Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Daphne’s sense of the past in the present is what many readers love about her novels. It carries with it a great beauty and none of the morbidity of Uncle Jim’s attempts at lifting the veil between life and death in plays such as Peter Pan and Mary Rose.

  Barrie’s art was neurosis-driven. He could not free himself from his obsession with death, and he ensured that Daphne would suffer similar agonies, by teaming up with Gerald and by his part in inflicting her ‘Daddy complex’ on her. That was the piece of Jim that lodged in her mind until the end. And ironically, that piece so aggravated her that it often produced the energy needed to get her writing.

  This is shown in her first novel, The Loving Spirit, written in Ferryside in 1929. It is a long way from being the best example of Daphne’s imagination at work, but it is interesting because it is immature and transparent.

  Scholars say that it owes a lot to the Brontes. The title is from a poem by Emily Bronte, and in 1931 the novel would be marketed by its publisher, Heinemann, as Brontë-esque. More importantly, it is about Fowey (called Plyn in the fiction). Daphne came across a derelict schooner, the Jane Slade, on the mud flats as she was walking by Pont Creek. She discovered the tomb of the real Jane Slade in nearby Lanteglos churchyard. And the Slade family, still living in Fowey, gave her a big box of letters crumpled and yellowed with age.

  Daphne’s imaginative sixth sense was always stirred by place:

  One night when The Loving Spirit was in embryo, scarcely born in thought, I walked up to Castle Point. The moon was high in the sky, and there was no sound but the moan of the still water lapping the rocks beyond the harbour. It seemed to me that I was standing on the cliffs years hence with a grownup son. I was a ghost, long dead, existing only in his thoughts. And from that I passed on to thinking about my unborn book. My thoughts were of a past and future no longer separated in time, and I knew it must be the story of four generations.10

  In the novel she has Janet Coombe, the fictional Jane Slade, do the same – her heroine leans against the old ruins at the mouth of the Fowey river, closes her eyes and breaks through into that other-world where past, present and future are one. As in Daphne’s ‘dream’, her heroine is ‘a ghost long dead’ and confronts the figure of a man she recognises as her (as yet unborn) grown-up son. And so the generational saga begins.

  But it is a terrible cheat. The scene is a take from Jim’s play, Mary Rose, where a long-dead mother appears to her grown-up son. Daphne was young, a mere 22. She was writing her first novel. We should not be surprised that both her dreams and her novel are influenced by Jim.

  In the mid-1950s, when Daphne became aware of how far Uncle Jim had got ‘inside’ her, she took to calling herself ‘Tray’ instead of her usual family nickname, ‘Bing’. Tray is the name of the dog in Trilby who loves and looks up to Little Billee (Kicky) ‘with sapient, affectionate eyes’ and sings to his tune, but is ‘a barytone [sic] dog by nature, with portentous, warlike chest-notes of the jingo order’.

  Daphne sang her grandfather’s tune, but, as a member of Jim’s boy-cult, she sang it ‘barytone’. Her dreams were as adulterated by Uncle Jim as Michael’s had been.

  Yet there was an active ingredient in her writing that was down to Jim, a live spark that provided the essential dynamic between Janet Coombe and her son. The grown-up boy who appears beside Janet assumes the spiritual blindness and ‘black fits’ of depression of the author’s own father, and she reasserts her loyalty to him with an alternative vision to his, one of eternity, beauty and peace. As I said, her Daddy complex is everywhere in the fiction.

  The Loving Spirit was published in February 1931. Denis Mackail was aware of Uncle Jim’s high regard for Daphne – ‘Clever Daphne, we salute you,’ he wrote, ‘and Barrie saluted you too.’ The novel was successful enough for her publishers to enter into a contract for two more – I’ll Never Be Young Again and The Progress of Julius. Readers and reviewers were astonished that these two novels were so different from The Loving Spirit. Daphne’s first novel drew on the du Maurier secret; the next two were caught up with Daphne’s relationship with her father and Uncle Jim, and with Jim’s relationship with Gerald.

  I’ll Never Be Young Again was finished before The Loving Spirit was published. Julius was completed at the end of September 1931. One can imagine an eyebrow being raised at Adelphi Terrace House, and we know that Jim’s friend Q chose this moment to take Daphne aside and speak to her ‘about a code of living, and a standard, and that marriage and children meant more in life than all the novels and successes ever written’. Daphne decided on a big change, and included the decisive moment in her novel. At the end of The Progress of Julius, Gabriel announces that she is ‘going to be someone else. Gabriel will go forever... I can’t tell you what it’s made me feel – all young again, and unspoilt, and as though I didn’t know things.’

  This was Daphne performing an alchemic ritual on herself, a tactic learned from Uncle Jim. She was effectively writing the manipulative ‘Gabriel’ out of her life. In October 1931 (a month after she finished Julius) a 35-year-old Major in the Grenadier Guards, Frederick Browning, sailed upriver towards Ferryside in a 20-foot cruiser named Yggdrasil. He and Daphne eventually met, fell in love, married in July, and honeymooned in Frenchman’s Creek.

  Daphne herself said it was ‘a queer stroke of fate’ that she had been ‘picked’ by a man who embodied precisely the kind of integrity Q had been expounding. Angela wrote, ‘Fate or a good fairy played into their hands.’ Yggdrasil is of course the enchanted ash in Norse mythology. The word means ‘the tree of fate’. But there is more.

  The family legend goes that Frederick Browning read The Loving Spirit, and so liked it that he came to see the place where it was set, hoping he might meet its author. When I first heard this twenty years ago, long before I knew about Jim, I wondered that a matter-of-fact, macho soldier like Browning should have enjoyed such a romantic novel so much that he decided to track down its author 300 miles away.

  Later I discovered that there were, in fact, connections between the Brownings and the du Mauriers, which centred round the Garrick, a club to which Gerald and Jim belonged. And Daphne’s suitor had two nicknames. One was ‘Boy’, the other ‘Tommy’.

  Was it all romantic happenstance, or was the puppeteer working overtime? What is certain is that the ‘delicate’ Daphne was now – with Romantic Tommy’s intervention – someone else’s responsibility. There is no record of Jim’s reaction to the news of their engagement. Gerald is supposed to have broken down and cried.

  Daphne and Tommy married three months after their first meeting. There was no question of it having been a shotgun wedding. Tommy, true to Q’s principles, had awed Daphne with a polite refusal to sleep with her before marriage.

  But Daphne was unsuited to the role of army wife, and Tommy soon began to aggravate her ‘Daddy complex’, emerging as something of a father-figure. He was ten years older than Daphne and expected her to minister to him, as Gerald had always expected Mo to do. Also, like Gerald, he was emotionally fragile and would take to bed with a collection of tatty, well-loved teddy bears.

  Then, of course, their first child, Tessa, was not a boy. Later Tessa wrote:

  [My father] had very exacting standards of discipline and was well known for them. He expected his wife to conform, take an interest in the other officers’ wives, as well as that of his soldiers’ wives. Daphne was totally out of her depth. It was not her scene at all. She became pregnant and immediately decided that this was to be the boy that she longed for. When I was born her disappointment was intense.

  So programmed was Daphne in Jim’s boy-cult that she could not countenance mothering a girl. ‘Daphne had wanted six little boys,’ wrote Angela (one more than Jim). Her second child was another girl, Flavia, and when finally her boy did arrive, in 1940 – Kits – he alone of the children was allowed into her writing room, and Daphne was ecstatic.

  In 1934, Gerald died. In the same year Daphne wrote and published her bi
ography of him. She then left Tommy and Tessa in London in one of the Cannon Hall cottages and went to Cornwall to write Jamaica Inn, in which her ‘muddled troubles’ with her father and Jim drive the melodrama.

  Orphan Mary Yellan falls prey to her adopted father, drunken Joss Merlyn, keeper of Jamaica Inn, who feels ‘they ought to have made you [Mary] a boy’. Mary discovers Joss’s secret, that he is bound into a secret society with an evil, elusive leader, Francis Davey, the Satanist Vicar of Altarnun (‘Altar none’). Their business is the wrecking of ships off the north Cornwall coast. Conspiracy and secrecy pervade the text, as does the threat of violence and sexual abuse. Joss bends Mary’s wrist (reminiscent of the father-daughter sadism in Julius and The Scapegoat) and tells her that he can ‘have her’ any time he pleases. At the end of the novel, Mary determines to follow Joss’s brother, in effect her adopted uncle. She follows him like a hypnotic, not by choice but ‘because I must’. His name – one might have guessed it – is ‘Jem’.

  The novel, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, was published in 1936, as Tommy took command of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards in Alexandria. Daphne sailed to join him with Tessa and her nanny, Margaret, and on arrival loathed everything about Egypt, especially the official duties expected of the commanding officer’s wife. Instead, she got on with a biography of her family, The Du Mauriers.

  On 16 January 1937, Daphne took a boat back to England.

  Daphne may have fled Egypt because she was pregnant and wanted to escape the oppressive atmosphere of life in Alexandria. But there is an additional reason: Uncle Jim was very unwell. He had been in ill health since the previous October. It had started with pains in the back, but he seemed to become smaller and more and more fragile as the days went by. Denis Mackail wrote of Barrie’s ‘Deep, deep depression in the solitude of the flat. And pains and sleeplessness, and the feeling that the doctors knew what was wrong with him, and wouldn’t tell him because they were afraid.’

  In February 1937 he was advised that ‘the symptoms were chiefly psychological’ and was treated ‘with some electrical apparatus’. Moments of relief would be followed by others when ‘he was just a scared, baffled and tormented mass of nerves’. Not until he was prescribed heroin did he get any relief.

  Daphne’s boat docked at Tilbury, but instead of disembarking she offloaded Margaret and Tessa (aged three and a half) and continued alone to Plymouth, thence to Ferryside. She stayed there until March, when Jim began to show signs of recovery and was well enough to receive visitors. In April he lunched with Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister.

  On 1 April Daphne checked into a short-let apartment at Queen Anne Mansions, Queen Anne’s Gate, less than a mile from Adelphi Terrace House, and to her surprise, because she wasn’t yet due, gave birth to Flavia the following day. Thereafter, she remained in London until July.

  Daphne was at a crossroads. The du Mauriers were planning a move. Mo and Jeanne were going to live at Ferryside, which would no longer be available to Daphne alone. Daphne’s Cornwall was slipping away from her, and she was never going to escape from being an army wife, an itinerant appendage of Tommy Browning.

  There is no record of her appointments in London, but it is inconceivable that she did not consult with the newly revived Uncle Jim, still well enough in May and early June, according to Mackail, to dine out and be ‘in wonderful form, gay, competitively and successfully funny’, though just as often deeply depressed. On 9 May he turned seventy-seven and the BBC broadcast a revival of Dear Brutus.

  It was then that the idea of Rebecca was conceived, ‘a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower... Psychological and rather macabre,’ as Daphne wrote to her publisher, now Victor Gollancz. The novel would be set not at Ferryside in Fowey, the Cornwall of A Loving Spirit, but at magical Menabilly, the house she had come upon beyond the Lodge at Four Turnings and which had been part of her dreams ever since. No one could take Cornwall from her imagination.

  On 19 June, Jim died.

  His funeral took place in Kirriemuir, and a memorial service was held in St Paul’s on the 30th by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who commented shrewdly:

  Though he saw the ultimate problems of human life with all the clearness of his vivid imagination, he attempted no solution of them, sometimes even seeming to resent while he could not resist their intrusion.

  Resentment was the key.

  When Daphne returned to Africa the following month, she left alone with Tommy, who had come to England on leave. Henceforth, Rebecca took precedence over everything, as Tessa reported:

  In July of that year [Flavia and I] were both left with our nanny in the charge of our paternal grandmother, whom we came to love dearly. Daphne and Boy returned to the terrible heat of Egypt.

  Back in Alexandria, Daphne couldn’t write and she couldn’t sleep. She complained that she did not have the ‘psychic energy’. She was prescribed Medinol, a sleeping pill, which calmed her. She managed 15,000 words of the novel and then threw them away. Was she upset by the separation from her little girls? Flavia was only three months old when Daphne left her. But when she returned to England in December, Daphne elected to go to Ferryside alone to finish her novel rather than spend Christmas with her children. Perhaps her writer’s block had more to do with the loss of Jim. In any event it was Menabilly that eventually facilitated the writing of Rebecca. Dreaming true, Ibbetson-style, she fixed her mind not on an island but on a house:

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.

  No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it . . .

  The images are no longer those of the author’s memory of Menabilly. The drive is ‘not the drive that we had known’. Nature has overwhelmed it, a nightmare of ‘stealthy, insidious’ growth, encroaching upon the drive with ‘long, tenacious fingers’. The woods have triumphed, she sees ‘the squat oaks and tortured elms... along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered’. This thread of a path led, surely, not to the house at all ‘but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness’, journeying as it were down into the subhuman, through the dreamer’s unconscious mind.

  But then suddenly she emerges into a clearing, ‘and I stood, my heart thumping in my breast, the strange prick of tears behind my eyes’ –

  There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.

  Maxim de Winter’s first wife, Rebecca, has been drowned, apparently in a yachting accident, her body never reclaimed from the holed boat at the bottom of the sea off the coast below Manderley. Maxim, handsome, commanding, with a strong military bearing, has married again. Quiet, self-effacing, vulnerable, the second Mrs de Winter is never named but identified by Daphne with her own dull, socially inept side as an army wife. Alfred Hitchcock always addressed the character as ‘Daphne de Winter’ on the set of the film.

  Mrs de Winter is met by Rebecca’s demonic acolyte, the mesmeric housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who still worships her dead mistress, and now sets about mentally overpowering her replacement, who she can see is unfit to fill Rebecca’s shoes. Rebecca’s intimidating spirit pervades the house.

  Daphne said that Rebecca sprang from an image she had of a beautiful, exotic brunette called Jan Ricardo, wi
th whom her husband had had a brief affair before they were married, her long sloping handwriting on letters found in Tommy’s desk indicating the dominant personality that Daphne thought Ricardo must have been.

  But jealousy of Tommy’s old flame, whom Daphne never knew, was not going to drive the writing of this novel. Mrs Danvers tells us what did, when she lets slip that Rebecca had the ‘spirit of a boy... She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that... No one got the better of Rebecca. She did what she liked, she lived as she liked.’ Maxim couldn’t possess her, and killed her when she proved his inadequacy.

  In the finest scene of the novel, Mrs Danvers tempts the second Mrs de Winter into throwing herself from the window of Rebecca’s bedroom, looking out through a sea mist over ‘the little clearing where the satyr [Pan] plays his pipes . . .’

  Rebecca’s spirit is the supernatural ‘spirit of a boy’, untouchable, none other than Jim’s demon boy. And finally we realise Daphne’s purpose in writing Rebecca. She is writing Jim’s demon boy into her life.

  Mrs de Winter has a dream. She is writing letters in the morning room of Manderley. She looks down at what she has written and notices that it is not her handwriting. She gets up, looks at herself in the mirror, and it is not her face that stares back at her: ‘The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed.’ Maxim brushes her hair, but it isn’t hers. It is Rebecca’s ‘cloud of dark hair’.

  The transmutation of Mrs de Winter is complete. ‘I so identified with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist.’ And Daphne’s single-minded purpose in writing the novel was also complete. She told her friend Oriel Malet that in writing it she had once and for all eliminated the doe-like Mrs de Winter side of her own character – ‘I’ve never been her since.’ Rebecca was Daphne’s first alchemic text, her Tommy, her Peter Pan.