The Birds and Other Stories

"First of all, I don’t agree with the term ‘historical romance.’ ‘Romance’ is a label that gets stuck to du Maurier and just will not go away. She admits that this is a correct label for Frenchman’s Creek , the novel where the aristocratic woman has an affair with a pirate. That is ‘Romance with a capital R!’, as she put it. She wrote it as escapism in 1941, during the war—Dona St Columb escapes her dull life with her dull husband by being swept off her feet by a pirate, it’s very beguiling! But it’s also romance in the medieval sense. The romance form in England is actually about adventure. “‘Romance’ is a label that gets stuck to du Maurier and just will not go away” In a way reminiscent of Walter Scott, it’s historical romance but in the sense of quests, adventure, rebellion, strong women, and so on. The portrayal of love in some ways in King’s General is probably one of the most emotionally felt. There’s a realism about the relationship between Honor and Richard Grenvile, Honor knows him for who he truly is and doesn’t shy away from his dastardly reputation. Often, sex and love in du Maurier are quite dark. Sex is often about power, which you certainly see in The Birds collection with the lady in ‘The Little Photographer,’ the Marquise, who has an affair because she’s a bit bored, and enjoys being in control and in power over the photographer with the clubfoot who is clearly completely besotted with her. When she’s had enough of him, she pushes him off a cliff in the most cold, calculating way. But the twist in the tale shows that the Marquise may get her comeuppance after all. Du Maurier’s short stories are masterful in their unexpected endings. I think they have been there all along. For example, Gartred in The King’s General is out for what she can get. She wants her own life and independence, she wants to make her own kinds of choices. That’s also a major theme in My Cousin Rachel (1951), which is written around the same time as The Birds , and deals with an enigmatic, bewitching woman who may or may not be a murderer, it’s up to the reader to decide! Daphne often uses male narrators to show how men represent or misrepresent or attempt to control women and women’s identities. This is apparent in Rebecca , too. Maxim can’t stand the idea of Rebecca’s control over her own life, indeed her control over Manderley, the symbol of his patriarchal identity. It’s quite timely, actually, in the #MeToo era. Part of it is a play with technique. She often experimented with form, especially in her short stories. For example, she wrote a short story in the form of letters and telegrams. But it’s also typical du Maurier sleight-of-hand. While she’s nameless, it’s easy to think the book is all about Rebecca. But I found this when re-reading it this year for the 80th anniversary, that Mrs de Winter is actually a much stronger character than you think she is. This is her narrative; she’s controlling our perspective. She’s both encouraging us to fantasise and imagine and fall for Rebecca, but she’s also very powerful in moments when she wants to assert her own identity and consciousness. She says to Mrs Danvers, “I am Mrs de Winter now, you know.” On first reading, you think of her as a mousy, shy, nothing of a person. But it’s a bit of a pretence. Actually, she’s the voice controlling the narrative. Du Maurier brilliantly shows us how things that are very familiar, domestic and ordinary can suddenly turn on us. ‘The Birds’ had a real-life inspiration: she was walking around the Menabilly lands. She saw a farmer with all these gulls circling around him. As some began flying down towards him, she suddenly thought, ‘What if the birds turned?’ It’s not just one species—it’s all the species of birds. It’s as if they’re all working together. The attacks, too, work like the tide; when it comes in, they attack, and when it goes out, they retreat. There’s this awful suspense, relief followed by inevitable attack. It’s terrifying. Her publisher Victor Gollancz described it as a ‘masterpiece’ and much of that is down to the pacing. Cornwall is also right on the edge of things. The characters have to fend for themselves, because no one ‘up country’ is going to do anything. Once the radios stop working, they’ve had it. Nat has to step up and protect his family. “It’s no wonder Tippi Hedren had a nervous breakdown at the end of filming Hitchcock’s The Birds ” The most disturbing part of the story is when he’s trying to secure the house against attack. He hasn’t got quite enough stuff to do it with, but there are dead birds everywhere, so he decides to use them. He wedges them in the gaps in the windows. The image of this house, covered in blood and feathers, ‘the bleeding bodies of the birds’, is completely horrifying and repulsive. It’s no wonder Tippi Hedren had a nervous breakdown at the end of filming Hitchcock’s The Birds . His control of her as a director was terrifying on so many levels. Loads of people ended up in hospital when The Birds was being filmed, because they had real birds and actors were often smeared with meat and fish to attract them. Sure, they had bird handlers, but they were essentially throwing birds at people. Worst of all was filming the attic scene, which is the most horrifying bit. Hedren had been told that they would use mechanical birds for the scene but not only did they use real birds—when I read this, I couldn’t believe it, as a fan of Hitchcock’s work—he tied the birds to her costume with elastic. They flew at her and bounced back, they were literally attached to her clothes. She nearly got her eye pecked out. The terror in her eyes, in that scene? That’s real. His exploitation of her was extraordinary. At that time, she wasn’t a well-known actress. She’d done commercials mainly. He also slapped Joan Fontaine across the face during a Rebecca scene. She played it and played it and played it, and said, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do any more tears; you’ll have to slap me.’ Instead of telling her to have a rest, he slapped her. He really made her feel as insecure as Mrs de Winter throughout the filming process. She was already anxious because she felt that Laurence Olivier didn’t want her in the part (which he didn’t—he wanted Vivian Leigh, because he was having an affair with her.) The power dynamic between men and women recurs again and again in du Maurier’s work as characters are pushed to their breaking point. There are two with female killers, ‘The Little Photographer’ and ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger.’ Here and in My Cousin Rachel , too, women refuse to be controlled by men. At the end of ‘The Little Photographer,’ she feels some guilt for what she’s done, but she’s also worried that she’s going to be blackmailed, and that she may have a child that will betray the fact that she had an affair. She’s worried for her own sake. ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’ is so powerful because it’s an inversion of what you’re expecting. The male narrator is, in a way, stalking the cinema usherette girl, and you get this awful sense of him as a predator following her. Of course, the sting in the tail is that she’s the predator. She’s been murdering all these RAF men and he only just escapes. But he still doesn’t really quite clock who she is, and the danger he was in. It’s a great inversion and quite thrilling. I think it’s partly because she was publicised and advertised as best-selling. ‘The latest best-seller from du Maurier’ was pretty much how most of the books were sold—you know, ‘From the author of Rebecca , which has now sold a million copies . ’ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Cambridge English professor, and friend and mentor of Daphne’s, said ‘The critics will never forgive you for writing Rebecca ’, and it’s basically true. She says in one of her letters—I nearly picked one of her letter collections, Letters from Menabilly —when The Scapegoat is being published in 1957, that if her publisher, Victor Gollancz, said “this book has sold no copies, and nobody who has looked at it can understand a word”, the critics would be nice for once!’ And I think she was right in that assessment. Yes. Even early on with The Loving Spirit , when people began to realise she might be a writer in the tradition of the Brontës and one to watch, it was never quite a favourable comparison. It was that she wasn’t quite as good as the Brontës, for all the atmosphere and sense of place in her work. And her historical fiction came in for a lot of criticism. Reviewers said she had no sense of the language of the period and yet as my research has shown, her knowledge of the Civil War was excellent and her ability to recreate its drama was second to none. Women who write historical fiction are often dismissed for such failings and the ‘romance’ label is persistently used as a way to pigeon-hole and dismiss writers such as du Maurier. Aside from Frenchman’s Creek , her work isn’t romantic at all! Unfortunately, women writers in particular are far more likely to be criticised than applauded, even today. Overall, the critics just didn’t recognise the range and quality of what she was writing, even though the reading public clearly did. What writers like Woolf and Angela Carter are praised for—stylistic experimentation, feminist themes, for example—du Maurier often does at the same time or even earlier. Daphne works hard to achieve a room of her own and she is a huge influence on modern women writers, from Sarah Waters to Sarah Perry. So the difference in reception is very strange. It’s partly Rebecca ; it’s partly the ‘romantic’ label; it’s partly how authors are mythologized and categorised, especially those who are bestsellers. That’s the subject of my next book: a redefinition of du Maurier."