THE KNOWLEDGE THAT back at Ferryside she had left an almost completed novel gave Daphne the energy to join in the Christmas festivities at Cannon Hall with more enthusiasm than she had shown for several years. Christmas itself was always a big affair with the du Mauriers – they celebrated it in Dickensian style with a magnificently dressed tree, lavish meals and generous presents. That year Daphne had ‘got a marvellous thing for changing into every night. Black evening trousers, cream satin shirt and black velvet jacket . . . I rather fancy myself,’ she wrote to Foy, ‘and try to look like Shelley!’ She enjoyed herself and it was not until the New Year that she began to grow restive.
Since she was trying so hard to be ‘good’ she could not go off with Carol too ostentatiously, nor stay out with him late at night, but in a way these restrictions added excitement to their assignations and at the same time gave her the excuse not to become too intense. She still thought of Carol as a very special friend with whom she had a sexual relationship, rather than as a lover who was also a friend: the distinction was clear in her own mind if not in his. What she liked best was not the love-making, but the talking and the listening and the hanging around cafés, speculating about strangers. Since it was January and cold, they spent rather more time in cafés than usual and visited not only insignificant places but also the Café de Paris in Coventry Street. They would sit upstairs, smoking, but sipping nothing stronger than orangeade, listening to the singers and watching the floor shows. These were often daring – ‘at the Café de Paris’, reported The Bystander, ‘an extraordinary dancing display is given by Roseray & Capella . . . both dancers being almost nude’. One night Daphne reported to Tod that she almost had her breath taken away when she heard ‘a negress sing a couple of songs . . . “I Like The Way He Does It” and “Put it Where It Was Last Night”’. The sensual side of her nature, which she was still unsure about, sometimes thinking it did not exist, responded so strongly to these suggestive songs that she was afraid her expression would betray her feelings and people would know.
Carol certainly knew, but he knew also that, whatever the appearances to the contrary, he was no nearer winning Daphne over completely. She was adroit at side-stepping his urgent requests to put their relationship on a more permanent basis, to become at least officially engaged. But she prevaricated, telling him she had work to do and must finish her novel before she thought about anything else. If he did not understand this, then he did not understand her. Another person who continued not to seem to understand her was her mother. Often, when they happened to be alone together in the house that January, Daphne felt she and Muriel might as well be on different planets. Memories of thinking, when she was a child, that her mother was like the wicked stepmother in ‘Snow White’1 flashed into her head. She knew this was silly, that her mother was very far from being wicked, and she was honest enough to acknowledge that, whatever the reason for her less-than-warm relationship with her mother, it could not be all Muriel’s fault. Angela and Jeanne enjoyed a perfectly harmonious relationship with her, found her affectionate and caring, and were quite at ease. The obvious explanation – obvious not only to Daphne but to everyone who knew the family – was that, since Daphne was Gerald’s favourite, Muriel saw her as a rival. It was a neat theory, and one Daphne had accepted while she was an adolescent, but now she was not convinced of its truth.
Daphne was envious, in a wistful rather than a raging sort of way, of her sisters’ relationship with their mother, but this did not create a barrier between the sisters themselves. The three of them were very unalike, both in appearance and personality, but they got on well together even if they were not exactly close. Angela was in the habit of confiding in Daphne about her ‘pashes’, and both of them had suffered together from Gerald’s suspicions which made a strong bond. Neither criticized the other: Angela respected Daphne’s need to be alone and Daphne was indulgent over Angela’s need to be surrounded by friends. Towards Jeanne they were both affectionate, but there was not the same involvement. Jeanne not only seemed much younger – four years younger than Daphne, seven than Angela – but she had a much closer relationship, as Daphne had observed, with Mo. She was Mo’s ‘ewe lamb’, just as Gerald had been his mother’s, and was treated, the older sisters felt, with more latitude.
It seemed to Daphne that increasingly, over the last few years, Jeanne had in many ways reigned supreme in Gerald’s affections. She, too, now reminded him of his father, but whereas he believed Daphne to have inherited George du Maurier’s talent as a writer, he believed Jeanne had inherited his talent as an artist. This pleased him, and so did another of his youngest daughter’s talents: she was surprisingly athletic. She did not yet play golf, Gerald’s chief sporting passion, but she was good at tennis, his next love, and adored hockey and riding. He was terrified she would get hurt and once, when she was hit by a hockey stick and slightly concussed, he forbade her ever to play again. But Jeanne easily got round him – she was, at this time, the darling of both parents.
Daphne, by contrast, felt that at home she was now nobody’s darling, and though she did not exactly want to be – if you were someone’s darling, their chief concern, you sacrificed at least a measure of independence – she felt a little displaced. None of her friends seemed to be available, and she realized that, in fact, Foy Quiller-Couch was now the person she was closest to, with the exception of Tod and Ferdy, who were in a different category and with whom she could only, on the whole, correspond. Yet she was careful to control her dissatisfaction and restlessness, fearing that if they became obvious she would be thought ungrateful and there would be no chance of returning to Ferryside. Mid-January arrived and she dared to enquire if she might return to her dog and her novel in Cornwall. The gracious answer was that she might, at the end of the month.
She was elated but, when the time came, bewildered to find how painful the parting from Carol proved to be. Exactly what she had hoped to avoid had happened: Carol needed her and said so. His distress at the news of her departure touched her deeply, but not so deeply that she was unable to analyse her feelings. When Gerald had made it plain he needed her and looked to her for support she had been, and still was, upset, but her distress over Carol’s misery was different. She discovered that whereas she resented her father’s demands she felt responsible for Carol’s expectations. To her own surprise she felt moved to tears, though confessing to Foy ‘I am not generally given to tears’, and confused over what Carol actually meant to her. What was this emotion which so unexpectedly overcame her? Was it love? Did feeling disturbed about someone’s love for her mean that she herself must be in love? Her old anxiety about what love was returned to torment her and she still had no answers, she still could not say to Carol, ‘I love you, I am in love with you’. All she could say was that she cared about him, that she hated to see him suffer, that it made her feel guilty not to be able to match his emotion with a corresponding feeling of her own. Though she was touched to the point of tears, she knew those tears, however genuine, were also for herself. She loathed not knowing her own mind, not being in control of herself, and it was not until she was on the train for Cornwall that she gained some mastery over what she considered her weakness.
All the way down to Cornwall she continued to worry about Carol, but once she was there her anxiety lifted and, in registering this, she wondered about its significance. Every time she thought she loved a man, he had only to go out of her sight for her to discover he faded from her mind. Instead of absence making her heart grow fonder, it made it grow cool. It was, she wrote to Tod, ‘queer’ and she did not altogether like to wonder too much what it meant, in case she came to the conclusion that she was shallow and heartless. Once back at work she threw off these worries and devoted herself to the troublesome Part Four of her novel. It was a struggle. Part Four brought her almost up to her own times and she felt there was something strained in the writing which had not been there before. It was the end of March before she completed Part Four.
The agreement with her parents had been that once her novel was finished she would return to London, which she did, leaving her manuscript to be typed out. She felt curiously depressed and exhausted and Hampstead did nothing to improve her mood. Far from hopes of instant success, she worried that what she had written might be ‘hopeless’ and prepared herself for her agent Michael Joseph shaking his head and telling her to stick to short stories after all. The completed typescript arrived a month later.
She shut herself up in the room above the garage and read it. Even then, she had no confidence. All she knew was that what she had written was very different from anything she had tried before. She was cautiously optimistic that she had succeeded in capturing the sense of place for which she had striven. Plyn, the village modelled on Fowey, seemed to her real and that pleased her. The character of Janet Coombe, based on what she knew of Jane Slade, but containing many facets of her own character, was also satisfactory. Janet emerged as strong, she felt, just as she had intended. One half of Janet wanted to be a conventional wife and mother, the other to be ‘part of a ship . . . and the seas’. Janet is always aware, even when appearing to settle down, that she is searching for something, though she does not know for what and feels there is ‘something greater waiting’, just as Daphne herself had confessed to Tod. Even nearer to what she herself felt was Janet’s inner rebellion against being a woman – ‘Please God, make me a lad afore I’m grown,’ Janet had prayed as a girl, and even after she had become a wife and mother she is saying ‘I’d been a man . . . if I had my way’ and ‘Why wasn’t I born a man?’ But what troubled Daphne, as she tried to judge her own work, was the visionary element. Had it worked? Was Janet’s yearning towards a future, when she would be dead, but in which her spirit would communicate with and sustain her beloved son Joseph, credible or just silly? Did it weaken the novel? She had no means of knowing and did not trust her own critical faculties.
What she did feel, as she parcelled the book up and sent it to Michael Joseph, was that she had succeeded in one vital respect: the reader, any reader, would surely want to know what happened next and how it all ended. And in this she was not mistaken. The narrative drive in The Loving Spirit is strong even in the less convincing parts of the novel. Between the first two and the last two parts the fire goes out of the story. Once Janet and then Joseph die the other characters seem mundane but, even so, curiosity is kept alive, that very desire to find out what happens afterwards, which Daphne wanted. The real difficulty, which the author suspected without being able to define it, lies in a shift of tone. The first two parts, those parts she had so enjoyed writing and had written so quickly and easily, with their inspired descriptions of the landscape and feeling for the atmosphere of Plyn, belonged to an older tradition of romantic (in the wider, artistic sense) writing. Daphne had been reading Mary Webb over the winter and there were touches of that kind of fervid prose in The Loving Spirit. Sometimes it worked and sometimes, particularly in some of the dialogue – of the ‘we’m cleft together you an’ I, like the stars to the sky’ variety – it became ludicrous, and it was only the passion in the writing which saved it from bathos. The third and fourth parts of The Loving Spirit are in a quite different tradition, more in the Kipps style of H. G. Wells, full of social observation and detail. There were really two novels here, determinedly lashed into one, with romanticism drifting into realism and both suffering from confusion.
Once the novel had gone to Michael Joseph, Daphne took herself off to Paris again. ‘Paris’, she reported to Foy, ‘has an electric thrill in the air you can’t mistake,’ and it made her feel happier. While she was there, staying with Ferdy, she received a letter from an elated Michael Joseph saying he loved her novel and was offering it immediately to Heinemann. Daphne was thrilled – she and Angela, when young, used solemnly to discuss whom they would choose as their publisher when each had written her magnum opus, and Heinemann was top of the list. Heinemann’s verdict was equally swift. While still in Paris, Daphne heard that they would publish The Loving Spirit with some minor conditions about cuts. They reserved the right to delay the publication date until they were satisfied, but publish it they would. This news was ‘wonderful’ and had an immediate effect. Success made her want to start writing another, better, novel at once. No longer would she drift. She was now a proper accredited author and she was eager to capitalize on her initial success – not for one moment did she consider waiting to see how her first effort was greeted.
What was remarkable, and certainly made Ferdy eat her words, was the discipline and commitment Daphne now showed. She returned to London and, under Michael Joseph’s direction, made the alterations (none drastic) required by Heinemann then, after a brief sojourn in Fowey, returned without complaint to London where she began at once on her second novel. All the encouragement she needed was the certainty of The Loving Spirit being published. The trappings of success – seeing the finished book, seeing the cover with her name on it, receiving reviews, notching up sales – meant little to her. What was important was that she had not deluded herself: she could write. Charles Evans of Heinemann was not Uncle Willie, and even if, as she realized, her name and age made her a tempting bet for any publisher, she had enough common sense to know that this would not have been quite enough without some evidence of talent. The thing was, she was launched and it was up to her to consolidate her position.
Her second novel, finally entitled I’ll Never Be Young Again, was startlingly different in both style and subject matter from The Loving Spirit. She no longer felt that being at Fowey was essential before she could write. She worked instead in Orange Street, off Leicester Square, in the office her Aunt Billie used as Gerald’s secretary. She organized a working day every bit as disciplined as she had had at Fowey, with the difference that instead of afternoon breaks walking or sailing she ‘nipped out for lunch with Carol’ whenever he was free. Their affair continued, with Carol still pressing for the commitment she continued to refuse him. She felt exactly the same about him as before – when she was with him it was fun and she was fond of him, but when she was not she did not miss him. What she had always liked about Carol was the way he lived for the moment, the way he didn’t want to be tied down and become staid and boring. But now, with regard to her, he seemed to want to do just that. His tendency to daydream, so like her own, showed signs of disappearing and he was becoming practical in a way she resented. Whatever he meant to her she was not prepared to become as serious as he wished. She felt each day, as she went from home to Orange Street, that she had a proper job which she did not want interrupted by Carol or anyone else. Writing was work and it was her life. Such was her application – a deaf ear turned now to all family attempts to ensnare her in delightful distractions – that she finished her second novel in two months, long before her first was out. There was no need this time for research. The research was all her own recent experience, partly of the Norwegian fjords, which she had seen on the Otto Kahn cruise, and more particularly her affair with Carol. Since this still continued she was living as well as writing part of the novel and no experience was wasted.
The story Daphne chose to write this time was highly contemporary and was intended to deal – bravely, for 1930 – with sexual issues. The relationships between men and women, especially sexual ones, had been the stuff of her early short stories, but always she had preserved an authorial detachment. Now, though her theme was the same, she dropped the cynical, world-weary approach and devoted herself to examining what sexual passion was all about. She wrote in the first person as a man, a bold step to free herself to write about her own experience: if the ‘I’ were masculine, then it would not automatically be suspected that this character voiced her own opinions and feelings. But he did. He was the boy-in-the-box, allowed out in her imagination. Dick, the young narrator, is far more Daphne than is Hesta, the girl with whom, in the second part of the novel, he has an affair. Dick’s pronouncements about sex match very closely Daphne’s own to Tod in her letters and, though Hesta shares some of Daphne’s own reactions to Carol, it is Dick who commands the attention, though it is not until the first part is over that Dick actually merits much attention at all. In this first half credibility is strained so far that it all but snaps. Dick is saved from suicide by a wholly unbelievable character, just out of prison, called Jake. Together, the two of them work their passage to Norway where they leave their ship and travel on horseback through the country. There is an implicit, though never realized, homosexual relationship between the two men, but there is also more than a hint that they are each a half of the same man. This makes for an uneasy read. Dick and Jake do not have conversations but make speeches to each other, they pontificate and make grand but banal statements about the meaning of life (‘Being young is something you won’t understand until it is gone from you’). The only redeeming feature lies in Dick’s relationship with his famous father in whose shadow he lives. As Dick reminisces, the narrative ignites briefly, but it takes Dick’s affair with an American girl during his travels to bring any real fire to a strangely wooden story.
Suddenly, the whole point of the novel becomes apparent. Dick is appalled by his first experience of sex – ‘the ugliness of passion . . . my own sense of inexplicable degradation’ distresses him beyond measure and he wonders why ‘desire should turn into degradation and from degradation into nothing’. Then, once Jake has been conveniently drowned and Dick is having a real love-affair in Paris with Hesta, his ideas about sex change. The novel begins to grow in strength, with the glory and then the death of sexual passion cleverly caught. Dick has to work hard to woo Hesta, but once converted to the joys of sex, she can think of nothing else just as Dick’s own interest wanes. What troubles Dick most is his wish to separate Hesta as a woman from Hesta as a source of sexual gratification. He says to her at one point, ‘I wish you were a prostitute,’ because then he could just use her. When, under his tuition, she begins ‘to do things’ when they make love, he tells her she is ‘wicked’. He cannot bear the discovery that she loves sex and ‘must have it, that’s all, it doesn’t matter [who] with’. Inevitably, they part, with Hesta despatched to a debauched life and Dick to a puritanical one as a bank clerk, glad that all passion is spent and he is no longer young.
Throughout this revealing novel, Dick has all the strong lines. He is determined that Hesta should realize sex is only a game, even if a dangerous and exciting one – it must not be confused with the serious ambition to do well with whatever talents one possesses. He tells Hesta ‘sex should be like a game of tennis’2 and should be practised as such until one becomes expert. At the same time, it is ‘natural’ and should not be repressed. But most important of all is the need to distinguish between sex and love. Sex is a step on the way to love, perhaps, but it is not to be thought of as the goal itself. In a conversation in a café with some rakish friends he has made, Dick is told ‘you’ll have to surrender to sex before you purify yourself’. He rejects this, deciding the whole crowd are ‘dirty, fusty little moles’ and he hates them. But when his need to have full sexual intercourse with Hesta overwhelms him he begins to think the ‘dirty moles’ were right. He overcomes her reluctance and then almost immediately ‘I had to deny passivity and be her lover’. She wants to ‘wander into my mind, to share that with me, to be part of this as well’, and he cannot stand this assumption that because of their sexual relationship they must also have a complete emotional and mental one. This he will not give her. He is a writer and knows ‘this power of writing [is] more dangerous than adventure, more satisfying than love’. Nothing horrifies him more than Hesta’s new sexual appetite – ‘Sweetheart,’ he tells her, ‘it’s beastly . . . it’s, it’s unattractive. It’s all right for me to want you, but not for you – at least, never to say. It’s terrible, darling.’ When she says she cannot help it – ‘I never cared to, and you used to beg and beg me . . . and now that I want you . . . you say it’s beastly’ – he is appalled.
Daphne felt shattered when she had finished this second novel and extremely nervous about what kind of reception it would have. The Loving Spirit might have its faults – she knew it did – but it would not shock. I’ll Never Be Young Again was almost certain to. People she admired, people like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, might be disgusted. But she was defiant, feeling she had tried to write honestly about something that mattered, something not written about openly, and this justified perhaps upsetting some people. The Loving Spirit was still not to be published for six months, but she submitted this second novel as soon as it was ready. Both her agent and her publisher were surprised by it. They were fairly certain it would not have the appeal of the first, but on the other hand amazed to find that in this new young author they had someone more versatile than they had suspected. If Daphne du Maurier, aged only twenty-three, could in the space of nine months produce two such radically different novels, then the future looked bright indeed for all of them.
Heinemann, secure in this knowledge, put a great deal of preparation into the publication of The Loving Spirit on 23 February 1931.3 Naturally, much was made of the du Maurier name and of the author’s youth and beauty – newspapers and magazines then, as now, liked to brighten their pages with photographs of lovely girls, especially lovely girls from famous families. The publicity drum beat loudly and the book was a great success in every way. It was widely reviewed by eminent critics – including Rebecca West – and sold well, for a first novel.
In America it had a tougher but equally prominent reception. Rebecca West’s quote – ‘a whopper of a romantic novel in the vein of Emily Brontë’ – which was used in the publicity by Doubleday, may have worked against it. The influential Saturday Review of Literature was rather scathing about the Brontë comparison, though conceding that The Loving Spirit was indeed in the romantic tradition and as such ‘interesting’. But it was the New York Herald Tribune which, either side of the Atlantic, proved the most perspicacious and prophetic. ‘When some literary historian comes to survey the first third of the twentieth century,’ it suggested, ‘he will have fun tracing the roots of the flourishing young romantic revival that is growing up among us.’ It went on to claim that after the First World War there had been a deluge of realism, ‘sparing no ghastly detail’, followed now by ‘a surprising number of long leisurely books to be savoured quietly’. It predicted that these ‘modern romantics’ would gain ground steadily because the public desperately needed not just the escapism offered, but the ‘sense of continuity’ these ‘saga novels’ gave. It noted, too, that in the bestseller list together with The Loving Spirit was Hugh Walpole’s Judith Paris (the second volume of his hugely popular Herries Chronicle) which supported this theory.
No first novelist could have had more attention, but Daphne was more impressed by the cheque, which arrived from Heinemann, and by her father’s delight. She hoped this delight would not be short-lived and prepared herself for it to turn to disapproval on the publication of I’ll Never be Young Again. Heinemann paid her more for her second novel – £125 as opposed to £75 – but to her surprise and disappointment printed three hundred fewer copies. The reaction of her family and friends – all so delighted with and proud of The Loving Spirit – was expected but none the less a little depressing. Tod hated it, as did Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Aunt Billie, but Angela, who was writing a novel herself4 at the time, was fascinated by it, and Gerald managed to say carefully loyal things.
Already Daphne had an idea for a third novel, which she started in Paris in January 1931 and continued in Fowey in March, as soon as The Loving Spirit was out. Rather to her surprise, this third book, The Progress of Julius, took nine months to complete. It was yet another departure, as different from I’ll Never Be Young Again as that novel had been from The Loving Spirit. By the time all three novels had been published it was impossible to predict which way this young writer would go, how she would develop.
The Progress of Julius is a powerful, if flawed novel, with a vigour in the writing absent from Daphne’s first two novels. This time she had an overall vision of one character, Julius Levy himself. This is a man whose whole life is dedicated to getting ‘something for nothing’, but who discovers, in his daughter Gabriel, his only true pleasure and satisfaction. But his joy in this daughter comes to an end when he finds he cannot possess and control her as he has possessed and controlled everything else in his life, even his wife. The murder of Gabriel by Julius, a murder he gets away with, is a horrifying but absolutely logical end to the story.
The story, since it covers the whole of a man’s life, compresses a great deal of material. Julius’ childhood, in the Paris of 1860–1872, and his youth in Algiers are sketched with great zest and written at a great, galloping pace. He is unmoved by the sight of his father murdering his mother (found in bed with another man because the child Julius has betrayed her), and by the girl prostitute who adores him so much that she is willing to endure any humiliation at his hands. On and on Julius goes, richer but uglier by the minute.
Daphne keeps his character perfectly consistent, and though there are many highly melodramatic episodes, sometimes teetering on the edge of the ludicrous, never for one moment is Julius’ single-mindedness doubted. She sees him as a type, but there is a wealth of detail in her observations on Julius’ behaviour. She knew how self-made Jewish millionaires conducted themselves and knew, too, the kind of prejudice which existed against them in the first quarter of the century. But it was in Julius’ relationship with his daughter that she developed her main theme and put into it her strongest personal feelings. What makes this novel startling is its clear autobiographical content.
Julius has ‘a voracious passion’ for his daughter, who is ‘exactly [like him] . . . in their supreme blind egotism’. When Julius sees his adolescent daughter playing the flute he finds he is overcome by ‘an odd taste in his mouth, and a sensation in mind and body that was shameful and unclean’. He cannot resist asking her ‘Do you like me?’ and her evasive answers enrage him. She tells him not to be silly and he asks her if she is a child or does she torment him on purpose? ‘I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about,’ says Gabriel, to be told, ‘You’re a bloody liar.’ The tension between them mounts, only to be diffused by the entry of Rachel, Gabriel’s mother.
This is one of many scenes in which Daphne puts into Julius’ mouth sentiments very near to Gerald’s own and, into Gabriel’s, words she herself had thought or written, if not uttered.5 Julius, told by his daughter that his wife Rachel is jealous of her, at first finds this ‘funny’ and then ‘the idea excited him’. Gabriel is not so excited. She tells him not ‘to harp at me, it bores me’ and he calls her ‘a bitch’. When she starts to have boyfriends and Julius’ own jealousy begins there are scenes closely matching those Daphne had endured with Gerald. Gabriel is so angry with Julius’ ridiculous snooping that she tells him to go to hell. She almost begins to hate him – ‘he was relentless, he was like some oppressive, suffocating power that stifled her . . . it was too much for her, too strong’. Yet at the same time she knew ultimately ‘she would be the victor . . . she held him between her hands and he did not know . . . Papa would be hurt.’ Just as in J. M. Barrie’s play Dear Brutus, she, the daughter, would do the hurting. It comes as a great shock to find that, although Gabriel does indeed do the hurting, she pays with her life. Unable to bear the thought of her with a lover, her father strangles her. She was lost to him, but nobody else could have her.
What Daphne put into The Progress of Julius in the last two parts was remarkable enough in its confessional content, but what she left out was even more revealing. The novel was handwritten in exercise books and contains extensive crossings-out. Whole pages are scored through, but are still legible. In the first rejected version the hatred of the mother goes much further than it does in the final novel. Julius’ father tells him he has always loved him better than his wife – ‘I will love you better than anything in the world and we will always be together.’ Julius is entirely happy and glad his mother is out of the way. He enjoys his father holding him close and ‘patting his body, pressing his little behind’. This is heavily crossed out, and so is the child’s assertion that ‘we are happy because we are the same, Papa’ and the father’s assurance that his wife had only been of value because she was ‘nice to touch’. Julius is nicer, though. There is no record that Daphne herself at any time experienced the kind of fondling Julius received from his father, but the whole imagined relationship in this draft, first between Julius and his father, and then between Julius and his daughter, certainly suggests a strong indication that the physical contact between fathers and children fascinated if not troubled her.
Parts Two and Three, in which Julius’ rise to fame and fortune are recounted, suffer little change, but in Part Four, when Gabriel is growing up, some drastic cuts are made. They are mostly about the mother. Julius’ passion for Gabriel is said to have come ‘at a critical time to husband and wife . . . She must fade and dim and dissolve away . . . a woman with a grievance . . . not positively unhappy but negative, a shadow . . .’ When Rachel watches husband and daughter together the sexual tension between them is immediately apparent. She is reminded, looking at Julius’ face, of a drawing she had seen of ‘a satyr . . . with a look of yearning on his lascivious face . . . hands stretching to lose themselves in the hair of a wild bacchante [sic] who lay curled upon the branch of a tree’.
Strangely, Daphne had no qualms about Gerald reading The Progress of Julius. Her confidence may have been an indication that what she had written about this relationship bore no resemblance to her relationship with Gerald (though, of course, the more startling passages had been removed from the final draft), but Julius’ possessiveness, and the distress this caused his daughter, is undoubtedly Gerald’s, and everything Daphne writes about the darker side of Julius’ obsession echoes what she had recorded herself as feeling. The fact that she felt able to write about it at all showed she had to a great extent broken free of her father’s emotional demands. She loved him deeply, but his ability to torture her with his need for her had gone. She knew herself to be moving out of Gerald’s emotional reach. She was moving out of Carol’s far weaker claim on her too – she knew now that she would never marry him, although she had not yet told him. What filled her thoughts, in 1931, was her career.
And at that point she met Major ‘Boy’ Browning.