writing, she finished Gerald and it was published before the year was out. Her warts-and-all portrait upset a good many of Gerald’s Garrick Club friends, who thought no daughter should be quite so frank about a father’s weaknesses, delineated unapologetically alongside his charms. Angela, ever loyal, insisted that Gerald would have given it his blessing and been delighted with the result. Despite the snorts of various old clubmen, most of whom Angela insisted had not even known their father, the book was enthusiastically received by the critics and sold well.
Angela had striven so hard during her youth to please her parents and be the responsible and good elder sister. All her life so far she had sought her father’s love and respect. Perhaps even more than her sisters, it was Angela, at thirty years old, who most needed release from Gerald’s values and view of the world. His powerful prejudices encompassed homophobia and a bathetic suspicion of every man who ever showed an interest in his daughters. With his death, she could break away from the stultifying demand that she remain a naïve, sexually ignorant girl. At last she could put away her propensity for fantasy love affairs with people who could never reciprocate her feelings. It was time to grow up at last and find a more honest and satisfying outlet for her febrile emotions and overactive heart.
Confused and grieving, she set off for Italy to visit her great old friend and mother substitute Micky Jacob. Micky had settled in Sirmione, the home town of the poet Catullus, nestling in breathtaking medieval splendour at the southern edge of Lake Garda. Here Micky dispensed comfort food and warm wisdom to friends who came to stay. It was here too that Angela met Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, who were still having to live with the fallout that followed the scandal over The Well of Loneliness. In Angela’s photo album there was Micky, as stout and jolly as a Toby jug, alongside a chic and shingled Radclyffe Hall, numerous Italian children and assorted Pekes. Incongruous in this company was a snatched photo of sleek, well-groomed men at lunch round a long trestle table covered with a white cloth. Angela’s caption, ‘Fascists Dining’, showed a glimpse of a darkening Europe. Hitler was about to become Chancellor of Germany and Spain’s unrest was escalating into civil war.
By the mid-thirties, Mussolini’s vision of Italy as a resurrected Roman Empire, with him as Il Duce, was becoming more radical. Military expansionism into Africa and glorification of an exalted masculinity and traditional hierarchical values was growing ugly and dangerous for anyone who did not fit the iron-clad glove. Jewish, liberal, lesbian, thespian Micky, and her motley friends, were too obviously the types of decadent individual so vilified by this emergent fascist order that sought to create the new uomo fascista. In barely four years, with the outbreak of the Second World War, Micky would have to leave her beautiful retreat on the shores of Lake Garda and head for the relative safety of England. When she returned to ‘Casa Micky’, after peace eventually came, she was given the warmest of welcomes from her Italian neighbours, delighted to see her home.
But while Angela was with her, it seemed there were just a few clouds gathering on the distant horizon. The everyday pleasures of Italian life continued. After some days of rest under the supervision of Micky’s motherly care and consolation, Angela was ready for adventure again and encouraged by her to accompany two very camp gentlemen friends of hers, Roland and George, to Venice. This was Angela’s first visit to the city. She filled her photo album with timeless images of narrow, inky canals, bobbing ranks of gondolas for hire, the importunate pigeons of St Mark’s Square and tourists, including herself with her beaming, well-fed companions, posing on the Lido. Despite rather limited experience, Angela declared Venice ‘the fairest city on earth’, adding that it was ‘unutterably beautiful and still unspoilt’.18
She was experimenting with her own viewpoints and friendships that would never have been countenanced by her father:
I began to meet and make exciting friends of my own. Hitherto they had for the most part been culled from my childhood and from Daddy’s plays and productions. But now … I began to discover for myself people belonging to the profession who were to be my own friends. I was to be Angela, and not merely Gerald’s daughter (nor, as yet, ‘only the sister’!).
Her growing confidence, and the company of more interesting and worldly women, moved her romantic relationships into the erotic: her writing was spurred on by these relationships, her poems and novels became gifts to the women she loved.
In the December after Gerald died, Angela went alone to see Mary Newcomb in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the Old Vic. Mary was the woman and actress for whom she had felt such an admiration and attraction when she met her after her dazzling performance in the play Jealousy some six years before. This time Mary was the star in the Old Vic season and went on to dazzle again as Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. In an up-to-the-minute production, striking for its modernist set design, the great theatre critic James Agate thought Mary portrayed Cleopatra as ‘a brilliantly clever, highly complex, neurotic lady of our times’.19 And her physical charms were not lost on Leslie Rees, an Australian writer working in London as a critic on the theatrical weekly The Era, who noted Mary’s glamour and beauty and, ‘her long leg-stride [that] reminds you of Garbo’.20
Now that Angela no longer had her father looking over her shoulder she felt emboldened to move from infatuated fan of Miss Newcomb, the actress, to become a loving friend of Mary,
the woman. Mary and her elderly husband Alex Higginson had just moved into Stinsford House in an idyllic part of Dorset, nestling low beside the parish church with its churchyard in which Thomas Hardy’s heart was buried. This was the village and the countryside that had inspired Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. ‘I was to know Stinsford in all its seasons,’ Angela wrote, and recorded a privileged life that had hardly changed since Hardy’s day:
In the winter, gay with hunt balls; in the early autumn, when I lazed abed in a high haunted room covered in antique Chinese wallpaper while Mary would be out cubbing;fn5 and in the spring when narcissi, daffodils, tulips and wallflowers made one wonder whether after all the youth of each year was not the best.
Alex, immensely rich and able to live the leisured sporting life as Master of the Cattisford, indulged his passion for hounds and hunting and other country pursuits while supporting a household replete with many servants, whom he would summon with his hunting horn.
Mary tried to be as good a consort as she could, but her natural predisposition leant much more to the theatre and the arts and here she found a sympathetic ally in Angela who was more than happy to be with her. Indeed, she spent so many months in this lovely setting over the next couple of years that Stinsford became what Angela described as her second home, the whole experience ‘a time of very great happiness’. The gardens were particularly romantic: herbaceous borders in summer overflowed with roses and delphiniums, and the sultry scent of wisteria and heavy, waxy magnolia flowers wafted from the creepers surrounding Mary’s bedroom window. Angela succumbed to the languid beauty of a lovely English house and garden, irresistibly combined with American standards of luxury and comfort: ‘Happy warm summer days in Dorset … with bees humming, and the sound of a lark high in the sky above the lush meadows beyond.’21