by Jane Dunn
Her novel Reveille was a dramatisation of her political interests. The heroine, Deborah Kilhoan, once again was like her, with an appreciation of grand estates and Pekinese dogs. She also had a touch of her sister Daphne in that Deborah only has one son and ‘no wish for daughters. What should she do with a daughter?’19 She is loved by a highly intelligent, unconventional socialist MP but, by marrying his dumb but easy-going, philandering brother, she sets up an epic hostility between the two. Political and personal arguments rage, her husband then dies in the war and the estate she loves is about to be wrested from her by the heir, her socialist brother-in-law (who intends to give it to the state). The whole struggle ends with the heir accidentally shooting himself. In a deathbed confession he admits she was the only woman he had ever loved and his ‘foul’ behaviour was due solely to sibling rivalry, fuelled by her choosing the wrong brother. Deborah soldiers on and triumphantly wins his parliamentary seat but this time for the Conservatives, praying to God for guidance to keep the nation steady in maintaining the status quo.
Shallow Waters on the other hand was a sparky recreation of the theatrical world of Angela’s youth, with the more modern overlay of the experiences of younger actresses like Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Marda Vanne and Martita Hunt. The story begins in the run up to the Second World War and she made her heroine, Maureen Tempel, a young ingénue actress, much as Angela imagined she would have been if she had persevered with the profession. Maureen is considered plain as a girl who grows into ‘a nice ordinary sort of person’,20 but ‘there was a streak of genius somewhere in her acting’21 that set her apart from the rest. Angela peopled the story with the real celebrities she knew and had known: her father, her great friend Betty Hicks’s father Seymour Hicks, and Ivor Novello. She even provides a Svengali-like figure to promote young Maureen’s career and take her into his bed. After various vicissitudes, Maureen falls in love with a rich, landed gentleman, about to become a Tory MP. In order to be the best wife and mother (‘half-hearted attempts at anything are seldom successful’22), she decides to give up her glittering career on the stage, against all the advice of her friends and fellow professionals.
Angela wrote this conclusion with great feeling, and at some length. Her novels were either a celebration of a woman friend or a way to work out her own preoccupations. This one was dedicated to Betty Hicks, her girlhood friend who had been widowed young and was devoted to her son.
The passion Angela invested in her heroine’s apologia for giving up the stage suggested that, from the vantage point of middle age, she considered that a woman’s commitment to the married state was the answer to a happy life. After all, she had not had the chance herself to be married to a devoted man, as was her heroine, but she had seen Daphne’s marriage struggle. She had also known redoubtable women like Olive Guthrie and Anne Treffry and admired their roles as strong talented women who, nevertheless, put their energies into becoming supportive wives. Even Marda Vanne, the great rebel and lover of women, had wondered in later life if she might not have been happier in the end if she had remained with her husband. The heroine Maureen’s paean to married love was something Angela also believed in the depths of her romantic and nostalgic soul:
You see I know now that Jonathan [Willoughby] means more than all the parts, all the plays, all the careers in the world … I don’t want to be a middle-aged wife, rushing off on a job of my own, leaving a middle-aged husband to loneliness. Or to other women! … I know you are distressed because I have said good-bye to the theatre, good-bye to audiences, and have buried Maureen Tempel. Don’t be. Maureen Willoughby is so much more real a person, and so much nicer a person … there isn’t a happier woman in England today than me.23
Perhaps she also felt, as she herself entered middle age and grew increasingly interested in the Church and its teachings, that there was something shallow about the thespian way of life, that her much-loved parents had been entertaining and charming, and wonderful actors, but had lacked that deeper purpose and identity.
Neither book caused even a ripple on publication day. Her time as a novelist had come, briefly flickered and then faded. Angela realised a tide had turned and her kind of books were considered ‘old-fashioned – “square” – except to our own generation … [the critics] are sick of you, you’ve had your day’.24 She protested that in an age of James Baldwin she could not change styles to suit the fashion and insert all kinds of four-letter words and obscenities. Baldwin was only ten years younger than Angela and he was writing with anger and honesty about a much tougher reality in Harlem than she could ever have imagined from the beauty and safety of Hampstead, Torosay or Cornwall. With the publication in 1953 of his semi-autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin took the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic by storm. Suddenly country houses and moneyed old duffers, hanging on grimly to outworn traditions, seemed completely irrelevant.
But Angela’s memoir, published in 1951, was a different matter. Written much like her letters – confiding, breathless, discursive – it was a fascinating triumph of name-dropping, celebrity anecdotes, of barely veiled emotion and hinted transgressions. She offered glimpses of the glamour of the theatrical world her parents inhabited and a childhood, with her sisters, that was both privileged and deprived. In this book she wanted her readers to guess that there was much more to the middle-aged spinster author than met the eye. Only the title let it down, for it was so much more lively, confident and entertaining than the self-deprecating words implied. It’s Only the Sister she took from an infamous incident when she was mistaken for Daphne by a gushing matron. ‘“I expect you think I am my sister, Daphne Browning,” I explained, “I am Angela du Maurier.” With the eyes and the voice of a Medea she turned to her husband, who was standing in the offing ready to be introduced, and cried – “It’s ONLY the SISTER!” and with that she left me.’25
This book also attracted some admiring fans, one of whom, Betty Williams, was to become a lifelong friend. Betty was thirty years old, a dancer who had had a nervous breakdown having been treated with psychological aversion therapy to ‘cure’ her of an attraction towards her own sex. Angela had written in her memoir with such tolerance and understanding on the subject of homosexual love that Betty thought she would understand her own unhappy experience, and she did. Soon her newsy and reassuring letters were flying regularly to Nottingham, to where Betty had returned home to recuperate. They helped the young woman more than any drugs or therapy could do, and Betty remained eternally grateful for Angela’s loyalty and care.
As Betty explained the loss of her great love after her mother’s interference, Angela confided that she was in love with ‘a fine lady’ and when Betty was invited to Ferryside she not only met Angela’s mother but Anne Treffry too. She found Lady du Maurier remote but charming, and generous with her offer to explore the house and garden. Mrs Treffry was warm and embracing and completely at ease in her own skin and her place in the world.
Angela, however, was ill at ease with hers, refusing to let Betty accompany her sea-bathing as she did not want to be seen in her swimming costume and was ambivalent about inviting her into her life. All the uncomplicated feeling and understanding she had shown in her letters became clouded and face to face Angela was a confusing mixture of affection and shame. A happy and peaceful evening rowing up the river was followed by kisses and then, ‘“Let’s go to bed”. I declined. [Angela] saw me to the gate saying, “I’m sorry I’m too selfish to keep up what you need”.’26 Betty felt Angela was full of conflict, finding it difficult to reconcile her true self, expressed in her warm and chatty letters, with her public face, the respectable middle-aged woman with a famous name, High Church principles, and the sound of her father’s hysterical disapproval ringing in her ears. While Betty Williams was at Fowey, she was invited out by Angela Halliday, who was living locally and whom she found uncomplicatedly friendly and accepting, but, tentative herself and anxious not to upset her friend, she demurred.
&
nbsp; When Betty Williams’s health dramatically declined a few years later, Angela proved what a stalwart friend she could be, rushing up to see her in hospital three times during her stay there. She had been upset to find Betty’s bedside was not surrounded by flowers and get-well-soon cards and so brought roses to cheer her up. Angela always believed in doing things properly. Only on her third visit did she revert to her suspicious conflicted state when, stony-faced and forbidding, she accused Betty of manipulating her into feeling responsible for her. This was soon followed by an affectionate letter, but Betty had become wary of Angela’s emotional unpredictability. Only when Angela was an old lady, and both Daphne and Anne Treffry were dead, did their friendship become as well fitting as an old glove.
In the April of 1951, Angela’s nagging health problems were finally diagnosed and she went into Fowey Cottage Hospital for a hysterectomy to solve the problem of fibroids. She loved this hospital, where everyone knew each other and the nursing and care was offered as if to a friend. A cheery letter to Marda captured the bawdy humour that lurked beneath the very proper, even stern, exterior:
Darling, here I am womb-less, sex-less (?) at last. You hate things that are misshapen and unbeautiful I know, but I cannot refrain from telling you that when they cut me open they found the cause of the trouble was something matron could only describe as ‘a man’s genitals’!!! So now we know.
Angela obviously identified with one of her heroes, Abelard, who was castrated in revenge for his forbidden love of Héloïse, as she signed herself ‘Angela Abelard’.27 This was a strange appellation that, together with the joke about being rendered sex-less, suggested perhaps that in some deeper way she felt both mutilated and condemned.
Angela sailed through the operation but had an increased propensity, she told Daphne, to burst into tears. She clung to her friendship with Anne Treffry. ‘Anne has been by me all the time, which of course was everything,’ she wrote to Marda, and the only other person she wanted to see was Daphne. Angela was due to go to stay with Anne for a week to recuperate and then they hoped to be able to visit Italy for two or three weeks in May. As Jeanne was away in Spain for four months, this involved Muriel and her nurse going to stay with Daphne at Menabilly. Daphne was not happy with the arrangement and irritated that Jeanne always went off to such inaccessible places. Muriel had shingles and, although she was only just seventy years old, she was already a semi-invalid with very little interest left in life. The sisters did not have to do any physical caring for their mother, as they had installed an excellent nurse, but Muriel lived with Angela at Ferryside and thus was her main responsibility, one that she found limiting and wearisome.
Daphne’s children, however, were a great delight to Angela. She thought her godchild Flavia was running true to du Maurier form: ‘Heaven to look at & shy in a strange way.’ Angela was gratified that she asked to be given a crucifix and a man’s watch for her fourteenth birthday, ‘& grumbled to Daphne that one couldn’t marry women … [Angela’s dots] I’ve altered my will in her favour’.28 This she wrote to Marda, who must have been relieved that she was no longer the beneficiary of the will – a favour that had been promised, against her wishes, when their affair ended years before.
When Jeanne returned from Spain she was, noted Daphne, ‘thinner than ever’,29 and it was obvious that it had been a disappointing and trying time. Her special relationship with Dod was unravelling. An interesting legacy perhaps was Dod’s peculiar voice. Michael Canney, the curator at Newlyn Art Gallery, remembered her as having ‘a cracked and perhaps affected voice that suited her opinions, which could be forceful and final’.30 Jeanne’s family realised that her voice too became odd and rather cracked; Noël Welch described it as ‘strange, like water breaking over stones. There are tears in it as well as laughter.’31 If it was a mannerism like Dod’s, then eventually it was shared by Noël too. However difficult her emotional life at the time, Jeanne’s career was on the rise. She had had three flower pictures accepted by the Royal Academy for their Summer Exhibition and two by the Paris Salon, the prestigious French equivalent – quite a triumph indeed. Noël Welch became more important in Jeanne’s life and in 1953 they moved together to a twelfth-century longhouse in a beautiful moorland village on Dartmoor. Jeanne had first seen it on a very cold spring morning and ‘it was its situation rather than the cottage that made me decide to buy it’.32
Half Moon, its evocative name from its past life as an inn, was once three cottages, squat, thick-walled and buttressed. All the du Maurier sisters chose to live in ancient or interesting buildings. From the front, Half Moon was a charming low-built house facing the village green, but from the back it looked as if it had grown organically out of the granite and the moor, its demesne becoming progressively wilder as its borders moved from fields to wood then rocks and moorland. It was here that both the artist and the intellectual set out to create an exquisite home for themselves and a beautiful place to work. Jeanne brought various pieces of du Maurier furniture with her: George du Maurier’s desk, on which he drew his iconic Punch illustrations, added a sense of family continuity and the rocking chair and dressing chest in her bedroom had once belonged to her father.
It was an ancient rustic house with few modern conveniences and dark wood and stone floors, softened only with rush matting. Jeanne, whose own style bordered on the austere, added Noël’s elegant Hepplewhite four-poster bed, whose soaring canopy reached right to the ceiling. ‘It is not a house for the timid,’ she wrote almost a decade after moving in; ‘all has a feeling of everlastingness that makes the shortage of cupboards, the bathroom like a rather primitive wash-house, and the fact there is nowhere to dry one’s often soaked clothes, seem trivial inconveniences … the great struggle was for light but I think has been won.’33 Throughout its atmospheric, uncluttered spaces could be heard the trill of canaries, recordings of plainsong or Jeanne’s own playing of Bach, Mozart or Chopin on her piano. It was a house full of music and work that mixed painting and poetry with horse-breeding and vegetable gardening.
Over the years they carved out a meditative garden incorporating the granite outcrops, and topiarising the gorse. The whole design was conceived as being in the shape of a cross with grass and paved crosses within it, and crossing grass walks. John Donne’s famous poem, ‘The Crosse’, pointing out the sacred in everyday things, was part of its inspiration and indeed Jeanne, from being a quietly religious girl in a non-practising family, converted to Catholicism in her adulthood. She liked to set up her easel and paint wherever a view, an angle, a collection of objects, caught her discerning eye. Jeanne would live with Noël at Half Moon for the rest of her life, with horses, dogs and a variety of other small animals, growing their own food and working at their art.
This life was under threat in the seventies through lack of funds and Daphne, always so generous with her money, came to their aid with the gift of the film rights for one of her films (possibly Don’t Look Now, Nicholas Roeg’s compelling thriller). Noël wrote to thank her effusively and pointed out they were not natural criers like Piffy (Angela) but both had burst into tears of sheer relief and joy. She also mentioned how appreciative they were of all Daphne’s years of hard work that had made such a generous gift possible.
It was taking a long time for Daphne to recover from the deadly sense that inspiration had fled with the sudden erasure of Gertie from her imaginative landscape. She was not ready for another epic creative effort but dragged herself out of depression by beginning to research her ancestress Mary Anne Clarke and her liaison with the Duke of York, with the idea of a book based on her life. Although writing Mary Anne, ‘has put me on my feet, and toughened me up’, Daphne was concerned about what she would do once she had sent the manuscript off and she feared ‘another bleak six months’. She wrote to Ellen that she wished, ‘I was like Noël [Coward] and could paint, and compose, and have dozens of things up my sleeve, when a book is over.’34
In fact she did start furtively to paint, feeling she was no go
od and untrained but responding to an overwhelming need ‘to slap onto canvas what my mind sees, especially the deep ruddy earth!’ She made a joke of it to her friend Oriel Malet, calling this new departure ‘Therapy for Schizophrenics!’35 But for a while her painting expressed the internal conflicts she was attempting to reconcile. To ally her mental state with schizophrenia, in its non-clinical manifestation, suggested she felt her two selves were at odds with each other to the detriment of the whole. Daphne also found herself drawn to writing a series of poems. She had always occasionally expressed herself in poetry, but the urge was now more insistent and she sent a couple of her efforts to Noël Welch, of whose intellect and education she was slightly in awe, and was encouraged that Noël thought them very good. Daphne confided to Oriel there was an appeal in being a poet and painter in old age, rather than someone who had to create epic fictions with her imagination at full stretch, while the real world receded in a sometimes alarming way.
But first she had a book to produce. From the details she gleaned of her great-great grandmother she created a memorable hard-nosed adventuress. Her Mary Anne Clarke dragged herself up the slippery social ladder through tireless capitalisation of her sexuality, intelligence and guile – even blackmail when it suited her interests. In the process Daphne drew a rollicking picture of the underbelly of Regency life, where people scrambled over each other for preferment, with bribery and corruption as their currency. And Mary Anne was up with the best of them.
Her reviewers commended her storytelling powers and thought Mary Anne a memorable figure. The book was ‘not top drawer du Maurier, but a sure best seller’,36 and made Book of the Month in the United States. A. L. Rowse, who was a little in love with Daphne, recognised her talent for historical research, although he did not care for historical novels. He declared, however, that Daphne’s own remarkable blue eyes were one of the distinguishing marks of the Hanoverian royal family, implying that he thought Mary Anne’s daughter could well have been the child of the Duke of York and that Daphne and her sisters therefore had royal blood, however dubious and dilute.