In 1934, at the age of twenty-seven, Daphne du Maurier published her first biography. Her recently dead actor father, with whom she had had an extremely close and, to some extent, psychologically disturbing relationship during her childhood and adolescence, was its subject. Son of George du Maurier, Punch artist and the author of Trilby, Gerald du Maurier was famous not for his assumption of any of the great classical roles but for the nonchalant elegance that he brought to contemporary drama. The biography provoked some of his friends and theatrical colleagues to disapproval for what they regarded as its undaughterly candour. But reviews and sales both immeasurably exceeded the young author’s hopes and expectations and brought her to the attention of a far wider public than her previous three novels had succeeded in doing.
The circumstances in which, some forty years later, Daphne du Maurier came to write her last two biographical works, The Winding Stair and its predecessor Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and Their Friends, were sadly different. As Margaret Forster poignantly records in her fine biography of du Maurier, the robust, eager, energetic, highly ambitious woman of the early years had by then become increasingly despondent and reclusive.
Worst of all, the imagination that had once been so fertile and fervent in its plotting of such best-sellers as Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek and My Cousin Rachel, now refused to yield up anything on which she could optimistically base another novel. The embarrassing and, to her, unexpected critical failure of her Rule Britannia, a satire based on the premise that Britain and the United States had been unified, must also have deterred her from embarking on further fiction—even though her fame ensured that that book nonetheless made her a satisfactorily large sum of money.
However, du Maurier felt confident that, even though she could no longer breathe life into invented situations, she still possessed the literary skill to do so into real ones. As both the Bacon books confirm, she was absolutely right in this belief. All the old ability incisively to delineate character, suspensefully to orchestrate incident and vividly to invoke atmosphere, are present in each.
One can only guess as to what impelled du Maurier, at this moment when the high tide in her life and suddenly begun to reverse itself, to write about Anthony and Francis Bacon and their friends. The novelist Robert Liddell, long resident in Greece, once told me that, on the occasion of a visit by her to Athens in the fifties, long before she had embarked on the Bacon project, he happened to mention that he had been rereading Francis Bacon’s Essays. At once she had responded with an enthusiasm matching his own. She then told him that a governess of hers had urged her to read the Essays in her late teens, that she had done so most reluctantly, but had then at once been overwhelmed. Subsequently, as Margaret Forster records, a reading of James Spedding’s monumental seven-volume The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon deeply impressed her. Like other of Bacon’s biographers, she was to rely heavily on it.
It may well be that du Maurier was also attracted to the subject by the rumours, current even in their lifetimes, that the two Bacon brothers had, as members of the intimate circle of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex, been involved in homosexual intrigues and even activities. Throughout her life, the subject of homosexuality fascinated du Maurier. Her unnaturally devoted father would often tell her that he wished that she had been born a boy. In her childhood and adolescence she even believed that she was a boy, trapped in the body of a girl—just as subsequently another writer, James (later Jan) Morris, believed that he was a woman trapped inside the body of a man.
When she was twenty-two du Maurier had had an affair, more passionate on his side than on hers, with the then apprentice but later famous film director Carol Reed, illegitimate son of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. This aroused the obsessive jealousy of her father. Subsequently she was a staunch wife to General ‘Boy’ Browning, a dapper, distinguished soldier. But nonetheless she was also repeatedly attracted to women. The most notable of these attachments, occurring in her fifties, was to the glamorous and worldly actress Gertrude Lawrence, for many years Noel Coward’s closest female friend, co-star and muse. Lawrence’s death at the early age of fifty-four totally devastated du Maurier. It could be said that it was after that bereavement that she began prematurely to give up on life and writing.
Unlike many authors of popular historical biographies, du Maurier resembled Antonia Fraser in being an indefatigable researcher. It is true that she employed others to help her in particularly onerous tasks, such as transcribing the letters of Lady Bacon, mother of Anthony and Francis; but nonetheless she wore herself out with her reading of boxes and boxes of arcane records and her travelling not merely around England but also to France. When the two books appeared, scholars generously praised her thoroughness and accuracy. It was she who first revealed to an English readership a surprise discovery, made in the departmental archives of Tarn-et-Garonne the year before the first of the books, Golden Lads, appeared. This showed that during a sojourn in France Anthony Bacon had been accused of sodomy, then a capital crime.
After A. L. Rowse had read the copy of The Winding Stair presented to him by du Maurier, who was both a neighbour and a friend, he remarked favourably on it to the publisher Charles Monteith. But then he added, ‘The only trouble is that these woman biographers always fall in love with their subjects.’ If by this he meant that du Maurier had not been stringent enough when dealing with the less attractive aspects of Bacon’s character and life—his notorious extravagance, his deviousness, his consuming ambition, his disloyalty in acting for the prosecution at the arraignment for treason of his former friend and patron Essex at Westminster Hall, his unprincipled skill in shinning up the greasy pole of preferment—there was some degree of truth in the comment. But the fact that she was ‘in love’ with her protagonist had the great advantage that it enabled her to show for him the same kind of empathy that she had already shown in such abundance for even minor characters in her novels. Bacon was certainly a deeply flawed man; but he was also unique for his time in the depth of his erudition and the range and daring of his thought. Du Maurier is triumphant in conveying that uniqueness.
Macaulay wrote primly of Bacon that he was ‘a man whose principles were not strict and whose spirit was not high’. Lytton Strachey wrote of him that, ‘The detachment of speculation, the intensity of personal pride, and the uneasiness of nervous sensibility, the urgency of ambition, the opulence of superb taste—these qualities, blending, twisting, flashing together, gave to his secret spirit the subtle and glittering superficies of a serpent.’ Perhaps du Maurier does not fully convey the serpentine danger and cunning of this all too fallible man; but what she does perfectly convey is the brilliance and glamour of his genius.
Since the publication of her two biographies, Baconians have often claimed du Maurier as one of themselves. But although she produces a lot of evidence that might, if favourably interpreted, be regarded as supporting the attribution of Shakespeare’s plays to her hero, she never ventures further than the proposition that the two Bacon brothers and other noblemen with literary talent may have at various times acted as minor collaborators. As she saw it, this would have merely entailed providing Shakespeare with now a few lines, now a situation, now a character, and now perhaps even a sonnet.
Nonetheless, everything that du Maurier writes about this nobleman of formidable intellectual powers, potent imagination, wide culture, and a supreme gift for a memorable phrase, indicates that the sole authorship of such stupendous works of literature is something of which he might well have been capable.
Francis King, 2005