Piffy, Bird & Bing

by Jane Dunn

  She had exhibited in the St Ives Society of Artists’ autumn show, an event opened by her mother. At one open day at her studio the following spring, Jeanne exhibited a self-portrait that was praised for ‘its bigness of style and directness of touch’.58 It was here that Dod Procter wandered in, liked what she saw and asked Jeanne if she would sit for her as she would like to paint her. From that point on Jeanne and Dod forged a close emotional and creative relationship.

  Dod was more than twenty years older than Jeanne and, for a time, just before the war, had been the most famous woman artist in the country. She liked to paint tender sculptural portraits of young girls and women and her nudes were so real they sometimes shocked and courted controversy.

  Morning, a monumental painting of hers that was hung in the Royal Academy Summer Show of 1927, so caught everyone’s imagination that the Daily Mail decided to buy it for the nation. Suddenly, her portrait of this sturdy young goddess asleep on her rumpled bed was hailed not only as the best painting in the show but a huge popular hit with critics and public alike. The Times celebrated it as, ‘no artificial composition reeking of the studio, but a fragment of life, nobly seen and simply stated … a creative design of compelling power and beauty for all who have eyes to see’.59 And people clamoured to see it: every town with any pretensions to a gallery wanted to be able to display it and it toured for two years. The young daughter of a Newlyn fisherman, Cissie Barnes, was only nineteen when she modelled for the painting and she too became almost as famous as the artist.

  Dod revelled in the attention, after all she was in her late thirties when fame struck and had worked hard for decades for this kind of recognition. She loved parties and was herself a good-looking, light-boned woman, ‘swift and active like a gazelle’,60 completely open about her driving ambition and confident of the excellence of her work. Dod had been widowed in 1935 when her painter husband Ernest Procter died when she was just forty-five. In 1942 she became only the second woman to be elected as an academician to the Royal Academy. She could not have been a better role model and friend for the younger more diffident Jeanne.

  Dod invited Jeanne to spend their first winter travelling and working together in Tenerife. It had become for her a favourite destination of warmth and dazzling light and a refuge from the cold dark days at home. Now in the company of a virtuoso painter, Jeanne too experienced the thrill of brilliant colour and beguiling scents, the intensity of heat and the pleasures of the senses, and so embraced a more adventurous style and a high-toned palette. She now entered a bold new world where colour and light and love mattered more to her than form.

  11

  A Kind of Reckoning

  This is the only answer, then, to be alone. This is the ultimate reply. Dependent upon no soul but your own self. Dependent upon the sounds that flood the mind. Creator of your world, your universe.

  DAPHNE DU MAURIER, The Parasites

  DAPHNE’S IMAGINATION WAS extraordinarily alive, spinning compelling narratives from a glimpse of someone’s life or a moment plucked from the passing show. It was not just people whom she cloaked in make-believe, she did the same to her chosen house. Indeed the possessive love she felt for Menabilly rivalled what she felt for any living creature: she knew that Tommy not only found the house cold and uncomfortable in winter but was jealous of the place it had in her heart. ‘No one realises that I have been in love, literally in love, with Menabilly for twenty years … I don’t want any other house, ever … I think if I ever do go I shall burn it down behind me so that no one else shall have it,’ she explained to Ellen whose love of Barberrys, the main Doubleday house, Daphne categorised as being circumstantial, made by happy memories of her family and her husband Nelson. Daphne felt her impulse was quite different:

  Mine with Menabilly is entirely possessive and personal. I wanted it for years, and got it, and had no associations with it whatsoever except those that came out of my imagination. When I consider it impersonally I realise it is quite a dreary old house, lived in for centuries by quite dreary people, and possibly had no character at all, until I gave it one.1

  She might have said the same about all the obsessions of her life – thrilling while they lasted, precious spurs to her creative imagination, and yet ultimately disappointing as daylight entered and pretence gave way to reality. Daphne thought that her heightened creative imagination was allied to sexuality, that somehow she sublimated her sexual energy into the fabrication of characters and worlds that she could inhabit for a while, ecstatic at her power of creation and control. But with the menopause came fading powers. Not only did inspiration seem to flee but Daphne even felt the grip of Menabilly loosened with the completion of My Cousin Rachel. Autumn and winter there depressed her, she told Ellen, and she became restless, ‘such a longing for the unknown, for something – but what, God knows’.2

  Her children were growing up and after some years being tutored by Tod had gone to boarding school, Tessa with pleasure as she was happy to have friends and be part of a wider world and Flavia with more ambivalence for, unlike Tessa, she loved the atmosphere and ghosts of Menabilly and was less well-equipped for the rough and tumble of life outside. Both girls had childhoods that were unhappy in different ways. It could not have been a more different upbringing from the one the du Maurier sisters enjoyed. The elder generation had been brought up in an elite London theatrical crowd, surrounded by people and glamorous organised activities. There had not been many children to play with but a constant stream of beautiful adults had passed through their house, and first nights, meals at the Savoy and theatrical parties were almost weekly occurrences.

  Menabilly was as far away from Hampstead and the theatrical life as it was possible to be. It was Daphne’s enchanted castle, fortified from the outside world where she could pursue her dreams undistracted by real life; it was a place of magic and adventure for Flavia and Kits, but to Tessa it was more like an island concealed within its deep and ancient woods, inward looking, where outsiders were not welcome. Tessa was driven to despair by the isolation and once told Flavia that all she remembered of her childhood at Menabilly was ‘the cold, the hunger and the wretched rats; and I suppose you could add loneliness’.3 In getting away to school she discovered friends and later just how attractive she was to young men and how much fun there was to be had. Flavia was the most disregarded in the family: neither the eldest, praised for her looks, nor the son and heir. And even when she was eventually sent to boarding school it was almost on a whim of her mother’s, with only a couple of days’ notice, and shocking to the sensitive, unworldly girl who was bundled so unprepared onto the school train.

  On the surface, Daphne was always affable, never lost her temper, was gentle and full of fun, but she was often inaccessible in a world of her own and could be extraordinarily uncomprehending of the feelings of others. Her children’s passions puzzled her, if she even noticed them. Emotionally remote, she was all the more tantalising for being physically near but unreachably far. From very young, it was clear to Tessa and Flavia that they were not centrally important in their mother’s life and that their longing for her unconditional love and unrivalled attention would remain unassuaged. She was so attractive with such a light-hearted manner that her elusiveness was the more painful, and her occasional dismissive comments the more wounding.

  There were precious high points when they were ill, when Daphne’s self-absorption was fractured by real concern for their welfare and they could bask in her almost full attention. And Christmas too was wonderful, when the house was magically transformed with decorations, installed by both their parents, and Daphne was emotionally present, playful and funny. Too soon these ecstatic interludes were over and their relationship returned to the usual maternal detachment, combined with the du Maurier critical eye. Flavia never forgot the throwaway comments on her plainness, something so far from the truth but once imbedded almost impossible to erase, and even Tessa, who was considered the sister with the looks, was compared unfavourably by
her mother to Neltje Doubleday, who was the same age but much more sophisticated. Neither girl was credited with any particular talents or given much encouragement to develop those they had.

  Their father was mostly away during their earliest childhood and when he returned from war was exhausted, demoralised and not entirely well. He was also not really at home at Menabilly, for it was so clearly Daphne’s domain. She did not need him there and grew to resent his presence. She had her house, her imagination and her son and this was really all she wanted – and even her love for Kits did not interrupt her essential routines of work and solitude. Tommy could be the most tremendous fun when he was on form but other stresses more usually intervened and he was often irritable or morose. He came from a generation when children were seen but not heard and it would have been inconceivable to think that his children could be encouraged to voice their fears and wishes or express their unhappiness. Their Aunt Angela was neither willing nor able to step into the breach; she had a romance about the idea of children but the reality was rather more tedious to her. Like her sisters she had a good sense of humour but could be sharp and disapproving and was too often full of her own concerns. Jeanne never pretended to like or understand children but was perfectly happy to be a kind but distant aunt.

  Kits had a very different childhood from his sisters. Precious from the moment he was born, adored as the golden boy, he was charming, good-looking and resolutely sunny-natured – why would he not be when treated as if he was the centre of a benign circle in which he was his mother’s darling, and his sisters’ pet? His important relationship with his father, however, was blighted from the start by Daphne’s exclusive love of her boy (she much preferred kissing Kits to kissing anyone else – except Ellen – she told Ellen Doubleday). Tommy’s concern that Daphne’s indulgence of their son would undermine his ambition and ruin his character was airily dismissed: despite the importance of her own father in her life, Daphne marginalised Tommy’s role in their son’s childhood. In fact she liked to imagine that Kits was a reincarnation of Gerald in his charm and success with women, belonging exclusively to her, and that he had little to do with the Browning genes. Even her encouragement of Tommy’s family nickname of ‘Moper’, coined from a chance remark of one of the children about their father moping before catching the train back to London, undermined his authority in the family.

  When Kits was sent to boarding school at Winchester before he was nine years old, it was a terrible wrench for Daphne and traumatic for him. He had never been away from home on his own before, rarely played with other small boys and was more used to running wild, free to explore the gardens of Menabilly in pursuit of his own games and interests, with little interference from the adults. Treated as an equal by his mother and sisters, he was quite unprepared for the tribal cruelties of small boys in austere and unloving institutions. Although the school, West Downs, was more enlightened than most, he found the banal and arbitrary disciplines imposed on pupils hard to take at a time when spirit and individuality were seen as something to be necessarily channelled into conformity. In his first letter home, Kits managed to relay, through code, that he was miserable and friendless. Daphne was distraught. When Angela came to lunch later that day she was greeted by her younger sister, leaning out of her bedroom window with the anguished cry: ‘Kits loathes his school and is dreadfully unhappy. What am I to do?’

  Angela’s response was unsympathetic. ‘Pull yourself together for a start,’ she said and then, turning to Flavia, added, ‘what a fuss. I expect he is enjoying himself and just wrote that to work her up.’4 In fact Kits was truly miserable and it took him a long time to settle in this alien and unsympathetic place. As a young girl, though much older than Kits, Angela had loathed being away from home and suffered horribly from homesickness. Her reaction showed such a remarkable lack of empathy and imagination it was possible that she too was jealous of her sister’s blind devotion to her son.

  Certainly Daphne felt she could not really confide in either Tommy or her sisters about just how bereft she felt and was only at ease talking about it to Ellen, whom she longed to entice to Europe so she could get away from the vacuum at home. But they were so different in their tastes. Ellen wanted luxury hotels in European cities and dressing for dinner: she loved shopping and seeing the sights, and was friendly and interested in people, attracting hangers-on in droves; Daphne told her she hated the idea of a European tour, had never been in the Ritz bar, and did not hanker after dining in expensive Parisian restaurants. She much preferred the cafés of the Rive Gauche she said (and decades later would wear Yves Saint Laurent’s new scent Rive Gauche in tribute to her bohemian tastes) and aimed to travel light and unnoticed, packing only a few comfortable clothes. She did not like to share Ellen’s attention with anyone, not even her children.

  Ellen was not very keen on making the trip but was pressured into it by Daphne. It did not turn out well. Daphne felt Ellen at times became too ‘like Mummy’, not the idealised version she longed for, but the critical real life one who had so fatally undermined her childhood. She also loathed the fact that her royalties had not arrived from America and she was totally dependent on Ellen for money, a feeling of powerlessness that she had left behind long ago when she first struck out for freedom against her family.

  Ellen had been unable to respond to Daphne’s emotional demands and on the holiday had told Daphne she disliked her playing the gallant and carrying her parcels. She had also accused Daphne of lacking perception, of losing her sense of humour while in her presence and of being obsessed, making her into a mother substitute or a reinvention of Ferdy, her first love. All of this was pretty close to the truth and it enraged and humiliated Daphne that Ellen was emotionally detached enough to find it tedious, and tell her so. To think she might be a bore and a burden was too much to bear. Apart from her infant longing for her mother’s love, Daphne had never before been the supplicating party in a love affair and she hated the sense of powerlessness this brought. Ellen had also complained of the burden of being clothed in Daphne’s fantasies, expected to live up to preconceived and mistaken ideas about her character.

  After the trip was over, and Ellen had left Menabilly to return to America, Daphne suddenly vented all her frustrations in a scathing letter to her, fuelled by drink. Part of her bitter response was that Ellen had become ‘an endless source of profit to my literary life’ and, as her fictions benefited Doubleday Inc., they were wedded to each other as ‘Finance is all’.5 She hit back at the slight that she lacked humour in Ellen’s presence by declaring loftily, ‘I am shaking with silent laughter most of the time, but you are possibly not aware of it … Besides, my sense of humour is rather warped.’6

  The following day, Daphne sent a heartfelt apology for her ‘stinking’ letter and Ellen appeared to understand and overlook the viperish tone. But for Daphne the remorse continued. She realised with a shock that, clever and entertaining as she was, and brilliant at plotting her characters’ imaginary lives, when it came to real people’s feelings she lacked empathy and insight. Human relationships were such a problem for her and her lack of understanding frightened her:

  I feel I have just botched everything, and you will never really trust me again, or have any faith in me. Even if I had never written that gin and brandy letter, there would still be something at odds between us … You think you have yourself in hand, and then you suddenly realise you have nothing of the sort, and are in complete turmoil, without judgment. The realisation of this is dreadfully shaming, and baffling too; frightening almost … I am the king of advisors to other people, and quite sound too – and then when it comes to living myself, worse than a young child. I think a young child would have more common sense, more understanding.7

  There were two ‘gin and brandy’ letters written to Ellen that showed a much darker, cruel underbelly to Daphne’s usual witty, light-hearted self. It was not a coincidence that the short stories she was writing around this time, ‘The Birds’, ‘The Old Man’, ‘Mo
nte Verità’, ‘The Little Photographer’ and ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’ were amongst her best, a step deeper into fear, violence and the macabre. She admitted she was struggling to come to terms with her creative masculine energy, ‘the problem of Niall’, so at odds with the womanly self that her husband and children needed. Her only way to try and understand the conflicts in herself was to employ her troublesome boy-self and write it out, and these remarkable stories were the result. It was a very misanthropic world that Daphne created in her imagination where people were not kind or empathic to each other, where selfishness and misunderstanding abounded and, as she so often explained, the barrier between the imagined and the real was fatally indistinct.

  The shortest of the stories, ‘The Old Man’, about a father who kills the son who has displaced him in his wife’s affections and thereby regains her love, ‘no longer a third to divide them’, turned out to be a swan. It was not only a reflection of Tommy’s jealousy of Kits, she said, but also an allegory of most religious teaching where we have to kill the jealousy within ourselves before we can rise again. She ended it with her murderous swan, forgiven by his mate and thereby transformed into a transcendent beauty, at one with nature, ‘[taking off] from the water, full of power, and she followed him … I tell you it was one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw in my life: the two swans flying there, alone, in winter.’8

  The stories were published under the title The Apple Tree, named after the longest story, a brilliant allegory based on the Puxley marriage, her part in its downfall, and its dogged survival. Daphne had noticed an ancient apple tree in the orchard at the Puxleys’ elegant house where she and her children had been guests during the war, and been struck by its resilience. In her story, a man attempts to destroy an almost barren apple tree, seen by him as a reincarnation of his self-sacrificing wife. He longs instead for the younger more fertile tree to replace it. The old tree endures his cruel blows and continues to give of itself with shade, apples, fuel, until the man himself is destroyed in the end by its indomitable, suffocating power. Daphne’s family and most reviewers were shocked by the anger and violence in much of these stories, but nothing could ever be too nasty for her old friend Hitchcock, and a decade later he would turn ‘The Birds’ into one of the most iconically terrifying films of his career.