Book takes a sympathetic, perceptive look at du Maurier

DAPHNE DU MAURIER: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, by Margaret Forster, Doubleday, 457 pages, $25.

In July 1937, the 30-year-old English novelist Daphne du Maurier accompanied her husband, Maj. Tommy “Boy” Browning, to his army post in Egypt. In the heat of the North African summer, she settled down to work on a new novel, “the psychological and rather macabre” one that she had promised her publisher. But her first efforts resulted only in what she called a “literary miscarriage.”

“Sitting staring at this same typewriter,” writes her biographer, Margaret Forster, “with the heat making even her fingers perspire and stick to the keys, she experienced a feeling of panic. What if she had lost the ability to write at all? All she had was a provisional, titled, `Rebecca,’ 15,000 words in the wastepaper basket, and her notes. These read: `very roughly the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second … she is dead before the book opens. Little by little I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second … until wife 2 is haunted day and night … a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens … it’s not a ghost story.”

The struggle and false starts of du Maurier’s Egyptian summer turned out to be the birth pains of a novel that would prove to be the most famous and best loved of all her works. When “Rebecca” was published the next year, the novel was an instant success, captivating readers on both sides of the Atlantic with its suspenseful and mysterious story of love and jealousy. Alfred Hitchcock’s film version in 1940 helped to popularize the book and its author even more.

“Never before had she entered the mind of any of her characters to this extent …,” writes Forster, “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.”

“I don’t know another author who imagines so hard all the time,” said Norman Collins, one of du Maurier’s editors, after reading “Rebecca.”

Drawing on previously unseen diaries, letters and family photographs, Forster creates a portrait of du Maurier as a passionate and disciplined writer troubled by sexual ambiguity and a marriage turned sour. In this sympathetic and perceptive biography, Forster consistently puts understanding above scandal-hunting, especially in her examination of du Maurier’s love affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence.

Du Maurier’s affectionate, flamboyant father, the actor Gerald du Maurier; Maj. Browning, her dashing husband, whose postwar withdrawal into himself leads her to give him the nickname “Moper”; her good friend and idol, the elegant Ellen Doubleday, wife of the publisher Nelson Doubleday — all these influential figures in du Maurier’s life are portrayed with sensitivity and a novelist’s eye for eccentric detail.

One of the greatest delights of the biography are the judicious excerpts from du Maurier’s letters. The bitterness du Maurier sometimes felt was always “leavened with humor” in her letters, Forster points out, and her playful code names (“Cairo” for making love, for example) and expressive if sometimes caustic descriptions of people and places serve as reminders of the verve and skill of the celebrated storyteller.

“You believe Man is essentially good, but I don’t know. I wonder,” du Maurier wrote to her publisher and friend, Victor Gollancz, in a letter that gives a glimpse of both her art and her elitism. “Often … my heart goes out to a stranger, some little unknown woman at a cash desk … (I) am utterly moved and love the human race. Then volta face … a swarm of very noisy smelly people come crashing through a field to the woods here in bluebell time, dragging bluebells from the roots in a careless almost brutal fashion, all yelling … and then they strew the beach, once so white and lovely, with sandwich papers, cartons, corn-plasters, contraceptives, and all these are our well-fed millions.”

Brian Boyd is a fiction writer who lives on Islesford.