Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  What the letter also reveals is the gap between how Gordon really was, and how her London friends perceived her. Marda was a selfish woman, and Gordon recognized that. Her portrayal of the actress Marta clearly shows the flaws of anyone following that profession, including the showmanship that can take the place of real feeling – though it is never harsh, just impartial observation. Marda had an image in her head of Gordon, and, used to young ladies who were emotional and somewhat uneducated, she underestimated her experience. Gordon might have been a newcomer to their London theatre scene, but she was a woman in her late 40s, who had experienced life, love and loss no less because she was not in the capital or living a public life.

  In November 1937, a year or so after this crisis point in their friendship, Marda typed out an A4 sheet of paper which she entitled ‘Progress’.28 In this, she looked ahead to try to imagine where she and her friends might be in the following years. The answers she came up with are ironic and amusing, but very revealing of how she saw her friends. Gwen’s ‘progress’ is in the world of highbrow theatre – ‘Persuades Gordon to adapt a play from the Greek [...] Suggests to Peggy the adaptation of a play from the Spanish’. Peggy (actress and director Margaret Webster) is to travel, producing and directing plays: ‘Goes to Rome to produce a play [...] Goes to Japan to produce a Noh Play.’ Their rich friend Lena ‘Buys the Globe [...] Buys Shaftesbury Avenue’. Marda herself is to have ever more fantastic love affairs; she sees herself only through that prism: ‘Has an affair with Ethel [...] Has an affair with Greta Garbo [...] Has an affair with the Princess Elizabeth’. And Gordon? Beth MacKintosh, who was so resolutely fixed in Inverness caring for her father, had managed to project her preferred image of herself so successfully to her London friends that Marda saw her as a seasoned, carefree traveller: ‘1940 – Gordon goes to London. 1942 – Goes to China. 1945 – Goes to Lapland. 1950 – Leaves for final retreat to Tibet’. ‘Progress’ is a piece of fun; a tongue-in-cheek look at the world with little reference to reality, but it shows how little Marda and her London friends understood Gordon. For all her professed love, Marda never made any attempt to visit her in Inverness. Gordon, to her, was an exotic traveller she wanted to snare in her net – a glamorous, creative, passionate woman.29 Beth MacKintosh had created this alter-ego of Gordon Daviot, who could live the writing life she wanted to have, and Marda, for one, was completely taken in.

  When Marda read Gordon’s letters she was trying to find evidence of her feelings – perhaps that’s why neither Gwen nor Marda made much of Gordon’s film work. They saw her only in the context of their London theatre lives, and struggled to see anything outside that. Gordon’s friendship with the two women survived Marda’s declaration and in February 1937, Gwen was secure enough to invite Gordon on holiday to Switzerland; Gordon was disappointed not to be able to go, but it led to a subtle shift, and was a precursor to much greater changes that were to come about in their relationships.30 In some of Gordon’s letters to Gwen and Marda there creeps in a tentative note, a desire to explain and make clear, to try to get them to understand that she never means to cause offence, and to explain how she sees the world. Another undated handwritten letter from the Cowdray Club to Marda reads:

  I think it was Kitchener who said ‘never explain’ – and for years I’ve tried to live up to so God-like an ideal but am always frustrated by my propensity for saying and doing things that apparently mean something actively different to other people! [...] I’ve been worried in my pre-breakfast moments by a crack I made last night. When Lena was holding back about coming to supper I knew she was refusing because she was afraid that she was barging into a party already made up, and since the party was still in a fluid state it seemed true that if I started an entirely new one there would be no question barging into on anyone’s part. Hence my ‘let’s [illegible] my party – then she’ll have to come.’ Which, to my horror, turned out to mean something quite different.31

  Lena, also a lesbian, had relationships with several different actresses. Marda was a jealous woman and did not like to see any preference on Gordon’s part for anyone other than herself. Gordon simply did not want to jeopardize these new friendships and the new circle she found so creatively and personally fulfilling – yet she was realizing that there were parts of it she could never fully enter into. It was a difficult balancing act, yet one that, for some years at least, before they were taken over by events, was maintained.

  For all the women, even Marda, their careers often took precedence. They were working in creative, challenging and fulfilling jobs. Peggy Webster, who had turned to directing rather than acting due to that lull in work created by the success of Richard of Bordeaux, was starting to shine. In 1936–37, she was working on a production of Richard II.32 Peggy had dual US-UK nationality as she was born abroad, and her parents Ben Webster and May Whitty had both acted in America, so Peggy was keen to pursue opportunities there. When Richard II was produced, Margaret Webster became the first woman to direct Shakespeare on Broadway. The play attracted a huge amount of interest, not just because of her directing and the quality acting, but because of interest in the play’s plot about a king abdicating. It was the height of the scandal surrounding Wallis Simpson, and King Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936. The Laughing Woman had played on Broadway from October to November 1936 at the John Golden Theatre with Helen Menken (ex-wife of Humphrey Bogart) as Ingrid and Tonio Selwart as Rene, and the link was made between the Shakespearian Richard II and Gordon Daviot’s earlier play Richard of Bordeaux.33 In November 1936, John Gielgud was corresponding with Douglas Fairbanks Jr about the possibility of turning Richard of Bordeaux into a film.34 Sadly, the plans never developed.

  In the meantime, negotiations for Gordon Daviot’s next play, The Stars Bow Down, had stalled. It had a large cast of thirty-two people including two or three child actors, and casting had proved to be a stumbling block. Daviot’s change of agent had slowed things up, and in 1936 what was to be J. M. Barrie’s final play went on – The Boy David. Like The Stars Bow Down, this was a religious play, and it was felt that for Daviot to follow it would not be a good move – it would have looked like copying, or ‘staggering with imitative gestures in the footsteps of genius’ as Daviot herself put it.35

  Gordon Daviot was happy in the mid-1930s, and in some ways it was a pinnacle of her career as far as respect and recognition went. She was mixing with the actors and writers who were shaping popular culture and there was ongoing interest in her work from theatre producers and even Hollywood. And yet, at the same time, with the exception of A Shilling for Candles, her work from this period did not survive. The Stars Bow Down was as yet unproduced and unpublished; her plays were successful but not as successful as Richard of Bordeaux, and have not remained in print; and her Hollywood writing never received recognition and even became almost completely forgotten. It was a turning point in the creation of the ‘mystery’ that was Gordon Daviot, as lack of understanding of this part of her career meant that people could not see the ‘join’ between Daviot and Josephine Tey. The slowness of production of her next plays had given Daviot time to write – and reconsider what she was writing. As the notes for Richard of Bordeaux show, she took her research seriously, and it was frustrating to put in considerable amounts of work without seeing any result. For her next project, Gordon Daviot turned away from the theatre. She wanted to write about the historical figure of Claverhouse, but decided a play was not the best format. Instead, she was going to write a book – and it was going to be totally factual, a straight non-fiction biography.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Claverhouse

  Claverhouse was John Graham of Claverhouse, 1st Viscount Dundee (1648-1689). He is renowned in Scottish history and myth from two entirely different angles: first vilified as ‘Bloody Clavers’, he was responsible for policing south-west Scotland and maintaining order for the Crown during the ‘Killing Time’, the period of political and religious unrest led by the Presbyterian Covenanters. Howev
er, his loyalty to the established order led him to continue to support James VII after the king was overthrown in favour of William of Orange in the 1688 Revolution. Claverhouse then became, ironically, a popular anti-establishment figure, leading a Highland clan army and celebrated in song as ‘Bonnie Dundee’. From Hollywood to Claverhouse is quite a leap. Many of Gordon’s theatre friends were completely London-centric – a few years later Dodie Smith almost broke her heart leaving London during the Blitz, convinced that she would never again be able to relate to her audience or write a hit play because she had not experienced London during the war. It never occurred to Dodie that there could be other valid British experiences of war. The London one was the only one that mattered. Beth MacKintosh never put London life and experiences ahead of her experiences in Inverness in this way. Despite her success in England, and her love of the country, she gave equal consideration to the culture that she encountered in Inverness and elsewhere, and her biography of Claverhouse was an attempt not only to reinterpret the life of a historical figure who fascinated her, but to seriously grapple with important political and cultural events in Scotland and the Highlands. Beth had been reading about Claverhouse for some time, and discussing her interest in him with several people.1

  Like her best-known Josephine Tey book The Daughter of Time, Claverhouse takes a serious look at how history is understood. In a forerunner of The Daughter of Time’s dedication and title, Claverhouse is dedicated ‘TO THOSE WHO may not prefer Scotland to Truth, but certainly prefer Scotland to enquiry’. This quote is originally from Dr Johnson, and was also referenced by Walter Scott.

  By 1937, when Beth was researching and writing Claverhouse, Neil Gunn had left his day job as an exciseman and become a full-time writer.2 As he was no longer a civil servant, he was now free to openly state his political views. In 1934, the two main Scottish nationalist parties had combined to form what we now know as the SNP, and Gunn, along with his friend ex-Inverness provost Alexander MacEwen, had worked hard behind the scenes to make this happen, pushing more conservative, less radical ideas, such as prioritizing devolution before full independence. Leading SNP figure John MacCormick, supported by MacEwen and Gunn, had stood for election for Inverness twice, once in 1931 and again, after the new SNP was formed, in 1935. SNP policies had been well and truly discussed in Inverness, and, through Gunn and his friends, were intricately linked with the literary scene. Neil Gunn very much enjoyed his position as literary lion of the Highlands, and in 1934, between political campaigning and starting an affair with MacEwen’s young daughter, had hosted the Inverness leg of the International PEN conference and tour, which had been based in Scotland that year. PEN, formed in 1921, aims to promote harmony between writers of all nations, using literature as a tool to promote freedom of expression and understanding. The Scottish branch was formed by C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) in 1927.3 It was an organization that meant a lot to many people, particularly in Europe during the 1930s and onto the years of the Second World War, when it supported writers whose work was banned by the Nazis.

  In 1934, the highlight of the Inverness PEN tour was an opera in Gaelic called ‘Ishbel of the Shealing [sic]’.4 Gunn and MacEwen were the hosts (Gunn’s affair with MacEwen’s daughter being, for the time being, a secret), along with a Gaelic expert, and Gunn was also invited to the main Scottish event in Edinburgh, where he met the guest of honour, H. G. Wells. In 1936, the Scottish branch of PEN had met again in Inverness – tying the meeting to the Mod, the annual celebration of Gaelic music. Beth MacKintosh, in 1937 probably the most successful author working in the Highlands, was not involved in any of this.5 She was certainly aware of Gunn and his work, and knew MacEwen as well – later, Beth was to become friendly with one of MacEwen’s daughters (not the one who was having the affair with Gunn) and MacEwen also worked for the solicitor’s firm that Beth and her father Colin used.

  Beth was never officially involved in Scottish PEN, whose membership list, as initiated by Hugh MacDiarmid, shows a distinct bias towards writers either sympathetic to the nationalist cause, or strongly linked to the Gaelic revival.6 Beth did contribute some money as a donation towards the 1934 conference, but she was not part of the organising committee, and no further involvement after that one 1934 donation has been found.7 Scottish PEN had acknowledged Gordon Daviot’s work as early as 1933, when one of the organizers, the writer Marion Lochhead, had included a short profile of Gordon Daviot in a series she wrote on Scottish writers, but the relationship had not progressed.8 Marion and Gordon Daviot corresponded briefly, but while many of the Scottish women Marion profiled wrote her long, detailed letters which Marion carefully filed, some of the Daviot-Lochhead correspondence seems to be missing, and Gordon’s surviving letter to Marion is, if not unfriendly, uncharacteristically short, and perhaps more formal than usual. Anything that Beth might have gained from associating with local writers was lost because their meetings and discussions were generally not centred on the craft of writing, but around politics. Beth found far more fulfilment in discussing the creative process with her London friends – but she did not disengage entirely from what was happening around her, as the donation to PEN shows. Claverhouse shows her creative engagement in Scottish history and identity as well, in her own unique way.

  Claverhouse is not one of Gordon Daviot’s well-known books, and for the first two-thirds of the book the reader may wonder why she wrote it. The answer is in the final section: the powerful descriptions of the battles, which Daviot makes modern and relevant by referencing the Great War; the insights into the character of Claverhouse and his troops; and the descriptions of their terrain, the Scotland over which they fight. In this final section, Claverhouse, his men, and his country, come alive, and Gordon Daviot conveys vividly why she is interested in this man. The biography format and Daviot’s tendency (already shown in her plays) to always tell a story from the beginning to the end with an assumption that the audience has a good grasp of the historical facts masks the fact that the most interesting thing about Claverhouse is the sweep of his whole life, and the way he was judged afterwards. It was a structural problem that Daviot was not able to solve in her writing until The Daughter of Time, with its unusual framing and much better known figure of Richard III. In Claverhouse, the contradiction between ‘Bloody Clavers’ and ‘Bonnie Dundee’ and how these two images can both be applied to the same man, is what makes him so interesting – but the essential problem for his biographer is that not enough people know who Claverhouse is in the first place. Gordon Daviot even admitted as much herself, saying in a letter to fellow playwright Dodie Smith that ‘I can’t believe his activities are of any general interest to anyone south of the Border’.9

  In this book, Daviot was writing a character study, which she thought would be of interest to people interested in history in her own country, Scotland – but she needed to make that clearer. Her sense of history and truth would not allow her to make overt links between 1930s nationalism and Claverhouse, but an understanding of the political situation at the time she was writing sheds light on her decision to write this biography. Claverhouse is a Scottish hero she could respect whilst still being pro-British: he leads a romantic Scottish Highland Clan uprising but is essentially a conservative figure who did not want change to the established order. Daviot explained the attraction to Dodie Smith by saying, although ‘[t]he Covenanting period is a dreich period in Scottish history [...] Claverhouse is a man after my own heart’.10 Protestant and honourable, Claverhouse was the sort of person Gordon Daviot could respect. In a way, Claverhouse is the figure that Bonnie Prince Charlie should have been, honourably dying in the victory charge. However, in order to respect Claverhouse as a Scottish hero, it is necessary to somehow get around his image as ‘Bloody Clavers’, the killer of the Covenanters, and it is this problem that Daviot’s Claverhouse biography is trying to solve.

  The choice of the Covenanting period of Scottish history was not an arbitrary one – it was one of the touchstones of the his
tory that the SNP was referencing. Neil Gunn’s friend Maurice Walsh wrote about the Covenanters in a fictional novel around the same time, while ‘the National Covenant’ was the SNP’s chosen name for their 1940 campaign for devolution.11 Gordon Daviot is engaging with Scottish nationalist rhetoric in this biography, by showing a Scottish figure she thinks is worth respecting, but she is doing so in her own way. It is impossible to read this book as a response to the political ideas of her day – the increasing Scottish nationalism – because it is so much on Daviot’s own terms. But, conversely, it is difficult to understand why it is important without understanding that Daviot was trying to present her own view of what was important in Scottish history partly because there were many other people at that time who were picking and choosing what they saw as important in order to build up a new nationalist ideology, an ideology that persists until the present day. Daviot’s book presents a new version of what is important in Scottish history, in the same way that her fictional books present an entirely different version of the Scotland of her time to that presented by her contemporaries. In personality, the principled, logical and Protestant Claverhouse was much closer to Elizabeth I of England than Mary, Queen of Scots, and Claverhouse held Daviot’s interest in a way Queen of Scots had not. The suggestion to write a straight biography had come from a publisher, but that suggestion had grown out of Daviot’s real interest in history: she had been talking about her reading to anyone who would listen. Claverhouse was her return to writing what she was interested in: writing for herself.

  Claverhouse was published by Collins, who, on the dust jacket of the book, made much of Daviot’s success on the stage, while talking up the excitement of the current work. It was maybe not quite the right approach to take – fans of Richard of Bordeaux might not have found what they wanted in this academic discussion of Kirk policy and her emphasis on the importance of bureaucracy in the bloody dealings in Galloway. Daviot was a difficult author to market: her publishers probably understood as poorly as her theatrical friends just why she was interested in life outside of London.