by Jane Dunn
For Daphne, her imaginative life and the worlds she created, and in which she lived for the duration of a book, were her whole life. She was entirely engrossed, elated with the power of her inventive mind, and there was nothing like the thrill of pursuing her dream to its conclusion. Real life was always something she chose to escape through fantasy. She loved Menabilly for its isolation, its mystery and many-layered atmosphere, so sympathetic to her solitary imaginings. But now she was seldom alone: Tommy, fragile, unwell, depressed, had to live there too, virtually full time, relying on her for company and attention. From being a place that inspired her creative mind, it became more of a prison where, shut away from the world, she was shackled to an unhappy soul whose desperation and need of her made her guilty and resentful.
In the middle of his breakdown, Tommy had been found in the flat in London sitting with his service revolver in his hand, threatening to blow out his brains. Daphne could no longer pretend that he was just going through some kind of male menopause, as she had hopefully suggested to Evie Williams. Facing up to the seriousness of the situation was an unwelcome recall to reality. She wrote to Ellen, ‘the strain is well nigh killing both of us … he gets into such near hysteria moods which are quite alarming, and here we are together, day after day, in a sort of set routine of old people, and I cant start work of course with him like this, or get a holiday.’ If she was away for even a few days, with Flavia having her baby or researching her life of Branwell Brontë, Tommy’s mental state deteriorated and Daphne’s independent spirit rebelled at the responsibility and the invasion of her precious space. ‘Coming back to my beloved Mena was like coming back to prison.’18
Unlike Angela with her unshakeable, unquestioning faith, and Jeanne with her own individual adherence to Catholicism, Daphne was much more intellectually curious. She was drawn to pagan myths in which spirits reside in the wind and the woods, and the ancient gods of Olympus extend their sinewy arms from the sky. At the worst times of her life she wondered if a conventional faith might not console her more, but somehow her lack of sentiment and suspicion of any group activity meant she remained resolutely apart:
I wish I had not lost that religious rather groupy feeling I once had, but looking back, I daresay that it was just a sort of emotional thing after all, and not really true. A God-damn fantasy, like everything else. What is real, though, that is the question. I suppose the answer is nothing, but birth, and death. They’re real enough. Everything else is what one makes up in one’s mind. Moonshine.19
The local doctor had given Tommy some anti-depressant medication that seemed at first to work almost miraculously. Within a few months he was sailing again and almost back to his old self. He was fond of a young woman in the town and flirted with her and took her out in the boat. Daphne was disconcerted and scathing about her to his face, nicknaming her ‘Sixpence’, a diminution of the du Maurier word ‘shilling’ used for anything disappointing or worthless. But her overwhelming feeling was relief that Tommy seemed to be better and she was released a little from the almost unendurable bondage of care. She felt free to get on with writing her biography of Branwell Brontë and set to with a will in the new year of 1960, intending to write non-stop until Easter.
Daphne was growing increasingly concerned about earning enough money to keep afloat the huge edifice of Menabilly, its staff and the various old aunts and retainers like Tod, for whom she felt responsible. In the good days of enormous sales and blockbuster films she had been immensely generous, sending money to friends and family in need. It was she who was the mainstay of her father’s cousin Dora, supported Aunt Billy and brought her to Cornwall, installing staff to help her, when she eventually became too old to live alone in London. All of this she did with no fanfare and little complaint. Responsibility for Tod became more and more tedious, for her old governess and Tommy just did not get on, possibly as they both vied for Daphne’s elusive attention and love. Daphne knew she was the love of Tod’s life and realised there was no way that she could cast her off. She had sent her instead to housekeep for Kits, now living up in London, and then accommodated her at Menabilly, until she eventually paid for a flat for her up in London. Although Tessa was in Grimsby with her family, Flavia was able to keep an eye on her there.
When Muriel died, the not inconsiderable royalties from ‘du Maurier cigarettes’ died with her. The agreement to lend his name to an expensive tipped cigarette was made by Gerald when he was being pursued by the taxman in the late 1930s and the monies had helped ease his family’s financial problems after his death. Daphne was concerned how the loss of this income might impact on her two sisters, who were partially funded from this. No doubt she stepped in to make up any shortfall in their allowances. She certainly had given Jeanne the royalties from one of her films to make it possible for her and Noël to continue to live in their much-loved house on Dartmoor. Daphne enjoyed being in complete control not only of her own destiny but the destinies of others too, but the associated responsibilities were onerous and limited her freedom and frustrated her hunger for independence. She felt that the two years of strain living with Tommy during the worst of his depression had taken its toll and feared she might appear more mute and surly, having become used to ‘a kind of closed-in shell in which one has wrapped oneself’.20
Daphne was aware, as she worked unflaggingly on her book on Branwell, that both Victor Gollancz and Doubleday were disappointed, champing at the bit for another great work of fiction that would make them and their author even richer. While hoping for the flame of imagination to reignite, she was consoled by her love of research and history as she worked her way into the Brontë household in the bleak heart of the Yorkshire moors. Daphne had a particular sympathy for the brilliant, tragic, misunderstood boy, the adventurous leader and initiator of the fantasy worlds and secret language so influential in the genius of his sisters.
A. L. Rowse thought her biography of Branwell Brontë her most moving and remarkable book and hailed it as an important work that fulfilled her intention completely of rehabilitating ‘a figure long maligned, neglected and despised’.21 Daphne was pleased with her respectable reviews but disappointed by the sales, not much more than 10,000 in hardback in the month since publication, a very creditable number for anyone other than Daphne, who had been used to sales in the hundreds of thousands.
In the spring of 1960, Ellen Doubleday came to London and then down to Menabilly for one of her rare visits. The impetus this time was to be present at the unveiling of a blue plaque to George du Maurier on his first family house, 91 Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury. The plaque described him as an artist and writer and noted that he had lived at this address from 1863–68. Daphne had always felt a great affinity with her grandfather. From earliest memory she had absorbed from Gerald a longing for him, a sense of his genius and her likeness to him. But independent of her father, she felt she shared with George what she described as an almost agonised interest in their ancestors. Her researches with Jeanne and Noël into the glass-blowing side of her inheritance had stayed with her, exciting her interest enough to hire a researcher in France to discover more, as she planned to write a historical recreation of their lives. She wondered if the feeling she recognised as ancestor worship was not just another expression of the natural human need for idealised mother and father figures that drove people to religion. Perhaps, she thought, her writing about her ancestors was like a tribal offering of gifts in tribute to the dead. While Tommy’s health held up on his largely teetotal diet of ginger beer, Daphne slogged away at her family story, periodically giving up drink and cigarettes herself for Lent.
Although she was more critical of her daughters, particularly as their marriages showed signs of strain, Daphne continued to derive enormous pleasure from Kits’s company, squeezing into his uncomfortable sports cars for holidays to Italy and an enjoyable traipse round Ireland visiting the places associated with Yeats, quoting his poetry as they went. She found her son irrepressibly cheerful and funny and told
Ellen she laughed herself sick at his jokes and stories when he deigned to turn up at Menabilly. For Daphne, one of the highpoints of their trip to Ireland was tracking down the atmospheric ruin of the Puxley mansionfn10 on the Beara peninsula in western Cork. The IRA had burnt it to the ground in 1921 and this epic tragedy for the family had sparked Daphne’s imaginative recreation of their story in Hungry Hill.
The only concern on her horizon was the news that the Queen and Prince Philip would be in Cornwall in the summer of 1962 visiting the Duchy farms and would like to drop in to Menabilly for tea. It was a gesture that honoured Tommy for his devoted service over the years and he was gratified but anxious at how Menabilly would conform to his high standards of organisation and eye for detail. The whole idea put Daphne into a panic. Tessa and Angela, both elder sisters and more Establishment-minded than she, suggested Daphne redecorate the shabby old place. Tommy said she would have to wear a hat. Daphne refused on all counts but felt her china, her catering, her pets and the lavatory facilities were lamentably not up to royal standards, and did not know where to begin.
A ferocious regime of cleaning and scrubbing was initiated by Esther Rowe, the pretty and vivacious young woman who had recently joined the staff at Menabilly as housekeeper and cheering presence. In London, Flavia was deputed to buy tablecloths and cakes from Fortnum and Mason and sent her own plates and teaspoons – as Menabilly, Daphne told Ellen, only had four. The silver cutlery was borrowed from the wild Carlyon sisters at the Tregrehan estate, famous for hybridising camellias, and Daphne was amused to see how important it looked with the Carlyon family crest proud upon each piece. Daphne herself filled twenty-seven vases of flowers and collapsed exhausted with the effort. Angela was drafted in for her social skills and the steward from the Royal Fowey Yacht Club was asked to pour the tea.
At ten minutes past four, to the precise minute, the great royal Rolls-Royce Phantom crunched up the drive, flying the Royal Standard. Despite her resistance to all the protocol and anxiety about the arrangements, Daphne felt a moment of pride as the Queen, radiant in white, with Prince Philip beside her, stepped from the enormous black limousine to enter the portals of Menabilly, the house she had raised from its decaying sleep. Still resentful of the Rashleighs’ claim on the house of her imagination, she was pleased that it was Tommy and she who brought royalty to Menabilly, she told Ellen Doubleday, and that the Rashleighs would never be able to boast such a coup. Within an hour the visit was over, the royal detectives emerged from Esther’s cottage, where she had been entertaining them to tea, and as the royal party was waved off, everyone went inside to relax enough finally to have tea themselves. Hardly anything had been eaten. Daphne and Angela surveyed the serried ranks of sandwiches and cakes and the local party went home with their own private stash of food, Angela particularly pleased as she had Father Clutterbuck coming to tea the following day.
Daphne had finished her novel about her forebears and called it The Glassblowers. She had enjoyed living for a while in her ancestors’ shoes and had been engrossed in the writing, but she feared others would find it rather dull and had little hope of glowing reviews, or the kind of stratospheric sales that had once been hers. The Times Literary Supplement had devoted a centre page to an analysis of her writing career and, as expected, it was equivocal, with praise for two novels, Rebecca and The Scapegoat for being significantly literary. She was lambasted, however, for the lack of authentic voice and detail in her historical novels.
Daphne had been pleased to be taken seriously in such an intellectual paper and was less concerned by the negative criticisms than was Victor Gollancz. Always touchingly modest about her extraordinary achievements, she did not even seem to realise the rare honour in 1969 of being made a DBE, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the equivalent to being knighted. Despite caring so little generally for what people thought, she did hanker after some recognition and respect from her profession. She wrote always encouragingly to her young friend, the writer Oriel Malet, who was blessed with excellent reviews for her novels, expressing her disappointment at her own treatment: ‘You don’t know how hurtful it is to have rotten, sneering reviews, time and time again throughout my life.’22 She felt that all the money she made, useful as it was, never made up for the disrespect, as she saw it, shown to most of her work.
It was in Daphne’s nature to be an outsider. Preferring solitude, she chose to live in a mansion hidden within deep woods on a small promontory in one of the remoter parts of the British Isles; her life was austere and focused on work. She refused to talk at any kind of literary or promotional event and held herself apart from her fellow writers and the metropolitan literary circuit. This self-imposed isolation, however, also meant that her work perhaps was more overlooked than would have been the case if she had been a literary insider, making friends and influencing people on the publishing and party circuit. She believed that her phenomenal popular success aroused a certain intellectual snobbishness towards her novels, and this also might have had some truth. There was no doubt, however, that Daphne felt generally cold-shouldered by the literary establishment.
With her new lease signed for Menabilly, and with Tommy happier than he had been for a long time, busy with plans for his expensive new boat, financed as ever by his wife’s hard-pressed typewriter, Sir Frederick and Lady Browning settled into a reasonably harmonious routine together. It was surprising how much Daphne had retreated from her old carefree life of independence and adventure. She dreaded the new boat as Tommy would expect her to join him and motor far and wide. Where was the girl who loved nothing more than sailing her own boat at Fowey, who had fallen in love with a seafaring soldier and stage-managed their honeymoon to revolve around boats and boating? Now, still only in her fifties, she had lost her youthful passion for seafaring and the sea, declaring to Ellen, ‘boating means damn all to me, tho’ I dare not say so’.23 Aware that the regatta was the highpoint of the town’s and Tommy’s year (he was commodore of the Fowey Yacht Club), Daphne wrote to her old friend Foy Quiller-Couch: ‘Regatta next week. I am hoping for rain.’24 No doubt this was in part just a joke but it carried also the truth that she had run out of energy for fun and adventure and could no longer be bothered.
Her daily routine – ‘routes’ – had always been important to her, perhaps to maintain some sort of control over a life that was marked by flights of fantasy and a tenuous hold on reality. But as she grew into her fifties and sixties these ‘routes’ became more limited and limiting, ‘even travelling has lost its allure’ she wrote to Ellen when she was only fifty-five and still slim, strong and fit:
I cant see myself wanting to climb mountains or go up goat tracks in Greece any more. What is it? Age of course. There is no doubt about it, as one gets older one does get very set. And almost the most pleasant moment, in winter any rate, is to get into bed about 10.30, feel the electric blanket is truly on (yes, I have one now!) and read for about an hour before switching off the light.25
This shuttering of her external life was very marked, and seemed to follow a du Maurier pattern of withdrawal.
Daphne was very much fitter than Angela, who had had a hysterectomy and her gall bladder removed, and Jeanne, who had faced an operation to remove a cyst from her breast. She prided herself on her robust mental and physical constitution and admired her old walking companion Lady Clara Vyvyan and the protest novelist Phyllis Bottome, still living an adventurous life in her seventies and described by A. L. Rowse, who introduced them, as ‘a good old war-horse, rather masculine, half-American, ready to tackle anybody’.26 Both women were more than twenty years older than Daphne and neither recognised the concept of retreat, Clara Vyvyan still extending her invitations to Daphne to join her on another of her goat-track walks. For Daphne, it was as if the myths of the du Mauriers were stronger than her own life force. Everyone in the family was made aware of the fact du Mauriers did not live to a good old age; in keeping with the insidious ethos of Peter Pan, they were at their best when
young and declined, or even died, before the less romantic reality of late middle age beckoned.
Unfortunately the equilibrium of Daphne and Tommy’s life at Menabilly would be short-lived. When Tommy’s health improved, his spirits recovered and he remained teetotal, and Daphne felt she could escape with Tessa for a short fortnight’s holiday in Italy. They had already travelled in 1955 to Saint Paul-de-Vence, the medieval town of the south-eastern French Riviera. In these breaks she was delighted to get to know her elder daughter better and was impressed by how kind and competent she was, effortlessly managing all the driving and organising on the trip. But Daphne was disappointed how tired she felt, finding Rome and cities in general too noisy to enjoy. She was determined, however, to get to Urbino and hoped it would inspire her as the setting for a new novel. They returned in time for Daphne to attend Victor Gollancz’s seventieth birthday party at the Savoy, where she was placed on his left as one of his most honoured authors. On Daphne’s left sat Lord Longford, someone she knew vaguely and liked. However, these carefree days came to a juddering halt when she returned to Menabilly. Tommy had been on a drinking binge that had started five days before her return. The faithful old gardener Mr Burt and his wife, who had been left in charge of Tommy and the household, were scared witless as to what best to do as he alternated between rampage and despair, sitting once more with his loaded revolver to his head, deaf to reason.
Daphne suddenly felt overwhelmed with responsibility for her husband’s welfare and the old depression returned with the thought that she could never leave him unless someone as competent as Tessa would agree to stay while she stole a few days off. How she longed for three months away from it all, she told Ellen. But Tessa was the mother of two children and busy with her own problems as her marriage to Peter de Zulueta unravelled. Daphne felt she could at least relax over Flavia, who seemed settled with Alastair Tower and was happily pursuing her painting, and Kits too, who was pursuing an Irish beauty queen he had met while working with his mother’s old beau, Carol Reed, on his latest film The Running Man.