Myself when Young – Daphne du Maurier (1977)

The week has really flown by and suddenly there are only a couple of days left of #DDMreadingweek, don’t worry however if you will be posting reviews after the fact – it really doesn’t matter. I still look forward to seeing what you’ve been reading and what you thought. I’m still catching up with other people’s reviews this week anyway. 

The second book I decided to read for DDM week was Myself When Young: The shaping of a writer. It is a memoir Daphne du Maurier wrote about the first twenty-five years of her life, when she herself was nearing seventy, using the diaries she had kept between 1920 and 1932. According to Helen Taylor in her introduction to this edition, DDM wrote the book with some reluctance as part of the commemoration of her seventieth birthday and out of a depression and writers block. At this time she was going through some personal difficulties – worry over two of her children, and a wrangle with Richard Attenborough over how her late husband was to be portrayed in a film he was making. 

This memoir begins with some of DDM’s earliest recollections. I always really enjoy childhood memoirs of the sort of period DDM was writing about – she was born in 1907. Her memories of this time include stories of the family nurse who took care of the children while they were young, the women who came to the house to teach them, her older sister Angela and her younger sister Jeanne. Her parents are portrayed with less affection than I had expected, though as the book progresses we see something of the difficult relationship she had with them. Other relatives like Aunty Billy and Big Granny crop up in stories of various visits and holidays that took place throughout what was a very privileged upbringing. 

“We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.”

Gerald du Maurier, Daphne’s father, was a famous actor-manager in the London theatre – his world was not one that Daphne particularly enjoyed. The portrait of Gerlad here is fairly benign, though  I have read other things in the past that suggest a much more complex, even disturbing relationship may have existed. Apparently her own biography of her father shows him in quite a different, unflattering light. The young DDM grows up absurdly sheltered, knowing nothing of sex for instance until she is around eighteen. There was also a strange relationship the adolescent Daphne had with an older, married cousin ‘nothing happened’ as the saying goes – and yet, there’s something distinctly inappropriate, and one wonders at Gerald’s anxious watching of them that DDM describes, fatherly concern or jealousy? The older Daphne gets, the more we get the sense that she needs to get away from her family, she certainly had more freedom than many young women of that time, yet she craved ever more. 

“I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that freedom is the only thing that matters to me at all. Also utter irresponsibility! Never to have to obey any laws or rules, only certain standards one sets for oneself. I want to revolt, as an individual, against everything that ‘ties.’ If only one could live one’s life unhampered in any way, not getting in knots and twisting up. There must be a free way, without making a muck of it all.” 

She spends a lot of time in Paris, finishing school first, which she enjoys and later spending time with her friend Fernande – her former teacher. She becomes increasingly fed up with London life, she has no time for the theatre and is fairly horrified when persuaded to do a screen test. She is determined to write from a fairly young age, but struggles with the form, trying poetry and short stories. Then she is allowed to spend time alone at the family’s house in Cornwall and her love affair with the county begins. She wishes she could stay there always, she takes up sailing, she has a boat commissioned for her – she carries on writing. Her efforts are continually frustrated – until someone in publishing tells her to forget the short stories and just write a novel – and she is off. Writing her first novel The Loving Spirit in just ten weeks. 

The book ends at a good, happy period of DDM’s life, a published author of two novels and newly married to her husband Tommy. Luckily for us, there was so much more to come too.