by Jane Dunn
The true story would have given Muriel sleepless nights and would have had Gerald turning in his grave. Angela described her life at the time in a poem to Marda, ‘With Apologies to Milton’. A parody of his sonnet ‘On His Blindness’, she cast herself, ironically, as Milton with Gwen, personified as Patience, giving advice on how to best manage Milton/Angela’s struggle to express love for God/Marda:
When I consider how my life is spent
Dashing ’tween Hampstead, Bayswater, South Ken.
Dishing out to women ’stead of men
Some perquisites of nature (which I meant
To give but Marda.) I am afraid –;
Tho’ she’s no axe to grind & I no stranger –
‘treat me as Greek & be not dog in manger’
I supplicate. But Gwen will upbraid
That murmur & reply ‘Marda’s no need
Of coats, pyjamas, tears. And if you pine
To gain her favour gitter not. Her state
Is Sap[p]hic. Thousands at her bidding speed
Up hill to Holly Place but cry and whine –
They sometimes – come – who merely lie & wait.’
In fact Angela did try and unite her life as a daughter and sister with her new transformative romance and invited Marda to stay at Ferryside for a fortnight in September. Marda confided to her diary: ‘I do not look forward to meeting her rather frightening family.’35 The du Maurier reputation was still awesome. Gerald was not long dead and Daphne had published three well-received novels and her acclaimed biography of their father was just out. Jamaica Inn was about to spring into vivid life. In fact Marda cried off from this visit to Cornwall at this point because she and Gwen had an opportunity to go away together, and she thought this a less daunting prospect.
Marda was already uneasily aware that this love affair had gone to her young lover’s head. Angela considered herself deeply in love while for Marda this was a delightful but passing diversion. Angela bombarded her with letters, poems and invitations. She gave her a bottle of gardenia scent and three pairs of pyjamas, while all Marda wanted was the distraction of sex. Nearly a decade later, and with the intervention of war, Angela was still writing to her, admitting that her current love thought Marda ‘the person that has meant most to me in my life. Well, well, well. I fear you’d be highly amused at the times your name crops up.’36 There was an inevitable gap in emotion between Angela, who had discovered a whole new world in which she could belong, and Marda, the experienced, world-weary actress, pursued by lovers but held at bay by the one woman for whose love she longed. Marda was above all honest, and wished she could be frank with Angela who was already imagining making a life with her. Instead, she wrote her the letter she could never send:
Thank you for your two letters which I received today. They distressed me because it seems you expect me to feel more than lust for you. Is not lust a decent honest thing? I have told you the limits of what I gave when I said the words of that song we heard together. ‘You’re lovely to look at, delightful to hold, & heaven to kiss.’ And that is all. I do not think about you now you are away [in Cornwall], nor long for your companionship, but I do long for the illusion of apple blossom you give me in bed. You’re clean, & fragrant, & damn silly; & you make, & will make, me proud of my body. Therefore, stop writing I pray you, & when you come back to London let us fall to love making without the ado of words. Yours, gratefully, Marda.37
By November, Marda was referring to Angela as her ‘ex-young lady’, but, unusually for her, their relationship continued as an affectionate friendship for many years. Their loving friendship’s longevity said a great deal about Angela’s warmth and generosity of spirit. When she came to write her autobiography some fifteen years later, Gwen commented to Marda that Angela’s ‘memoirs I fear will have to be so censored as to be a little dull!’fn638 Marda eventually met Lady du Maurier for lunch with Angela in November and felt uncomfortable about it but, good actress that she was, reported she managed to stop her hands and lips from trembling and did not give the game away. She seemed to arouse great affection and loyalty in her lovers, for when Angela told her, with a flourish, that she had made her the beneficiary in her will, Marda related to Gordon Daviot that Angela was the third young woman to do so. It embarrassed her, but she knew they were young, time would pass and the will would be changed again (as indeed it was).
One of the more interesting couples Angela met through these new friendships was the novelist and bull-fighting aficionado Marguerite Steen and her much older lover, the distinguished painter William Nicholson. Delightfully youthful and dandified in his dress, William welcomed Angela to his famous London studio in Apple Tree Yard. Rich with the divine clutter of a working painter, the studio was converted from stables just behind St James’s Square. Full of mischief and rapid-fire repartee, he was an artist of wide-ranging ability and brilliance, and in recognition of this was knighted the following year. Yet one of Angela’s fondest memories of him was when she took Jeanne round to see him one afternoon at the studio and ‘with strange humility he showed Jeanne and myself picture after picture as though we were Duveens or Kenneth Clarks’.fn7 39 Of all the famous men she had got to know well in her life, and this must have included her father and all the eminent actors of her acquaintance, she considered William Nicholson to be the only really great man among them.
Angela was enjoying her newfound liberty to be herself with a group of women (and the occasional man) who did not judge her plain, disgracefully fat, or undesirable, and whose lives as single, liberated working women of independent means seemed to be far more interesting and adventurous than their married counterparts. In the mid-1930s, once a woman married she lost much of her autonomy and independence and was expected to defer to her husband on all the important and practical matters such as money, how to vote, and even sometimes what to think.
Daphne was struggling with just this very constraint as an officer’s wife in Surrey. Tommy was tolerant and understanding of his wife’s need for freedom, but he was conventionally brought up and subject to the social conventions of the time. He also had to maintain his authority and face in a very conventional, masculine world where officers’ wives were expected to be attractive and amenable and very much the secondary partner. A wife who went her own way ran the risk of undermining her husband in his relationship with his men and fellow officers, where it might be wondered how he would control his troops if he couldn’t even bring his wife into line.
Daphne started out determined to do her best, but had never been exposed to the harsh deprivations of working-class life and visiting the wives of the squaddies under her husband’s command was a shock. How could women live like this, she wondered, with so many children, no servants, little money and poor living conditions, and yet be so happy and uncomplaining of their lot? ‘I must say, though,’ she wrote to Tod, ‘the poor things are cheerful on the whole, and clean.’40 The ‘and clean’ revealed her detachment and lack of natural empathy with women whose men would fight and give their lives under her husband’s command. She could not identify on a human level with these wives and mothers and their hard-pressed families, but intellectually she knew how privileged she was and how she had some duty to them as the commanding officer’s wife. She set to letter-writing to help claim benefits due to them, and was always kind and polite, if rather remote.
Daphne may have found the lives of the ordinary soldiers and their families incomprehensibly difficult but she was, for different reasons, just as horrified by the wives of the officer classes. Again to Tod she confided: ‘I dread the picture of paying calls, and watching polo, and hearing Mrs So-and-So whisper in Mrs Such-and Such’s ear (“Of course you know she had a terrible reputation in England – drinks like a fish – and they say the little girl is’nt her husband’s at all ….”) What a life!’41
However, the Army wives’ loss was literature’s gain, for the grimness of Army wifedom spurred Daphne on to blissful escape into her imagination and work
. Her dismay and contempt for most human society precipitated her with increased energy into the worlds she created in her novels, peopled with characters utterly under her command. After the success of her biography of her father, Daphne set to with a will to write a novel that expressed all her love of the wildest most mysterious aspects of Cornwall, a novel of gothic adventure and suspense with wreckers, countless murders and brutal reversals of fortune. The atmosphere of the sea and the moor was so vividly conjured that Cornish mists seemed to rise from its pages.
The previous autumn, Daphne and Foy Quiller-Couch had set off for Bodmin Moor and, sheltering from the swirling fog and sheeting rain, stayed a couple of nights at Jamaica Inn. She had first come across this ancient coaching-inn the previous November. The women had undertaken an expedition on horseback and got lost on what seemed so mysterious and sinister a moor, only finding their way back when they dropped their reins and relied on their horses’ instincts for home. From that point the place lived on in her imagination. This second visit with Foy, and a chance meeting at the inn with a diminutive local pastor, provided a hook for a story that would not let her go. ‘What seed was dropped that night into the subconscious? I shall never know.’42
The seed grew into Jamaica Inn, and Victor Gollancz was determined to publish it, thereby poaching her from Heinemann, her previous fiction publisher. He offered Daphne the princely sum of £1,000 as an advance with generous twenty per cent royalties up to the first 10,000 copies sold. With Tommy only able to draw on his military salary, Daphne was aware that she had become her family’s main breadwinner and was proud of the fact, enjoying the independence and power it brought. Although she was not one to spend money on herself and cared little for clothes, she valued the freedom that money bestowed and was gratified at being the sole provider for her family with the same kind of largesse that had characterised her father’s approach to life.
Margaret, the nanny, looked after Tessa virtually full time and Daphne had a cook and a cleaner so her day was almost entirely her own. She continued to escape as much as she could to Cornwall, the land that fired her imagination and fed her spirit. Writing with intensity and discipline, she managed to work five to six hours a day and, by the beginning of 1936, was writing her last paragraph of Jamaica Inn. She made her heroine, Mary Yellan, eschew the conventional female yoke of support and subjection, and choose instead an uncertain future with her disreputable lover in his vagabond life. The novel was complexly plotted with terrific twists and turns to the melodramatic tale.
Daphne’s own response to the visceral power of Cornish sea and landscape and the pull of the past made her story thrillingly affective, and her dysphoric view of human nature permeated it, with menacing and brutalised characters denied redemption. The most disconcerting revelation was that her villain was not the murderous but tragic thug who terrorised the neighbourhood, but the albino vicar who admitted he was a ‘freak in nature’, someone from whom her heroine Mary instinctively recoiled: ‘In the animal kingdom a freak was a thing of abhorrence, at once hunted and destroyed, or driven out into the wilderness.’43 In Angela’s novel, The Little Less, she too made much of society’s reaction to ‘freaks of nature’, as homosexuals were described at the time, and their fear of misunderstanding, contempt and ostracism. Gerald’s long shadow still loomed over them.
Published with confidence and flair by Daphne’s new publisher, within just three months Jamaica Inn had sold more than her previous three novels put together and Daphne and Gollancz had a bestseller on their hands. Daphne had her family to thank for an unerring sense of the dramatic. Even home life with Gerald was like an extended pantomime, with extremes of histrionic emotion, intense intimacy alternating with almost hysterical rejection. Although difficult to cope with in real life, it stimulated Daphne’s sensitive understanding of all the dramatic tricks used so memorably by her father in his acting and theatrical direction. The excitement of the cliffhanger, the volte face, the unmasking of the unexpected villain and the terror of the other, hidden self, all served her brilliantly in her fiction.
But rather than please her new publisher by capitalising on this new vein of English Gothic, Daphne wanted to return to the subject of her family once more and suggested instead that she write about grandfather George, at the centre of a group biography on the du Mauriers. She was someone whose active curious mind was excited by research and particularly fascinated by her own family and its romanticised roots in France. Her position as Tommy’s wife, however, was set to make its first intrusive demands on her life. Her husband was now a lieutenant colonel and in sole command of 2nd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards in Alexandria in Egypt. Daphne recognised her duty was to go with him.
Life in Alexandria as Mrs Browning was almost unendurable for Daphne. She could not bear the heat, recoiled from the locals and loathed the social life of cocktail parties and gossip with the other English ex-pats, whom she looked down her nose at as ‘horrible Manchester folk’. Just as she was taught as a child to have perfect Edwardian manners, Daphne behaved with old-world courtesy, but also as their father had encouraged his children to mock behind people’s backs, her vitriol against the people she met was expressed in letters home. At fifteen on holiday in Algiers, she had been fascinated by the Arab traders, but that curiosity and interest was not now extended to the Egyptians. She thought them filthy and was irritated that they could not understand the English language. The English people in Egypt she found petty-minded and second-rate and she could not wait to leave.
Daphne ached with longing for England, but specifically for Cornwall, and swore she would never again stray ‘east of Looe, or west of Par’, a promise to herself she pretty much managed to keep. But, in her professional, hard-working way, Daphne slogged all through the heat of an Egyptian summer working on her book on the family, at times wishing she had never contracted to do it. She finished at last, but slumped into a depressed listlessness. Pale and low spirited, she had lost her appetite for food and life. The energy of three-year-old Tessa, even though she was in the full-time care of the redoubtable Margaret, still seemed too much for her mother to bear. Nothing seemed to be right.
Daphne had never become emotionally attached to her young daughter, although at times she was shocked by sudden feelings of protectiveness towards her. As a mother she always appeared kind and even-tempered, but puzzled by why anyone should delight in the company of one’s children. Daphne was proud of the fact she was not ‘one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time’,44 and seemed incapable of empathising with her daughter who, like herself as a girl, longed for love from an attractive, elusive mother. Daphne was so sensitive and articulate about the damage done to her by her mother’s remoteness, yet it never occurred to her that she was repeating the same pattern in her own relationship with her daughter. Rather, she chose to dilute Tessa’s intimate connection to her by insisting her daughter was more a Browning than a du Maurier, but also more like Angela than herself, both these descriptions emphasising the little girl’s inferiority and separateness from Daphne and Gerald, who by her reckoning were quintessential du Mauriers.
When Daphne was eventually seen by a doctor and diagnosed as being not ill but pregnant she was horrified. She did not want another baby at this point in her life. Even Tommy, trying to lift her mood with the jokey speculation that she might be carrying twin boys, failed to raise her spirits. Daphne wrote to Tod, who was living in Baker Street trying to make a go as a hat-maker, trusting her old governess to understand and sympathise: ‘The worst. Another infant on the way!! This was really rather a knock-out blow, as you can imagine.’45
Depressed that life seemed to be alarmingly beyond her control, Daphne could not know that her career and fortune were about to be transformed by a serendipitous creative relationship with the young film-maker and friend of her father’s, Alfred Hitchcock. Their stars would rise together as he took three of her most compelling works of imagination and turned two of them into iconic
works of cinematic art. Her stories would help propel him into Hollywood and immortality and he would make her one of the most famous and high-earning writers in the world. But bereft of inspiration and feeling powerless to command her own life, Daphne faced only the encroaching demands of marriage and maternity.
Angela was living a completely different life and, as great letter writers, the sisters were aware of how much their experiences were diverging. Her social life had expanded dramatically through her intimacy with Marda and Gwen and their Hampstead friends. They were an intellectually lively and creative, unorthodox group concerned with the arts and the world at large and Angela, although as sheltered in her upbringing as Daphne, was more able to sympathise with people less fortunate than herself. Her work with the Red Cross and VAD had made it inescapably clear how the majority of her countrymen and women struggled. Angela had a sympathy for the lives of others. She also felt some outrage at the injustices in England at the time, hence her parting from family tradition for a while and becoming a socialist. Even that aberration, however, was sparked, as with every big decision in her life, by love.
England in the mid-thirties was still struggling with the effects of the Depression. Society was deeply divided by class and region and Daphne was not alone in being ignorant of or uninterested in the two million unemployed, most in the industrial north, and how they managed to live on meagre dole money, food handouts, with little hope of work or progression. For those who did have jobs, however, there were numerous innovations that people with money could enjoy. Car ownership (and fatal accidents) increased dramatically, and cinemas and lidos were being built in the more prosperous suburbs and towns. The 1930s was seen retrospectively as the decade of depression and yawning inequalities. Yet, by the middle of the decade, economic prospects appeared slightly rosier, while the political landscape in Europe grew increasingly dark.