Header overlay

Daphne’s Moment of Decadence

If Daphne du Maurier had tottered on for as long as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother she would have been celebrating her 100th birthday this year and with almost as much fuss. Even without the Dame’s physical presence there will be a celebratory conference at the eponymous literary festival which has taken place for the last decade in the Cornwall about which she wrote so evocatively. There are also plans for a remake of the film of Jamaica Inn, theatrical versions of The Birds and Don’t Look Now and, as usual, much on the Rebecca front. Indeed Kits Browning, Daphne’s son, who manages her estate, has told me that a Rebecca musical – of all things – has just opened in Vienna – of all places. This can only be a harbinger of more improbable du Maurier revivals and adaptations in her centenary year.

Du Maurier’s reputation seems, if possible, to grow with the years, not least because she is so difficult to pin down. Everyone, including Margaret Forster, her often uncomfortable official biographer, feels that she is, in a sense, a romantic novelist, but she also manages to be one with a literary reputation. This makes her unusual, if not unique.

As the world pores over the du Maurier oeuvre in her centenary year the one bet I would venture is that hardly anyone will even mention the novel which I like best of all – The Parasites. There is no swashbuckling or crinkled crinoline here, for this is a brittle story of contemporary life, written in 1949. I think it has strong elements of autobiography about it. It is uncomfortable, sometimes almost shocking. You could argue that all her novels are, up to a point, untypical, but this is a one-off. Above all it is very funny which,

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

If Daphne du Maurier had tottered on for as long as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother she would have been celebrating her 100th birthday this year and with almost as much fuss. Even without the Dame’s physical presence there will be a celebratory conference at the eponymous literary festival which has taken place for the last decade in the Cornwall about which she wrote so evocatively. There are also plans for a remake of the film of Jamaica Inn, theatrical versions of The Birds and Don’t Look Now and, as usual, much on the Rebecca front. Indeed Kits Browning, Daphne’s son, who manages her estate, has told me that a Rebecca musical – of all things – has just opened in Vienna – of all places. This can only be a harbinger of more improbable du Maurier revivals and adaptations in her centenary year.

Du Maurier’s reputation seems, if possible, to grow with the years, not least because she is so difficult to pin down. Everyone, including Margaret Forster, her often uncomfortable official biographer, feels that she is, in a sense, a romantic novelist, but she also manages to be one with a literary reputation. This makes her unusual, if not unique. As the world pores over the du Maurier oeuvre in her centenary year the one bet I would venture is that hardly anyone will even mention the novel which I like best of all – The Parasites. There is no swashbuckling or crinkled crinoline here, for this is a brittle story of contemporary life, written in 1949. I think it has strong elements of autobiography about it. It is uncomfortable, sometimes almost shocking. You could argue that all her novels are, up to a point, untypical, but this is a one-off. Above all it is very funny which, in print at least, is not what one thinks of when one thinks of du Maurier. At times it reads almost like Evelyn Waugh. The funniest scene in the book is one in which Pappy, who simply must be a fictional rendering of Daphne’s larger-than-life father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, packs for a weekend house-party at a grisly sounding country mansion called Coldhammer. Pappy is a hypochondriac, an egomaniac and a fusspot. ‘When I pack,’ he bawls at his wretched daughter, ‘I pack for all eternity.’ He does too. As the book has it:
He had too much luggage. One suitcase was entirely filled with medicines. Enos, cinnamon, Vapex, Taxel, friar’s balsam, even syringes and rubber tubes. ‘You never know, my darling,’ said Pappy, ‘I may be taken ill. I may have to stay at Coldhammer for months, with two nurses, night and day.’
Pappy is however only a peripheral figure in the novel, which is dominated by three siblings – Maria, Niall and Celia. Maria and Niall are the illegitimate children born before the Delaneys met and married. The only one of the trio who is the legitimate child of both parents is Celia. Margaret Forster in her rather gloomy biography of Daphne says that the three young Delaneys ‘represent different facets of herself ’. I am wary of this sort of literary criticism, sensing, as Forster herself must know from her own novel-writing experience, that novelists don’t really work like that. Nevertheless The Parasites does strike me as the most personal and passionate of the du Maurier novels. Maria, the eldest Delaney, is an actress, married to the home-loving, bridge-playing Charles. She is clever, brittle and, superficially at least, the sort of 1920s and ’30s showbiz character Daphne must have known all too well as a result of her own theatrical upbringing. In fact it’s often forgotten that there was a part of Daphne herself that actually revelled in being what we would now describe as a ‘celebrity’. Niall is also a ‘celebrity’ – a Noël Cowardish figure who writes tremendously successful popular songs while acknowledging that they are really only ‘cheap music’. Part of him is slightly ashamed of his facile success, and he has hidden depths and intriguingly dangerous sexual cravings. Celia is cosy and mumsy yet unfulfilled. She dotes not only on Niall and Maria but also on Maria’s children – which Maria herself doesn’t always manage. When the novel opens, Charles and Maria’s marriage is already in disarray, and one damp weekend at Farthings, their house in the country, Charles, normally so controlled and apparently benign, snaps and picks up on a clue in the crossword. ‘A parasite,’ he says.
And that’s what you are, the three of you. Parasites. The whole bunch. You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change. You are doubly, triply parasitic; first because you’ve traded ever since childhood on that seed of talent you had the luck to inherit from your fantastic forbears; secondly, because you’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist; and thirdly, because you prey upon each other, the three of you, living in a world of fantasy which you have created for yourselves and which bears no relation to anything in heaven or on earth.
The rest of the novel is taken up, more or less, with examining this proposition, mainly by using flashbacks to explore the childhood and adolescence of the three young Delaneys. They travel everywhere with their thespian parents, at once indulged and deprived. It seems that they have no normal friends beyond their family and no conventional schooling. They move rootlessly from one first night to another, not as children but as rather blasé grown-ups in miniature. This was the only book that Daphne wrote quite spontaneously and without meticulous planning. She did so in a garden shed that she had erected in the grounds of Menabilly, the Cornish house she so loved and which served as the model for the brooding presence of Manderley, Maxim de Winter’s home in Rebecca. Du Maurier wrote The Parasites at a time when her own marriage to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning, more usually known as Tommy, ‘Boy’ or, to her, ‘Moper’, was in trouble. Browning, a distinguished and much-decorated young officer in the First World War, was a more controversial soldier in the second, famous for his supposed remark that Arnhem might be ‘a bridge too far’, which became the title for a Richard Attenborough film. Browning had come home from his second war to find a wife now wedded to life in remote, rural Cornwall and three children aged 13, 9 and 5 whom he hardly knew. He himself retired from the army and joined the staff of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip at Clarence House. His life was essentially metropolitan and, as so often happens to those who work at Court, he became virtually an adjunct of his royal bosses, working ridiculously long hours and becoming almost totally absorbed in their lives. Daphne on the other hand did not like the army or the stuffy formality of life at Court, much preferring the romantic wilds of Cornwall. Boy moped, periodically lost his temper, drank more than he should and led a bachelorish life in London. Daphne wrote in her garden shed, brought up the children, went for long solitary walks and became famous and also, though she was perfectly companionable if choosy about her friends, a recluse. Is Charles ‘Boy’ Browning? Well, as so often, even in a roman-à-clef, yes and no. Like Boy, Charles has a deeply conventional upper-middle-class side to his character and this demands a wife to match. Sadly neither real-life Daphne nor fictional Maria are able to deliver, which is part of the reason why both marriages are in crisis. In The Parasites Charles demands a divorce and finds solace with another. Maria carries on acting, caring, like the Miller of Dee, for no one, while no one cares for her; Celia takes refuge in an ostrich-like domesticity; and Niall takes his decrepit little boat out for a sail and she springs a leak. I rather assume he drowns, but du Maurier herself never spells this out. Typically, she left a suggestion in a letter to her friend and confidante Maureen Baker-Munton, formerly her father Gerald’s secretary, that Niall may have survived to live again in another book under another name. Daphne famously used a similar boating ‘accident’ as a pivotal moment in Rebecca. She was herself a keen sailor though not as proficient as her husband who was, for many years, Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club. She lived by the sea in a seafaring community and, in a sense, the salt got into her blood. Victor Gollancz, Daphne’s adoring and protective publisher, loved The Parasites and so did her friend, the actress Gertrude Lawrence. Sadly they seemed to be the only ones. Sales were, by her standards, poor and the reviewers generally disliked it. There was a slightly prudish distaste for its exotic sexuality, a feeling that it had been written too hastily. Yet as well as being a very funny book, The Parasites is sad and dangerous, not to mention sexy. It gives off an aura of decadence, laced with hints of sibling incest and forbidden relationships, gaslight and greasepaint. Those of us who savour it will never be as numerous as those who worship Rebecca and other favourites, but I have a feeling that we think we know something other du Maurier fans don’t. To say that The Parasites was born out of the Brownings’ marital breakdown may be an over-simplification, but the book’s dedication has an anger and pathos which still have the power to move. Daphne du Maurier signed it ‘Menabilly, Spring 1949’ and the dedication reads simply, ‘For whom the cap fits’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Tim Heald 2007


About the contributor

Tim Heald lives in Fowey, Cornwall, not far from several of the houses in which Daphne du Maurier lived. His biography of Princess Margaret was published in 2007 and was followed by his whodunit, A Death on the Ocean Wave.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.