by Jane Dunn
The summer of 1955 was a happy one. The weather in Cornwall was consistently hot and sunny; life at Menabilly seemed all the more to be suspended in some enchantment, cut loose from time and place. Daphne went on a week’s walking holiday on Dartmoor with Jeanne and thoroughly enjoyed her short stays with her younger sister and Noël on Dartmoor. She said that it was such a change it refreshed her spirit. She was called on for more onerous duties, however, when a prize mare bit Noël’s face so badly she had to go for treatment from a plastic surgeon in Bristol, accompanied by Jeanne. Daphne was left in charge of their menagerie of two mares, one of them unpredictable, a foal, thirty hens, two dogs and one cat – and no help, so she had to cook for herself and care for the animals with the help of a local man Noël and Jeanne called Bump. Daphne rose magnificently to the challenge and enjoyed even the privations of cleaning out the hen house by imagining herself a lay brother in a monastery. She and Jeanne shared a love of monasteries and she had always seen the attractions of the life of a recluse.
That summer was also busy. Daphne told Ellen that both her daughters were down at Menabilly and seemed happy, Tessa married to a handsome Guards officer, Peter de Zulueta, with a ‘fat and contented’ baby daughter and just pregnant with her second child, and Flavia in love with the man she would marry, another Guards officer but this time from the Coldstreams, Alastair Tower. Kits was always happy when away from school and back in the embrace of Menabilly and his family. Daphne’s sunny summer was topped off by a visit to France with Jeanne and Noël in search of her forebears. This bore exciting fruit and, to her immense relief, re-lit her imagination she feared had been extinguished with the death of Gertrude Lawrence and the cooling of her obsession with Ellen Doubleday.
She was buoyed by the sense of her creative spirit stirring to life once more. She could even have a laugh with Evie Williams about Gertie’s husband Richard remarrying – this time his secretary – and asking that Gertie’s bedroom furniture be shipped from New York to his new marital house in Spain. This Daphne thought rather insensitive and so was delighted by the cable Richard subsequently sent Evie: ‘bedroom and drawing-room furniture all burnt in transit, lorry caught fire’37 – a sign she was sure of Gertie’s inextinguishable spirit still working her mischief.
Although Daphne and Angela saw each other at least once a week and Jeanne much less frequently, as she lived some seventy miles or so away, it was Jeanne with whom Daphne occasionally embarked on adventurous trips while Angela at Ferryside carried the responsibility for their ailing mother. Noël noticed that Jeanne had developed into the most ruthless of the three sisters: certainly she had announced that her art came first and she could not work while caring for Muriel. Once Jeanne had moved into St Ives and then away to Dartmoor with Noël, she maintained her separation and independence despite having been the most amenable in her youth. Angela too found that she could not write during what would be her mother’s final seven years. Even after Muriel died in 1957, she felt inspiration had deserted her until 1962, when a trip to Ireland with Anne Treffry spurred her imagination once more.
Daphne, free to travel whenever she pleased, returned from France fired up not only with the stories of her ancestors, the glass-blowers, but more urgently with an idea about human greed and the problem of duality in our natures. Her love of France, her increasing identification with her own Frenchness, and the research into her ancestors’ manufacture of glass, was the backdrop to a powerfully realised novel, The Scapegoat. Her central male narrator is a disaffected Englishman who is given his wish for another life when suddenly he is assumed by others to be a French aristocrat. But this means he steps into a life that, although apparently glamorous, is complicated by a perilous set of relationships and various onerous responsibilities as the head of an extended and failing family dynasty.
Daphne had always been intrigued by the doubleness in her own life: the tensions between the creative adventurous spirit, necessarily selfish, and the beautiful woman, expected to be nurturing and self-sacrificing. Yet all the while she was aware that the self she found most exciting, and most alive, was the energy that powered her fictions but could be destructive and egoistic in real life. Struggling with her guilt and disappointment over her emotional estrangement from Tommy, and with her own chameleon sense of identity, she posited that everyone had a double nature, that Tommy was in conflict with his good and bad sides too. She even wondered if in fact she was both Rebecca and the second Mrs de Winter in Tommy’s life. She had always thought of herself as the second Mrs de Winter who could never measure up to the fantasy of the super-competent, charismatic first love. As she grew older and colder towards him, and discovered and faced up to his romances with other women, she wondered if in fact she was not more the Rebecca figure, ever-present, haunting, preventing him from being happy with another.
The Scapegoat was a powerful exploration of Daphne’s own preoccupations at the time: her growing dissatisfaction with the rigidity of her and Tommy’s separate lives; her pride in her own French roots; her fascination with Jung’s writings on the unconscious, and her sense of a fugitive self, longing at times to escape her current restrictions and live a different more adventurous life. The story of a ‘twin’ being asked to impersonate another was also the main conceit in The Prisoner of Zenda. This terrifically successful adventure novel was set in Ruritania and a favourite of Tommy’s, surely read by Daphne too, when young. Certainly their second daughter was named after the beautiful heroine Princess Flavia, who tragically falls in love with the impostor King, yet does her duty by marrying the real one when he is restored to the Ruritanian throne. The good and evil alternate self had long exerted its power in Daphne’s imagination, from her father as both Hook and Mr Darling, through the story of Jekyll and Hyde to her own creations of the de Winter wives in Rebecca, and the eternal mystery of Cousin Rachel’s character, both devil and saint.
Daphne wrote The Scapegoat with great intensity. She had hopes that it might break her out of the mould of popular romantic novelist in which she felt she had been lazily confined by reviewers who patronised her and missed the point of her complex layered plots. In fact, her reviews were good and film companies vied to buy the rights. Although Cary Grant was mooted for the lead role, Daphne insisted that Alec Guinness should play the double part as he reminded her of her father. Three dull scripts were turned down before it was given to a brilliant young writer, Gore Vidal, who had become contract screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer.
Vidal was unknown at the time to Daphne, who described him to Ellen as a ‘screaming pansy’,38 a categorisation he may well have resisted, writing in his memoir years later that ‘there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.’39 A natural American patrician, Vidal’s novel, The City and the Pillar, written before he was twenty-three, described the coming of age of a young man with homosexual impulses. Despite its discretion, it caused such fury in America that for a while his subsequent novels were largely ignored by the critics and he turned to writing screenplays under contract to MGM to make a living. When Daphne read his script she dashed off a letter to Michael Balcon, the film’s producer, ‘I was frankly appalled. And indeed, for a time, wondered if the whole thing was a joke or leg-pull … Then I began to get angry. The whole point of the original story was gone.’40 Vidal’s script, however, was approved by the studios and the film went ahead.
The Scapegoat was eventually screened in the summer of 1959 and was not a box office success. Unfortunately, the director Robert Hamer was an alcoholic, ill and distracted, and did not inspire confidence in his cast. Bette Davis as the hero’s mother and the drug-addicted, cigar-smoking matriarch of the family, seemed well cast but she and Alec Guinness did not get on. He recalled, ‘she despised all the British film crew … and she obviously considered me a nonentity – with which I wouldn’t quarrel greatly.’ (He had won an Oscar the previous year for Bridg
e on the River Kwai.) ‘But she was not the artist I expected. She entirely missed the character of the old countess … she knew her lines – and spat them forth in her usual familiar way … A strong and aggressive personality.’41 After the film flopped, Bette Davis accused Alec Guinness of being responsible for cutting most of her part out of jealousy.
Suddenly in June 1957, completely without warning as far as Daphne was concerned, Tommy collapsed and was taken to a clinic near Harley Street. Daphne was summoned to London and was horrified to see him so thin, emotionally bereft and diminished. She had known about his excessive drinking and occasional trouble with his liver but had never really appreciated the extraordinary stresses of his life that led to this full-blown nervous breakdown. The emotional toll of two traumatic world wars had been an underlying strain throughout his adult life. The implacably high standards demanded of himself and others, the perfectionist drive to perform, all made each day an ordeal to get through.
However, unsupported by Daphne, and incapable of talking deeply to her of anything that really mattered, his heart was also in turmoil. Unbeknownst to his wife, he had been conducting two love affairs in London, one with someone whom he had met at the ballet and codenamed ‘Convent Garden’. This woman telephoned an already distraught Daphne to tell her she was Tommy’s mistress and that his breakdown was a result of unbearable strain over his double life. Daphne’s world was suddenly shattered. Her self-contained existence, pleasing herself in Menabilly, pursuing her life of the imagination, was now under threat. When Tessa suggested divorce she was surprised at her mother’s emotional reaction: ‘She was furious, “But I absolutely adore him,” she cried, to which I replied, “You could have fooled me.”’ Tessa thought it the age-old response of possessiveness and jealousy when a stranger moves in on your territory.42 Daphne was a fighter and would not relinquish her husband to another and so rose to the situation with customary courage. Once Tommy was able to leave hospital he was to come home to Cornwall. She determined to put aside her longing for solitude, nurse him back to health and rebuild their marriage.
The noblest of intentions, however, cannot hide for ever the resentments and humiliations that remain under the surface of a proud woman who has been betrayed. All her life Daphne had been the one in control: in her marriage to Tommy it had been he who needed her more, loved her more than she did him. Now this certainty was gone from her mind and, unhitched from all she had taken for granted, she started to swing wildly, grasping at theories and fantasies to explain what was happening to her world. She wrote a passionately felt letter to Tommy’s much-trusted aide, Maureen Luschwitz, full of fear, anger and grief and a deep desire to understand. On Maureen’s suggestion, Daphne wrote to Tommy taking her share of responsibility for the failings in their marriage. She confessed to her relationship with Christopher Puxley during the war and tried to explain how ‘my obsessions – you can only call them that – for poor old Ellen D and Gertrude – were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddles troubles, and writing, and fear of facing reality’.43
Most of her references in her attempt to explain to Maureen the shift in power and the unravelling of her fast-held beliefs were to her own novels and short stories. In this letter to Tommy she showed her tenuous grasp on a core identity as she became in turn one character and then another. She used Rebecca as an extended analogy of her relationship with him and his with the other women in his life, ending with her irrational fear that she could even be at risk of being shot by Tommy, ‘in a blind rage’ of jealousy, because her love of writing superseded her love for him. Her short stories, ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’, ‘Monte Verita’ and ‘The Apple Tree’ were all enlisted in her search to explain, and ‘The Birds’, she insisted, was the threat to those who did not recognise the evil in themselves. In her desperation to understand, she flailed from one scenario to the next. Daphne identified also with her ancestress in Mary Anne, thinking it might have been the story of her life if she had married Christopher Puxley. She then outlined the significance of her various psychological states with reference to My Cousin Rachel and The Parasites. Even Tommy, in the midst of his distress, was affected by the powerful evocations of Daphne’s imagination and told her he feared he had become ‘the bad man’44 in The Scapegoat.
The confluence of fiction with reality was confusing and frightening. For a while Daphne became paranoid, barely managing to hang on to her own sanity under the strain of having to cope with this new unwelcome truth. The shock of being no longer in control of her world, ‘had so shaken me from my dream-world that I began to think I was going potty, it seemed to me everyone was an enemy …’45 A few years earlier she had been reading Adler, and was struck by how closely this related to her: ‘it seems we all underline [sic] want power over our fellow-creatures, and our life-plan we settled at the age of five … mine was to be left alone, and not go down to the drawing-room. So it still holds good! But its lonely, being alone.’46
12
Heading for Home
Death has already orphaned us, but kept us sisters close. There is a special ‘closeness’ I believe between those of the same generation, and although one grieves bitterly when beloved parents pass on there is an inevitability about it which we accept. Strange – maybe wrong – as it may sound, the death of one of my sisters would be to me much harder to bear.
ANGELA DU MAURIER, Old Maids Remember
THE LAST YEARS of Muriel’s life were made miserable for her and those who loved her by a form of vascular sclerosis and depressive senility where she progressively lost interest in life. She was in her late fifties when Gerald died and she became a widow, still pretty, still able to exert her charm on visitors and tradesmen in town, but always cool, detached and judgemental. She had been struck throughout her widowhood by periods of depression, but as she grew older various ailments meant she increasingly lost the ability to move unaided and to take care of herself.
In her rush of confessional letters to Ellen Doubleday, Daphne mentioned her mother more often than her father, and when she did it was the pain of her hostility and lack of maternal love on which she dwelt. The references to her father were few and mostly concerned with how her son and then grandsons reminded her of him. Occasionally she mentioned how much she missed him. She also wrote of his style, his sense of make-believe and deliberate attempts to charm people, that she found herself imitating. Gerald did not seem to haunt her thoughts as did Muriel’s antipathy and the effect it had had on her girlhood. Tod, who loved Daphne and knew her better than most, always thought that she was frightened of her mother. It may be that the main reason for Daphne’s lifetime escape into fantasy, for her fundamental shyness and sense of aloneness in the world, lay more at the door of her mother and the vacuum where her love should have been, than her father’s possessive and intrusive control. Certainly a large measure of the attraction she felt towards Fernande Yvon and Ellen was because they were women who seemed to embody the unconditional love and consistency of a good mother. In the letter she wrote to Maureen, as she clung to sanity in the middle of her husband’s breakdown, she mentioned the ‘terrific reliance and love’ that she had found in both Ferdy, when she was a lost ‘kid’1 of eighteen, and then later in Ellen Doubleday.
Favouritism was celebrated in the du Maurier family with little concern for the effects on the favoured and unfavoured child. It was part of the family romance that Gerald was his mother’s favourite, her little ‘ewe lamb’, and this convention continued with his children, where Daphne, of course, was his favourite and Jeanne Muriel’s. Jeanne was referred to by Daphne in exactly the same way, as the ‘ewe lamb’2 whom Mummy wanted close. Jeanne had paid her dues to her mother during the war and was now settled in her relationship with Noël Welch in their house on the moors and unwilling to compromise further either her life or art. Both Angela and Daphne felt Jeanne could do more as Muriel became increasingly dependent. Daphne complained: ‘Jeanne is not being very good. She s
ays her painting comes first … and says Mummy does’nt mind if she’s there or not, which is not true. Jeanne is Mummy’s life.’3 Daphne was never expected to do much nurturing, although was always generous with money when it was needed. So the care of their mother largely fell to Angela, the eldest, the unattached daughter and no one’s favourite, but hoping through good works to earn some special notice – as the main companion of a once lively woman, who was now chronically depressed and losing her mind.
This responsibility was dispiriting for Angela. The long years of living with Muriel at Ferryside in increasing distress took their toll on Angela’s nervous system and she too lost her equilibrium. She resented being the sister relegated to the caring role, the butt once more, and had told Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies that she was having a hard time and could not share the burden with Jeanne, who in this matter ‘was completely unreliable’.4 Angela had begged a month off in the summer of 1957 and Muriel and her nurse were installed at Menabilly. This happened just as Daphne was suddenly forced to cope with Tommy’s breakdown and his own immediate need of care, an unforeseen crisis that had blasted into her enchanted world, demanding action. As Angela had gone abroad with Anne Treffry, Daphne was left not only to care for a shattered husband but also for her mother, who appeared to be dying.
Instead of being a dreaded burden, Muriel in her last months was undemanding and grateful. For the first time in her life Daphne felt her mother was pleased to be in her company and during the worst of times with Tommy’s rehabilitation she found herself seeking her company and finding a kind of peace. Now that her critical mind was blurred, and perhaps her mistrustfulness of Daphne long forgotten, Muriel gazed on her prodigal daughter ‘as if I was the archangel Gabriel, it nearly broke my heart’.5 And Daphne’s habit of half a century’s fear and resentment melted away.