Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  Her Primrose Hill friends introduced Angela to another woman who would broaden her musical tastes and offer her love. Until she met Bo Foster, Angela had thought that ballet came a poor second to opera as a musical and emotional experience. But now, with Bo as an experienced guide, she became a devotee of the various Russian companies who had formed after the break-up of Ballet Russe on the death of Diaghilev. Together they saw most of the great Russian dancers of the time. Particularly impressive was Tamara Toumanova, the choreographer Massine’s favourite ballerina, nicknamed ‘the black pearl of Russian Ballet’, a reference to her dark beauty and extraordinary dramatic performances that marked her out in an already scintillating company. Angela saw so many extraordinary performances but Les Sylphides, the shimmering nymphs in diaphanous white as weightless as thistledown, was outstanding, ‘danced by a corps de ballet in which every dancer was worthy to be a prima ballerina’.7 Angela was hooked.

  But Angela, it seemed, was also attracted to Bo Foster. She was an interesting cultured woman, a devout Catholic and a Tory activist. She was nearly ten years older than Angela and they met after Bo’s long, turbulent love affair with the poet Valentine Ackland had just come to an end. Valentine’s description of Bo mirrored a photograph in Angela’s photo album of Bo gazing into the distance, looking bulky in a tweed suit and tie, with her hair in an unforgiving crop: ‘her rather heavy face, with its noble seventeenth-century nose and the beautiful arch of forehead (or is it brow, just above the eyeball?) looked most grave, most moved as she stared out of the window’. They were listening to Hahn’s song, ‘L’heure exquise’, that had supposedly made Verlaine weep.

  Valentine had met Bo Foster when she was a troubled teenager of seventeen and still called Molly McCrory. She was two years younger than Angela but had packed a great deal of frantic living into her life so far. Valentine’s relationship with Bo lasted for six years, through her impetuous and unconsummated marriage to a homosexual youth, and various other febrile affairs with women, and a few men. It finally ended when Molly met and fell in love with her life partner, the erudite poet and writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, in 1930.

  When Molly changed her name to Valentine she put on trousers to mark her new identity. She was nearly six foot tall, as thin as a couturier’s model and strikingly androgynous. At this time for a woman to wear men’s clothes and crop her hair as short as a boy’s was a bold advertisement of her independence from men and from male desire, and the constraint put on women by the expectations of others. Valentine, like many young people before and after her, was told by her father that loving someone of your own sex was ‘the filthiest, the most unforgiveable thing’, and that her ‘unnaturalness’ would make her go mad and blind. ‘I believed this,’ she wrote in a memoir, ‘in a kind of cold reasonableness, I tried to teach myself to type and play the piano with my eyes shut … But the madness I could not think how to prepare for …’8

  Just two years before Angela met Bo, a small book of poems celebrating erotic love between women had been published by Valentine and Sylvia as joint authors, causing a stir among the alternative intellectual set. It was called Whether a Dove or Seagull and, like Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads, refused to attribute the poems to either one of the poets so that readers came to them without preconceptions. It was also a generous act from Sylvia who wanted to encourage a wider publication and readership of Valentine’s work and used her name to do so. It certainly encouraged Angela.

  Bo Foster, or ‘BF’ as Angela identified her in her poetry book, asked Angela to write a sonnet dedicated to her. Angela, in her less flamboyant way, was as brave as Valentine Ackland, if not as skilled as a poet. She was, however, just as unafraid of her subject matter:

  …

  It ought to be terribly easy

  To sing to the woman you love

  in villanelles, sonnets, & such like

  Without asking help from above!

  When you’ve given me all that I crave for? And have lain in my arms till the dawn

  And I’ve kissed you from midnight till daybreak? Perhaps I shall not be so torn As to how to compose for you sonnets? Comparing your eyes to the stars,

  Your breasts to two exquisite hill-tops

  You Venus in fact, & I Mars!

  In brackets she added an alternative last stanza:

  Shall I tear you asunder with worship?

  Will you faint ’neath my burning caress?

  If I ask you to yield to my passion

  Will you ever surrender, – say ‘yes’?

  This interesting, independent, sexually free group of people with whom Angela was now mixing were exactly the friends that Noël Welch alluded to when she wrote of the sisters in middle age: ‘I have seen photographs, curled at the edges, blurred and hastily snatched away, showing a wilder Angela than the one I know, though sometimes in a sudden flash of humour, a ribald remark, one gets glimpses of a bohemian past that alarmed her father.’9

  Angela and Daphne were in close communication, the intrusive suspicions and exaggerated protectiveness of their parents having enhanced their closeness as confidantes, something that lasted throughout their lives despite Daphne’s necessary discretion about the trials of her own marriage. It was clear that Daphne knew about Angela’s explorations of love with women, just as Angela had known about Cousin Geoffrey, Ferdy, Molly Kerr and Carol Reed. By midsummer of 1937, however, Daphne was no longer experimenting with love but had returned to Tommy and Alexandria, having left Tessa and four-month-old baby Flavia in England with Margaret under their aunt Grace Browning’s watchful eye. Instead, in stifling temperatures, she was struggling to bring to paper the ideas that teemed in her head. Her only escape from the heat and frustration was to imagine herself back in her beloved Cornwall, and Menabilly and its cool dark woods became an almost transcendent object of desire. ‘What I’d give to be at Fowey!’10 she wrote despairingly to Tod. This longing for the powerfully envisioned world in her memory and imagination became the driving force of the book.

  Her passion for the dreamlike Menabilly, decaying in its enchanted, encroaching woods, combined in her imagination with her long fascination with the even grander Milton, where she had stayed as a child, to create the most haunting and desirable character in Rebecca, Manderley itself. Daphne’s own unease in the social roles expected of the wife of the commandant, her inability to run her household efficiently, even though she had servants to do every bidding, all fed into the character of the diffident outsider, the second Mrs de Winter. Her lack of a name just underlined her fugitive sense of self. As Daphne struggled to recover her old fluency and speed, she feared too for her own identity, for without being able to write she was nothing.

  After nearly five months away from England and their children, Daphne and Tommy returned home, Daphne with only about a quarter of Rebecca in her luggage. She was impatient to get to Cornwall and desperate to work, but she feared the presence of two small children, from whom after so long she had been emotionally disengaged, would interfere with that. She made the surprising decision to continue the estrangement from her daughters by leaving them with Nanny for Christmas. She and Tommy then headed alone to Ferryside to join the rest of the du Maurier family. Daphne feared it appeared ruthless and unkind, particularly with Tessa, aged four and old enough to know what was going on and express any feelings of missing her mother (although she recalled later that she enjoyed herself anyway). Daphne was full of justifications. It would be better for the girls, she said. ‘I do so dread [Tessa] becoming too precocious and for the next few years want her to lead as quiet and nurseryfied an existence as possible,’ she explained to her mother. The real reason, however, eventually emerged, ‘I should get no work done.’11

  Her writing proceeded slowly over Christmas. The children were reunited with their mother in January and by the spring, Daphne had settled herself, the children and servants into a charming new Army house, Greyfriars, near Fleet in Hampshire, close to Tommy’s work at Pirbright
Camp. She was suddenly writing again with real concentration and pace and was enjoying herself tremendously. Her imaginary world had come alive. By April, Rebecca was finished and, although she had eventually found writing it a pleasure, she felt it was too grim to be a bestseller and that the psychological scaffolding might not be appreciated.

  Her publisher Victor Gollancz knew better. Here was an exceptional, atmospheric novel full of drama and suspense. His editor thought it an exquisite love story. Daphne always baulked at being considered a writer of romances. She was far more concerned with power and identity than love, and instead thought this new novel full of hatred and fear. Rebecca’s mutability, its capacity to draw very different responses from its readers, ensured it would be solid gold for Gollancz’s beautiful young author, and a terrific boost for his own young publishing company.

  More than any critical reaction, Daphne cared most about how much the book would earn. Though she had the responsibility of being the family’s main breadwinner, she liked the way this altered the balance of power in her marriage. Daphne was now free to choose to spend her money how she liked, and eventually to decide where and how they lived. Earning so much more money than her husband bought her the freedom to write, and to decline most of the usual duties of an Army wife and mother. It was central to her sense of herself as a creative, hardworking, boyish spirit who could be bold and adventurous in both her real and imaginary worlds, where she answered to no one. Money freed her from dependency and service, the condition of most women’s lives in her and previous generations, and one that filled her with horror, fuelling some of her most searing fiction.

  Rebecca was published in August 1938 to wide, if at times patronising, acclaim. The predominantly male reviewers stressed the book’s popular appeal and some its boldness and strangeness. All agreed that its author had written an unusual bestseller and Daphne was delighted – with the numbers of copies sold and monies earned more than with the opinions of strangers. Within a month of publication, Victor Gollancz could answer her anxious question by telling her she had made £3,000, including her original advance.

  The book’s American publication by Doubleday in the autumn brought another cascade of reviews, again some rather carping, suggesting Rebecca was a poor relation of Jane Eyre’s, or invoking the spirit of the Brontës, not always to Daphne’s credit. All of this fired the excitement, and the novel soared away once more to great success. The most crucial accelerator of Daphne’s fame and fortune, however, came when her nascent career as a writer was hooked up to the rocket of Alfred Hitchcock’s genius. Her extraordinary imagination, combined with his complex understanding of fear and cinematic brilliance, for a while propelled them both on a blazing trajectory to world recognition and acclaim.

  The producer David O. Selznick had bought the rights to Rebecca and hired Hitchcock to direct the film. It was due to be Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie, after plans to film a story of the sinking of the Titanic were scrapped. Before he left for Hollywood, however, Hitchcock was offered the chance to direct Daphne’s earlier novel, Jamaica Inn. This was a nightmare to direct, the whole process riven with problems, the biggest of which was its temperamental star, Charles Laughton. When Jamaica Inn was eventually released, the critics complained of its melodramatic clunkiness, but the audiences loved it and turned it into box office gold.

  Hitchcock began his career in Hollywood buoyed by this success. His second great stroke of good luck (and Daphne’s too) was that Selznick was too absorbed in finishing Gone With the Wind to interfere or oversee his new protégé’s work on Rebecca. They had already cast two fine actors in the main parts, Laurence Olivier for Max de Winter and Joan Fontaine as his tormented wife. Hitchcock made the film as close to Daphne’s story as he could, except the American censors would not allow Max to get away with intentionally killing Rebecca and so her death had to be accidental. Even so, he made the film entirely his own. The result was sensational and the film won an Oscar for best picture and another for best cinematography. Hitchcock’s global reputation was made and Daphne could look forward to lifelong financial security.

  Her anxiety that she might not be able to shoulder the household expenditure was stilled; she and her family could continue to live as she had as a child, with the necessities of space and live-in staff that left her free to pursue the only thing that mattered, the creative life of her imagination. She may have taken on her father’s mantle as the high-earning breadwinner, the moral paterfamilias, but she was nothing like as extravagant and was determined not to squander the cornucopia that suddenly seemed to shower into her lap.

  But just as her career took off, unbeknownst to Daphne, the subterranean unhappiness of her two daughters began bubbling to the surface at home. Neither girl had received any sense of her importance in her parents’ lives, and neither had received enough love and attention from their mother, the one person they longed to affect. They knew, with the instinct of small children, that they made little impression on her emotional radar, although she was concerned and conscientious about their physical welfare. Where there is not enough love to go round, children invest great significance in any signs of affection or favouritism.

  Tessa, as the eldest, had lived longer in this atmosphere of unrequited longing and her baby sister can only have been a threat to the already inadequate portion of love that was hers. According to Flavia, the flashpoint that marked the unhappy breakdown between Tessa and herself came when she inadvertently broke her elder sister’s precious and much-loved doll, a present from her glamorous godmother, Atalanta Arlen. The relationship between them deteriorated from there, with Tessa unhappy and resentful and Flavia uncomprehending of the reason for this sibling friction. Tessa’s irritation with her younger sister evaporated once she had escaped into her own life, with friends and love to sustain her. In a sensitive memoir, written many years later, Flavia recognised the tragedy when a precious sisterly relationship was spoiled: ‘We are now close and the best of friends, but I often think both our lives would have been quite different if we had got on well as children.’12

  Daphne’s phenomenal success with Rebecca not only altered the balance of power in her marriage, it also utterly dominated her sisters’ forays into their own careers. All three sisters had grown up aware that the world knew them as the daughters of Gerald du Maurier, some even thought of them as the grandchildren of the more notable George. Their surname was distinctive and singular to their family, but with their father dead, his claim on the name began to fade in the public’s memory and for a while they were seen as discrete individuals in their own rights.

  Once Daphne’s name was united with the most successful and highly rated film of 1940, her meteoric fame meant that from this time Angela and Jeanne would be known as sisters of Daphne. They were much less famous, much less successful – and less strikingly attractive too. Gallingly perhaps, Daphne only endured the fame as a spur to her earning capacity. She valued power and autonomy and shrank from publicity, from any kind of public show as the famous author. Daphne was even cavalier about her own good looks, recognising them as a means of gaining what she needed in life; to feel in control, to bolster her fragile self-esteem and to win her freedom to write. Even her evident beauty, however, was not enough to make her feel confident in unfamiliar social situations.

  The comparisons between herself and Daphne were more invidious for Angela. She was the eldest and naturally felt some advantages should have come her way. Coming off worst in all the comparisons was bad enough, but most difficult of all was the fact that she aspired to be a writer too. She recognised this last barrier in a memoir written in late middle age:

  A lot of people say I have suffered because of Daphne’s fame and success … I am still – and know I always shall be – asked ‘Are you the writer?’, and I still – and always shall I suppose – reply ‘I’m the Sister’ …13

  It was to her credit that she continued to write in the increasing obscurity of Daphne’s shadow. Initially critics t
hought she was published because she was Daphne’s sister. They then compared her unfavourably to her younger sister, and finally ceased paying much attention at all to her work, even though by the end of her life she had published eight novels, a collection of short stories, one spiritual travelogue and two books of autobiography.

  Angela’s rackety social life with the bohemian set in London was suddenly interrupted in the late summer of 1937 by an invitation out of the blue. Olive Guthrie had written, asking her to come to stay at Torosay. She needed help with her rhododendrons, she said. Angela was ‘astounded’ that Olive had remembered her. There had been those three blissful days the previous year and her one letter of thanks and no other communication since.

  She arrived on Mull during a brilliant autumn and was initiated into the life of a great Scottish estate: stalking deer on the hillside, an activity that had her winded before she had managed half a mile, duck shooting at dusk, collecting mussels from the rocks for the evening moules marinières, and daily sawing of rhododendron branches where the invasive bushes suffocated the natural undergrowth.

  Angela was also introduced to the cries of the wilderness, the call of the heron and ‘the low thrilling sound of the stags’ roar in the forest, to me the most exciting noise on earth’.14 Despite the fact that Olive’s daughter, ‘Bobs’ de Klee, much the same age as Angela, was staying along with other sporting friends, some sympathetic understanding between Olive and Angela sprang up that autumn. ‘Daily one became more fascinated by Olive’s wit, and the general charm and the enveloping tendrils of Mull closed slowly around me.’15