Finding Herself in Fowey

FINDING HERSELF IN FOWEY:

THE CASE OF DAPHNE DU MAURIER

Dr Ella Westland

OUTLINE

Daphne du Maurier herself emphasised the strong link between her identity as a writer and her personal commitment to Cornwall, her adopted land. This paper sketches several dimensions of this relationship, and (in Part II) looks at her attitude to tourism in Cornwall, and her sense of the parallel between a writer's stance and the tourist gaze.

PART I – Daphne du Maurier and Cornwall

(i)  the case for linking Daphne with Cornwall

(ii)  analysis of Daphne's account of her epiphany on the River Fowey when, as a young writer, she fell in love with Cornwall

(iii)  the mythologising of a writer's identity, and the modification of her image as a Cornish writer

PART II – Tourism and the writer's gaze

(iv)  Daphne's attitude to tourism as an incomer to Cornwall

(v)  her changing relationship to Cornwall from 1930s to 1970s

(vi)  her later use of the tourist as a figure for the writer

PART I – Daphne du Maurier and Cornwall

(i) In the public imagination, Daphne du Maurier is inseparable from Cornwall. Though she grew up in Hampstead, the second of three daughters of the successful actor and theatre manager, Gerald du Maurier, she spent two childhood holidays in Cornwall, and in 1926, when she was 19, she drove down with her mother and sisters to find a family holiday home. This was a converted boat-house on the bank of the River Fowey, renamed Ferryside, which is still owned by the du Maurier family.

Married with three children, she negotiated a lease on the manor house of Menabilly, near Fowey, moving in during the war and staying for 26 years. When the Rashleigh family decided to take their house back, they offered her the nearby dower house of Kilmarth, where she spent the rest of her life.

Half of her fictional output, and most of the famous du Maurier titles that made her such an extraordinary publishing phenomenon before and after the war – Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek, Rebecca, The King’s General, My Cousin Rachel – have Cornish settings, though of markedly different places and periods. Castle Dor, the novel begun by her old neighbour and mentor, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which she completed on his death, takes its title from a nearby Iron Age fort. One of her two plays was set at Ferryside; and the idea for her most famous short story, 'The Birds', came from watching seagulls follow the plough on the Gribben headland. The House on the Strand was inspired by her move to Kilmarth, and followed by her last novel Rule Britannia, set in the same area.

So, according to this widely accepted narrative, Daphne's identity and writing are inextricably bound up with Cornwall. This image has been relentlessly reinforced by the media – last summer, TV's Country File focused on the Fowey area, and during May 2007, the centenary of her birth, coverage includes a radio series on Woman's Hour of Cornish walks linked to her novels, and a TV programme introduced by the man who put Padstow on the map, the chef Rick Stein.

(ii) FINDING HERSELF IN FOWEY

In later life, Daphne du Maurier encouraged her audience to identify her with Cornwall. I'd like now to look now at Daphne's published account of a defining moment in her life – the discovery of Ferryside, which marked her return to Cornwall as a 19-year-old fledgling writer.

There was a smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain, a smell of tidal water. Down harbour, round the point, was the open sea. Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known. Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone. It could not be mere chance that brought us to the ferry, and the bottom of Bodinnick hill, and so to the board upon the gate beyond that said For Sale. I remembered a line from a forgotten book, where a lover looks for the first time upon his chosen one – ‘I for this, and this for me.’

Vanishing Cornwall (1967), p.6, quoted in Myself When Young (1981) pp.102-03

Already in this journal entry, as she relives her entrancement, Daphne’s distinctive talents are at work, arousing the reader’s senses with the ‘smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain'. The idea of the boundless ocean, tantalisingly close yet beyond the point, stirs within the reader an inchoate desire for escape from the restrictions of everyday life, offering an image of individual freedom that we will encounter many times in du Maurier’s Cornish fiction. Daphne's images of the future are of taking control of her life, walking and climbing, and holding the oars of her dinghy in her own hands. Yet her future is also laid out before her – there is a sense of destiny as powerful as that fixed in the premises of romantic fiction in the meant-to-be-ness of that meeting, a meeting that will bind her to one place for ever.

What, then, caused this sense of recognition, this kind of déjà vu? We can speculate that Daphne had entered a place already known to her through her reading – as she grew up, books had been her constant companions, as they are for most inventive children. It is hard to miss here:

Ø  the inescapable influence of the Romantic movement - Daphne was a devoted Bronte fan. English culture was (and is) still imbued with Romanticism, and any whiff of the sea brings it on in bucketfuls;

Ø  the boys' adventure stories she devoured as a child - another vital ingredient in the chemistry she experiences. We know (because she has singled them out) that her favourite tales included Treasure Island and Mr Midshipman Easy ;

Ø  the magical island of Peter Pan, a pervasive influence in du Maurier family culture – J.M.Barrie was the girls' Uncle Jim, who watched them act out Peter Pan in the nursery, and Daphne's father played the first Captain Hook.

But – if my assumption about this literary construction of Cornwall is correct (and of course you could equally legitimately go further back, and search for underlying psychological causes for her favouring these works in her early reading), and we have some explanation here for her damascene conversion – this does not in any way undermine its integrity.

There is something else rather intriguing going on in this passage in her easy adoption of a male stance – when she feels like a lover looking for the first time upon his chosen one. Daphne had been a defiant tomboy, with a imaginary male alter ego, a cricket-playing boy named Eric Avon. Because of her occasional bisexual leanings, much has been made of her reference to what she called her 'boy in the box', which she said she had to shut away on growing up – but it might be more significant to speculate that this boy had his freedom when Daphne was in writing mode, and what her male gaze at her lover, the land, betrays is the insouciance of the androgynous artist. As a writer she will be free, male and female in one. Or if she has to choose, she will be male, freely appropriating the land and water in her wandering and her purposeful oarsmanship.

However we interpret the nuances of the passage, what is being described here is her emerging sense of selfhood: crystallising around her identity as a writer, and caught up, inextricably and for ever, from this moment, with her idea of Cornwall.

(iii) Or so she says … This account is far from the spontaneity of the diaries that she and her sister produced at the time. The moment has been re-imagined forty years later, and carefully positioned in the narrative that represents Daphne's retrospective understanding of herself – and her projection of a public image.

The decision to include this extract from Vanishing Cornwall in the rather unrevealing memoir she published at the age of 70 publicly mythologises the event for posterity. An undeniably powerful passage, it is also in the process of being re-mythologised by readers, writers, and promoters of Daphne du Maurier. It is now often quoted, and appears this year on the back cover of the programme advertising the annual Daphne du Maurier festival in Fowey. And – as with, say, Charles Dickens's Blacking Factory – the more we talk about it, the harder it is to tell Daphne's story of selfhood any other way.

Daphne sealed her pact with Cornwall when she not only wrote her first book at Ferryside on the bank of the River Fowey but made the place the setting and, in some ways, the subject of The Loving Spirit. So far, so Cornish. But she was not living in Fowey permanently, and her next two books, I'll Never be Young Again and The Progress of Julius, ranged ambitiously in their settings from Paris to Stockholm and Algiers. Evidently at this early stage of her career Daphne did not see herself as in any sense a 'Cornish novelist'.

Another telling fact is that she composed some of her best-known Cornish books before she lived at Menabilly, and at a great distance from Cornwall. As the young wife of a senior army officer, she found herself writing Jamaica Inn in Surrey, Rebecca in Alexandria, and Frenchman’s Creek in wartime Hertfordshire. Her yearning for Cornwall made these novels even more atmospheric. But there is anxiety in her mind about her access to these places even in her memory – in the opening lines of Rebecca, the narrator passes only with difficulty - in a dream - through the gate of Manderley:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.

Daphne wrote most evocatively about Cornwall when she was exiled from the place she longed for, or haunted by the nightmare of dispossession.

The King's General, a historical novel about Menabilly in the Civil War, was conceived on first moving to Menabilly – when it was not certain that her tenure of the house would be a long one. The House on the Strand, a brilliant time travel story set at Kilmarth, emerged at the time of her move from Menabilly to Kilmarth. In other words, both books were produced on the cusp of her residence in these houses. During the 26 productive years she spent at Menabilly, the only Cornish novel to appear was My Cousin Rachel, which bears the marks of an emotionally turbulent period of her inner life. The estate owned by Rachel's admirers in the novel is a re-invention of Menabilly, but, far from being a place of contentment, this Menabilly has a decaying corpse swinging from a gibbet outside its gates and a dark foreign woman within.

However great Daphne du Maurier's personal need for seclusion and security in order to write, a need satisfied by her long tenure of Menabilly, and however great her love of this quiet Cornish house and its dramatic coastal landscape, having a settled relationship with the place she inhabited was not the driving force that generated the vividly imagined Cornwall that her readers know.

And – one final, if obvious, point worth stressing about the relationship between Daphne's beloved Fowey and her representations of Cornwall – Daphne is obviously not writing about one Cornwall, even when she returns in her fiction to the same geographical place. Often it is her Gothic imagination that suffuses a lovely landscape with a sinister atmosphere, projecting the mental state of a tormented narrator. It is not only an urban landscape (such as the London that our first speaker explored) that can be multifarious and haunted! And a seascape is of course tantalisingly hard to capture with its shifts in tides and weather, waves and currents: Daphne was highly sensitive to all these continual natural changes. Even in her first novel, The Loving Spirit, which - I have suggested - can be seen as springing from that first moment of identification with Fowey, and can be read on one level as a reasonably factual account, geographically and historically, of life in a riverside village, the landscape has a symbolic use in mapping female identity, as the heroine is torn between domesticity and wildness, the cottage and the cliffs. Daphne writes always out of her transforming imagination, and therefore gives us as many Cornwalls as there are chapters in her Cornish books.

Despite the undeniable symbiosis between Cornwall and Daphne's writing life, the relationship must be recognised as unstable – and far more problematic than she was prepared to admit in her later reflections on her own identity as a writer.

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PART II – Tourism and the writer's gaze

There are many models for understanding the dynamics between a person and a place, and I have already touched briefly on several different ways of dealing with Daphne and Cornwall. The only moral I would like to draw at this stage is that the methodologies employed on the Understanding Landscape project will of necessity have to be plural. But for the final part of this paper, I would like to make specific use of the concept of the 'tourist gaze', which has proved to be a powerful tool for understanding the nexus of place/ identity/ modernity since the pioneering publications of Dean MacCannell in the 1970s. I am not going to look now at the possible association between the tourist gaze and the incomer gaze, which could (arguably) be applied to Daphne du Maurier's representations of Cornwall. Instead I am going to focus on Daphne's own obsession with tourism, her disgust at tourist attitudes, her admission that she herself played the tourist role (but only when outside Cornwall), and her growing awareness that, as a writer, she was taking up a position vis-à-vis her material that was uncomfortably close to the tourist's stance.

(iv) Daphne was always vexed by the summer intrusion of tourists and holiday makers into her personal corner of Cornwall. Her Cornish novels tend to use tourism to highlight the ugliness and artificiality of the modern world, thereby magnifying the allure of the past. In The House on the Strand, where time travel takes the reader back to medieval Cornwall, modern bathing huts are described as lining the Cornish sands on Par Beach ‘like dentures in an open mouth.’ Even in pre-war Rebecca, holiday-makers threaten the margins of Manderley, not only with the litter and noise that Daphne detested but also with their degrading lack of appreciation of the landscape. She was as it were in rightful possession of Menabilly by virtue of her love of this Cornish coastline, just as Maxim de Winter was the rightful inheritor of Manderley.