My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles

by Alec Waugh

  In 1937 he had gone to India. He had felt for many years that Kipling had covered the ground too completely for it to be worth his while to go. But Kipling’s world no longer existed, and ‘I should be trying,’ he said, ‘to see a different India. I found a lot. As soon as the maharajahs realized that I didn’t want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poets and philosophers, they were very helpful. I planned to return there in the autumn of 1939; the war prevented that. I think I should have got a great deal from a second visit.’

  As he deliberated the alternative to that phial of sleeping pills, he must have suspected that in the cancelling of that trip to India his last chance of re-creating himself had gone. In A Personal Record he tells us that he decided to return because he felt that one or two people in England might still need him. He left the pills in his bathroom. Had he emptied that phial, he would have been spared some bitter hours in his later years, but he would have missed the summit of his career.

  In A Personal Record he described the discomforts, privations, the farcical situations of that journey back. But he did not tell how a fellow passenger who had deviously acquired an extra ration, offered him a share. Maugham declined. His pride would not allow him, at such a time, to avoid the common lot.

  There was nothing for him to do in England. In the First War, he had carried out a number of secret missions but this time he could see no scope for himself. He might as well go to America. Control of currency was strict. He could take no money out of England. His continental income was frozen and he arrived in New York with two dollars in his pocket, to be instructed by the British Treasury authorities in Washington that he must turn over to them all the dollars that he earned, in return for which they would make him what they considered a reasonable allowance. His publisher Nelson Doubleday built him a comfortable eight-room house on his estate in South Carolina, ‘in desolate yet oddly beautiful country’, and after a visit to Hollywood he moved there in December 1941.

  He relished its peace and quiet; but it was too quiet and peaceful for Gerald Haxton, who now that America was in the war, saw an opportunity of becoming something in his own right, not just ‘Willie’s friend’. He took a clerical job in Washington. While Maugham, in exile, driven back upon himself set to work, once again, upon a major novel.

  Through 1942 and the early months of 1943 he worked steadily on The Razor’s Edge. Never had he written so sunnily, with such serenity. As the narrator he was not Willie Ashenden, but Willie Maugham, speaking in propria persona and allowing himself to be teased by a heroine who is no less charming than his own fictional favourite Rosie Gann.

  While he was turning his enforced solitude to his own advantage, Haxton, without Maugham’s watchful care, was working and drinking himself to death. He died in November 1944.

  The serialization of The Razor’s Edge started in 1943 and the book was published in April 1944. It was as lucky in its timing in the Second War as Of Human Bondage had been unlucky in the First. War-time conditions, with the blackout and the curtailment of entertainment, had created a demand for reading matter that the publishers could not satisfy. Old books went out of print, and though new books were issued in rationed quantities the standard of contemporary writing was very low. The young writers were in uniform, the elder ones were either too busy or too harassed to write well or had put aside their pens for war work. It was, in 1944, both for the general reader and the critic, an immense relief to be offered a mature, adult novel, the work of a perfected craftsman, working within his powers, with an exact knowledge of those powers and with the sense of reserves behind him. The Razor’s Edge is told in the first person and nowhere has Maugham deployed that particular technique with more assurance. Never had he been more mellow.

  The timing for the theme, too, was lucky. The plot is that of The Fall of Edward Barnard. (How often authors rewrite their old stories after twenty-five years from a different angle: Theatre is a retelling of Mrs Craddock.) Two friends, Americans, fall in love with the same girl. Their friendship is not ruined by her choice between them. The fiancé goes to Europe to make his fortune; but while away he loses his faith in ‘the American way of life’, refuses to return to America and stands aside while the girl marries the other man. It is the same plot as Edward Barnard, but the theme is different. For whereas Edward Barnard made an escapist’s choice, living on in Tahiti, idly, with a pretty Polynesian, the hero of The Razor’s Edge refused the conventional pattern out of a discovery in himself of a sense of purpose, a working towards the life of a mystic and ascetic. It was a theme appropriate to the hour. Escapism is sympathetic to a decade of disenchanted lassitude, but it is not sympathetic to an hour of strain and action. In The Razor’s Edge Maugham offered hope; he had got past bitterness. Yet he was not throwing out his solution as a sop. He wrote as a man with faith.

  The last time I lunched with him, I asked him whether, when he wrote The Summing Up, he suspected that he had another major book inside him. He had written then that he had completed his œuvre, but that œuvre would have been incomplete without The Razor’s Edge. He shrugged when I asked him that. He could be exceedingly evasive when he chose. But he did not insist that he had always had The Razor’s Edge in mind. I like to think of the episode as another working out of that ‘divinity that shapes our ends’. Fate had decided to give Maugham the opportunity of expending his talent to the full. He took it with both hands.

  In theme and content, The Razor’s Edge is one of his major books. It is a long novel with a number of secondary stories woven into the central plot. Yet ‘the direction of interest’, which is his own definition of a plot, is never lost. The book was a great immediate success and it laid the the foundation for the fame he was to enjoy after the war, when he returned to France.

  Fame is the proper word to use. During the 1930s he had been sensitive to the lack of recognition that he had received from the intelligentsia. ‘When clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me.’ He said more than once that he considered himself unlucky to have begun writing short stories at a time when Chekhov’s stock stood so high and Maupassant’s so low, and the preface to his collected edition of short stories, Altogether, consists in large part of a comparison between Maupassant and Chekhov. He had also mentioned that the French admire order, pattern, and form, and that his reputation stood higher in France than it did in England. More than once he had felt it necessary to defend the magazine short story. But now he had the highbrows on his side. Time had placed him in perspective.

  The ten years after the war marked his apotheosis. He was the Grand Old Man of letters. He stood alone. Many of the pre-war writers were exhausted, the young ones had not yet appeared. His stories and novels were reissued in a succession of editions. His plays were revived. TV gave him a new medium. Three selections of his short stories were put upon the screen, with he himself introducing them. Most years he issued a collection of literary reminiscences or critical studies. The Villa Mauresque was still a social centre. He was accorded at last the critical acclaim that he had been denied between the wars. On his eightieth birthday in January 1954, almost every newspaper in the world paid him lengthy tribute. In the birthday honours list, he was made a C.H. (Companion of Honour), the highest award short of the O.M. (Order of Merit) that can be paid to a British man of letters. He was in good health, he was active and alert. He appeared to be thoroughly enjoying his success. In the fall of 1959 he sailed for the Far East to revisit the scenes of his old stories. Thirty years earlier indignant rubber planters in Malaya had sworn that he would never dare return. He could never be forgiven for The Letter. But he was received everywhere with honour. It was the climax to an Indian summer. It is a pity that the curtain could not have fallen then.

  He lived too long for his own happiness and dignity. His last years were marred by his quarrel with his daughter and the ill-advised publication of the story of his marriage. In The Summing Up he wrote, ‘Beyond a certain poin
t I do not intend to take the reader into my confidence.’ He forgot that promise.

  Alan Searle, in an interview, attributed his loss of judgement to the rejuvenation injections that he took in Switzerland. He had three of these operations. He lunched with me in Villefranche on his return from his last visit. It was a mild spring day and we sat in the open at the harbour side. He was allowed to drink only champagne and the gold-foiled bottle in its steaming bucket was an incentive to conviviality. He looked wonderfully well. He had put on weight and the extra flesh on his cheeks had absorbed his wrinkles. It was hard to believe that he was eighty-eight. His appearance seemed to provide an amulet against the approach of age. I asked him about the injections. ‘When should I start having them?’

  ‘Before you actually need them. In your case fairly soon.’

  But I never shall. His example provides a salutary warning. They gave his body a vigour that at that age his mind could not support.

  He announced, when he was working on those final memoirs, that they would not be published in his lifetime. Alan Searle said, ‘You had better get yourself buried pretty deep. A lot of people will want to dig you up and hang you.’ Maugham knew they should not be published. But eventually he consented to a serial publication, under the influence of Lord Beaverbrook, so it has been said. The temptation must have been very great. It is difficult for a writer to suppress a piece of work which he believes is good, and Looking Back as it appeared in Show—in the London Sunday Express it was ruthlessly compressed—was a dramatic narrative that could have figured effectively in a fictionalized Willie Ashenden biography. But as a confession purporting to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about his marriage, it clearly told only half the truth. There was no reference to the part that Gerald Haxton played in its break-up. There was no need for Maugham to take the world into his confidence, but when he once decided to put himself under the microscope, he was beholden to reveal everything that showed upon the slide.

  The publication of Looking Back roused great indignation among many of his late wife’s friends. Nobody particularly minded its being said that fifty years back in the hey-day of Edwardian gallantry a number of rich men had contributed to her support, but the allegation that she sold her jewellery and bric-à-brac and then claimed from the insurance companies was profoundly shocking; a letter of protest to the Press was signed by a group of men and women for whom he could not have failed to feel respect. It was rumoured that when he went into the bar of the Garrick Club, a number of members left the room. That was in the late autumn of 1962. He said that he would never go back to London. As far as I know, he never did.

  The last eighteen months of his life were sad. He was unhappy in himself. He had his good days but he was very weak. His memory played him tricks; he had trouble with his eyes; he was very deaf. For a long time he refused to buy a hearing aid—it was too expensive, he said. When at last he agreed to buy one, he lost patience with it and flung it into the sea. Conversation with him was very difficult. One would mention a friend of long standing. ‘Ah, yes,’ he would say. ‘Now I must have met him surely, Alan, thirty or forty years ago.’ Searle would reply, ‘He spent two weeks here the summer before last.’

  Many stories were told about his slips of memory. At a Riviera lunch party he sat next to an old friend, Eric Dunstan. They had a long and cosy talk. Finally Maugham said, ‘I was sorry to hear of Eric Dunstan’s death. I liked that man.’ There was the occasion when his daughter paid him a visit after their reconciliation. He mistook her for her mother. ‘Syrie, you bitch,’ he shouted. ‘You’ve ruined my whole life. How dare you come into my house? Get out of it at once.’

  But I wonder sometimes whether, conscious of his own predicament, he did not often deliberately exploit its possibilities for his own amusement. I recall how at the end of a lunch some months before his death, when I was exhausted by ninety minutes of confusion, a look of schoolboy mischief flickered in his eyes. ‘Tell me now,’ he said, ‘what happened to that fellow who wrote all those stories about Malaya. I thought him rather promising.’ Perhaps more often than any of us guessed, the old jester whose sallies from the Edwardian stage sent ripples of laughter through the auditorium, was having a final fling for the sake of his own private chuckle.

  At the end of A Writer’s Notebook, Maugham allows himself to wonder what part, if any, of his work will be read a century hence. He is becomingly modest on the issue, but at the same time he is not unconscious of his unique position. Of Human Bondage is the most read of his books and the most generally admired. I asked him once if he considered it his best. He said he had no idea, since he had not read it since he corrected the final proofs. It may seem odd that curiosity should not have sent him back to it, but it is typical of him that he should have resisted the impulse, knowing that he could do nothing now to better it.

  In A Writer’s Notebook he expresses doubt as to whether so long a book can hope to survive the pressure of the future. But it is, it seems to me, on other grounds, that Of Human Bondage is less likely to appeal to succeeding generations than many of his short stories. He has said himself that though a writer may set out to draw a picture of life, it can never be more than a partial one, but if he is fortunate he will succeed in doing something else, he will draw a complete picture of himself. And though Maugham has called Of Human Bondage an autobiographical novel, there is less of the essential Maugham there than in Cakes and Ale and in The Moon and Sixpence. Philip in Of Human Bondage may have shared many of Maugham’s experiences, but he is not Maugham; he is an obscure doctor, not a successful author. A man with Maugham’s temperament would never have remained obscure.

  In a few years’ time, inevitably, Maugham’s reputation will undergo a slump. He has been so long supreme, and those who enthrone a new deity will find it necessary to increase the praise of the new god by decrying the qualities of the old. But I cannot believe that the reaction will last for long. Several of his books may go out of print for ever, but there are so few great story-tellers, and few have equalled Maugham’s capacity to carry your interest on from one page to the next. You cannot put him down, not only because of the excellence of the plot but for the manner of its telling. It is not chance that led him to put an Arab charm against the evil eye upon the covers of his books. He has a deep affinity with those story-tellers of the market-place who hold their audience with the power of their eye, the intonation of their voice, the movements of their hands. He lays his individual spell upon you, so that in retrospect you remember not only the tale itself, but the teller of it. The story is a medium, a means to an end, and future generations will, I am very sure, be as fascinated as we ourselves have been by this enigmatic man, the object of so much conjecture, a man at the same time so thwarted and so rewarded, a man who has been offered the sampling of every dish the banquet of life has for offering, yet has been denied on his own admission the very consolations that alone make life tolerable for the vast majority of human beings; a man so disillusioned, so unself-deceived, so ruthless towards himself yet to others so invariably helpful; a man who in the last analysis has always been upon the side of what was true and simple, of what the Greeks called ‘the beautiful and good’.

  19

  The MacDowell Colony

  (Written in 1965)

  During the post-war years my links with the U.S.A. grew closer and stronger. Four-fifths of my income was earned there and if you work for magazines, it is as well to be in touch with editors. Moreover I had now more friends in New York than I had in London. Most of the friends that I had made in 1920 had been ten to fifteen years older than myself. None of them had been young enough to serve in the Second War. They had gone six years in one direction, I in another. Several of them were on the brink of retirement. We had only the past in common.

  In America, on the other hand, I was meeting my opposite numbers—either my contemporaries or men younger than myself, the equivalents to me of what I had been to my seniors twenty-five years
before. You make friends more quickly and more easily in New York than you do in London. I was spending five or six months a year in the U.S.A.

  I was happy to be doing so. There was, however, one major problem connected with my change of base. I have never been able to work in cities, and I needed in America some equivalent for the small country inns like the Easton Court Hotel, at Chagford, where I used to go periodically for a month’s concentrated writing. Carl Brandt shook his head when I asked him his advice. There was, he said, no equivalent of Easton Court. There were hotels in the country and on the sea but they were only open in the season, when they would be crowded. I would be caught up into the animation of resort existence. There were farms that let off rooms to lodgers, but there I should have to join the family at meals. I should not get the seclusion that I needed. ‘There is only one kind of place where you could go, one of those artists’ colonies. Yaddo or MacDowell.’

  The prospect filled me with misgiving. I could not imagine anything worse than the constant company of artists, most of whom presumably would be precious and peevish. Things would have gone wrong with them, personally or professionally, or they would not be at an artists’ colony. The old ones would have chips upon their shoulders, the young ones would be superior, disdainful of anyone who wrote for magazines. I should be better off with a family on a farm.

  Carl Brandt again shook his head. ‘They aren’t that kind of place at all. You can tell that from the people who go to them.’ He reeled off a list of MacDowell names—De Bose Heyward, Hervey Allen, Elinor Wylie, William Rose Benét, Carl Carmer, Margaret Widdemere, Thornton Wilder… the names flowed on. It was an impressive list. I let myself be persuaded. Stanley Young, who was at that time a partner in Farrar Straus, was on the board of directors. He forwarded my application for a two months’ residence, and on 1 June 1951 I took the train for Boston, my heart heavy with foreboding. Today, fourteen years later, I wonder how I should have managed without the MacDowell Colony.