By April she had finished it and sent it to Victor – ‘here is the book . . . I’ve tried to get an atmosphere of suspense . . . the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim.’ It was, she warned, certainly too grim ‘to be a winner’. Victor gave it to his senior editor, Norman Collins, telling him to read it at once – ‘it ought to be looked at for the possibility of turning it into this year’s Cronin’. Norman Collins read it in two days and reported back euphorically: ‘The new Daphne du Maurier contains everything that the public could want.’ Daphne had been wrong: she, and Gollancz, had their winner.

  Chapter Nine

  THE REPORT NORMAN COLLINS gave Victor Gollancz on the manuscript of Rebecca was a model of its kind. What he had realized straight away was that this novel had a most unusual quality. It was, he wrote, ‘sentimental . . . but in a haunting, melancholy way’ which captured the reader’s attention and sympathy from the very first paragraph. But it was also ‘passionate . . . not that there is any sign of physical passion’ and, though melodramatic, ‘brilliantly creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense’. He gave a summary of the plot, then commented: ‘I don’t know another author who imagines so hard all the time.’ The faults of the novel – ‘the spelling is quite incredible’ – lay in a certain clumsiness in the writing, but he thought this unimportant – there was a power here which he assured Victor would make it ‘a really rollicking success’, maybe even greater than A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel of the previous year, which Victor longed to repeat.1

  Victor himself then read Rebecca and shared his editor’s conviction. In his own letter to booksellers which he sent out a month after receiving the novel he wrote that he never remembered a book which so obviously contained every single one of the essential qualities of the bestseller – ‘it is moving . . . it contains an exquisite love-story . . . it has a brilliantly created atmosphere of suspense’. His first print run was 20,000 copies and he immediately started rolling the kind of publicity at which he was so adept. This thrilled Daphne but also made her nervous. ‘I am worried’, she wrote to Victor, ‘that you and Norman Collins are taking so much trouble over the book, and I only hope it’s not an awful flop, because you’ll all lose a lot of money.’

  Money was very much on her mind. ‘God knows,’ she wrote to Victor, ‘I have no desire to be rich, but my husband possesses nothing in this world but his army pay and . . . I do definitely consider myself the breadwinner.’ The army pay of a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Grenadier Guards was £1.175.od. a day, which gave some substance to her claim, considering their joint expenses. ‘It’s a bit grim sometimes,’ wrote Daphne, ‘when I think in the middle of the night how difficult it would be for us if my mind stopped working.’ Victor reminded her that she would be receiving, apart from her £1,000 advance, 20 per cent of all sales in the UK up to 10,000 copies and 25 per cent on sales between 10,000 and 20,000, so that already, with the subscription from booksellers at 15,000 copies before publication and a reprint of 10,000 in hand, she need have no night-time qualms. Whatever else it was going to do, Rebecca would make a lot of money, especially since ‘film people are already sniffing around’.2

  The summer of 1938 was the happiest Daphne had ever known. Buoyed up by the accolades for Rebecca which came flooding in before publication, and comfortably settled in the charming old house, Greyfriars, she felt well and in control of her life once more. Yet she by no means took it for granted that all those who had praised Rebecca were right. Always wary of flattery, and recognizing a kind of copy-cat applause when she heard it, she was not at all sure her novel would make the impact her publisher anticipated. She herself saw it as ‘rather grim’, even ‘unpleasant’, a study in jealousy with nothing of the ‘exquisite love-story’ her publisher claimed it to be. There was more hatred in it than love, in her own opinion, and she had tried very hard to show her unnamed heroine as intimidated, humiliated and even abused throughout most of the story. Never before had she entered the mind of any of her characters to this extent – again and again in the novel she used fantasy to heighten the reader’s awareness of the dream-like state in which the second Mrs de Winter lived. She had done this from the beginning of her writing career, but now it dominated her writing, so that what happens in this woman’s mind is more important than what actually takes place around her. The book begins with a dream and retains this fantasy element to great effect throughout. There are endless daydreams, some projecting into the past, most concerned with the future, so that the reader is constantly pulled out of the events taking place and drawn into the strange and haunting imagination of the heroine. ‘I could imagine’ becomes the constant refrain.

  The author also worried about whether, behind the obvious excitement of the plot she had so carefully concocted, critics would recognize that she was trying to explore the relationship between a man who was powerful and a woman who was not, just as she had done, in a different way, in Jamaica Inn and, to some extent, in everything she had written. She had wanted to write about the balance of power in marriage and not about love. The heroine, after the terrible scene in which she wears the same dress as the dead Rebecca and is angrily ordered to take it off by Maxim, lies on her bed reflecting that there is ‘nothing worse, so shaming and degrading, as a marriage that had failed’. It is important to her that no one should guess how humiliated she feels, how threatened her marriage is. And Maxim is a husband who is prone to humiliating her at every turn even when he thinks he is being loving. He treats her, she feels, as he does his dog and she is reduced to begging for his love, any love, ‘as my father . . . brother . . . son’. Even when it is revealed that Maxim hated and murdered Rebecca, the heroine still seems subservient to him and has to plead with him to grant her a different status – ‘I’ll be your friend and companion, a sort of boy,’ she cries, in desperation. When put to the test, at the inquest, her contribution is actually to faint. Once more, Daphne had created a man the reader is bound to dislike to the end – harsh, dominant, bad-tempered – and a woman for whom only pity can be felt. But would reviewers notice any of this? She had more misgivings than she cared to admit, except to herself and her publisher.

  In the event, the critics, though almost unanimously praising the novel, did not see what she had wanted them to see. Most of them stressed that Rebecca was ‘unashamed melodrama’ and harped on its ‘obvious popular appeal’ in a way that always sounded faintly derogatory, in the author’s ears at least. The Times, whose opinion Daphne still rated highest, was rather patronizing, commenting that the ‘material is of the humblest . . . nothing in this is beyond the novelette’, and yet admitted there was ‘an atmosphere of terror which . . . makes it easy to overlook . . . the weaknesses’. Beside that, Daphne did not care so much that the Sunday Times rated Rebecca ‘a grand story’ and was positively irritated that it was labelled ‘romance in the grand tradition’. One or two reviews pointed out that Miss du Maurier was ‘an odd writer . . . hard to pigeon-hole . . . mixing the grossest fantasy with the most admirable transcription of little scenes . . .’ That was more what she wanted to hear, but she still craved a different kind of assessment. Frank Swinnerton in the Observer almost gave it to her. He, too, stressed Rebecca’s popular appeal, but he thought something more should be said of it than that. It was, he commented, ‘not a paltry fake, and the fearlessness with which Miss du Maurier works in material so strange . . . is magnificent’. He thought that ‘the sniggers of meticulous sophisticates’ should be ignored and instead found it commendable that ‘a young writer of extraordinary talent should risk absurdity and should unquestionably triumph’. Victor Gollancz put another reprint in hand at once, bringing the number of copies to 45,000 within one month of publication.

  Daphne was elated, but more by the money than the praise. ‘Could you give me a rough estimate of what I’ve earned from Rebecca?’ she wrote to Victor. ‘It would help me budgeting expenses for the coming winter.’ (The answer was £3,000, less her original advance.) She had been so keen that the book should sell, and so conscious of her debt to her publisher, who had been lavish with expensive advertisements, that she had done something she had always vowed she never would: in August, on publication of Rebecca, she was a guest at a Foyle’s Literary Lunch. She agreed to let Victor persuade her on condition she did not have to speak, and sat in silence while other authors, Margery Allingham and Audrey Lucas among them, made speeches. She disliked the experience intensely and condemned her fellow authors quite savagely – ‘Women shouldn’t speak in public unless they are born with the gift, and damn few women are. And the efforts of Miss Allingham . . . proved to me I am right!’ She thought their speeches embarrassingly bad and the whole occasion an appalling waste of time. Not even to please, or help, Victor, nor to boost her sales, would she ever attend such an event again. It made her miserable to be stared at and she wrote to Foy that authors never should be seen or heard. She herself had no desire to meet other authors, even those contemporary authors she admired at the time, like J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene, and belonging to any kind of literary circle held no attractions for her at all.

  Throughout the autumn of 1938 the success of Rebecca grew and grew, constantly amazing her. In America, too, where it was published by Doubleday in September, its success was instant, though the reviews were often sarcastic. Comparisons with Jane Eyre were even more numerous than they had been in the British press, usually to the detriment of Rebecca. But just as Frank Swinnerton had defended the author against the suggestion that she was a mere cheap populizer, so several of the American critics warned against dismissing Rebecca as an inferior Jane Eyre, pointing out that even if much more crude and less sophisticated in the writing, it had its own real power and a strange passion easily comparable with Charlotte Brontë’s. No one, either side of the Atlantic, paid any real attention to the battle between the sexes in Rebecca, or saw it as a psychological study in jealousy, as Daphne had hoped. But beside her enormous success this was merely puzzling, and she had no intention of complaining. The money poured in (another reprint brought copies to 60,000 by the end of the year) and she set about husbanding her earnings. She was determined not to be like her father in his rich years – she wanted to put almost everything into the bank and had no plans for spending any of it on luxuries. She was rightly proud to have earned so much, and Tommy, who had no false pride, was equally delighted, though more enthusiastic about some spending. The future looked bright indeed, except for a shadow slowly looming ahead: the approaching threat of a war that Tommy believed was sure to come in the next year.

  Whenever she looked back on her childhood Daphne saw very clearly how protected she and her sisters had been, ‘three doves in a gilded cage’, cosseted by a father who wanted to keep them safe in a predatory world. Breaking out of that cage had hardly resulted in her becoming any less protected. She was still, at the age of thirty-one, insulated from the harshness of an era in which even some of the rich wavered in confidence. In her role as wife of a commanding officer in the Grenadier Guards she was almost as shielded from reality as she had been as a child. But towards the end of 1938 it began to dawn on her, as it did on almost everyone, that war was indeed coming, and when it came no one would be immune. Bombs would not discriminate between privileged and underprivileged, rifle shots would kill officers as well as men, there would be no way in which she could preserve her charmed life intact.

  Slowly, because she had never shown much interest in politics, Daphne began to pick up from Tommy what was happening. He could talk of nothing else but ‘the wretched lack of preparedness’ in the British Army and raged and thundered, wrote his wife to Tod, against the ‘incompetent nincompoops’ at the War Office, who did not seem to realize this. Only Winston Churchill, according to Tommy, knew how badly equipped the army was and how slack its discipline had become. He himself was writing a new Drill Book for the instruction of the whole army, but he knew it would be too late to have much effect. He was, Daphne wrote to his sister Grace, in a great state about it all, but she confessed she loved him ‘stamping . . . and declaring . . . the army is a bloody undisciplined rabble’. But she felt afraid in a way she had never done before. Everything was at risk, everything she had could disappear in a flash.

  Grace, who was in hospital having a hysterectomy, received a letter from her of a kind she did not usually write. ‘I’m bad at talking face to face,’ she confessed, ‘a foolish shyness prevents me,’ but she wanted to explain what she was feeling at the moment. She had taken to reading the Bible regularly, in a slightly embarrassed way, searching for some kind of comfort in the face of approaching chaos. The Gospel according to St John, bidding everyone to be of good cheer, had appealed to her and made her think about what optimism meant. It was surely a way to conquer fear. ‘The only real enemy of every living person’, she wrote to Grace, ‘is not so much fear of bodily hurt as acute fear of being unhappy. We are afraid of war not for our own selves being bombed, but because people we love might be taken from us and we ourselves made miserable. Therefore the root must be self-pity. We don’t want to be lonely. The Stoics conquered grief and pain by a sort of armour of apathy which must have helped to destroy them, therefore apathy is no good. One has just got to be above self-pity and recognise that every individual soul is working out his own particular jigsaw puzzle which is part of a universal jigsaw and that everything will fit into place eventually, it just has to be.’ It is to be hoped Grace waited until the effects of the anaesthetic had worn off before attempting to make sense of this confused logic, but what followed was a little clearer. ‘If someone you or I love dies tomorrow,’ wrote Daphne, ‘it’s not destiny laid down for them at the toss of a coin, but their own little jigsaw fitting into place and linking up, and because of it your and my little jigsaw comes nearer to completion.’ So if Tommy were killed in action this would be part of some master plan and therein lay the comfort.

  Unfortunately, it was not enough of a comfort. Daphne struggled to convince herself, tried hard to develop her own philosophy by taking a bit from the Greeks, a bit from the Bible, and by mixing legend with superstition, which is what she ended up doing, but only confused herself. She wished she could share Tommy’s deep and very simple religious faith. He believed in God and the triumph of Good over Evil, of Right over Wrong. He would go into battle, as he had done before, trusting in the Lord. She marvelled at this faith but could not share it. Far more to her liking was the idea that the individual must change and put faith in himself. If everyone changed themselves, if each person became unselfish and kind, then the whole course of history would be changed and war averted. In this mood she was highly receptive to the words of her old friend Bunny Austin, then at the height of his fame as a tennis champion, who had become inspired by Frank Buchman’s3 call for a kind of moral rearmament. Bunny explained to her that the ‘Oxford Group’, as it was first known (later becoming the Moral Rearmament Movement, or MRA) was trying to start a moral revolution by starting one in each individual. He told her he himself was convinced Buchman’s ideas represented the best chance of stopping the outbreak of war and that he was going to devote himself wholeheartedly to the movement. Daphne professed herself interested – and so did Tommy – but at that point took her interest no further.

  In Fowey that autumn, on holiday enjoying one of Tommy’s leaves, she could hardly bear to think of the beautiful coastline soon perhaps to be bristling with guns, the sea full of destroyers, the beaches infested with mines. Everything in the landscape she loved was threatened. Her feelings of apprehension deepened and the happiness of the summer already seemed remote. Miss Roberts, her old landlady at Nook Cottage, with whom she had kept in close touch (as she did with all friends and servants she had liked), had cancer of the bowel and, visiting her in hospital, Daphne was humbled by this little old lady telling her to cheer up, war might never happen. She wrote to Grace saying how ashamed she was of herself, and that she was going to try to be a better person.

  But back at Greyfriars she found this hard – her irritation was so easily aroused, and yet she knew she really had nothing to complain about and should make the most of what Tommy warned her was ‘the lull before the storm’. The children had colds and Tessa was annoying her by ‘joining in the grown-up chatter, as she always does, given half the chance . . . I feel agonised’. She found Tessa, at five years old, ‘most alarming’, she wrote to Grace, ‘she walks so quickly and her voice is the loudest I have ever heard’. As for eighteen-month-old Flavia, she had decided she was neither as pretty nor as quick as Tessa and there was already a disparaging if affectionate note in all her remarks about her. She knew she shouldn’t judge her small children so harshly, but confessed to her mother, ‘Instead of thinking my children are marvellous I am super-critical.’

  Her own intolerance of almost everything dismayed her. Apart from the children’s colds she was also exasperated by her husband’s stomach trouble. He was having frequent attacks of ‘me tum’ and also of some sort of colic which she dismissed in letters to Tod as ‘only a chill’. Even the ordinary tribulations of life made her exhausted – she told Tod she could hardly cope with the traffic, and after one visit to London when she had spent forty minutes driving herself from Oxford Street to the Strand she had returned home hysterical. If she was so feeble that she could not survive children’s colds, husband’s chills and heavy traffic, how, she wondered, was she going to survive war? She succumbed to a sore throat and lay in bed feeling ‘wretchedly unworthy’.

  Bunny Austin, visiting her at this time, in November 1938, found her more receptive than ever to the MRA beliefs. To his delight, she agreed to sign a letter to the Sunday Times and other newspapers already signed by himself, Peter Wood and Prunella Douglas-Hamilton. In this letter the cause of MRA was explained as ‘our nation’s destiny . . . we must rearm our moral might’. This meant ‘casting out fear, hate, pride and self-seeking which divide man from man, and form the root causes of war. It demands that we first admit our own faults before trying to remedy the faults of others.’ This was what Daphne herself was trying, and failing, to do, and it seemed to her the MRA cause made perfect sense. So she went, in January 1939, with Bunny to an MRA conference in Eastbourne, staying at the Grand Hotel, and, shielded by Bunny from any attention, she listened carefully to all the speakers and at the end of the week felt genuinely inspired. She decided not only to support MRA but to offer to do something to help.