Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  After the first night, there was the tradition of sitting up to wait for the first editions of the newspapers, to read the reviews. These were universally good, but there was still a somewhat muted feel. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies wrote a long letter to her mother after the first night, saying that booking was good and they were hoping for a reasonable run, but she was more interested in the idea that Richard of Bordeaux might encourage Bronson Albery to put on some Shakespeare for her and John Gielgud later, and concentrated on telling her mother about a conversation she had had with playwright John van Druten at May Whitty’s party, where van Druten had said he hoped Gwen would be in one of his plays.20

  When John Gielgud went back to the theatre the next day, he discovered that box office takings were only £77.21 The first night had also clashed with a major ballet opening, so some of the respected critics had attended that instead. However, Richard of Bordeaux turned out to be a play that did not need positive critical reviews in order to succeed. The morning after it opened was the first indication that something special was about to happen. The box office had been so quiet that the manager gave permission for his assistant to head out for an extended lunch break. The manager carried on with his work, but suddenly became aware that a long queue was forming, right out from the theatre doors, across the street, and down St Martin’s Lane. The Man in the Queue had given a picture of London theatreland from the point of view of the audience: ‘No one moved away from the long line. Those who were doomed to stand for three hours more seemed indifferent to their martyrdom. [...] who would not stand, and be pleased to?’22 These descriptions of the long queue of punters waiting to get in to see the smash hit play of the season match almost exactly Gielgud’s later descriptions of people queuing to get into Richard of Bordeaux. Gordon Daviot’s fiction had become a reality. The cast of Richard of Bordeaux, waiting to go on stage, had to wait an extra fifteen minutes before the curtain finally went up, to allow the unexpectedly large audience to have time to take their seats.

  Richard of Bordeaux became a massive popular hit, with audience numbers growing through word-of-mouth. The Old Vic audience played a large part in that. In her letter written after the first night, Gwen mentioned to her mother that ‘all the old Vic enthusiasts were there in full force and have announced their intention of coming every Saturday during the run’.23 The Old Vic regulars were thrilled to see their actor, John Gielgud, play a Shakespearean king – but in modern language. They loved the pairing with Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and the memories it brought back of their pairing as Romeo and Juliet. They were enthralled by the story of the doomed love affair, and the scenes with the interjections from ‘commoners’ were perfectly judged to capture their imagination. Their enthusiasm was contagious. People returned over and over again to watch the play, up to thirty or forty times. The anticipation in the audience before favourite lines was palpable. Richard II’s emblem, a white hart, was sewn onto handkerchiefs, drawn on postcards, and gifted to Gielgud in every possible way. Dolls were produced of the main characters, wearing reproductions of the beautiful Motley costumes. The Motleys started to take orders from ladies anxious to have evening dresses modelled on the clothes Gwen wore in the play. John Gielgud was interviewed and photographed and painted and followed home by fans. He lived in St Martin’s Lane, right by the theatre, and was totally immersed in Richard of Bordeaux for the whole of its run. Richard of Bordeaux ran for over a year before touring regionally for six further weeks and transferring to Broadway in New York. With fourteen months and 472 performances, Richard of Bordeaux was seen by something like 400,000 people in London alone. It made a star out of John Gielgud, and was the turning-point of his career as well as Gordon Daviot’s. They were both stars – if they wanted to be.

  When it became obvious that Richard of Bordeaux was going to be a hit, there was huge interest in the identity of the unknown author ‘Gordon Daviot’. As mentioned, a few years earlier, Dodie Smith had written Autumn Crocus. Similarly, this was her first play, and it also went on to be hugely successful. Dodie had come from ‘nowhere’ (really from a failed career as an actress and from a background steeped in the theatre, but, as far as the public were concerned she was an unknown) and the papers absolutely delighted in telling her story – as Dodie delighted in finally getting the recognition she thought she deserved. Headlines screamed ‘Shopgirl Writes Play’; Dodie’s photograph was everywhere; and journalists fought to interview her.24 Dodie’s chosen gender-neutral pen-name of C. L. Anthony didn’t last, and soon the name in lights above theatres was ‘Dodie Smith’. In some ways, Dodie’s career is a template for what Gordon Daviot’s could have been – but Gordon chose to go a different way.

  John Gielgud said, many years later, that Gordon deliberately avoided the press.25 She certainly did not give interviews after the launch of Richard of Bordeaux in the way that Dodie Smith did after the launch of Autumn Crocus, but the biggest difference was that Gordon was not resident in London. The press and photographers could not show up at her place of work, as they did with Dodie, because Gordon was already heading back to Inverness. For the London press, this seemed very strange, and increased what they thought was a mystery.

  A popular impression has persisted that Gordon Daviot was hounded by the press, and that, horrified, she backed away from all interviews, trying desperately to preserve her anonymity. The reality is perhaps a little different. There was no tabloid-style exposé – ‘Former PE Teacher Writes Play’; in fact Gordon Daviot’s identity was already an open secret, ‘revealed’ several times. Articles had already appeared after the publication of her first novels, from as early as 1931, and, after the initial two showings of Richard of Bordeaux, the Glasgow Herald printed a short article, on 24th January 1933, explaining that ‘Gordon Daviot’ was in fact a woman – which the Herald should certainly have known, since Gordon had been writing for them. Richard of Bordeaux opened for its full run a couple of weeks later on 2nd February, and interest in the identity of the author grew from that point on, but there was certainly none of the paparazzi-style attention we would understand as part of press harassment today. In July 1933, Gordon was even happy to write and give biographical details for one short piece in a Scottish writers’ newsletter – though details she gave were brief and slightly inaccurate.26 Even though Gordon’s identity became fairly well known through press reports just after Richard of Bordeaux opened, newspapers were still able to run ‘exclusive’ reports on her identity over a year later – particularly in America, where her identity was ‘revealed’ once more in the Boston Globe of 17th January 1934.

  However, the success of Richard of Bordeaux was much greater than she had expected or prepared for, and there’s no doubt that Gordon did not go out of her way to look for publicity. She was a genuinely modest person. She may, in fact, have found the constant ‘reveals’ more trying than one big story would have been. She might have done herself a favour if she had granted one interview to one newspaper, as that way she could have controlled her image, and presented more of what she wanted, while also satisfying the public demand for information.

  There was another factor at work. Gordon was still considering the impact of her novel The Expensive Halo. This novel had potentially adversely affected family relationships, particularly with her father, because of her portrayal of characters who were too close to her family, and made Gordon more wary of promoting herself and her work. The Inverness Courier had been following the progress of Richard of Bordeaux since its first trial performances in 1932, running articles about ‘the daughter of a well-known Inverness businessman’. ‘Inverness has reason to be proud of a new playwright’, they wrote, quoting ‘Eulogies by London Critics’.27 There was no direct quote from Gordon Daviot herself, and a slight hint began to creep into the articles that Gordon Daviot wasn’t playing the game. She wouldn’t even give quotes to the local paper and she wasn’t acting like ‘our local author’.

  There was one other major factor that made Beth shy of courting publi
city. Gordon Daviot suffered further when London newspapers not only revealed her identity, but also published reports saying that she was being sued for plagiarism by Gillian Oliver, author of a 1930s novel about Richard II called The Broomscod Collar.28 Daviot’s working methods and research are clearly shown by the materials held in Inverness Museum, but, at the time, she was an unknown author, and her relative anonymity made it easy for other people to make claims that, to an outsider, seemed to have some justification. The case was arbitrated by a Professor Oman, who came to the conclusion that the two texts showed similarities because both writers had done their research in the same places, both going back to original documents in the British Museum, but Gordon found the accusations extremely upsetting, and chose to settle with the complainant rather than put up with the publicity associated with defending her work in court. Gordon did not discuss the accusations publicly, and information about the case was hard to come by.

  No further accusations were levelled at any of her future work, and her long writing career in itself shows that Beth was a talented writer who did not steal ideas. A treatment of Richard II’s life was not a new thing – it was a Shakespeare play, after all – and other authors had written about him. These accusations of plagiarism were unfounded, but they did not help Beth’s attitude towards publicity and the press, and encouraged her to hide behind pseudonyms.

  Chapter Ten

  The Laughing Woman

  In some ways, Beth had split into two people, living two entirely separate lives. In Inverness, she got up, looked after Colin, sat at her kitchen table and wrote out the ideas for two new plays. In London, Gordon Daviot was fêted by the press. ‘Richard of Bordeaux was an achievement for the stage’, said the News Chronicle, greeted by the audience ‘with a glorious full-throated roar such as the West-end seldom hears in these sophisticated days’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘Vigorous in movement; in its dialogue, modern but without anachronistic flourishes; and in its search of human nature, watchful and diligent’ (The Times); a ‘really fine piece of work’ (Sunday Times) and the answer to people who said that cinema was killing the stage (Sunday Observer).1 It was watched and praised by theatre luminaries such as Ivor Novello, politicians like Stanley Baldwin (then part of the National Government), and finally had its own royal performance, in front of King George and Queen Mary.2 An amusing short story, found among Gordon Daviot’s family papers but possibly never published, gives a flavour of Gordon’s own experiences, as it describes some fortune-hunters desperate to invite the new playwright ‘Alexander’ to their party, only to be horrified to discover that ‘Alexander’ is a pen-name for a woman.3

  The Inverness Courier collected the good reviews for Richard of Bordeaux together, but struggled to assimilate them with Inverness life.4 ‘Inverness is rapidly cultivating a dramatic sense,’ the paper said, ‘for not only are there seven entries from the town alone for this week’s Dramatic Festival when last year there were none, but during the last few days there have appeared in all the most influential London papers, long and admiring criticisms of a new play by an Inverness playwright’. It is a little unfair to criticize a local paper for being local, but the Inverness drama festival and London’s West End are hardly comparable. The slightly antagonistic tone that the Inverness Courier begins to take towards Daviot, which sometimes seems to be reflected in Invernessians’ attitude to her today, starts to be visible in this article, as it continues by expressing a wish that Daviot ‘will now turn her attention to some of our own historical personages, and make them live before our eyes in as wonderful a manner as she has succeeded in doing for the English King’: the paper comes across parochial on a Scottish scale as well as an Invernessian one. Daviot was interested in Scottish and local history, as works such as her biography of Claverhouse, and play about Duncan Forbes (in Leith Sands) show, but there began to be an air of resentment that she did not use her fame to promote Inverness and Scotland, something that may be linked to Daviot’s refusal to back the Scottish National movement.

  The arts scene in Inverness was strongly linked to both the Gaelic revival, as Mairi MacDonald’s writing shows, and the rise of Scottish nationalism, as personified by Neil Gunn. Mairi MacDonald herself believed that Richard of Bordeaux was a turning-point in Beth’s relationship with Inverness – she thought that Beth was aggrieved because she was fêted in London but ignored at home.5 Mairi’s own explanation for this was that Inverness was such a religious place that it could not support a playwright, but, while there may have been an element of truth in the idea that some northern churchgoers did not approve of the theatre, Mairi’s hypothesis is not borne out: local papers regularly talked about the theatre, and Inverness had no problem supporting male or Gaelic writers. Perhaps Inverness simply did not know how to respond to Beth as a success. While a visiting London playwright would have been celebrated, a playwright who was a fruiterer’s daughter whom they all knew was a confusing social situation. Mairi, an untravelled Highland writer, was pleased with her achievements in getting articles into the Scots Magazine. She never really understood that Beth, who was about to consider whether Laurence Olivier was good enough to be in her plays, was in a different league.

  If Dodie Smith was the London exemplar of what Gordon Daviot’s career could have been, Neil Gunn shows what Beth’s Scottish writing life could have been.6 By 1933 Gunn was an establishment figure in Inverness: a published, full-time writer, he had become formally involved in the Scottish National movement in 1929, when he had gone to a sparsely attended meeting at Inverness Town Hall led by speaker John MacCormick, and after the meeting, along with three other like-minded souls, had formed a local branch of the National Party of Scotland and started drumming up support. Over the next few months Gunn and his colleagues had recruited over 500 members and embarked on some serious fundraising. During the next few years, and over the course of hard campaigning for MacCormick in the General Election of 1931, they had managed to attract support in Inverness in the person of the town’s former provost Sir Alexander MacEwen. MacEwen had published The Thistle and the Rose, his view of Scottish independence, in 1932, while Neil Gunn was pursuing his troubled friendship with C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) and working on his book Sun Circle (published 1933).

  It is in this context that Highland reviews of Richard of Bordeaux have to be read. In London, journalists could not understand the Highlander Gordon Daviot, but in the north of Scotland Gordon Daviot did not fit the mould that was being created of what a Highland writer should be: she was not involved with the local community in the way Gunn was, not a friend of ex-provosts, not a nationalist, not writing in Gaelic (or Scots), and not writing about overtly ‘Scottish’ subjects. Gordon Daviot’s phenomenal success did not lead to her being accepted into the local writing community. If anything, she was even more excluded. She had chosen a different route and had gained success on a British stage without engaging with the Scottish arts community. She was not in the least interested in becoming part of Gunn’s world, but this separation from both the writing scene where she lived and, by distance, from the artistic scene she could have fitted into more easily in London did have the effect of making her strangely isolated: an anomaly and mystery. This separation gave her the advantage of a different perspective, adding much to the originality of her work.

  The poet T. S. Eliot visited Inverness in 1933 and stayed with Neil Gunn. Eliot was, as he saw it, visiting a far-away place with its own literary scene based on its own history and culture, and he was staying with one of his own Faber authors who exemplified that culture. It is unlikely Eliot was aware that the most successful London West End play of the moment had been written just a few minutes up the road from Gunn’s house.

  Gordon Daviot’s work continued to be in demand. The Man in the Queue was translated into French and published as Le Monogramme de Perles. Richard of Bordeaux continued to play to full houses, and theatre producers in London were keen to have another Daviot play ready for production. Dodie Smith, like T. S.
Eliot, was also holidaying in Scotland in 1933, and, as far as theatre producers were concerned, she was the sort of playwright they wanted. Like Gordon Daviot, she had come from ‘nowhere’, but she settled down to consistently write one high-quality, crowd-pleasing blockbuster after another. But Dodie was steeped in London theatre and craved the applause; she always considered the mass audience. Gordon Daviot was in Inverness, thinking about her writing and her reading and her own interests, and the next play that she submitted for consideration was very unlike Richard of Bordeaux.

  In the same way that the settings of her published short stories had moved from Scotland down to England and France, Gordon Daviot’s second play The Laughing Woman was also set in France and London. The published version of The Laughing Woman makes the source of Gordon Daviot’s interest in the story clear at the outset in an author’s note, stating that the play was ‘suggested’ by the life of sculptor Henri Gaudier and his partner Sophie Brzeska. Daviot had long had an interest in art, even considering art college when she left school, and her interest in and knowledge of French art and culture had been deepened by the trips she had made to the continent after the war, especially when her sister Jean was working there. The Laughing Woman’s subject matter is consistent with Daviot’s rejection of Highland culture, and interest in a wider stage, and two influential biographies of Gaudier had not long been published. However, Henri Gaudier and Sophie Brzeska’s relationship was something of a strange fit for Daviot, who worked best when she wrote of things she understood. She had proved she had a real feel for history in Richard of Bordeaux, and had handled the contemporary scene adequately in Kif, but she doesn’t seem to have fully grasped the reality of the Gaudier/Brzeska relationship.