The du Mauriers Read online

  The Du Mauriers

  Daphne du Maurier

  Foreword by Michael Holroyd

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  Foreword

  Daphne du Maurier published her family history, The du Mauriers, in 1937 when she was aged thirty. She had already in her twenties written a remarkable biography of her father, the famous actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, and four novels, the last of which, Jamaica Inn, was a spectacular success.

  But if her literary career seemed effortless and happy, her childhood and adolescence had been unusually complex. Her mother was an actress and had met her husband during a production of J. M. Barrie’s comedy The Admirable Crichton. Barrie seems to have been Gerald du Maurier’s favourite dramatist—St John Ervine calculated that ‘his tally of Barrie pieces was eight, including Peter Pan (in which he “created” the parts of Captain Hook and Mr Darling)’. He was something of a Peter Pan himself, a man who would not grow up—at least not gracefully or with generosity. As the younger son and youngest child of a family of five, he was his mother’s favourite and, made secure by her love, continued to feel happy during his schooldays at Harrow and confident of his success in the theatre. His nonchalant, easygoing style of acting, which concealed a fine technique, made it appear as if his great triumphs on stage came without any special exertion—indeed with the same inevitability as his daughter was to win her popularity as a novelist. ‘He did not know what it was to wait at stage doors to interview managers,’ she wrote of him, ‘and to beg for parts in a new production.’

  Everything began to change after his marriage. ‘Muriel, I love you,’ he wrote to his wife shortly after they married in 1903. ‘It is a splendid thing that has happened to us both, dearest, and I hope the Great Spirit will bless us. It’s by our truth, loyalty and devotion to each other that we shall accomplish a beautiful life… I seem to love you in all ways, as a child, as a boy, as a grown man.’

  But the Great Spirit which blessed his first thirty-five years and granted him ‘a beautiful life’ was about to take away what he called his ‘sweet sense of security’. The painful death from cancer of his brother-in-law Arthur Llewelyn Davies in 1907, followed by his sister Sylvia’s death three years later and, at the beginning of the First World War, those of his mother and his brother Guy, destabilised what had appeared to be Gerald’s naturally buoyant and optimistic nature. The joker who was always such good company, the charmer who became everyone’s favourite and who had been spared adult responsibilities was ‘more than normally overwhelmed’ by these tragedies. Daphne du Maurier’s perceptive biographer Margaret Forster tells us also that he grew dissatisfied with his acting career, became subject to a strange ‘moodiness’ and eventually to periods of alcoholic depression which he inflicted on his wife. ‘Mo’, as she was called, ‘worked hard at ensuring Gerald’s “boredom” was kept at bay,’ Margaret Forster writes.

  [She] gave Gerald what he needed: stability, adoration, the comforts of a well-run home. But as he became more dissatisfied with himself Gerald began to grow restless… What Mo could not respond to was the mercurial side of Gerald’s character, the side of him which was quick, a touch wicked, even a little crazy… She was the centre of Gerald’s life, but increasingly he liked to travel away from it.

  She also gave him three daughters, but not the son for whom he longed to carry on the name and history of the du Mauriers. Daphne, the middle sister, was born on 12 May 1907. During her early years she worshipped her father. He was funny, companionable, attentive—almost like another child. In temperament they were very similar. But he could not conceal his wish that she had been born a boy, and so, to please him, she imagined herself to be one—and he encouraged this. ‘My tender one,’ he wrote to her,

  Who seems to live in Kingdoms all her own

  In realms of joy

  Where heroes young and old

  In climates hot and cold

  Do deeds of daring and much fame

  And she knows she could do the same

  If only she’d been born a boy.

  And sometimes in the silence of the night

  I wake and think perhaps my darling’s right

  And that she should have been,

  And, if I’d had my way,

  She would have been, a boy.

  The onset of menstruation put an abrupt halt to Daphne’s fantasies of being a boy. But the more she observed and experienced adult sexuality, the more bewildered and unhappy she grew. Though her father complained that he could not get to sleep without Muriel beside him, he had no difficulty in going to bed with a series of young actresses. Why did her mother put up with such philandering? Daphne could not understand it. But mother and daughter had never been close, largely because Gerald came so awkwardly between them.

  Daphne was educated by governesses at home and then, at the age of eighteen, sent to a school outside Paris to complete her education. Here she formed an emotional attachment with one of the teachers. ‘She has a fatal attraction… and now I’m coiled in the net,’ Daphne wrote. ‘… She pops up to the bedroom at odd moments… it gives one an extraordinary thrill.’ So perhaps, she reasoned, she really was a boy after all. ‘I like women much better than men,’ she confessed. But the knowledge that she was partly lesbian—or had ‘Venetian tendencies’ as she described it—further complicated her emotional life because she knew how much her father abhorred the ‘filth’ of homosexuality.

  Daphne’s flirtations with men, and her first, rather lukewarm affaire with the actor-manager Beerbohm Tree’s illegitimate son, the future film director Carol Reed, provoked many scenes of possessive jealousy and anger from her father. Gerald seemed increasingly dependent: sometimes clinging to her, at other times accusing her of blatant immorality—to all of which was added her mother’s disapproval for causing him such misery.

  It was to find emotional and financial independence that Daphne took up writing. Her first short stories, apparently influenced by Katherine Mansfield and Guy de Maupassant, but nearer in mood, as Margaret Forster suggests, to Somerset Maugham, were bleak exposés of the hypocrisy and unhappiness of sexual relations between men and women. But though she would intermittently return to the contemporary world in her fiction and explore problems she herself experienced, her main strength as a novelist arose from the longing she felt to be someone other than herself and her need to escape the problems of contemporary life. Her passionate interest in other people, and the intensity of her desire to travel into their lives, gave her novels their extraordinary narrative power and a pervasive atmosphere that held her there, and holds the reader too.

  These thrilling adventure stories and engrossing family sagas provided the entertaining fantasies and sense of security that were so desperately needed in an age of devastating world wars. The spirit of the age was with her and she was to lead a flourishing revival in romantic fiction. Her own needs and those of the country seemed to coincide, and she achieved a similar feat of popular escapism to that of her father, whose natural style of acting had led many audiences to think of highly dissimilar roles as being merely aspects of himself. Gerald believed that Daphne was furthering the du Maurier destiny by following the example of his father, George du Maurier, the famous author of Trilby. For this reason he supported her writing career even though it was to make her an independent woman.

  More surprising was his approval of his daughter’s husband, ‘Tommy’ Browning, whom she met in the spring of 1932 and married that summer. He looked like someone who might have stepped from one of her romances: a tall, athletic Old Etonian and ‘the best-looking thing I have ever seen’. A much-decorated officer in the Grenadier Guards, Browning had a commanding air of authority which reassured Daphne that he would never become emotionally dependent on her like her father, and which also impressed Gerald himself as being beyond bullying.

  Gerald was to die suddenly, following an operation, in April 1934. Daphne did not go to his funeral partly because, in her grief, she did not wish to admit he was dead. Almost immediately afterwards she began writing his biography, Gerald: A Portrait, bringing him back to life on the page. It is an extraordinary book, part biography and part autobiography, though written in the style of a novel. It gives a vivid evocation of her father’s charm and engaging humour and, though not charting all his philandering escapades, it conveys something of the more difficult aspects of his character and their effect on her (‘I wish I were your brother instead of your father’). The book was written at top speed, completed within four months and published before the end of the year.

  The du Mauriers, published three years later, is a companion volume going further back in time. It was written under unusually vexing circumstances. Her husband, now in command of the second battalion, the Grenadier Guards, had been posted to Egypt where Daphne and their daughter Tess, with her nanny, accompanied him. While he busied himself happily with troop manoeuvres in the desert, his family settled down in the heat and dust of Alexandria. Daphne hated her life there. She hated the natives
who were all ‘dirty’, often blind or covered with sores, and who ‘don’t speak English’; and she hated the English themselves who filled their empty days with gossip and cocktail parties.

  ‘I never realised I liked England so much,’ Daphne wrote. It was to England, and also to France, in more glamorous times, that she escaped in The du Mauriers. She cut herself off from everyone and sat sweating over her typewriter in temperatures of 100°F, ‘writing it like Gerald, so that it reads like a novel’, though fearing that it might develop into ‘a sort of Forsyte Saga’. By September 1936 it was finished. ‘I feel it is something of a tour de force to have written it in an Egyptian summer,’ she wrote to her publisher, Victor Gollancz. Such was her success at immersing herself in nineteenth-century Europe and obliterating contemporary Egypt from her mind while re-creating the lives of her great-great grandmother, mistress of the Duke of York, and of her own grandfather, the sensational novelist and artist George du Maurier, that it was only after she had dispatched the book to England that she became aware she was pregnant.

  Gerald: A Portrait and The du Mauriers belong to a vintage period of Daphne du Maurier’s writing, a period that produced two of her best-loved novels: her Gothic thriller Jamaica Inn and the melodramatic novel of suspense, Rebecca. Gerald: A Portrait was composed in the imaginative genre of biography made fashionable by Ariel, André Maurois’s life of Shelley. But The du Mauriers goes further than this. Though there are a few biographical bones to be seen lying around, they have been exhumed and reassembled not by any systematic research or pretence of scholarship, but by pure dramatic instinct. The story is full of terrible events—prison, penury, a missing husband here, a court case there—all arranged as romantic comedy and marvellous entertainment (it would make a fine basis for a musical). The pain of life has been eradicated. Daphne du Maurier describes her great-grandfather, the mercurial Louis Mathurin’s fruitless search for an astronomical ‘invention [that] will change the face of the world’. In this engaging book, his great-granddaughter has come up with a fictional equivalent of that magical device.

  By the 1960s, following the publication of George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust and Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Daphne du Maurier’s inventive essays in biography appeared terminally dated. But today, when Peter Ackroyd, Julia Blackburn, Andrew Motion and others are experimenting with hybrids of fiction and non-fiction, her two volumes of family biography find a new place in the history of the genre, reminding us of the need we all have in our lives for the consolations of romance and adventure.

  Michael Holroyd

  2004

  In the belief that there are thirty-one descendants of Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier and his wife Ellen Jocelyn Clarke alive to-day, this story of the past is dedicated to all of them, with affection.

  DAPHNE DU MAURIER

  October 1936

  FAMILY TREE OF THE DU MAURIERS

  Part One

  1

  On a cold spring day in 1810 a little sallow-faced girl of twelve leant with her nose pressed against the windowpane of a tall house in Westbourne Place. She was in the servants’ bedroom because the other rooms in the house were being stripped of their furniture, and strange men she had never seen before were strolling backwards and forwards through the two drawing-rooms pointing to the chairs and tables, feeling the legs of the little gilt boudoir couch with coarse dirty hands, running inquisitive fingers up the rich brocaded curtains. She had watched them for a time earlier in the day, and no one had noticed her; she had been free to wander through the rooms and passages and see the severe-looking gentleman in the dark coat put numbered tickets on the dining-room chairs. Then he went away, and in a few minutes came back again with two workmen who wore aprons and had their shirt sleeves rolled above their elbows, and he told the men to take the chairs away.

  The room held an air of odd surprise when the chairs had gone. Then another man came and laid out all the best glass and china on a side-table, and, when he had arranged them to his satisfaction, he carried them through to the drawing-room and put the table against the wall. The chairs had been placed back to back in a long row, and the pictures had been taken down from their hanging-rails and stacked in a pile on the floor.

  The callous indifference of these men towards her mother’s possessions was, to the child, like a little stab of pain. She had known for some time that Westbourne Place was to be sold, and she and her mother would move to another home, but she had not understood that the chairs and the tables, the glass and china, the very plate off which they ate, would be theirs no longer. One by one the familiar things were touched and tested by unfamiliar hands, and a dreary procession formed itself like a line of mourners at a funeral, bearing from the house a succession of little corpses that could not say farewell. When the gold timepiece was lifted from his place above the stairs the child could stand no more, and she turned away with tears in her eyes and crept upstairs to the servants’ bedroom at the top of the house.

  That clock had been a friend to her in the many lonely hours. He had a singing chime every quarter that she would listen for when she lay awake in bed, and that note of reassurance had never failed her yet. Now she would never hear him again. And he would go perhaps to people who would care nothing for him, who would forget to dust his smiling face, and let his chime rust and ring false. As she knelt with her nose and chin smudged against the window, she felt for the first time a little sting of bitterness against her mother, who permitted these things to happen.

  Ever since last year her world had been changed and insecure, and that daily life that every child imagines will continue into eternity had suddenly ceased to be. No longer did she ride in the phaeton every morning, with her mother at her side, up and down Hyde Park in a procession of carriages, or sometimes out to Richmond to drink porter with Lord Folkestone, who used to measure her with his riding-crop to see if she had grown. And, while her mother laughed and chatted, teasing Lord Folkestone in her own inimitable way, whispering oddities to him behind her hand that made him shout with laughter, the child Ellen sat silent, like a little sallow mouse, watching the play between them with a strange inborn sense of disapproval. If this was how grown-up people spent their time, she had little use for them; for herself she preferred books and music, having a thirst for knowledge of all kinds that her mother declared to be positively wearisome in a child not yet thirteen.

  ‘You see,’ she would say to her friends, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders and a shadow of mock despair in her eyes, ‘my children have outgrown me already. It is monstrous. I am too young for them; they consider me irresponsible and giddy. Master George must lecture me from school like an old professor, and Ellen here, clasping solemn hands, asks “May I learn Italian, m’am, as well as French?” ’ At this there would be much laughter at Ellen’s expense, and the child would flush uncomfortably until they had forgotten her again.

  Yet driving in the Park or at Richmond was a pleasure, for there were so many things to see, and so many people to watch, and even at ten or twelve Ellen must consider herself a student of human nature.

  She was old beyond her years because she had never had the companionship of other children. George, her only brother, and an idol, had been sent early to school, and was now so much taken up by his new companions, the horses he had learnt to ride, and the talk of his future military career, that the conversation of a small sister was something to be heard with impatience.

  Ellen had to depend upon herself. Books became her friends then, and music, when her mother had money enough for a master; but she must understand, her mother would say, that living as they did amongst such elegance, keeping the table they did, and with the carriage and horses, there was little over for such fads as music-lessons and an Italian master. ‘I will see if it can be arranged,’ she would say vaguely, waving her hand in the air; and, smiling that brilliant smile that meant she was thinking of something else, would pull the bell for the servant to discuss the dinner-party for the evening.