Absent is a father’s natural love for his daughter. Instead, their dialogue has a quasi-erotic ring. Daddy is controlling; he has taught her all she knows, as a master teaches his dog how to catch a biscuit in its mouth. He even takes credit for her beauty: ‘I wore out the point of my little finger over that dimple.’† The daughter’s independence threatens to cheat her father of something that is by rights his. Daddy holds ultimate power over her.
But as the child recedes from his imagination, he leaves her in the wood on her own, and she cries:
Daddy, come back; I don’t want to be a might-have-been.
As the curtain fell, Daphne ran from her seat in tears. None of Barrie’s alchemical texts had ever had so immediate a reaction.
‘First nights played a big part in our life,’ Angela recalled, ‘not only Daddy’s but those of our many friends.’ So, when 10-year-old Daphne attended the first night of Dear Brutus, there was nothing unusual or stressful about the event. Yet, when she recognised herself and her relationship with Gerald and watched his cruel disposal of her, ‘I had to be led sobbing from the box.’
There is no doubt that Gerald’s special relationship with Daphne was the focus of the play. Sixty years later she could still exclaim, in an interview with BBC Radio: ‘I was his daughter. It absolutely finished me!’
Why did Jim do this to Daphne, and, more to the point, why did Gerald let him? Jim and Gerald must have discussed the play at great length. But Act II takes Gerald’s relationship with Daphne into very dubious territory. It is the equivalent of Jim’s bed scene with George (as ‘David’) in The Little White Bird, except that this plot involves two men, a writer and an actor, and their victim is a girl.
It was a feature of Gerald’s particular style of acting that he was unusually susceptible to Jim’s notion of alchemic texts. Daphne called her father the founder of ‘the naturalistic school’. Gerald became his stage characters, and often brought them home with him, which made him vulnerable to the influence of the man who wrote his lines.
Suddenly, the slapstick father-figure who had been Gerald was joined by a new Gerald, who began sharing tales of his sexual conquests with his young daughters. Naturally, the girls joined in: ‘Who’s the latest in the stable, and what’s the form this week?’ Daphne remembered jeering, without a thought for her mother. It became known as ‘the stable game’, admitted Angela, and it ‘could only be played amongst children who had Gerald as a father... Sometimes the conversation would be strangely bawdy.’ If Mo heard what was going on, she would stamp her stick on the floor of the room above.
This ‘unorthodox game’ had a deep effect on Daphne, distorting her values and warping her sense of humour, so she wrote in Gerald (1934), her biography of her father. But the game was only a part of what was going on.
In time, Gerald and Daphne followed to the letter the suggestively incestuous relationship prescribed for them by Jim in Dear Brutus. Neighbour and family friend Bunny Austin told journalist and biographer Michael Thornton: ‘[Gerald] couldn’t keep his hands off her. It was quite embarrassing at times.’ Thornton claims that Daphne told him in 1965: ‘We crossed the line, and I allowed it.’12 But in a rare extract from her diaries, written at the time, Daphne admits only that she engaged in ‘a sort of incest’ with her father, her feelings ‘tragic’ because they never were fulfilled.
However far it went in fact rather than fantasy, the point is that her ‘Daddy complex’, as Daphne came to refer to it, the main destructive drive in her life and work, was conceived in her by Uncle Jim – Dear Brutus the catalyst, her father the instrument of Jim’s power over her.
One immediate effect was the impact that it had on Daphne’s relationship with her mother. ‘I could never feel quite sure of [my mother],’ she wrote, ‘sensing some sort of disapproval in her attitude towards me. Could it be that... she resented the ever-growing bond between D and myself?’
So significant to Daphne was this alienation from her mother that she considered that it encouraged her more intimate relationships with women. In January 1948, in a letter to Ellen Doubleday, one of the three great female loves of her life, Daphne considered that her desire to be with Ellen was an attempt to recover the mother love which had been a casualty of her relationship with her father.
One might argue that Uncle Jim cannot be held responsible, that Gerald would have seduced Daphne even without his encouragement, but there was no suggestion of incest prior to Dear Brutus, while after the play Gerald’s intense relationship with his daughter proceeded in parallel with Jim’s with Michael, already a recognisable pattern in the Barrie boy-cult.
Moreover we have seen how Jim held Gerald in his power and how Jim used his novels and plays as instruments of power first over Sylvia and George, and more recently over Michael. Literary alchemy was his metier and method, his fantasy works drawing on real lives, his imagination in reality transforming them.
Dear Brutus worked its dark magic on Gerald and Daphne, as her reaction to it at the first night suggested it would. Everything was bound up with the imagination. All the du Mauriers captivated by Jim lived their lives within his imagination, losing their souls to him thereby. For Daphne alone the Faustian payload was her success as a writer.
Incest is, as would be expected, given the importance of the real-life emotional trigger in Daphne’s fiction, a persistent theme. The saddest, most explicit reference is in her novella, ‘A Borderline Case’,13 where the daughter has sexual intercourse with the father. But perhaps the most troubling occurs in The Scapegoat (1957), a novel in which, as Daphne wrote to a friend, she was trying to assuage ‘the sins of the family’. In an effort ‘to give myself a penance to fit the crime’, the daughter fetches ‘a small leather dog-whip with a knotted end’, slips off her nightgown and lashes herself across her back and shoulders – ‘There was no feint about it.’ She then asks her father to do it for her. The daughter is thereafter in control of the father. She teases and tantalises him, raising his desire to impossible heights. Daphne was the victim, the scapegoat of the title.
The dynamic of her relationship with Gerald is most clearly laid bare in another novel, The Progress of Julius (1933). I am not the first to point this out. Daphne’s biographer Margaret Forster concedes: ‘What makes [Julius] startling is its clear autobiographical content.’
Julius, a French émigré in London, rages to possess his daughter Gabriel, who reminds him of his dead father (as Daphne reminded Gerald of Kicky).
It seemed to Julius Levy that the discovery of Gabriel was the most exciting thing that had ever come to him in life. It was stimulating, it was crude; because she was unknown to him though part of him the realisation of her was like a sudden secret adventure, tremendously personal to them both, intimate in the same absorbing fashion as a disease is intimate, belonging to no one else in heaven and earth, egotistical and supremely self-obsessing.
When Julius sees his 15-year-old daughter playing her grandfather’s flute he is overcome ‘by an odd taste in his mouth, and a sensation in mind and body that was shameful and unclean’. He cannot resist asking her, ‘Do you like me?’ Her evasive reply enrages him. Yet Julius and Gabriel never have sex. They have an ‘adventure’ together, which is ‘secret’, ‘tremendously personal’, until Julius drowns her.
The secret is something passed down from the grandfather to the granddaughter. In the novel it is the ability to play the flute, a neat side reference to Pan pipes perhaps, but clearly the du Maurier secret is the reference: ‘You play the flute like my father would have played it if he’d sold his soul to Satan,’ says Julius (the father) to Gabriel (the daughter). We are to believe that Daphne inherited a similar secret from Gerald’s father, Kicky.
To Julius with his eyes shut it was like the song that Père had sung to him as a child and the whisper that led to the secret city, but this was another whisper and another city, this was not the enchanted land beyond the white clouds, so melancholy, so beautiful, forever unattainable land of promi
se unfulfilled – for there was a sudden swoop and a turn and a plunge into the bowels of the secret earth, heart beating, wings battered and scorched, and this new discovered city was one that opened and gave itself up to him – there were eyes that welcomed and hands that beckoned, all mingled in extravagant confusion of colour and scent and ecstasy.
‘Do you like that, Papa?’ said Gabriel.
The incest is bound up in the inheritance of the family secret. And this is how it was for Gerald and Daphne in their secret city.
In taking Cannon Hall, Gerald had returned to the scenes of his own childhood. All around were places that held memories of Kicky and Peter Ibbetson. Daphne – aged 10 and at her most impressionable – became imbued with it all. And Gerald was happy to be swept up by the intensity with which his favourite daughter rose to the seduction.
Daddy would take me up to New Grove House where he had lived as a boy. ‘There’s the studio,’ he’d say. ‘That’s where Papa drew every day... And there behind the wall is the small garden. You’ve seen the picture he drew of us, pretending to be trains, with Aunt Trixy leading, and myself the baby at the end.’ Later he had written three novels, of which the first, Peter Ibbetson, was to exert a great influence on my life.
Time and again Daphne would relive the walk on the Heath, which Kicky had so often undertaken with Gerald as a boy. She enjoyed doing what Gerald had done, sitting in the crook of a tree where he had sat, walking along the walk that had reminded Kicky of Passy, of the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, of the mare d’Auteuil, of his childhood, which of course was Peter Ibbetson’s childhood too. ‘Here was a new perspective,’ she wrote. ‘His past was my past too . . .’
She read Peter Ibbetson, learned about dreaming true, was encouraged by Jim to play the island game like Peter Ibbetson and Mary, and, at length, was given to believe that she might have inherited Kicky’s secret ability to dream true and realise the ‘sixth sense’, which had been the source of Peter’s ecstasy in the novel.
Daphne found it ‘haunting, queer’ to know that Kicky’s past was her own past, and it didn’t take much to believe that she was the one in the family to inherit his secret ability, his ‘gift from the Devil’. Originally, it was thought that this was Sylvia’s inheritance, on account of Sylvia being given the name Jocelyn, which tied her to Barty Jocelyn, the hero of Kicky’s novel The Martian, where he discussed who would ‘carry him’ into the future. In her Introduction to The Martian written in 1947, Daphne played with the suggestion that Sylvia’s younger sister May was the model for Marty, the legatee in the novel. But no-one was less like Marty than Aunt May. Marty ‘with her boyish ways, her striped skirt, her fisherman’s cap on the back of her head, and her passion for making up stories about shipwrecks’ was Daphne, and it was Daphne who in the 1920s was photographed with the fisherman’s cap on the back of her head, and who wrote all about boats and shipwrecks in her first novel, The Loving Spirit.
Here was serious fantasy material for Uncle Jim to conjure with. Here too were all the ingredients of a classic steering strategy, which, according to forensic psychologist Dr Keith Ashcroft, ‘characteristically involves destabilising a victim and getting them to accept the controller’s novel, often warped version of reality’.
Make your victim feel vulnerable by exploiting a relationship which means a lot to her (Daphne’s relationship with Gerald). Follow this with her removal to an environment which favours her immersion in the story you want her to believe and which will empower her (the move to Cannon Hall, centre of the Ibbetson/du Maurier myth). Separate the victim from someone close who may not approve of the controller, in this case Mo, who was a conventional wife and did not approve of plays about her children that made them cry, or any other sort of suspicious investment in Daphne by Jim. Whether or not this steering strategy was actually contrived, these things occurred and the environment was set for Daphne’s initiation.
While there is a humiliating taboo on incest in the eyes of the world, in a fantasy or cult it can be empowering. With a cool and remote air and mask of indifference, like Trilby, and like Sylvia, Daphne was definitely empowered by the du Maurier myth. She became cynical about the real world. School friends of Jeanne complained that she was ‘haughty and rather fierce’. Meeting her for the first time, adults felt ‘summed-up and judged, and definitely discarded’, an attitude encouraged by Jim, who himself held ordinary people with ‘a cold stare of disdain’. Daphne admitted at the time: ‘I only think of myself and pity anyone who likes me’,14 but secretly she felt, like Gabriel in The Progress of Julius, ‘scornful of the pitiful world... apart, taller than before... someone who lived with dreams, and beauty and enchantment, who conquered by silence, who dwelt in a secret city’.
From 1920 to 1922, between the ages of 13 and 15 Daphne pretended to be Eric Avon. There was something a little odd about Eric, and yet he was strangely familiar. Looking back on her childhood, Daphne described him as a man of action and adventure, but ‘there were no psychological depths to Eric Avon. He just shone at everything.’ Eric is Gerald, or rather Jim’s vision of Gerald, the empty hero, outwardly impressive, ever ignorant of deeper issues, a role which he often played for the Master on stage.
This fantasy persona had such an impact on Daphne that ‘Eric remained in my unconscious to emerge in later years – though in quite a different guise – as the narrator of the five novels I was to write in the first person singular, masculine gender* ... each of my five characters depended, for reassurance, on a male friend older than himself.’
In modern culture, in the film Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is an example of Eric, the hero who must be guided by the older, wiser Obi-Wan Kenobi, in order to confront and overcome the dark side in Darth Vader. When Daphne played Eric, she was identifying with her father, and at the same time engaging in a fantasy expression of Gerald’s relationship with Jim.
As Professor Auerbach notes,15 not only do all Daphne’s novels in which there is a male narrator proclaim this ‘paradigm of intimacy’, as she calls it, between two men – the weak narrator (the Gerald figure with whom the author identifies) ‘bound to an elusive male leader’ (the Jim figure) – but this duo always make a girl (the Daphne figure) their victim. Auerbach did not identify Barrie as the elusive male leader, but darkly she points out the inimical nature of the paradigm, in which the ‘incest’ and Daphne’s mythic initiation did indeed subsist.
A good example of the relationship is in her second novel I’ll Never Be Young Again (1932), where Jake’s power over Dick is Jim’s over Gerald in reality. Daphne wrote in the first person as Dick describing the older, wiser, invasive Jake:
He had an intuition of my every mood. He joined in with them as though he were part of myself. Even my thoughts were not hidden from him. We were bound henceforth as comrades and I loved him and he understood.
Dick (who, like Gerald, lives in the shadow of his famous father) moves from a close friendship with Jake (the Jim figure) to a sadistic love affair with a girl called Hesta (the Daphne figure).
In her biography of Daphne, Margaret Forster observes the special intimacy of Dick and Jake and describes Gerald and Jim’s relationship almost too perfectly.
There is an implicit though never realised homosexual relationship between them.
* Pelléas et Mélisande, a play by Maurice Maeterlinck.
* There is a line of continuity from Kicky through Jim, Gerald and Daphne drawn by the Trees. Beerbohm Tree produced Kicky’s Trilby on stage and backed Jim’s application for membership of the Garrick, which was also Gerald’s club. Tree’s wife, the distinguished actress Helen Maud Holt, worked with Gerald on Jim’s plays, What Every Woman Knows (1908) and Shall We Join the Ladies? (1921). Their daughter Viola was friends with Jim, and with Gerald, and his family, especially Daphne. The film director Carol Reed, who fell in love with Daphne, was an illegitimate son of Tree.
* Jim despised ‘might-have-beens’. In his memoir, The Greenwood Hat, he writes: ‘Sadder far than any
word was the tragic story told in the phrase “I Might Have Been”... It implies fault on your part; and what so bitter in this vale of tears as the consciousness that you suffer for your own error, your own blindness . . .’
† Daphne’s dimple on her chin was a childhood feature.
* I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, and The House on the Strand.
CHAPTER THREE
Michael’s suicide
By 1918, Michael was bursting to break free and live his own life apart from Jim. He had shown talent as a painter at school, and expressed a desire after leaving Eton to follow his grandfather’s example and go to Paris to study art. But Uncle Jim’s plan for him was Oxford, and Michael’s idea was not even given consideration.
In August 1918, Jim took Michael and Nico on holiday in Scotland, and his letter to Elizabeth, the estranged wife of E. V. Lucas,* tells of Michael’s despondency:
All the highlands of Scotland are denuded of their young men [due to the war], there are scarcely any tourists, and we have this big hotel to ourselves – indeed we seem to be almost the only people in Glengarry. I had to knit my teeth to come away at all and it is uphill work to make the days pass. Michael feels the dreariness and the sadness of it too and we flounder about my lochs and streams with an effort. I am out with them all day, carrying the coats... I’ll try to stay in Scotland four weeks, but we may make tracks south before then... Now I’m off to read War and Peace.
On 17 January 1919, after passing the entrance examination, Michael went up to Oxford for the first time. Jim wrote again to Elizabeth:
Michael went off today to Oxford and Christchurch full of suppressed excitement. He has a very nice panelled sitting-room, with furniture that would make you shiver. He hopes to be able to put in pieces from Campden Hill in place of it.
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