She took from the writing of Rebecca ‘a power thing’, which was exhilarating and altered her life completely. Imbued with Rebecca’s spirit, instead of remaining the itinerant wife of an army major, she became one of the world’s most popular novelists, and had an affair with a married man, Henry ‘Christopher’ Puxley, which led him ‘to drink himself to the brink of insanity while his wife lost her youth because of it’.11
She then wrote Frenchman’s Creek (1941), based on the affair, setting the most romantic part of it in a creek off the Helford River, where Daphne and Tommy had spent their honeymoon – ultimate treachery perhaps.
In 1943 followed Hungry Hill, a thinly disguised fictional history of Puxley’s family, with Christopher, charming, attractive, but weak and inadequate, a mixture of lost alcoholic ‘Wild Johnnie’ and his lovably treacherous brother Henry.
Thereafter, still driven by ‘the demon boy’ in her, Daphne engaged in two affairs with women, Ellen Doubleday and Gertrude Lawrence.
Throughout this period, from Rebecca to the start of her awakening in 1950–51, her relationships had little to do with reality, they were ‘pure Gondal’.12 She dwelt in a fantasy world in which she treated real people as mere ‘pegs’ onto whom she hung her emotions. Only later, in 1955, could she accept that ‘Pegs, poor dears, have their emotions also.’13
That Rebecca appeared on Daphne’s fantasy palette in the very year that Jim bowed out is at least appropriate. The persona was conceived when she was in England during the last months of Jim’s life. It was the little spark of himself that retained control. The demon boy was, until after her breakdown in 1958, part of Daphne’s self-image. He had been written into her life.
In December 1943, with the huge royalties from Rebecca, Daphne took a long lease on Menabilly. This was her new persona’s crowning achievement and immediately proved its value to the imagination in a new novel, The King’s General (1946), which celebrated Daphne’s possession of her ‘house of secrets’ by exhuming an episode in its history – the discovery, during building works in 1824, of a skeleton of a young man seated on a stool, a Cavalier of the Civil War, walled up in a sealed room. The cavalier was an Eric Avon/Gerald character, walled up in the house that was a symbol of Daphne’s unconscious.
Menabilly was all to Daphne that she hoped. It became the only place where her creative self could operate freely. At Menabilly there was always a book brewing in her mind. Flavia recalls that she would spend all morning in her writing hut with its view of the sea, ‘and in the afternoon she would be free for an hour or so to go for a long walk. Wrapped up against the chill wind we would set off across the fields, armed with stout sticks to feel more boyish’, and invariably they would talk ‘about a character in the book she was writing, about how she would start thinking like that person and pretend to be them... And I would tell her of the strange dreams I had.’14
The Menabilly woods were home to other eccentrics too. Here a certain Captain Vandeleur lived in his hut, ‘painted green to camouflage it during the War’. Further afield, two old ladies lived in ‘a witch’s cottage, half-submerged by undergrowth... overtaken by time and forgotten’, as Oriel Malet wrote. These were strange neighbours, glimpsed but occasionally, perfectly in keeping with the imaginative world Daphne, and the children, now occupied.
Tommy was demobbed in 1947, and took up a position as Comptroller and Treasurer to Princess Elizabeth. For the next twenty years he led a dual existence between London during the week and Menabilly at weekends. It was not ideal. When he grew unhappy, disconsolate and demoralised Daphne changed his nickname from Tommy to ‘Moper’.
It was clear to Daphne that Browning could no longer lay claim to the title of Tommy. Their marriage had proved Jim’s principle that people are pegs on which we hang our emotions. Browning never was Tommy; she could see that now.
At weekends, when he was at home, this was obvious. Flavia gives us the picture:
If [my father] was in a jolly frame of mind he would hold forth on politics, local events and his boats... Kits and I would stay mute, in case picked on. Bing, if she was brewing a story, would sit at her end of the table, picking at her food and staring into space, a vacant look on her face. My father would suddenly pounce and ask her a question: ‘Well, what do you think, Duck?’ (They called each other Duck.) She would drag herself back to the present: ‘Well, I can hardly say, Duck,’ she would reply, a faint smile on her face. My father would look down the table at her and thunder, ‘Woman, you live in a dream!’ which indeed she did . . .15
In the same year as Tommy returned, a lawsuit citing Daphne and alleging plagiarism in Rebecca came to court in America. One Edwina L. Macdonald sued over a story she had published in October 1924 in Heall’s International Magazine, under the title ‘I Planned to Murder My Husband’, which was then written as a novel, Blind Windows. Daphne had not heard of the woman or her work, but she had to take the witness stand in New York, and suddenly her Rebecca persona was to be put to a real test.
She was to be the star witness. It should have been Rebecca’s greatest performance. The plan was to travel with Flavia and Kits on the liner Queen Mary and stay at Barberrys, the home of Ellen Doubleday, wife of Daphne’s American publisher. Ellen appeared one morning in the stateroom. Flavia recalled ‘a slim elegant woman, her arms filled with white flowers for Bing’, who was ‘closely followed by a steward bearing a basket of splendidly wrapped gifts for us all. We were quite taken aback.’16
Daphne was ‘made speechless’ by the ‘Rebecca qualities’ she perceived in Ellen, the well-heeled daughter-in-law of the founder of Doubleday, at that time the largest publisher in the English-speaking world. Ellen was sophisticated, at ease with people and the power she held over them. Later Daphne came to admire her maternal qualities just as much, marvelling that this career woman could also be a caring mother of four and a comforting wife to her husband Nelson Doubleday, head of the family firm, a hard drinker and beset by neuritis. But, in particular, she loved the way Ellen comforted and advised her each day when she came back from court. Without Ellen, she would have been lost.
Daphne’s problem in court was insoluble. She was asked to expound on the genesis of Rebecca. How could she? She could not even explain to herself how she had come to write it. Her silence was fused into the nature of the secret world of imagination in which she lived – although she did not see it like that.
She wrote to Maureen Baker-Munton that she couldn’t bring herself to make public that she had written the novel out of feelings of jealousy over Tommy’s affair with Jan Ricardo, and that the fear of this becoming known had sent her ‘nearly off my rocker’.
But jealousy is not an issue in the novel. Rebecca is about possession. Rebecca possesses Manderley and then she possesses Mrs de Winter. And possession was Jim Barrie’s scene, not Jan Ricardo’s. The brief fling between Tommy and Ricardo had been before Tommy had even met Daphne. Moreover, Ricardo was now dead. She had married another man in 1937 and died during the war, having thrown herself under a train, an event that occurred (with its own tragic coincidence) after Rebecca was published. At the time of the plagiarism case Ricardo was not around to protest, and Tommy couldn’t have cared less what Daphne said in New York. So, why was she so concerned not to make the Ricardo affair public? Was it that her jealousy would make her appear petty or silly? Possibly. But was this enough to bring on a nervous breakdown? For that is what happened. Daphne had a serious breakdown after the case.
Daphne’s problem in court was not Ricardo, but that of most victims of possession when they are told to name their controller: they cannot see that they are being controlled. None of Jim’s victims ever had anything bad to say about him. Nor do victims of possession in the many cases that come before the courts today.
For example, in 2005 Robert Hendy-Freegard commandeered the lives of eight people by persuading them that their safety was under threat by the IRA, duping some of them into thinking he was recruiting them to MI5, subjecting them
to a series of bizarre rituals and relieving them of a million pounds (he is now serving a life sentence). His victims described being controlled as being in ‘a prison cell that followed you around and you couldn’t leave’.
Freegard was described in the press as having ‘kept a Svengali-like hold’ over his victims, all of whom were intelligent people, among them a lawyer, a psychologist, a company director, a civil servant, and three students. They were completely bound up in his fantasy world, but in the real world were on auto-pilot, unable to see what was going on. A friend of one victim said, ‘It was impossible to talk to her sensibly.’
After Freegard’s conviction, they were able to accept that they had been manipulated, but it took special counselling to bring them to it, and their awakening was a delicate process. Had they been summoned as witnesses to court beforehand – as in effect Daphne was being summoned before her awakening – they would have been quite unable to give evidence against Freegard, and might have manufactured an alternative ‘Ricardo’ explanation for what had been going on, fully believing the story themselves. Lawyers pushing them into a corner might have opened the floodgates to anxiety, and quite possibly to breakdown.
In the Rebecca case the judge was asking Daphne to look into areas into which a skilled psychoanalyst might have been reluctant to take her. It was, Daphne wrote, one of two occasions when ‘the fear of reality’ broke in.* Confusion and paranoia ensued. Daphne broke down, and that is when, as she put it, ‘I turned bang to Ellen.’
She turned to Ellen, the mother of four, as if to her own mother – the mother she had never had. Ellen released ‘a subconscious thwarted longing to have sat on Mummy’s lap’. Daphne even believed herself possessed by the spirit of a miscarried child of Ellen. Sending her a manuscript for publication became ‘like a child thrusting a bunch of daisies into its mother’s hand’.
Ten years later she explained that her relationships with Ellen, and with Ferdie and Gertrude Lawrence, were ‘all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself [her emphasis], partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality’.17
Jim had a hand in all of it: Daphne’s ‘muddled troubles’ with Gerald; the ‘writing’ of Rebecca into her; the ‘fear of facing reality’ from the ‘prison cell’ of fantasy to which he had consigned her: ‘I wasn’t just fighting a foolish case for plagiarism,’ she wrote from to Ellen, ‘I was fighting all the evil that has ever been.’
Central to Daphne’s affair with Ellen was Eric Avon, Daphne’s teenage alter ego. Her feelings for Ellen released ‘a boy of eighteen all over again with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady’s feet’. Wrote Margaret Forster:
A boy, not a girl, the boy she explained she had ‘locked up in a box’ long ago when she had accepted that, since she was outwardly a girl, she must face facts and live as a girl.18
But this ‘boy’ was not a lesbian, as this suggests; ‘. . . by God and by Christ,’ Daphne wrote later to Ellen, ‘if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with “L”, I’d tear their guts out.’ Her desire to play ‘boy’ was a return to the fantasy boy released in her by Jim and suppressed since childhood – she even cast Ellen in the role of Mary Stuart as her foil. Sex was not the point. Unable to face reality, either in or out of court, she ceded control once more to Jim. It was the inevitable character of the breakdown, because at bottom the breakdown was due to Jim. She was, as later she acknowledged, short-circuiting, reverting to her childhood fantasy world. Just as Daphne reverted when under pressure in New York, so George on the fields of the Somme was reading The Little White Bird, the story of his captivation. One wonders what fantasy reversion eased Michael into Sandford Pool, and tipped Peter into nothingness at Sloane Square tube station.
Ellen handled Daphne’s breakdown with exquisite poise, above and beyond the call of duty as her publisher (though she did end up with the American copyright of Rebecca). Nor did she blanch when Daphne wrote her into a play, September Tide.
Ellen had been dreading a lesbian plot. Had she known Daphne better she would have expected what she got: not quite incest, but ‘love within the family’, between a young artist, Evan, and his mother-in-law, Stella. Evan was pegged on Daphne; Stella on Ellen. Daphne as playwright then conspired to make Stella fall in love with Evan, as Jim had conspired to match Gerald and Daphne in Dear Brutus. But the casting of the play changed everything.
Noël Coward came to dinner at Barberrys, made a great fuss of Flavia and Kits, ‘showing us tricks of throwing nuts into the air and catching them in our mouths’, and introduced Daphne to Gertrude Lawrence. Gertie had form with Daphne’s father, Gerald. She had been one of his ‘stable’. They had starred together in Behold, We Live by John Van Druten at the St James’s Theatre in 1932.
There was never any question from the moment Daphne met Gertie that she would play Stella. ‘Suddenly I was overwhelmed with an obsessional passion for the last of Daddy’s actress loves,’ Daphne wrote to Maureen Baker-Munton. At the heart of everything Daphne wrote, and everyone she loved, was her relationship with her father, disfigured by the ‘paradigm of intimacy’ with Jim.
Her next step was to put her feelings in a novel and try to effect a relationship with Gertie. She set about writing The Parasites (1949) about a theatrical family called Delaney. Weak, possessive Pappy Delaney was Gerald. His children, Niall, Maria and Celia, were to be ‘the three people I know myself to have been’. Daphne ‘who turned to Ferdie, and later to Ellen and Gertrude’ cast herself as Niall (the boy on stage) and had him fall in love with Maria (the actress on stage).19 The alchemic reaction worked. Gertie and Daphne made love over a weekend in Florida.20 Thus Daphne’s affair with Gertie was predicted in her fiction, just as her intimacy with her father had been sealed in Dear Brutus. She was again operating in main-stream Barrie-inspired mind control territory.
From Rebecca on, she used her fiction to ‘re-write’ the lives of herself and the people she used as pegs, to exercise her will upon relationships, and eventually to rid herself of unwanted influences. All of this came directly from Uncle Jim.
Now was the time that Peter Llewelyn Davies came back into her life, and Daphne began putting her life in order. Her tenth novel, My Cousin Rachel, written shortly after her foray with Gertie in Florida, was the alchemic vehicle selected for the purpose.
Daphne explained all in a letter to her friend Maureen Baker-Munton: ‘Gertrude and Ellen merged to make the single figure of Rachel... In the book I killed both.’ Later, she reiterated in a letter to Oriel Malet that she was writing her two female lovers out of her life by killing Rachel off. ‘It was only by making [Rachel] die that I was able to rid myself of it [my obsession]. For writers, the only way we can do it, is to write them out.’
Coming upon Daphne at Menabilly at this time, one could be forgiven for thinking one had stepped into a world more supernatural even than Barrie’s flat on the Strand. Daphne revelled in her reputation locally for being something of a psychic. She joked to Oriel that the locals believed her to have ‘a little Hut somewhere in the woods, where she would call up the spirits and get them to write her books. She was always in a trance they used to say.’ She was laughing at the locals, but the truth was that she did have a hut where she wrote her books, and she did believe that ‘a writer is a kind of medium’, and was perfectly serious about her alchemic use of texts.
Her friend of twenty years, the explorer Clara Vyvyan, went on holiday with her, and marvelled at her ability to sit in a trance on some mountainside in Europe and return hours later ‘in a mood of mountain ecstasy’. At Menabilly, in the summer of ’58, she slept out for nights on end beneath the stars and on one occasion (not for the first or last time) experienced a sensation of breaking through into the order of things that lies beneath the everyday world.
My Cousin Rachel was published in 1951, and in the following year Daphne’s meetings with Peter yield
ed her first short story collection, The Apple Tree. The opening story, a novella called ‘Monte Verita’, is, as she wrote to Maureen, ‘about myself and Tommy’. Here, for the first time Daphne takes the blame for the tensions in her marriage, but there are other concerns. The story cuts right into the fabric of the fantasy world in which she had been living since she was a child.
Tommy (Victor, a mountaineer in the story) loses sight of Daphne (Anna), with whom he is helplessly in love, while climbing Monte Verita, a mountain in an unspecified European country. Anna has been taken in by a cult of boys lodged in an ancient monastery on the mountainside. Under their guidance she appears to find her Nirvana and experiences a mystical sense of ultimate truth, an insight into the essence of all things. Her husband, Victor, is convinced that she has been ‘hypnotised and is speaking under suggestion’. He descends the mountain on his own, and has a nervous breakdown.
The third character in the story is the narrator, who tells us what happened when he went up the mountain to try and trace Anna. He hears the cult members chanting; it is ‘unearthly, terrifying, yet beautiful in a way impossible to bear’. He is then surprised by the cult of boys and thrown into a cell, where he is haunted by the mocking laughter of one boy in particular, referred to as ‘that damned boy’. He is overcome by the boy, indeed by a whole host of boys, and knowing he is no match for them he gives himself up to death at their hands. ‘I expected the laughter again, mocking and youthful, and the sudden seizing of my body with their hands, and the savage thrusting of me through the slit window to darkness and to death.’ He closes his eyes and waits, braced for horror. Then, amazingly, he feels ‘the boy touch my lips... [and] it was as if the peace of God came upon me, quiet and strong, and, with the touch of hands, took from me all anxiety and fear’.
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