Look pretty and find a husband: that was what upper-middle-class girls in
late-1920s England were expected to do. The wealthy du Mauriers threw
parties and went on grand excursions. But this didn’t matter to Daphne, the
second of three daughters. All she wanted was to write. She was brimming
with ideas, a daydreamer, desperate to make her name.
She could have written about flappers dancing till dawn, men flying across the
Atlantic, the new “talkies”. Instead, she wrote dark little stories of death
and disappointment, callousness and hypocrisy, twisted romance. What could
have made a single young woman from a privileged background so bitter about
the world – and so worldly about the bitterness of love?
She would have been alarmed to think future readers would wonder about her own
life. In her late sixties, about to write a memoir, she said: “Few people
really want to be frank about themselves, or their ex-lovers.” In her
fiction she unflinchingly exposed harsh truths about relationships, but she
knew she’d find it hard to dredge through her own. “This is where one is
bound to have a lot of glossing over… the whole business is fraught with
difficulties,” she said.
Next month, with the centenary of her birth, interest in du Maurier and in
what she might have “glossed over” will intensify. The author best known for
Rebecca, Don’t Look Now, and The Birds, dismissed as a romantic novelist and
a chilly recluse in her lifetime, was as intriguing as her stories. She
claimed never to base a character on anyone she knew, but those close to her
indisputably found their way into her work. So the discovery of a short
story that had vanished for 70 years – scandalously raunchy by the standards
of the day, written when she was young and apparently innocent – is
explosive. Her own son, keeper of her estate, had no idea it existed. Why
did she let it disappear?
Cynicism drives the long-lost story, And His Letters Grew Colder, as it traces
an adulterous affair from initial ardour to passion extinguished. The
letters are from an older man to a less experienced “Mrs B”. He flatters her
into submission; they share ecstatic trysts. But once the thrill of the
chase has faded, he tires of her.
The story came to light in Fowey, the Cornish harbour town where du Maurier
lived and which next month hosts the 11th annual literary festival in her
name. The finder was Ann Willmore, a self-confessed du Maurier obsessive who
co-runs two bookshops in the town: “She’s like a drug. You get pulled into a
world that isn’t real and it’s hard to fight your way out.”
Willmore has a network of dealers in literary ephemera who get in touch if
they come across a rare item. (Signed first editions of Rebecca sell for
thousands.) A contact in California sent her a faded copy of the September
1931 issue of the American magazine Hearst’s International Combined with
Cosmopolitan, containing the short story, not realising its significance.
The title meant nothing to Willmore, but that wasn’t unusual: sometimes
stories were published with different names overseas. As she started
reading, however, she realised to her delight that it was unknown. She
checked her computer database. Nothing. “Then I went back through all the
compilations. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
Du Maurier’s son, Christian “Kits” Browning, who still lives in the house,
Ferryside, that the family acquired in 1926, says she must have written the
story when she was very young. “But she published a book called Early
Stories,” says Willmore, “and it’s not in there… It’s strange. It’s a puzzle
how it slipped through the net.”
If the origins of the story are obscure, its inspiration is even more so.
“It’s incredible that she had so much in her at such a young age,” says
Willmore. “They’re not happy stories. She was very perceptive of adult
relationships and how men can treat women. Where did all that come from? You
wouldn’t just dream that up.”
Tantalisingly, in 1979 du Maurier put a 50-year embargo on the diaries she
kept until her marriage. Kits says: “A lot of them are mundane – ‘had hair
washed’, and so on.” Why the embargo, then? “I think it’s a tease. She loved
mystery.”
“The du Mauriers were great mickey-takers,” says Willmore. “They could really
play games with people. If you had a diary you didn’t want people to see,
you’d burn it, wouldn’t you?” Unless you wanted to withhold something that
might embarrass the living. By 2029, Kits and his sisters, Tessa and Flavia,
will no longer be alive. At the end of her life, du Maurier’s inspiration
had dried up and she was miserable: would she have felt like playing a prank
on the world?
Let us delve further into the milieu of her youth. She was born to a famous
family in 1907. Her grandfather, George, was a writer and Punch cartoonist,
friends with the likes of William Morris and Henry James. Her father, Sir
Gerald, was a star of the theatre. Their Hampstead home, Cannon Hall, was
always packed with visitors, including “Uncle Jim” (J M Barrie). But Daphne
wanted to make her own way. So, whenever she could escape the soirees, she
scribbled away.
In September 1931, when this long-lost story was published in America, she was
24. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, had been published in Britain that
February. She was living at Ferryside and working on her third, about a man
who brutally uses women and drowns his own daughter rather than lose her to
another man.
But it seems unlikely that du Maurier would have taken time out from a novel
to write a short story. The notes to her first collection of early stories
state they were written between 1927 and 1930, when she reached 23. “I’d
guess that And His Letters is even earlier,” says Kits. So we’re looking at
Daphne in her late teens or early twenties, when she lived at Cannon Hall,
visited France, Switzerland and Norway, and discovered Cornwall. Could any
of the men in her life have been fictionalised as the letter-writer to “Mrs
B”? “I think it was her father,” says Willmore.
Much has been made of Daphne’s relationship with her father. She wrote a
biography of him after his death that was considered outrageous in 1934 for
its mention of his affairs, drinking and depression. Her biographer,
Margaret Forster, says: “His mood could, and did, turn ugly.” In the novel
Julius, Julius calls his daughter a bitch for kissing a man for eight
minutes (he watched and timed it). He accuses her of playing with his
emotions. “Are you a child or do you do it on purpose? You’ll tell me, won’t
you, when you begin to feel things?” When Daphne announced her engagement,
Gerald wept, crying: “It’s not fair!” Her father’s flings with young
starlets were no secret to his children. “He was the sort of man who would
woo someone to see if he could get them, and then once he’d got them, would
want to draw back,” says Willmore.
Helen Taylor, editor of the forthcoming Daphne du Maurier Companion, which
includes the rediscovered story, believes du Maurier might have withheld the
story because of the muted response to her second novel, I’ll Never Be Young
Again, in which she had also written about sexual politics. “Perhaps this
came out of the same moment.”
The story isn’t dated, but a good guess is she wrote it in 1926. Ella
Westland, a du Maurier expert and the author of Reading Daphne, says: “There
was a huge burst of creativity around the year she came to Fowey. The
stories she wrote then are bitter, full of empty relationships.”
“In 1926 a man and his play came into our horizon which altered the whole
course of our lives,” wrote du Maurier. The man was the writer Edgar
Wallace, whose play The Ringer Gerald produced in May 1926, enabling Gerald
to buy Ferryside. Wallace was “an incredibly generous man, a frightening
man… a wonderful friend – and I should imagine an implacable enemy,”
Daphne recalled. He took her and her older sister, Angela, to Caux on
holiday. “Edgar was a superb host, and spoilt one completely.”
Forster, in her biography, mentions a “mysterious suitor” in the summer of
1926. At the end of June, he sent her an unsigned letter, dated “3.20am,
Tuesday”, in which he said he had “just got home from leaving you to your
bluebells – very late – very quiet – I never want to wake up from the trance
into which I shot suddenly. Don’t ever wake me and don’t put it in your
diary – oh, that diary! Dangerous, indiscreet and stupid”. He entreated her
to “be happy – rather young, than old and wise”.
On holiday afterwards, du Maurier wrote two poems about this man. One included
the lines, “If to be happy one must needs be chaste… Surely one would choose
then to be sad…” The other, Richmond Park, talked about “a greater risk, a
happy fear” and “crushed ferns”. Could the man have been Wallace? It’s not
beyond the bounds of possibility. Wallace and his daughter did spend a lot
of time with Gerald and Daphne that summer. But there is a far stronger
candidate.
Daphne’s cousin Geoffrey was 36, divorced and remarried when he first came to
stay with the du Mauriers when Daphne was 14. He was a charming rake. When
the family sunbathed on the lawn, rugs over their knees, Geoffrey would lie
beside Daphne and hold her hand. “Nothing, in a life of 70 years, has ever
surpassed that first awakening of an instinct within myself.” In 1928 he
came to stay again, and they kissed. “Funny, my first experience.” Geoffrey
related to her a conversation he’d had with her father: “Are you in love
with Daph?” “I’ve been in love with her for seven years.” “Nothing can come
of it, you realise that?” “I know, Uncle, I know.”
A 1929 diary entry suggests the relationship remained fairly innocent. “What a
pity I’m not a vagrant on the face of the earth. Wandering in strange
cities, foreign lands, open spaces, fighting, drinking, loving physically.”
But at some point that year she did “love physically”. Her partner was Carol
Reed, who became a famous film director. It was a wholesome affair and he
was devoted to her. He was nothing like the cold suitor of And His Letters
Grew Colder.
The previous summer, Daphne had shaken off the advances of an older man, Otto
Kahn, on a steam-yacht cruise of the Norwegian fjords. On the banks of a
fjord he made a pass at her. But she found a way to say no: she stripped off
and jumped into the water. “He was in his sixties, and did not attempt to
follow my example.” We know also that Daphne later had a flirtatious
exchange of letters with her publisher, Victor Gollancz, in which they
discussed a short-story collection. She called him “dynamic, exuberant,
tender, intolerant and the only publisher for me”. Gollancz said she was
“beautiful, adorable, gracious, charming and good”. But we can discount him
fairly quickly; there is no evidence that they had known each other as early
as the 1920s; and as Gollancz’s biographer Ruth Dudley Edwards says, he was
so devoted to his wife that “infidelity was unthinkable”.
So the mysterious suitor’s identity remains an enigma. And soon, Daphne was
swept off her feet by her future husband, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick
“Boy” Browning – whom she called Tommy – who arrived in her life in
spectacularly romantic fashion, sailing his yacht into Fowey on October 3,
1931, looking for the author of The Loving Spirit. But her scepticism
towards men pervades her writing, fiction and nonfiction. “Drinking and
making love are two of the loneliest pastimes in the world,” she said. And
on another occasion: “Romantic love is an illusion.” At 15 she observed a
happily married couple. “It makes me feel lonely… I shall never be able to
love like that, openly and calmly.”
“I think she slightly despised men, found them pathetic,” says her daughter
Flavia. But Daphne stuck by Tommy through thick and thin (affairs,
separation during the war, his troubled mind afterwards). When Flavia told
her she was divorcing, she responded harshly: “Do you know what you’re
doing? Just pretend you’re someone else. Just pretend all is going well.”
Daphne was good at pretending. Her father had wanted a boy and, as a child,
she wore boy’s clothes. Men seemed to have all the adventures. Her sisters
both turned out to be gay, and in the 1950s Daphne herself fell in love with
Ellen Doubleday, her American publisher, and had a brief fling with the
actress Gertrude Lawrence.
But her father had despised homosexuality, and it was more or less a given
that she would settle down with a man. Forster describes this as a
“subterfuge”, and Daphne as “tortured”. The author once wrote that her life
had been “one long lie”, and she had always seen herself as a “potential
suicide”. “If you met her, she would be smiling but distant,” says Forster.
“But behind it all were these appallingly violent thoughts, full of pent-up
rage.” But this isn’t the Daphne du Maurier her family knew and loved.
She was prone to melancholy, but it could vanish at the sight of her beloved
Fowey. “Oh, the utter joy of looking across the harbour. Blue smoke curling
from the grey houses opposite, the haze over the water, the noise and smell
of ships.” Kits describes her as “terribly funny. And warm. She did have a
thing of getting into the characters. She was always acting. The real her
was our mum, that was the lovely, funny side. When she wasn’t working, she
gave everything to us. If there was a crisis, she could disguise that
emotion, putting it into fictional characters and making a story out of it.
That was her escape”.
Why does he think And His Letters Grew Colder was never published here?
“Perhaps she just went off it. It probably got lost, or she forgot she ever
wrote it. I’m sure it is pure imagination. I’m certain she is not the Mrs B.
Nor is it based upon letters she received from some older man.”
One of Daphne’s few surviving friends is Billie Graeme, a painter, now 92.
They became close in the mid-1960s when their husbands developed cancer.
Billie asked where the dark stories came from. “I don’t know,” Daphne said.
“I just sit there and they come into my head.”
“She was friendly, happy. Great fun,” says Graeme. Not tortured? “Absolute
rubbish. It makes me very cross. She wasn’t a dark person at all.” She
remembers Daphne as loyal, practical, happy to muck in. Daphne once tried
some watercolours. “All landscapes – sea, sky and cliffs. No people in them
anywhere.”
“I can’t say I really like people. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always preferred to
create my own,” du Maurier once said. The problem with being dead is that
people extrapolate from everything you ever said. Nobody questions the
vividness and originality of her imagination. But could she really, in her
early twenties, with little sexual experience, have imagined the
relationship in And His Letters Grew Colder? Her old friend Billie is in no
doubt: “I think it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world.”
The Daphne du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor, is published by
Virago on May 3, price £9.99. It is available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst
price of £9.49, including p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585
The men Daphne knew
Who was du Maurier’s ‘mysterious suitor’? And was he the adulterous
letter-writer to ‘Mrs B’?
The writer Edgar Wallace spent time with Daphne in 1926, when her father
produced his play. She called him a “generous man, a frightening man”
Geoffrey Millar, Daphne’s cousin, was 22 years her senior. He admitted to her
father that he loved her — and she had her first kiss with him
The actor Carol Reed, whom she “loved physically” sometime in 1929. He
proposed and remained a friend
Otto Kahn, who made a pass at Daphne in 1928 during a cruise of the Norwegian
fjords. He was in his sixties
