Every last nook and corner in Kilmarth is filmed: the staircase featuring the drawings of George du Maurier, Daphne’s bedroom with “her” sea view, Tommy’s teddy bears sitting on a shelf, the engravings of Mary Anne Clarke, her scandalous ancestor. The camera follows them into the little private chapel in the vaulted cellar of the old house, then into the archive room, where Daphne shows them the original manuscript of Rebecca, with its legendary opening sentence. Then Daphne is seen in front of her desk in the living room, face concentrated and unsmiling as she types, as if she were all alone in the world.
The interview seems to go on forever, but Daphne plays the game, remaining patient, replying with humor and kindness, occasionally bursting into laughter, lighting cigarette after cigarette. No one could imagine how it exhausts her to talk about her work, about her literary tastes from childhood (Beatrix Potter, Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, de Maupassant), but also about her everyday life, her solitary dinner on a tray in front of the television, which she watches assiduously every night. Her voice remains melodious and gentle, not changing even when she deftly argues against the “romantic novelist” label the journalist applies to her. There is more laughter when he asks her if she is wounded by her lack of critical recognition: It would be wonderful getting reviews saying you’re Shakespeare, but I’m happy enough. She remains guarded, even as she leans back on her cushions as if she’s entertaining her best friends, one foot balanced nonchalantly on the couch, cigarette stuck between her lips, like a sort of protection. She describes, with obvious awkwardness, her fascination for incest: I don’t mean bed incest, I mean this thing of sons looking for their mothers, daughters looking for their fathers.… Her face relaxes when Wilfred asks her what job she would do now if she hadn’t been a writer. Another exuberant burst of laughter. Archaeologists, perhaps, digging, you see! If I’d had the brains, a doctor, or a chemist, to do with genetics, you see, family again. Finally, they leave. It is time to savor a well-earned whiskey, to collapse in front of the television, not to have to think about anything. Now she must wait for the show to be broadcast the following month, and Daphne knows that, when the moment comes, she will feel as if the whole of Great Britain is poking its nose into her bedroom.
For now, she is making good progress on a new, and very different, novel, with which she is rather pleased: the fantastical tale of an old, eccentric lady, inspired by Gladys Cooper—the du Maurier family’s actress friend, to whom the book is dedicated—but also by Daphne herself. Mad (short for Madam) lives by the sea in a large house surrounded by a horde of adopted boys, bearing a startling resemblance not only to Barrie’s Lost Boys but also to Daphne’s own grandsons. She has given free rein to her inspiration, admitting to Oriel that she felt like taking the mickey out of everything,22 her writing drifting into the realms of the absurd and the burlesque. The plot features England being unexpectedly invaded and annexed by the United States, then the fierce anti-American resistance born in the depths of this lost corner of Cornwall, led by the incorrigible grandmother and her tribe. It is a much more personal novel than it appears, and beneath the acerbic parody of a belligerent Peter Pan embodied by the indomitable Mad—whose clothes are a mix of Mao Tse-tung and Robin Hood—and Emma, her granddaughter, as a sensible, reasonable Wendy, the reader can sense Daphne’s visceral attachment to Cornwall, shown in the real world by her joining the local independence movement, Mebyon Kernow, in 1969. Mad is an authentic du Maurier heroine: rebellious, audacious, in the lineage of Dona St. Columb and Honor Harris, only forty years older.
This is the first novel Daphne has written in her living room at Kilmarth. When the book, titled Rule Britannia, appears in January 1972, readers and critics are left baffled. What is du Maurier playing at? Her anti-Americanism appeared more discreetly through Stoll, the repulsive drunkard in “Not After Midnight,” and Vita, the young scientist’s persnickety wife in The House on the Strand, but why should she exhibit it so brazenly in this novel? Why has she suddenly turned so satirical, so political, so vulgar? The first word pronounced by Ben, the last adopted son, a little black boy three years old, is “Sh … sh … sh … shit!” In this dystopian novel, Daphne caricatures an England unwilling to become part of Europe, where prices soar and the government is so helpless and incompetent that it has to ally with the United States to form a new country, USUK, pronounced you suck, which doesn’t leave much to the imagination regarding the author’s standpoint on these fictional events. The reviews are awful, with The Economist reproaching Daphne for having isolated herself to the extent that she no longer has any idea what the modern world is like. The Saturday Review of Arts says it is “difficult to tell whether this novel is written with irony or genteel paranoia.” One headline reads: “Yankees Go Home, Roars du Maurier.” Her fans are disappointed, shocked, lost. Where has the magic of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel gone?
Daphne accepts this negativity. Though widely misunderstood, this novel, Rule Britannia, enabled her to express her personal opinions. On the other hand, she is irritated by Tod’s remark—My dear, I don’t like that character called Madam, she orders everyone about too much!23—and by a letter from her friend Frank Price, who absolutely hates the book and tells her so in great detail: the plot is weak, the humor pale, the characters unconvincing, and the dialogue hollow. According to him, Daphne’s editors did not have the courage to tell her just how bad the novel was. Moving on, Daphne enjoys a pleasant summer, swimming, walking, being with her family and friends. She meets Veronica Rashleigh, Philip’s new wife, with whom she becomes friendly, and who allows her to walk around Menabilly whenever she likes. She goes on vacation in Dordogne for a few weeks with Kits and Hacker, her faithful traveling companions, her son behind the wheel, her daughter-in-law in the backseat, organizing the logistics of the trip. Daphne’s only sadness that summer is not the poor reception given to Rule Britannia, which she is able to rise above, but the divorce of Flavia and Alastair, after fifteen years of marriage. Her trip to Provence comes as a breath of fresh air, my old rusty French tripping from my tongue,24 and she tells Oriel about their stopover in Cap d’Ail at the sumptuous villa belonging to her old Camposenea friend Doodie, kitted out in a pink Chanel suit and high heels: I doubt if she has ever worn trousers in her life!25 Doodie has become very posh and proper, serving them grilled fillets of trout, raspberries, and Vouvray wine. Later, Kits makes his mother laugh, as always, by saying that he thinks Doodie ought to organize orgies in her gloomy living room, with its décor straight from an Agatha Christie novel.
* * *
She still has no ideas for a new novel. Daphne waits patiently, but nothing comes. She has to start work again before the start of winter, she must find something, make some progress. Another biography, perhaps? Maybe that would rehabilitate her after the unfavorable reaction to Rule Britannia the previous year, help win the critics back over to her side? Her last biography, on Branwell Brontë, came out twelve years ago, in 1960. Writing about another person would allow her to maintain her precious “routes,”* would give meaning to her life, keep her going. In a letter to Foy, she confesses: One of the reasons I have a dog is that I have something to get up for, to take him walking.26 But, even more than her Westie, she knows that it is the prospect of a book to write that truly provides her days with a structure. Before, ideas used to come on their own; now, she must seek them out.
She starts to wonder about people whose lives would require her to embark on some long, fruitful research and ends up thinking about the Bacon brothers: Francis, the scientist and philosopher, born in London in 1561, and his elder and less illustrious sibling Anthony, born in 1558. Why the Bacons? Not much is known about their lives, certain aspects remain in the shadows, and this time, in contrast to the more psychological approach she attempted with Branwell Brontë, Daphne wants to build her book on solid research, in order to unearth new evidence and facts. Most pressingly, she must hire assistants who will meticulously search through all the documentation relating to the Bacon
brothers at the London Library and Lambeth Place Library. Daphne closely examines everything she receives in the mail, dissecting the brothers’ childhood, the deaths of their elder sisters, their relations with their demanding, erudite mother, their education at Cambridge. She is interested in Anthony, who spoke fluent French—always menacing, as she tells Oriel. Her assistants get their hands on documents that prove Anthony spent twelve years in France as a spy for the Elizabethan government. I am now happily settled in for winter, surrounded by heavy-going books on Bacon and trying to make notes,27 she writes excitedly to Oriel in November 1972.
The following spring, while she continues to go through the discoveries concerning the Bacon brothers, Daphne invites Martyn Shallcross for lunch, the young man she met in Crete three years before, and with whom she has stayed in touch by mail. During the meal, served by Esther, the telephone rings several times. I don’t do personal appearances, Daphne says into the receiver, rather irritably. Why can’t they get the vicar’s wife or someone else, to open the fête?28 Now she has found the central theme of her book, Daphne gets down to work with a formidable energy that comes as a relief to her children and close friends. Her letters to Oriel testify to her fervor: Surrounded with books from the London Library, and am getting more interested in Anthony than in Francis, even, and with secret spies in France.29 Her team of bloodhounds tracks down a significant family secret in the departmental archives of Tarn-et-Garonne. During the summer of 1586, Anthony Bacon was accused of sodomizing his young page, Isaac Burgades, and arrested in Montauban. In September 1586, Henri IV personally intervened, at the last minute, to save the young Englishman from execution—a story that never filtered back to England, his homeland, but which pursued him internally throughout his life. Daphne does not deny her subject’s homosexuality but does refute the charges of cruelty and barbarism heaped on him. A shrewd observer of the world that surrounded him and an amateur poet, suffering with poor health and spiraling debts, Anthony remained one year longer in Montauban and Bordeaux, where he grew close to the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, before he was able to return to England. Another major breakthrough: Daphne’s researchers succeed in locating, for the first time, Anthony Bacon’s gravestone, in St. Olave’s Church, on Hart Street, in London.
In early August 1973, Daphne receives a letter from her French publishers, Albin Michel. Rule Britannia is in the process of being translated—by Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe, who already translated The House on the Strand, following the death of Mme Butler in 1968. The translator would like to be given the references to various Wordsworth poems quoted by Daphne. It is Daphne herself who responds to this request on August 8, in French, cutting out the middleman of her French agent. Thank you for your letter, and please excuse my poor French. Unfortunately, it will be quite difficult to find the exact verses of Wordsworth’s poems, because I mixed them up, a few lines from one poem, a few from another. They are all taken from Miscellaneous Sonnets. My word! What a lot of work! You have my sympathies! P.S. In England and in the United States, no one seems to have understood that my novel Rule Britannia is FOR Great Britain’s entry into Europe.30
That same month, Daphne goes off in search of Anthony Bacon’s traces in Aquitaine, along with Kits and Hacker. They go from Bordeaux to Agen, then to Montauban, up to the châteaux of the Loire, and, while in the region, pay a visit to Chérigny, where Kits takes a picture of his mother in front of the Le Maurier sign; Daphne particularly enjoys this part of her pilgrimage. Back at Kilmarth, Daphne gets down to work again, interrupting her flow of words only to attend a preview showing of Nicolas Roeg’s movie version of “Don’t Look Now” in London. For once, she is favorably impressed by the film adaptation, which mirrors the intensity of her story, all the way to its dreadful climax in the confrontation of two worlds, the rational and the superstitious. The color red recurs like an insidious refrain, and Venice is shown in its little-known autumnal aspect, sunk under rain and bereft of tourists, who all left with the warm sun.
When it is released, the movie is a huge success, receiving rave reviews from critics. Daphne writes to Nicolas Roeg in October 1973: Dear Mr Roeg, I must add my congratulations to the hundreds of letters and telephone calls you are surely receiving for the success of your film. At the end of her note, she writes jokingly: And please, one of these days, find another of my short stories to screen!31 The movie’s producers judged it prudent to show Daphne the American version of the film, which did not include a torrid sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Kits says one sees EVERYTHING, Daphne laments to Oriel. A pity about the sexy bit, though, so unnecessary.32
Winter arrives, bringing rain and gray skies, and Daphne’s morale collapses. The writing of the biography does not give her the pleasure she was hoping for, and she is weakened by a bout of bronchitis. In 1974, she receives a copy of the book A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan, a meticulous Irish journalist and author, known for his books on World War Two, The Longest Day and The Last Battle, published in 1959 and 1966 respectively. In 1967, two years after Tommy’s death, Daphne had replied to the author’s questions regarding Operation Market Garden. She had made clear that she knew nothing about that event at the time, that Tommy had barely mentioned it to her. She did say how badly affected her husband had been by the loss of his men. Reading the book, she notes that the author has quoted her accurately. What worries her most, however, is that a movie of the book will be made by the British director Richard Attenborough. She, more than anyone, knows how far screenplays can diverge from the books they are based on. She writes to Attenborough, requesting that he send her the script when it is finished.
A series of deaths increases her sadness, beginning with the loss of Christopher Puxley to cancer, then, later in the year, of her aunt Billy, at ninety-three. When Daphne finally manages to finish her biography, Livia Gollancz informs her that it will not be published until September 1975, more than a year away. Daphne is perplexed. Does this mean that her publishers don’t like the book? Otherwise, why delay its publication?
A gray summer does not help matters. It is too cold to go swimming. The only ray of light comes with the birth of Kits and Hacker’s first daughter, Grace, in June 1974. Though she doesn’t know exactly why, Daphne has the strange impression that this sadness is here to stay, that it won’t be easy to get rid of. The du Maurier family’s long black ribbon, which so affected Kicky and Gerald, is unfurling now between her fingers, wrapping itself around her wrists, as if to more fully imprison her.
* * *
When her biography of the Bacon brothers, Golden Lads, is published in the fall of 1975, the reviews are mostly favorable and only Kirkus Reviews judges the work “meandering” and “a shade dull.” It doesn’t sell much, but it does draw congratulations from Arthur Leslie Rowse, as well as some other well-known historians, impressed by the author’s scrupulous research. Daphne now begins a new biography—of Francis Bacon alone, beginning after his brother Anthony’s death in 1610. She believes there is still much to say about this man who was a writer, lawyer, philosopher, scientist, politician, and friend of William Shakespeare. Gollancz would have preferred a novel, and so would she, in truth, but fiction must wait a while longer. She has no ideas, no inspiration. Given that she still possesses all the documentation, it makes sense to continue writing about Francis, the younger brother, even if, deep down, the idea of this book does not really thrill her.
Every morning, Daphne replies to her letters before laboriously working on the Bacon biography. A fifteen-year-old reader named Julie, who dreams of being a writer, writes to her regularly. Daphne sends her a photograph of Kilmarth, explaining how the house inspired her novel The House on the Strand, and wishing her good luck with her exams. In a following letter, she includes a signed photograph of herself on the beach at Par. She must also reply, and this is less amusing, to those irritating letters about Rebecca, which never seem to have stopped arriving, asking her to explain the ending and why she didn’t give the seco
nd Mrs. de Winter a name. Even Agatha Christie, whom Daphne admires and with whom she exchanges a few letters, asks her this dreaded question.
The book about Francis Bacon, The Winding Stair, is published in January 1976. “Trivial pablum” is the brutal judgment of Kirkus Reviews, while the Observer is not much kinder. Thankfully, the Sunday Times reviews it positively, as does the Yorkshire Post. But this second biography does not have the power of the first one, and sales remain poor. Daphne suffers another humiliation when her French publisher, Albin Michel, suggests turning the two books into a single volume, a project that requires considerable cutting. Her German publisher wishes to condense the two books, too. This means the loss of more than a hundred pages, resulting in a book of 350 pages. Daphne has no choice. She writes to her agents to accept this proposal, but the cut pages leave her desolate.
It is in this gloomy context that Daphne starts dreaming up her next book. In 1977, the following year, she will turn seventy. Time for her to write her autobiography? Until now, she has always refused. But she is obsessed by her dearth of inspiration for another novel. What if Rule Britannia was her last work of fiction? She doesn’t even dare think about it. Since The House on the Strand, the voice of Eric Avon has fallen silent. So often in the past, Daphne had relied on her masculine alter ego for inspiration. I’m still passage-wandering re: work,33 she complains to Oriel. And so, as she has to write, she may as well write about her own life. To sate the appetite of the legion of Daphne du Maurier fans, Gollancz publishes a selection of her short stories, but none of them are new.