by Alec Waugh
For the next seven years he wrote exclusively for the stage. Walking past the Comedy Theatre where the ‘House Full’ boards were up outside Mrs Dot, he thought, at the sight of a sunset above Panton Street, ‘Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it.’ He planned never to write another book. But he had reckoned without his temperament. He found himself living in his own past. ‘It became,’ he wrote, ‘such a burden to me that I made up my mind that I could only regain my peace by writing it all down in the form of a novel.’ That was shortly before World War I and the novel was Of Human Bondage.
It was published in 1915 and in England it made little stir. It had no bearing on the war and the very qualities that have given it a capacity to interest the readers of later generations prevented it from succeeding then. It dealt with permanent problems at a time when the public was concerned with the day’s events. No, it is not surprising that W. L. George writing in 1918 should have failed to realize on the evidence of a single book that the course of Maugham’s career had changed direction. The betting was a hundred to one against any such occurrence. But this happened to be the hundredth time.
‘Success,’ he was to write twenty years later in The Summing Up, ‘may well cut the author off from the material that is its source,’ and this might have been his fate. His plays earned him a great deal of money at a time when income-tax was low; he bought himself a house in Mayfair, and soon after married. Had the marriage proved a happy one he would presumably have led a fashionable metropolitan life, writing Mayfair comedies, until after a dozen or so years his material wore thin. Luckily for literature that did not happen. His marriage was a failure. Personal unhappiness made him dissatisfied both with the life that he was leading and the work he was producing. ‘I was tired of the man I was,’ he wrote, ‘and it seemed to me that by a long journey to some far country I might renew myself.’
He was over forty, and the exigencies of his war-time duties in Intelligence simplified the cutting of his links with England. They gave him a chance of visiting the South Pacific. As soon as the war was over he went to China. The South Seas gave him Rain and The Moon and Sixpence, but the Far East was to give him more; it brought him back to the material he understood. He had roots in Malaya to an extent that he had never had in Mayfair.
He had been educated at one of the smaller public schools, and it was from this type of school that were recruited the bank clerks, district officers and planters who people his Malayan stories. The lives that were led in England by the cousins and brothers of his characters, in the prim domesticities of suburbia, would have bored him inexpressibly but their own lives against the background of the East were vivid, violent, and dramatic: or perhaps it would be more true to say that he interpreted their lives in terms of violent and vivid drama.
He wrote always about what are called ‘ordinary people’, but he showed them under the pressure of unusual circumstance. Many of his Far Eastern stories end with suicide or murder, and adultery is the pivot for a large proportion of them. They are long stories, 15,000 to 20,000 words, roughly the length of a play, and one of them, The Letter, like Rain, was capable of almost direct transference to the stage. His mind was adjusted to the types of plot and theme that fitted within this circumference. It is a length that few writers have managed to employ. But it is a very satisfactory length. It takes an hour to read, and it gives scope for the introduction of settings and of minor characters. By writing at this length Maugham was able to keep the background of the East constantly before the reader’s eye. He rarely attempted what is called ‘fine writing’ but his scenic descriptions are masterpieces of accurate observation. You touch and smell the East. You can understand how in that atmosphere ‘ordinary people’ could be driven to desperate remedies.
He re-created himself during a decade of travel and his output during this period was remarkable: two novels—The Moon and Six-pence and The Painted Veil; two travel books—On a Chinese Screen and The Gentleman in the Parlour; one of his very best plays, East of Suez; the collection of secret service stories which introduced the character of Ashenden, his alter ego; the six South Sea stories of The Trembling of a Leaf; the six Malayan stories of The Casuarina Tree which included The Letter; a number of short stories awaiting publication in book form. Nineteen-twenty-two also saw the triumphant, prolonged success of Our Betters, written in 1915, while The Constant Wife ran for many months in New York though in London it never recovered from an unlucky first night, when the pit was allowed into the back two rows of the stalls and chaos ensued when the owners of the numbered seats arrived. The pit was asked to move back two rows and naturally having waited for several hours declined. I arrived a few minutes before the curtain was due to rise to find ‘God Save the King’ being played in order to get people on their feet, and quiet. The curtain eventually went up twenty minutes late. Several dramatic critics were forced to stand throughout and the cast was so upset that the timing was badly at fault in a play that depended on timing for its success. In New York it was, however, a very great success.
In New York the play of Rain ran for two years. In London it was less successful. Tallulah Bankhead had been most anxious to play the lead, but after a few rehearsals the part was given to Olga Lindo. On the other hand the play of The Letter with Gladys Cooper as the murderess was a great success in London. By 1930, which saw the publication of Cakes and Ale he had become one of the most discussed figures in English letters. Not only was he producing a sequence of exciting and dramatic stories, but he was in tune with the temper of his time. He had had no message for the eager young Fabians of 1908 who had discussed women’s suffrage over glasses of Russian tea, but he did have for an exhausted post-war generation that had achieved victory at the cost of immense self-sacrifice only to find that the war that was to end war—H. G. Wells’s phrase—was being followed by the peace that would end peace. Maugham was in the same leaking boat. In spite of his wealth and fame he was reputed to be an embittered man. He had won, after long labour, to success, only to find its savour that of dead sea fruit. Disenchanted himself, he offered to his readers the philosophy and pattern of escape. Mystery as well as glamour was about him. There was a sinister undertone to the legend that surrounded him. Where Kipling had presented the British Empire in terms of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, Maugham presented it as a means of cutting free from the Western ‘rat-race’, from the profitless amassing of possessions that moth and dust were waiting to corrupt. The Moon and Sixpence, The Casuarina Tree, and The Fall of Edward Barnard coloured the outlook of the disillusioned 1920s just as Ann Veronica and Man and Superman had fired the optimism of the last Edwardians. Maugham was the mouthpiece of that decade.
For ten years he lived in suitcases. Then he felt the need of a home, a base, and bought high on Cap Ferrat the villa that can be seen white and rectangular against the pines, along the coast from Antibes, and set on its gatepost the sign against the evil eye that is stamped upon all his books.
A great deal had happened indeed during the nine years between that lunch in the St Paneras Hotel and my first visit to the Villa Mauresque in the spring of 1931.
On that first lunch I was the only guest. There were just the three of us, W. S. M., Gerald Haxton and myself. Much has recently appeared in print about Haxton that could never have been printed in Maugham’s lifetime. Maugham had a strong homosexual streak; how strong it is futile to conjecture. Robin Maugham reports his uncle as having confessed that one of his major mistakes was having tried to convince not only others but himself that he was only twenty-five instead of seventy-five per cent homosexual. Haxton, an American, had as a young man been arrested in London on a homosexual offence; he was acquitted, but the Judge was convinced of his guilt and he was registered as an ‘undesirable alien’ and forced to leave the country. If Maugham wanted to enjoy Haxton’s company, he had to enjoy it out of England.
There can be little doubt that Haxton was largely responsible for the break-up of Mau
gham’s marriage. There was a bitter rivalry between him and Syrie Maugham, and Beverley Nichols’s A Case of Human Bondage has an excruciatingly comic account of an attempt by Syrie Maugham to woo her husband back during a long week-end at St Tropez.
Beverley Nichols regarded Haxton as the evil influence in Maugham’s life. But no matter how reprehensible morally it may all have been, it served the purposes of literature. Haxton may have been a heavy drinker and a reckless gambler, but he was the ideal companion for the travels that were the source of Maugham’s development. He was debonair and dashing, good company and a good mixer, everything that Maugham was not. In The Summing Up Maugham expresses his debt to him. ‘It was a great help when I was travelling to have someone who made friends quickly with the kind of person whom it was important for me to know.’ Nearly everyone liked Gerald Haxton, right away. And I have heard more than one man say that his best times with Maugham were in a trio with Gerald Haxton. Cyril Connolly in his review of Beverley Nichols’s exposé wrote, ‘Haxton was probably a bad hat, but I found him charming.’
From 1931 until the end of his life, I saw Maugham regularly in London and in the South of France. I would hesitate to call myself a close friend of his; disparity of age and of position precluded that; inevitably he meant much more to me than I could ever mean to him. But we had, through my travels, much in common. Myself, I felt always close to him.
He had the reputation of being difficult. Many of his friends complained that they could never feel at ease with him. Certainly his stammer made conversation awkward. He wrote of Arnold Bennett that it must have been infuriating for him to think of a witty interpolation and have to refrain from making it for fear that it would be ruined by his stammer. He was thinking of himself, in early days.
By the time I met him he was treated with deference. The table would wait for what he had to say. He had moreover evolved a conversational style that incorporated his stammer. Even so it was with a sense of conscious effort that a long sentence wound to a full stop. One was left at the end with a feeling both of exhaustion and achievement. One was tempted to applaud as one does when a runner breaks the tape. It was not easy afterwards to pick up the thread of the conversation quickly. There was a danger that each time Maugham began to speak there would be a hiatus when he stopped.
Another reason for uneasiness in his company was the fact that because so many of his stories are told in the first person or through the mouth of his alter ego Ashenden, one felt one knew in advance his temperament and tastes. Ashenden was an acute and pitiless observer, judging people by the way they dressed, talked, behaved at table, entertained. It was impossible not to suspect that one was being judged oneself, in just that way; one was on guard.
It was generally held that he did not like to be complimented on his books. In his story, His Excellency, he approves the tact of the ambassador who did not mention any of Ashenden’s books but indicated by a couple of casual references that he had read them. But I am not certain that he did not appreciate an occasional compliment if it was made at the right time, in the right way. In the spring of 1956, I was escorting along the coast a flamboyant lady of considerable charm but little education. I had qualms about taking her to the Villa, but I wanted to see Maugham, and her feelings would have been deeply hurt had she been left behind. I briefed her carefully. ‘Whatever you do,’ I warned her, ‘don’t refer to his books.’ She followed my instructions, but on the way back, she said, ‘It was ridiculous of you not to let me talk to him about his books. I had something I particularly wanted to say. I know he’d have been pleased. I’m going to write to him.’
She showed me the letter before she posted it. It explained how I had told her that she must not discuss his books with him, but she had to let him know how much his work had meant to her. Mentioning two or three of his short stories, she concluded by saying that she owed her interest in Indian philosophy to him. It seemed to me the kind of routine letter that most professional writers get every now and then. To my astonishment it had on Maugham the effect she had anticipated. Next time I saw Alan Searle, his secretary, almost the first thing he said was, ‘What happened to that wild redhead that you brought up here? I’ve never seen Willie so much touched by anything as by the letter that she wrote him.’ Maugham asked after her at once. Repercussions came back to me through Cyril Connolly. ‘I couldn’t think what Alec was doing with that eccentric creature,’ Maugham had said, ‘and then from her, of all people, to get that letter.’
Clearly she had been right and I was wrong. Perhaps, in our anxiety to avoid mistakes, to spare him irritation, we all went to the other extreme. Perhaps he missed the homage that we would have paid him so readily, so gladly, from such full hearts.
We accepted, all of us, too easily the picture that he presented of himself as ‘I’ and ‘Ashenden’. The ‘I’ of The Moon and Sixpence and of The Trembling of a Leaf, the Ashenden who said, ‘You fool, you’ve murdered the wrong man,’ was aloof, detached, sardonic, watching with cynical enjoyment the follies of his fellow mortals. He had a chilling presence. A character in his story The Pool quotes Francis Thompson’s ‘In No Strange Land’. ‘I’ve read “The Hound of Heaven”. It’s a bit of all right,’ he says. ‘It is generally thought so,’ Maugham’s ‘I’ says. What a freezing remark. What a deterrent to anyone young and enthusiastic meeting Maugham for the first time. Yet behind that mask, there was an affectionate, though watchful person, and it must be remembered that when he was writing The Moon and Sixpence, The Trembling of a Leaf, and Ashenden—the books that first presented his persona to the world—he was passing through a series of harrowing domestic crises. The ‘I’ of The Razor’s Edge is a very much mellower person than the ‘I’ of The Moon and Sixpence. Ashenden was the screen behind which Maugham protected himself against the facile emotions of a self-deluding world. Some of us are proud enough to feel that at times we broke through that screen, to find on the other side someone whom it was not difficult to love.
Maugham was accused both as a writer and a human being of a lack of sympathy. But he had been trained as a doctor to diagnose complaints and prescribe cures. Michael Arlen’s wife said, ‘He will listen quietly as though you were in a consulting room. He will ask one or two pointed questions, then he will say, “If you do this, Atalanta, that will happen. If you do that, this will happen. You must decide for yourself.” I found great comfort in that,’ she said.
A few years ago, an ageing actress came to him in high indignation, because her lover had abandoned her for a younger woman. ‘I told her,’ he said, ‘that she had had nine years of him, and that she should be grateful for what she had had. She thought me very heartless.’
Myself, I always felt that he was the one person in the world who could completely understand me. If I were to go to him in trouble, very little explanation would be required. Like a doctor, he would resolve my perplexities. I always had to resist an impulse to confide in him. I resisted it successfully. But the confidence that I knew I should be understood added a dimension to my deep fondness for him.
In 1936 he published his autobiography The Summing Up; it was a kind of leave-taking. A writer set out to create un œuvre, he said, and he had finished his. He compared it to a house: in his remaining years he would go on writing; he might add a gable here, a turret there, he might lay out a rose garden, but the main structure was complete. He had reached the tether of his ambition.
He seemed to have everything a man could need. He had made and was making a very great deal of money. In his early sixties, he was active on the tennis court, the golf course, in the swimming pool. He could entertain his friends under the most congenial conditions, looking out from his high terrace, across the sea, to the outline of the Estéreis. There were his annual visits to London in the autumn; in the winter there was usually a long trip, to India or the Caribbean. As far as he ever could be happy, I would say he was, in the 1930s. ‘All that should accompany old age’ was waiting in the wings.
In th
e preface that he wrote in 1952 to a selected collection of Kipling’s stories, he suggested that authors usually reach the full development of their powers between the ages of thirty-five and forty, do their best work for the next fifteen or twenty years then start to decline. He may have thought of himself as being about to enter upon this final stage during those summers of the later ‘thirties. But fate once more intervened. In the spring of 1940, the Germans broke through to the channel ports and Maugham in his sixty-sixth year had to make a snap decision. Should he stay on at the Villa Mauresque or risk a return to England in a coal boat through submarine-infested waters? There was another alternative—a phial of sleeping pills in his bathroom drawer. He never considered the possibility of letting himself be taken prisoner, but he must in that hour of indecision have contrasted the dangers and discomforts of that journey with the amount of enjoyment life had still to offer him.
It may not have seemed to offer him so very much. A few years back he had retired from the theatre with his last three plays little more than half successes. He had exhausted his Far East material; the South of France had supplied him with one or two amusing plots, The Three Fat Women of Antibes in particular: but the issues in that charming playground were less vital, less dramatic. He had made a disappointing trip to the West Indies. I was to remark to him twelve years later on the eve of sailing for the Leeward Islands that although I had spent many months in the Caribbean I had only found two or three plots there. He had had, he said, a similar experience. Kipling had told him that there were plenty of plots there, ‘but that they were mine not his. I went but I found nothing.’ The life of the French convicts on Devil’s Island gave him two short stories, and a motif in Christmas Holiday. But that was all.