However, as it turned out, Daphne’s Branwell is not really a biography at all. Like almost everything she wrote, it concerns herself. Branwell, the boy who never grew up, the trickster-boy, ‘brimful of mischief as a bog pixie’, is also the Master, for it is he who first orchestrates the imaginary worlds the Brontë siblings inhabit.
Daphne considered first the physical similarities. Branwell ‘was almost insignificantly small – one of life’s trials’. Her adult Branwell is a boy ‘who had not grown an inch since he turned fourteen’, and self-conscious on account of this, brushing his hair ‘high off his forehead to help his height’. He also had ‘a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour and a downcast look, which never varied’. Nature had maimed him physically and psychologically, and she used Barrie’s phrase to characterise Branwell’s battle against fate to avoid becoming a ‘might-have been’.
The children’s imaginary worlds of Gondal and Angria first took shape the day their father brought Branwell a box of lead soldiers. Juliet Barker commented in The Brontës4 that as the stories multiplied, the soldiers changed character. For example, Charlotte’s favourite soldier changed from being Arthur Wellesley to the Marquis of Douro and the Duke of Zamorna. But in Daphne’s hands this rapidly becomes a Barrie-inspired alchemic ritual, so that it is Charlotte herself who is transformed by the soldiers: ‘The plain, intensely shy, seventeen-year-old ex-schoolgirl was none other than Arthur Wellesley, Marquis of Douro, soon to be Duke of Zamorna.’ Daphne observes transmutations for Emily and Anne, too, and great pains are taken to depict the transmutation and empowerment of Branwell, ‘Chief Genius Brannii’, the boyish controller of their infernal world. His whole life is transformed as Alexander Percy, future Viscount Ellrington and Earl of Northangerland, who is everything Branwell longed to be – a mountain of a man, a success with the ladies, heroic, but demonic too. He ‘looked like Lucifer, Star of the Morning. And the sneer was here before me too. . .It was a sneer of calm contempt at himself and nature.’ It is the sneer in the portrait of Dorian Gray, it is Peter Pan’s cynical, ‘frightful sneer at the laws of nature’.
So, here we have Daphne’s true vision of Uncle Jim – ‘Satan had usurped his body... that Satan could seize his right hand and master it, compelling it to write what it had no desire to write. The prospect was too hideous to contemplate.’*
The transformation into Percy took Branwell into a pact with the Devil, as Barrie with Peter Pan –
O Percy! Percy! where art thou?
I’ve sacrificed my God for thee . . .
Percy becomes Branwell’s ‘second self’, though we are never sure whether the whole thing happens only in his mind.
Margaret Forster criticised Daphne for mixing documentary fact ‘in the most awkward fashion with entirely imaginary suppositions, greatly to [the book’s] detriment’. Go to The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë for a biography of Branwell and you may be disappointed, but go to it knowing that Daphne had just come out of a major breakdown over J. M. Barrie’s destruction of her family, and you will be enthralled. No wonder that during the writing of it she suffered ‘the kind of paranoid imaginings which had afflicted her after Tommy’s breakdown’.5
And of course Daphne grasped the thrill of fantasy and the clandestine nature of the Angria and Gondal games, which Charlotte described so well:
How few would believe that from the sources purely imaginary such happiness could be derived – Pen cannot portray the deep Interest of the scenes, of the continued train of events, I have witnessed in that little room with the low narrow bed & bare white-washed walls... What a treasure is thought! What a privilege is reverie – I am thankful that I have the power of solacing myself with the dream of creations whose reality I shall never behold – May I never lose that power may I never feel it grow weaker – If I should how little pleasure will life afford me – its lapses of shade are so wide so gloomy. Its gleams of sunshine so limited & dim – !6
Daphne understood that ‘secrecy must be maintained. If anyone should ever discover about the play, read the hidden books, identify a living figure in one of their fictitious beings... there would be a catastrophe.’ Secrecy had been Daphne’s mode since childhood, and the Bronte method of preserving secrecy by writing in minuscule lettering was familiar to her, because it was a habit of Kicky’s.
Part way through writing, Daphne discovered that Winifred Gerin was writing a biography of Branwell too. Whipped on by her publisher, she wrote flat out from New Year 1960 until the last week of March in a race to finish first, which she won.
While Daphne was exorcising her demons in Branwell, Peter was submitting to his. On 21 February 1960, he wrote to Dolly from 20 Cadogan Court:
I can’t forgive myself for not writing sooner to thank you for your letter which I so loved getting. Ill health is the weak excuse – my wife’s as well as my own. Writing has become a fearful effort. Even if it wasn’t so I couldn’t write of my beautiful mother of whom I knew so little and remember so much, and whose bony structure and much of whose temperament I believe I inherited. You gave me treasured glimpses of her and of my splendid father, from your own memories.
Now, ‘melancholy has marked me for her own.’ No more photographs please. We leave here soon, I don’t know where for. Thank you so very much for writing.
The pain of the mind control victim is the hopeless pain of the abused. Peter will have felt ‘betrayed, exploited and, worst of all, fooled’, just as Forster noted Daphne did. Daphne’s response, which I believe kept her going, was anger, for what lesser emotion would have galvanised her into writing the nightmare out of herself? Indeed, she transferred this emotion to Peter, writing to Nico:
Being myself, constantly and for no earthly reason, a potential suicide, I don’t think one does it from despair, but from anger – it’s a hit out of THEM – THEM being, to the potential suicide everything ONE is not (for that particular minute). The violent feelings rising within can only be assuaged by greater violence, hence the train. The off-balance Self says to the mythical THEM, ‘If this is what you’re doing to me – Right, Here We Go.’ A half-bottle of something would help to blot out responsibility, naturally, if obtainable.
In September 1959, Jack died. By then, Peter was himself a psychological and physical wreck: in a letter to Nico, Daphne alluded to ‘the fixed look on his face and the shuffled step’ at this time. In October, Peter’s wife Peggy suffered a nervous breakdown. The following April, Peter walked off the platform at Sloane Square station to his death under a train – no ‘awfully big adventure’, no ‘unfriendly seeker’ required, surely no anger either, only the tearful remembrance of a little boy of four forced to walk the plank against his will by Captain Swarthy.
Peggy never recovered. She was taken in by her sister Alison and diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea. She died a few years later in hospital. Because Huntington’s chorea (now called Huntington’s disease) is hereditary her three sons, Rivvy, George and Peter, decided never to have children in case the disease was passed down the line.
* Daphne was told who Tommy’s mistress was, and made a point of meeting her, but by chance I discovered that Tommy’s London lifestyle had been a good deal more racy than even Daphne learned. In the early 1950s Barbara Taylor Bradford was a young journalist in Fleet Street and a firm friend of a lady from Kentucky called Jeannie Gilbert, who had been very close to Tommy Browning.
‘When I met Jeannie she was already working at the Savoy. At some point while promoting Diners Club she met this man, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning, who was very taken with her. He must have been a director of the Savoy Group because he got Jeannie the job of PR of the Savoy, Claridges and the Berkeley. She was widely regarded as the best press officer the Savoy Group ever had... And she was very pretty. There was a picture of Browning always in her house, with him in that uniform. He was living in London and she saw a lot of him.’
Tommy had indeed been a director of the
Savoy, and Jeannie had helped keep him away from that dreary little flat in Whitelands, with its squeaky floorboards and faint smell of gas and eau-de-cologne. ‘Now, whether or not they had intercourse I don’t know,’ Barbara concluded. ‘I wasn’t under the bed. But she always said to me that that is how she got the job.’
* Alas, her letter to Tommy is not available.
* The reference is clearly to Barrie, although Daphne got it wrong, it was his left hand Satan seized. Due to writer’s cramp he had been forced to learn to write with the left hand, and noticed the difference in the material it produced. ‘The right has the happier nature, the left is naturally sinister,’ he wrote in The Greenwood Hat. It was not so much that he wrote things with the left as ‘it writes things with me... I never, as far as I can remember, wrote uncomfortable tales like Dear Brutus and Mary Rose till I crossed over to my other hand.’
CHAPTER THREE
No escape
On the last day of March 1960, five days before Peter’s suicide, Daphne wrote to Oriel,
My own non-Branwell news is that Ellen is flying over in April, and I have promised to unveil a plaque to my grandfather outside the house in Great Russell Street (Doubleday offices). Ellen insists on representing the firm! I don’t know what I do; just pull a string, I suppose. I shan’t make a speech!
The house in Great Russell Street had been Kicky and Emma’s first home after they married in 1863. The ceremony had originally been scheduled for March, but Daphne had postponed it to put the finishing touches to Branwell. Peter died on Tuesday, 5 April. The inquest was held between 8 and 12 April. Daphne had no immediate writing commitments, no reason to remain in Cornwall, but there is no record of her being in London until the unveiling of the London County Council’s blue plaque on the 22nd. Nico, his two sons and Trixy’s son Gerald Millar also attended.
This was terrifically symbolic, coming so soon after Peter’s death. For, as Daphne wrote to Nico on 12 April, ‘To me personally [Peter] stood for every thought I had ever had about Grandpapa, or Kicky as we used to call him at Café Royal lunches, sometimes with weeping nostalgia.’
Tommy died five years later, aged 68, after which Daphne moved out of Menabilly to Kilmarth, the dower house on the Menabilly estate, where she lived more or less alone until the end of her life in 1989. In her last few years with Tommy, she had found unexpected unity with him in her research for Castle Dor, a novel begun by Q and completed by Daphne after his death, which returns the legend of Tristan to modern Cornwall.
Henceforth she discarded any notion of transmuting lives in her fiction. ‘Imagination, yes,’ she wrote to Oriel Malet, ‘but so that you use it to perceive the past, and re-live it . . .’ She had been re-reading Peter Ibbetson. She was back to the source, untainted by Jim.
It was then, in her closeness to this ancient part of Cornwall, that she enjoyed her greatest ‘unity within’. After Castle Dor (1962) came The House on the Strand (1969), and the non-fiction Vanishing Cornwall (1967), with photographs taken by her son. She was digging in, even became a member of the Nationalist Party of Cornwall, and in her final novel, Rule Britannia (1972), as an actress simply called Mad, she became the matriarch of all she surveyed in Cornwall.
Uncle Jim had not, however, been forgotten. The House on the Strand sprang from her musings about a professor who once lived at Kilmarth, who, she fancied, had dabbled in alchemy. The novel alludes to Peter Llewelyn Davies’s suicide, and confirms that she alone knew the reason for it.
Professor Magnus Lane falls under a passing train as it rattles out of a tunnel. The hero, Dick Young, with whom Daphne identifies, realises how his death will seem –
It would make sense to no one. Not to the police, or to his many friends, or to anyone but myself. I should be asked why a man of his intelligence had wandered close to a railway line on a summer’s evening at dusk, and I should have to say that I did not know. I did know.
In the mid-1970s Oriel Malet woke up to the fact that something was once again deeply wrong with Daphne. It had something to do with ‘the world of her imagination’ and with ‘something very early in her life... Daphne was so anxious to conceal her fears,’ she wrote.
About this time Daphne built an altar in a tiny room in the basement of Kilmarth, which I saw for myself, and which was as likely to carry ‘the horn that echoes from the further hill, discordant, shrill’, as a Christian cross. There had been beauty and mystery, but in the end she knew that hers could never be a joyous ‘other world’. The transmutation could not be undone.
Last night the other world came much too near,
And with it fear.
I heard their voices whisper me from sleep,
And could not keep
My mind upon the dream, for still they came,
Calling my name,
The loathly keepers of the netherland
I understand.
My frozen brain rejects the pulsing beat;
My willing feet,
Cloven like theirs, too swiftly recognise
Without surprise.
The horn that echoes from the further hill,
Discordant, shrill,
Has such a leaping urgency of song,
Too loud, too long,
That prayer is stifled like a single note
In the parched throat.
How fierce the flame! How beautiful and bright
The inner light
Of that great world which lives within our own,
Remote, alone.
Let me not see too soon, let me not know,
And so forgo
All that I cling to here, the safety side
Where I would hide.
Old Evil, loose my chains and let me rest
Where I am best.
Here is muted shade of my own dust.
But if I must
Go wandering in Time and seek the source
Of my life force,
Lend me your sable wings, that as I fall
Beyond recall,
The sober stars may tumble in my wake,
For Jesus’ sake.1
Oriel watched aghast as her friend degenerated during the last years of her life. Daphne began to complain of pains like drug withdrawal, of fears, panic. ‘What is happening, I ask myself?’ she pleaded in a letter to Oriel in 1981. Not long afterwards she made an attempt on her life, a failed overdose of sleeping pills.
I met Daphne two years before she died. I had approached her with an idea for an illustrated memoir,2 an ensemble of autobiographical writings and extracts from her Cornish fiction. Meeting her at home on the Menabilly estate, studying her life and visiting the places in Cornwall in which so many of her stories are set, I could not help but be spellbound by her imagination.
I was warned that I might find her frail. In fact, she was delightful. After lunch she took her regular walk down ‘Thrombosis Hill’, while I took some photographs of the house and garden, exquisite views over the sea. On her return she surprised me in the garden, and mistook me for someone else. What struck me was the look of blind panic on her face. I thought, how appropriate for the author of ‘Don’t Look Now’. Later I read Oriel Malet’s Letters, where Oriel wrote: ‘On my last visit I had been struck by her look of panic, almost of fear, as she came to the door to greet me. Clutching my arms, she whispered, “Oh, Oriel, Oriel . . .”’
Is this the nightmare vision to take away from Captivated, or do we remember the sudden feelings of absolute bliss – Daphne’s peak experience, her ‘vision of Life and Death, and everything in harmony’ one summer’s afternoon at Kilmarth, or earlier on a summer’s night when she slept out in the Menabilly garden and sensed all around her another time, another world, and immersed herself in the memory of it in ‘The Pool’? The ‘relief of that vision had been so tremendous ‘that something seemed to burst inside her heart and everything that had ever been fell into place’. Again, a sense of harmony had been key, as it had been for her grandfather. The joy was in
describable, and the surge of feeling, almost like a drug, ‘like wings about her in the air, lifted her and she had all knowledge. That was it – the invasion of knowledge.’
Uncle Jim had promised the boys knowledge. ‘One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge,’ he told them. But he was never clear what that knowledge was. Michael ‘half knew it’, Jim told the students at St Andrews in 1922 – ‘He half knows something of which they know nothing – the secret that is hidden in the face of the Mona Lisa. As I see him, life is so beautiful to him that its proportions are monstrous.’
But it was all words, no truth. His ‘knowledge’ was just another cultist piece of nonsense that would extend his control. Even the secret behind the Mona Lisa’s smile wasn’t his. It was taken from Peter Ibbetson. Mary, Duchess of Towers gazes at the picture in the Louvre when Peter sees her for the last time.
Jim’s problem was that while Kicky knew, and George and Michael, and certainly Daphne knew, he never could know, he never won Kicky’s secret, he never experienced the ‘other-world intimacy’ that Kicky described in his novel. Nor could he, because his dislocation from the world of reality was born not of innocence and a longing desire to know, like Kicky’s dreaming ‘boy’, but of psychosis.
One piece of very important knowledge did come out of all his trickery, however, and it was the truth that empowered him, namely that ultimate power rests on the boundary between two worlds – the world of reality and the world of illusion. If you can make people believe something of your dream, it will cleave to their perception of reality and they will cede control to you. Every magician, every religious leader, every politician knows this to be true. Barrie proved it.
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