Piffy, Bird & Bing
Page 23
Mary not only took Angela under her glamorous wing but she also introduced her to the pleasures of poetry, particularly of Walt Whitman, the great American humanist poet who dealt earthily and erotically with matters of the heart. Guided by Mary’s enthusiasm for this writer, Angela thought him ‘a poetic giant’ whose work she found more heady than any wine. This was an epiphany for her. She recalled, ‘I never really read much poetry till I fell in love … indeed it was not until I had reached my thirties that I “fell” for poetry in a big way as they say, both reading it and writing it.’22
Lazing in this beautiful garden, Angela wrote poems of her own, focused on love and desire, entirely reflective of her own state of mind at the time, and dedicated them to Mary. She expressed in poetry everything she felt she could not say in person. Mary was a sophisticated, experienced woman of the world, twice married and firmly heterosexual. Given the leisurely weeks and months they spent together, however, it would have been remarkable if Mary had not realised the true nature of Angela’s feelings for her. She was in her early forties while Angela had just reached an emotionally immature thirty, but growing up fast. Mary’s triumph as Cleopatra inspired this poem, a real-life version of the central theme of The Little Less, Angela’s most personal novel that rejection had made her shut away in a drawer:
M.N.H. as [Cleopatra]
If I were asked where’ere I’d been
Who was the loveliest vision seen,
I would reply with haste, I wean
Why Clementine, my Clementine.
… Her dimpled chin & roguish eyes
Fill me with wonder & surprise,
But she will n’er my thoughts surmise
Will Clementine, my Clementine.
For friends am I, & only such
Who would alas! Be more by much,
But I must not so much as touch
My Clementine, – my Clementine.
What would I give to so possess
Such bounty as thy dear caress?
Thinkst thou, thou couldst thyself demean
To grant such pleasure, Clementine?
If thou dost know what sweet delight
Is mine when in my arms you lay
Perchance when even turns to night
Thou wouldst not spurn me with a ‘nay’.
For kisses sweet I fain would rain
Upon thy breasts & ears & lips
And take them back to give again
To eyes that launch a million ships.
Although Angela here was still pursuing, as in her youth, love affairs that could not be consummated, Mary’s calm, motherly presence allowed her to come to terms with an emotional nature that would have brought out the overwrought bully in her father. After all, she had been called a whore by him for chastely falling in love with a married man; what would she be called if she had declared her love for another woman? Mary valued Angela’s company, accepted her love and reassured her fears. In doing so, she provided Angela with the bridge into her adult emotional life.
One of Angela’s last poems to Mary was much more sophisticated, deftly amusing, and played on the du Maurier sisters’ code, ‘I have other fish to fry’ (meaning ‘I am pursuing forbidden love affairs’) which they used to deflect their prying parents:
To M.N.H. On Losing the Desire to Fry Fish
I am no longer int’rested in fish
Since you provided me another dish.
A wealth of fruit; forbidden, – it is true;
But who would look to Neptune’s realm when you
Are by?
Not I.
Daphne was certainly kept up to date on Angela’s emotional flowering for, in generously sharing some of her royalty money with her sisters, she wrote to Angela, ‘The only condition I make is that it does not go on “flowers” for Mary Newcomb, etc!!’
The intensity of Angela’s feeling for Mary dissipated with her friend’s trip to America on tour in 1937. But Angela had already moved into a new and exciting circle of friends. She had been introduced, by the actress Phyllis Terry, to the gaily adventurous Caroline ‘Lena’ Ramsden, a racehorse owner, sculptor, writer and large-hearted bon viveur. Lena’s extrovert personality attracted an array of theatre people, artists and writers into whose orbit Angela was flung. These included the actresses Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Marda Vanne, and Martita Hunt, actors John Gielgud and Dave Burnaby and the playwright Dodie Smith. The writer Marguerite Steen and her lifetime partner the artist William Nicholson also circled on the periphery of this group.
Everyone congregated in Lena’s handsome studio home, 8 Primrose Hill Studios (Arthur Rackham lived at Number 6), decorated in her racing colours of royal blue and white. Here Lena threw lavish parties – one to celebrate the success of one of her horses lasted for three days. There were always lethal cocktails, a piano being played and voices singing, or declaiming to the assembled throng. For cosier and marginally less wild times, people climbed further up the hill, to Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Marda Vanne’s cottage at Holly Place, Hampstead.
A love of small distinctive dogs also bound these new friends to Angela. She had her Pekinese Wendy and her mother’s Pekes too, while Lena had a French bulldog called Napoléon and Gwen and Marda a little pug, Snuffles, ‘a dog of extremely strong character and completely devoid of charm’, but doted on by Gwen and Marda who gave him Marda’s surname and treated him like their child.23 On at least one of many occasions Lena had a raging row with her close friend, the actress Martita Hunt, who for a while lived in a flat at 7 Primrose Hill Studios, this pretty mews peopled by huge artistic egos. Lena feared her love affair with Martita had been ruined for ever and, in floods of tears, rang Angela and Gwen for solace. All three women, and their dogs, ended up on Hampstead Heath and walked and laughed until perspective returned once more to the world. Lena explained it was impossible to be close to Martita and not have occasional fights, ‘unless your argumentative attributes were no better than those of a doormat’.24 Angela was learning that the company of interesting, unconventional women was fun and rewarding in all kinds of ways.
Gwen and Marda were an intriguing couple. Lifelong partners despite occasional separations, they were poles apart in character and in the way they practised their art. Gwen was hailed as the best Shakespearian actress of her day. Her luminous portrayal of Juliet was heart-wrenching and unforgettable to anyone lucky enough to see it. She was striking looking with a lovely speaking voice and an emotional truth that animated everything she did. Gwen was already quite well acquainted with Angela’s father, having acted with Gerald in J. M. Barrie’s play, Shall We Join the Ladies?, a one act murder-mystery in which Gerald played the butler, Dolphin. It proved to be a popular play and Gwen and Gerald appeared together in at least three revivals between 1925 and 1932, with John Gielgud joining the cast in 1929. So Angela entered the circle of friends trailing clouds of theatrical glory.
Marda Vanne (short for Margaretha van Hulsteyn) was five years Gwen’s junior and a handsome and headstrong South African, whose family were part of the Afrikaner elite. Her father, Sir Willem van Hulsteyn, was a Dutch born lawyer who had been knighted for services to the British Empire in 1902. With her wonderful rich voice and a talent for comedy Marda was determined to be an actress. She was already becoming established when she married an eminent lawyer, Johannes Gerhardus Strydom, while still very young. Marda barely lasted a few weeks as the conventional wife of a man whose uncompromising toughness in his political career became legendary. When she bolted from the marriage it became a scandal in the highly conservative world to which they belonged, and Marda, barely twenty-two, escaped for England to further her acting career. Her ex-husband eventually, in 1954, became Prime Minister of South Africa and an intransigent proponent of apartheid. Marda never took his name, kept her own but shortened it to Vanne, and barely mentioned him again. He, on the other hand, apparently never stopped loving her. At the end of 1926, when she was thirty and Gwen thirty-five, these two remarkable women met and t
heir lifelong relationship began.
When Angela first got to know them in 1935 she entered a vibrant, relaxed world of actresses and artists. But it could not have been more different from her du Maurier upbringing in Hampstead, just half a mile further up the hill. She was familiar with the excessive emotionality that characterised her father and his friends, but the fact that the norm here was love between women and candour about sex was a startling liberation. The free-and-easy mores, the falling in and out of bed and the apparent lack of jealousy, was remarkable. The women who circled Gwen and Marda were all successful or wealthy, and independent of men and marriage. They enjoyed interesting, creative lives with a racy group of varied artistic friends. However, their emotional and sexual lives were entangled and, despite the love and support between them, there was also a high degree of neurotic obsession, casual sex and unrequited love.
Angela had been invited into a ménage in which Lena was in love with Marda, who was living with Gwen, but obsessed with the elusive playwright Gordon Daviot. Gordon Daviot was born Elizabeth Mackintosh, and yet to become the hugely successful mystery novelist Josephine Tey. As Josephine Tey, she immortalised Marda as the character Marda Hallard in a number of her major novels. The real Marda was not only pursued by Lena but also by an actress Toska von Bissing, with whom she engaged in dangerous liaisons, while longing for the company of others.
For Angela, the lack of shame of these women and their frankness and light-hearted enjoyment of sex was an extraordinary revelation. Lena held erotic cocktail parties in her bedroom, ‘for one or two especially nice folks selected from the adult members of the community’, and lubricated by loads of alcohol. Lena ended a love letter to Marda with the touching, ‘You make this already grand world even grander’, and then added a P.S.: ‘Would you like me to shave Pussy? I’m told it’s customary!!! P.P.S. You are a cave woman!’ Toska, a baroness and an actress, was also besotted with Marda and sent her sizzling love letters, including one with an anatomical drawing of her vulva with x marks the spot, where Marda had bitten her. This was a whole new world to Angela, where women were in charge of their lives and, through both pain and pleasure, pursued their own romantic destinies.
Various presents also passed between the friends. Lena remarked that Marda seemed mostly to give her girlfriends watches. Marda wrote in her diary that in reply she ‘murmured truthfully that I had given five young cuties wristwatches’,25 while Lena admitted her favourite gift for a girlfriend was the trouser press. Marda asked her what if they don’t all wear trousers? But Lena was undeterred; this was the perfect gift in the circumstances. Lena lavished not a trouser press but a fur coat on Marda, who immediately felt ashamed that she had accepted such an extravagant present in exchange for sexual favours. This made her ‘three-quarters skunk’, she feared, and ‘one-quarter angel’; Lena pandering to the skunk and Gwen to the angel. Her self-disgust was mitigated by Angela saying: ‘Well darling, so long as you have it, what the Hell does it matter who gave it to you? You will look lovely in it & I shall see you.’ She thus consoled Marda who subsequently felt that she and Angela shared a certain sensibility. Gwen’s response to her moral dilemma was more practical and less reassuring: ‘Well, thank God you won’t borrow mine now.’26
Fear, confusion and shame over sex were the salient emotions in Angela’s girlhood and suddenly she found herself among women who revelled in one another’s bodies and, best of all, thought she was charming and desirable too. She had entered this bohemian world with excitement and some alarm. She was clear in her memoir how her father’s death had allowed her to explore her own friendships and an alternative way of living in which she was not expected to play the role of supportive wife, so faithfully enacted by her mother, and now so chafed against by her beautiful and brilliant middle sister. Angela had been born and brought up to practise ‘the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’.27 She would have followed her mother’s peerless example if a willing man had presented himself. Without that man, however, her ecstatic, worshipful nature turned her reflective powers on women instead. And unlike Mary Newcomb, Marda Vanne was more than ready for the gift.
Naturally timid and law-abiding, at thirty Angela had found the courage to make her own way at last, freed from the constraints of her family’s ethos and the harsh judgements of the world. To be engaged in something generally considered deviant and transgressive was to be cast out of the mainstream into an often lonely struggle for self-acceptance. The circle around Gwen and Marda made her feel less aberrant and alone.
Marda was energetic and adventurous. She poured her energies into her work as an actress, writing letters, diaries and poetry, and was generous with her sexual favours – a fact that caused much grief to Gwen but one she came to accommodate. In fact Marda valued herself most as a sexual being. ‘What does it matter if I fail as an actress? I shall have raised sweet-peas, made my friends happy, & given satisfaction to my lovers.’28 The effect she had on her numerous young women, however, made her uneasy. Too predictably they imagined themselves in love with her and were hard to shake off once the romance had gone. Marda was remarkable for her clear-sightedness and unflinching honesty, and suggested the cause: ‘My desire for power which has been thwarted on the stage, comes out in my relations with these unhappy young ladies … now this is a ghastly thought. I have no conscious wish to hurt or maim.’29
By the time that Angela arrived on the scene, Marda and Gwen’s relationship was subsiding towards the loving companionship that it became. Where Mary Newcomb had introduced Angela to contemporary poetry, Marda continued her education by encouraging her to read Shakespeare and Milton. In response, Angela now turned her poetic efforts towards the sexually experienced Marda. Angela’s first effort (‘To M. v. H.’ Marda’s maiden name with the ‘v’ underlined to differentiate her from Mary ‘M.N.H’) was an unfinished fragment that expressed her acceptance that Marda loved Gwen, while being in love with Gordon Daviot:
If to be loved is Heaven
Then I indeed at Heaven’s
portal stand.
Seeing that your heart
Whereof I have the Key
Is locked to mine –
It seemed that generous, insightful Gwen understood Angela’s longing to be loved, and Marda’s keenness to comply, at least for a time. Gwen was also possibly exasperated by Marda’s continued unrequited longing for the absent playwright and hoped that a dalliance with Angela might distract her for a while. For the last week of July 1935, she sent them both off alone, without the housekeeper, to their house in the country. Gwen and Marda had jointly bought Tagley Cottage, near Finchingfield in Essex. This had originally been two attached cottages but was now a delightful retreat with about an acre of gardens. It was to Tagley that their friends would come, pouring out of London at weekends which, when Gwen and Marda were in a play, started on Saturday night and lasted until Monday afternoon. The area was becoming a popular retreat for writers and actors. John Gielgud had a house locally, as did the actress Diana Wynyard, and Dodie Smith, with her Dalmatian Pongo, and her bestselling novels yet to come.
Angela and Marda were dropped off by Gwen. She knew that neither woman cooked, so deposited them with a roast leg of mutton. ‘What memories [it] evokes,’ Angela wrote in her memoir, recalling her time at Tagley: ‘Gwen once sent Marda and me alone there for a week, we were to do the cooking between us …We survived and so did our friendship. So these new Gerald-less days passed.’30 Perhaps it was significant that she should think of Gerald as she recalled her first consummated love affair. Angela had always thought it was foolish to be ignorant about sex, ‘one of life’s pleasures’, and although she agreed with her father that ‘to be shop-soiled at sixteen is a tragedy’, she departed from him when she declared ‘but to be white as the driven snow at thirty is just damn silly’.31 Perhaps it was also significant that her initiation into sexual love should happen when she was thirty. Marda, however, was less sanguine about th
is proposed week of love, as she confided to her diary, ‘being in no condition for dalliance … nothing in or out of the world will induce me to touch anyone when I have spots on my face’.32 But Angela reassured her that she was not in the least put off.
In fact the week turned out to be much more successful than Marda feared. The beauty of the countryside, the woods full of pink whorls of ragged robin, the birdsong and the sweetness of Angela’s company, all made her relax: ‘I forgot my spots & all my other ailments, & my face, full of grease, took on grace … I take back all I said about my young lady’s silliness. She is gay & gallant & has a nice wit.’ Cooking was still a challenge and Angela, with ill-founded confidence, set about making a bacon omelette for their supper. Marda had to intervene when she saw her young companion frying the bacon in dollops of beef dripping.
The week ended happily, as Marda noted, ‘We dined together in mutual admiration. Greek acknowledged Greek & the suburban twins, tenderness & respect were conceived.’ Later, Angela caught the midnight sleeper train to Cornwall. The love affair lifted Marda’s spirits but they evaporated with the return to everyday life at the house in Holly Place: ‘If my young lady had been here I should have gone to Goodwood [races], danced all night, & swum in Kenwood [Hampstead] at six the next morning without turning a hair. I suppose I must be one of those women who are good for one purpose only – bed.’33
Angela was based at home with Muriel and Jeanne and, although Gerald was dead, she still had to navigate Muriel’s disapproval of the unconventional women whose company her eldest daughter enjoyed. While they were staying in London, Angela learnt quickly not to confront but to deceive:
I had certain friends who were not always approved of, so I found the best thing to do was to lie when I was with them and say I had been somewhere else, and although at thirty I had to ‘clock in’ to my mother’s bedroom at whatever the hour of my return, I discovered there were ways and means of inventing some story of one’s evening pleasures.34