* Barrie’s first ‘collaboration’ with the boys, published in 1902.
* In fact, Nico inherited £3,000, as did the only other surviving brother, Jack.
† Frank Thurston, Barrie’s manservant.
* J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird (1902), in which Nanny Hodgson is lightly disguised as Nurse Irene.
* The writer Oriel Malet was a close friend of Daphne du Maurier and corresponded with her from 1950. She edited a collection of Daphne’s letters to her – Letters from Menabilly: Portrait of a Friendship – in 19930.
* The name Barrie gives the nanny. In Edwardian times, it was customary for Nanny to sleep in the night nursery with her charges.
* Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale in which the people of the Empire refuse to acknowledge the Emperor’s nakedness in the royal parade after they have been convinced by a couple of swindlers, who have made off with the gold cloth out of which they were supposed to make his clothes, that only those with a true aesthetic sense will be able to see them.
* Later the politician Lord Boothby.
CHAPTER TWO
What is the secret?
In April 1949, Peter wrote to Nanny:
I have some very interesting letters from my du Maurier grandfather when a young man, to his mother. They lead to the conclusion that he changed very much after marriage: and I think that my mother inherited a good deal from him.
What Sylvia had inherited from her father, George du Maurier (always known as Kicky), goes to the very heart of our story. It was for an opinion on it that Peter invited Daphne to come to see him.
Daphne and Peter, who shared this grandfather, had known one another in the old days and on occasion holidayed together. But Daphne was ten years younger than Peter and the age and gender difference meant that they had rarely if ever played together as children. Now, however, Peter identified her as having a particular insight into their grandfather. Two years earlier she had written a biographical Introduction to an omnibus edition of Kicky’s novels, published by Peter’s firm in association with Pilot Press. There was good reason to expect her also to have a view about Barrie. Her father Gerald, Sylvia’s brother and a well-known actor-manager, owed his career in theatre to Barrie, and Barrie was as much ‘Uncle Jim’ to Daphne and her two sisters as he was to the five Llewelyn Davies boys.
From December 1943, Daphne had buried herself in Cornwall, living in her beloved house, Menabilly, a sixteenth-century, seventy-room pile set in magical woodland leading down through a rhododendron-strewn valley to the sea. Her publishers had long ago given up trying to extricate her from Menabilly to promote her novels. But when she received Peter’s call she took it very seriously indeed. First reference to their revitalised relationship appears in a letter Nico wrote to Nanny Hodgson on 14 October 1950 in which Daphne’s sisters – Jeanne (younger than Daphne by four years) and Angela (older by three) – are also mentioned. ‘Jeanne du Maurier has her first exhibition of pictures in London next week. Angela I see a good deal of as we publish her. Her autobiography – Only the Sister – comes next year. I’m correcting it now! No great literature but great fun! Daphne the really successful one is still published by Gollancz tho’ she is doing an excellent preface for us for a marvellous book of Grandfather’s letters... which we publish next Spring. Peter deals with Daphne . . .’
Reading Kicky’s letters had led to a commission from Peter for Daphne to write not, in fact, a preface, but a lengthy Introduction to an edition entitled The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters, 1860–1861, which Peter published in 1951.
Given that George du Maurier, though famous in his day as an illustrator on Punch and the author of the international bestseller Trilby (1894), meant precious little to readers in 1951, a selection of his letters (let alone a selection restricted to seven years of his life) would seem on the face of it to be a rather risky project. Peter and Daphne did not see it as such, however, and today their decision is at last justified. For The Young George du Maurier represents an important source of the truth about Barrie. It is one of a series of literary clues, or stepping-stones, that Daphne saw fit to leave in her work for future generations to follow – a key piece of the jigsaw that presents a completely new picture of Kicky, Barrie and Daphne and brings new significance to the three fictional characters with which we associate them – Svengali, Peter Pan and Rebecca. Along the way, the completed jigsaw also explains why Peter Llewelyn Davies committed suicide in 1960; and why Michael died in a suicide pact in 1921; and why Peter, Jack and Daphne herself suffered nervous breakdowns in the late 1950s.
Judith Cook, who knew Daphne in the 1960s, wrote that Daphne and Peter became ‘special friends as well as cousins and he was one of the few people with whom she could happily talk for hours’.1 This was no mere editor-author relationship, or polite huddle of first cousins. ‘Daphne got to know Peter very well in his later years,’ Nico confirmed in 1976.2 They became absorbed in each other’s company, she as preoccupied with the family history as he.
‘We never discussed the world of today,’ Daphne wrote after Peter’s death, ‘only the past. Always the past . . .’ Their meetings initially took place in the Grill Room at the Café Royal in Regent Street, but they could never have sustained the relationship over a decade had Daphne not also had her London base.
Daphne’s London apartment was on the sixth floor of Whitelands, a block at the convergence of King’s Road with Cheltenham Terrace, round the corner from Peter and Peggy’s flat at Cadogan Court. Daphne’s second daughter Flavia described it as ‘a dreary little flat with squeaky floorboards and no carpets. There were two small bedrooms, a sitting-room, a tiny kitchen and bathroom. It smelt faintly of gas and my father’s eau-de-cologne.’3It was not the kind of place that would attract Daphne away from her beloved Menabilly, unless there was good reason. Originally the flat had been leased as the weekday base of her husband, known as Tommy, who, after demobilisation in 1947, served the Royal household.* Daphne was ‘anxious to support him in his new job, [and] went up to London more frequently to attend royal functions and other social events’.
In 1949, Daphne had a play running in the West End, September Tide, and she was seeing a great deal of its starring actress, Gertrude Lawrence. From the early 1950s, being in London became even easier. Daphne’s elder daughter Tessa flew the nest and was soon to be married, and Flavia and brother Christian (known as Kits) both took up places at boarding-school, Kits following in the footsteps of four of the Llewelyn Davies boys to Eton.
The more Peter and Daphne talked about family, the more family became the focus of Daphne’s work, so that in May 1954 Peter wrote to Nanny, ‘My rich and famous cousin Daphne is having lunch with me today. She has just written a novel about our naughty great-great-grandmother Mary Anne Clarke . . .’†
Later in the decade, marital problems were further reason for Daphne’s presence in London, and when in July 1957 her husband collapsed and was hospitalised, ‘Daphne put her own wishes aside to be with him in London, and to give him her support.’ She was still writing letters from the King’s Road flat in December that year, and ‘trying hard to establish a new London routes [routine].’4 And when Tommy handed over the reins to his successor at Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1959, returning to live full-time at Menabilly, Daphne began looking to Whitelands as an escape. She understood that Tommy needed her, but also knew she had to get away as often as possible, and fortuitously research for her biography of Branwell Brontë necessitated frequent trips to the British Museum.
So it was that Daphne was in London on and off during the entire decade, the period of Peter’s descent into depression, feeding and being fed by his obsession with Barrie. She knew that Peter had fallen into a melancholia while working on the family history. Seemingly no one interviewed her or asked her why he had committed suicide. And Daphne was elusive and secretive by nature. She told no one what she and Peter had discovered.
The only person she wrote to after Pete
r died was Nico. In the knowledge that Nico knew nothing of deep significance about Barrie, she tried to settle his mind by suggesting that Cynthia’s death had upset Peter – ‘I would think Cynthia’s very recent demise triggered something off in Peter’s mind, almost an imp who said, “Anything you can do I can do better.” Let them have it out, with Uncle Jim telling them both where he himself got off (and he had plenty of time to find that out) and then to the huge relief of Granny* (who would hate any unpleasantness) both Cynthia and Peter shake hands, everything settled at last, and Cynthia evaporates to her own clan, and Peter rushes to aunt Sylvia’s arms, because really it was about time he did, having regretted them for about 50 years.’5
But the only imp in this story is Barrie, and Daphne’s fantasy of Uncle Jim in Purgatory with Cynthia and Peter was a smokescreen for Nico’s benefit. She knew well enough why Peter had taken his own life, but to speak or ‘write openly about herself, or others, was against her nature’.6 Except, that is, in her fiction.
Had Daphne indeed been interviewed in April 1960, she might for amusement have given her inquisitor a copy of The Breaking Point, which had been published a few months earlier. Having a sense of humour cut with satire, and no respect for people who took things at face value, she would have enjoyed doing that. Although its title begged ominously for association with Peter’s dramatic demise, no one, certainly not Daphne’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, or the press, had suspected that the book, a collection of short stories, might offer a key to the suicide. For the fact is that hardly anyone associated Daphne du Maurier with Peter Llewelyn Davies or Daphne du Maurier with J. M. Barrie, except in passing.
Like Barrie, Daphne used fiction to sort out her emotional life. All her novels and short stories have autobiographical triggers. I am not the first to claim this, and Daphne herself admitted it. Indeed, she depended on the autobiographical trigger to get herself going. Her stories emerged from ‘something observed’, but would only mature, or ‘brew’ as she called the process, if in the hidden places of her mind they attached to something of personal emotional significance. Daphne was no formula writer. ‘Everything I write comes from some sort of emotional inner life,’ she said.7
It was inevitable that her meetings with Peter, which struck at the heart of her emotional life, would yield telling stories. First, in 1952, three years after Daphne’s association with Peter began, she published a collection called The Apple Tree. Her biographer Margaret Forster was struck by the new note they rang: ‘These were strange, morbid stories, in which deep undercurrents of resentment and even hatred revealed far more about Daphne’s inner life than any novel had ever done.’8 All of them, wrote Daphne, ‘have inner significance for problems of that time’.9
Her second collection, The Breaking Point, written after her breakdown and published shortly before Peter’s suicide, is yet more transparent, a chilling reappraisal of the happy legend of Peter Pan trotted out by journalists after Peter’s death. The Barrie figure, often an uncle and readily identifiable as ‘Uncle Jim’ (he is actually named in two stories), is presented as an interloper, a psychological controller, a perpetrator of evil. Malevolence, morbidity and psychological disturbance attend him. Evil is tangible, and invariably he wears a trilby hat. The trilby reference is not lost on those in the know, for Kicky’s novel had given the soft felt hat its name.
Trilby introduced to a mass audience for the first time the notion of the unscrupulous attainment of power by one individual over another by means of hypnosis, the incredible fact that people can be made, even as they know what is going on, to do something they would not otherwise do, and be unable to remember it afterwards. The fictional musician Svengali is the agent of mind control in the novel. Trilby, an artist’s model, is his victim. In Daphne’s stories the trilby hat is the symbol of Svengali’s hypnotic power, its appropriator the personification of pure evil.
In Daphne’s story, ‘Ganymede’, set in Venice, the villain is an uncle who wears ‘a broad-brimmed trilby’ just like Svengali’s. On setting eyes on him, the narrator has a premonition of disaster: ‘The aroma of evil is a deadly thing. It penetrates and stifles, and somehow challenges at the same time. I was afraid.’ He has every reason to be, for Uncle will change his life for ever.
In ‘The Alibi’, the smooth-talking trilby-wearer is middle-aged Fenton, who insinuates himself into the Kaufman family: Anna Kaufman and her young son, Johnnie. Fenton’s excuse is that he is an artist, one ‘Marcus Sims’. He wants to put Anna and Johnnie on canvas, wants to ‘make it streaky’ with them. At every point Anna falls over herself to facilitate his plan – as, in reality, Sylvia apparently helped Barrie – even offering herself to him on a plate: ‘And now, Mr Sims, which would you prefer first? Come to bed, or paint Johnnie?’
Exasperated by her compliance, Fenton excuses himself from having sex with her, pleading impotence, and turns to her son Johnnie instead. Anna ties Johnnie to a chair to keep him steady, and Fenton paints his portrait. As he does so he begins to believe he has a talent and derives ‘a tremendous sense of power’ from capturing both Johnnie and his mother in oils. There is a nasty feeling of the occult, a sense of the Devil about Fenton. What turns Fenton on is ‘the fact that the bulk of a live person... could be transmuted by him upon a blank canvas’. The sense of power he derives from putting them on canvas is more satisfying than sex. In the end, Fenton kills mother and son, and we discover that he wasn’t impotent after all. He is caught disposing of the foetus of his child by Anna in a waste bin.
The references to Barrie putting the Llewelyn Davies family on the ‘canvas’ of Peter Pan are clear enough, but in the lingering morbidity, the callousness of the killings, and the sense that Fenton is drawing on a dark, Mephistophelean power that gives him control over others’ lives, ‘The Alibi’ reaches into the darkest corners of Barrie’s psyche.
In ‘The Menace’, a lighter satire, impotence is again the focus, and Barrie is actually named. The background is the world of films. The talkies are giving way to ‘the feelies’. Audiences will soon be able to measure the potency of their screen idols while watching them on film. But there is a problem for Gigantic Enterprises Ltd. Their number one star, Barry (sic), registers only G on a scale where the high point is A. No matter how sexy his leading lady, nothing can get Barry going. His producer and the star’s posse of male attendants, known as ‘Barry’s boys’, are worried, but they don’t dare ‘let a psychiatrist within a hundred miles of him’. Instead, they take him on a fantastic escapade of sexual titillation and put him on a testosterone-rich diet. But Barry is not turned on and always prefers to eat porridge. Then he meets a childhood friend who shows him photographs of her grandchildren and at last there are stirrings in the undergrowth. Gee-ed up by ‘a snapshot of Pinkie’s second grandson in paddling drawers bending down and patting a sand-castle with a wooden spade . . .’ Barry returns to the set and startles everyone by registering a Force A.
Daphne could well have been looking at the photograph to which this refers. It was once in her possession and is now in the du Maurier archive. Pinkie’s second grandson in paddling drawers is straight out of an album of photographs Barrie took when he turned up at the Davieses’ summer holiday retreat in Rustington-on-Sea in 1899.
In ‘The Blue Lenses’ again Barrie is named, as is his wife. When bandages are removed from Marda West’s eyes after an operation to save her sight, the other people in the nursing home appear to have animal heads instead of their own. It’s funny at first, but then Marda realises that the heads are peculiarly telling of a hidden character. A nurse, who befriended Marda while the bandages were on, and whom Marda has invited to live with her and her husband for the period of her recuperation, turns out to have a serpent’s head. Her name is Nurse Ansel (sic). Snake-in-the-grass Ansel’s friendship with Marda is revealed as a covert means to gain entry to her home in order to pursue an affair with her husband, who is a co-conspirator in the subterfuge. When he arrives in the ward, he has the head of a vult
ure, a feeder on death, and his name is Jim.
The power of the story is that only Marda can see the heads, only she can see the truth. The weight of this knowledge is shattering because no one believes her. Awakening to truth is the first step to breakdown when no one believes you, when only you can see.
Although she was not thinking of Jim Barrie as the culprit, Margaret Forster wrote perceptively: ‘As an allegory of Daphne’s state of mind this story was painfully clear – she felt betrayed, exploited and, worst of all, fooled.’ It was an allegory of Peter’s state of mind, too, and Daphne recognised it as potentially suicidal.
If, as this and other stories in the collection suggest, Peter’s awakening to Barrie’s betrayal of members of his family was the reason for his suicide, how did Barrie betray them?
‘The Menace’ suggests child abuse. Another story, ‘No Motive’, makes suicide the endgame for child abuse, after something breaks through the mental cloud that has concealed the truth for so long. But there is no reference to Barrie in ‘No Motive’, and sexual abuse is not a major theme of either The Apple Tree or The Breaking Point* On the contrary, sex is sidelined. Time and again these stories suggest that spiritual ecstasy is more intense than sexual orgasm.
After reading ‘Monte Verita’, Daphne’s publisher Victor Gollancz wrote to her: ‘I don’t understand the slight implication that there is something wrong with sex.’ In ‘The Archduchess’, the life of the spirit is brought ‘to such delicacy of interpretation that the coarser methods of so-called love-making are rarely used’, while in ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’, physical sex is a cold business between strangers.
From the start, Daphne grasped more keenly than Peter what lay at the bottom of his well of uncertainty about his childhood, and questioned him subtly so that he might find the answers himself. ‘More than once’ she questioned him about Nico,10 pointing to the fact that, unlike Peter and Jack, Nico had apparently escaped the streak of melancholy and depression which haunted the others.
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