The Power of Darkness: How Night Skies Inspire Creative Thoughts

In the summer of 1957, Daphne du Maurier was riding high. Her latest book, The Scapegoat , had been lapped up by the critics she most respected, and a film adaptation was under way. Even better, her favorite actor (the legendary Alec Guinness) had been cast in the lead role, and the script was being penned by the rising star Gore Vidal. But on Monday, July 1, a few weeks after her fiftieth birthday and two weeks before her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party, Daphne received a phone call. Her husband, Tommy, had collapsed in London and was in the hospital. She rushed to his bedside, horrified to find him sobbing and “emaciated and exhausted, his body all skin and bone, looking suddenly ten years older.” More shock was to follow: when Daphne returned to the pair’s London flat, the phone rang, the caller introducing herself as Tommy’s lover. The woman accused a speechless Daphne of causing her husband’s breakdown, forcing him to live a double life, making him turn to alcohol of necessity. Devastated, Daphne took a double dose of sleeping pills, but to no avail. She didn’t sleep that night, her mind whirring frenetically. Instead she wrote a long letter to Tommy. The next morning she put the letter into his hand, then fled back to her country house, Menabilly, in Devon. Here, she told friends that only swimming and visiting her increasingly frail mother could soothe her broken nerves. As for writing (her customary means of catharsis), there was no chance: “I have no writing plans at the moment—can’t,” she wrote to a friend. A wariness of the dark combined with low light alters how we think and write. To add to the disruption, Tommy arrived at Menabilly—a place he’d previously inhabited only on weekends—to recuperate. Here he sat in front of the television surreptitiously drinking. His doctor made it clear that Tommy could no longer be alone. Suddenly Daphne was cast in the role of caregiver, grimly watching the deterioration of both her husband and her mother, while her own much-needed independence and solitude vanished. Friends—frightened […]

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