The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Gradually, as Willie grew accustomed to his new surroundings, he came to love the green and gentle Kentish countryside. The shore between Whitstable and the mouth of the Thames was wild and the marshes when overcast appeared gray and desolate, but only half a mile inland the landscape changed. Here was rich farming country, with lush pastures full of sheep, with hawthorn hedges and clumps of ancient elms, with shady lanes and wooded hills. At intervals set back from the road were the farmhouses, with their spacious barns and oasthouses overlooking the hop fields, and in clusters between them the farmworkers’ cottages, their tiny gardens ablaze with wallflowers, hollyhocks and tiger lilies, with nearby the little whitewashed inns, the Jolly Sailor, the Merry Ploughman, the Crown and Anchor, their squat doorways draped in honeysuckle. In winter the wind came straight off the North Sea and sometimes it rained for days on end, but even then Maugham found something that moved him in the harshness of that barren coastline. The boy gazing out over the cold waters of the North Sea could imagine what might lie in the gray distance, even if for the present he was firmly anchored to England, with no possibility of venturing beyond.

  During his first year in Whitstable it was arranged for Maugham to do his lessons at the house of Dr. Charles Etheridge, a neighbor of the Maughams and one of the town’s two physicians. As the boy’s education to date had been mainly in French, it was important that he should concentrate on perfecting his English, a task that was not made any easier by his newly developed stammer. In fact, however, he made greatest progress on his own, unconsciously familiarizing himself with the language during the hours he passed reading in his uncle’s library, a form of recreation that was popular with the grown-ups as it kept him quiet and out of the way. Spending so much time in his own company, insensibly he formed “the most delightful habit in the world,15 the habit of reading…. Haphazard among the sermons and homilies, travels, the lives of the Saints, the Fathers, the histories of the church, were old-fashioned novels; and these [he] at last discovered. He chose them by their titles, and the first he read was The Lancashire Witches, and then he read The Admirable Crichton, and then many more. Whenever he started a book with two solitary travellers riding along the brink of a desperate ravine he knew he was safe.” And thus Maugham discovered one of the great passions of his life, a passion that would provide both pleasure and inspiration, that would encourage and clarify his own formidable skills as a storyteller, but that would also increase his isolation: in later life he found it difficult to be in anyone’s company for more than a few hours before the longing came over him to be alone with a book. Books were to be his great comfort and resource, his most reliable retreat. At this early stage in his development, however, Maugham was aware of none of this. “He did not know16 that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.”

  THE VICARAGE LIBRARY PROVIDED a welcome haven, but if Maugham believed his way of life was now settled he was mistaken. In May 1885, less than nine months after his arrival in England, his world was again turned upside down when he was sent away to school.

  The King’s School in Canterbury, situated in the precincts of the great cathedral, was one of the oldest schools in the country. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Canterbury had become something of a backwater, and with the coming of the railways the more prosperous Kentish families sent their sons to Eton, Harrow, and Westminster, leaving the King’s School to cater mainly to sons of the local clergy, of the officers at the cavalry depot, and of the better-off tradesmen and manufacturers. Yet if it could not be ranked among one of the leading public schools, it was highly regarded within the county; Dickens paid it the compliment of sending David Copperfield to school there.

  Accompanied by his uncle, Maugham made the short journey from Whitstable to Canterbury by train. Apart from his kindergarten in Paris, Maugham at eleven years old had had no experience of school and knew no other boys, and with his head filled with alarming scenes from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he felt sick with apprehension. Most of all he dreaded being mocked for his stammer. On arrival they were shown into the parlor, and while waiting for the headmaster to appear, Maugham in panic blurted out, “Tell him I stammer, Uncle.”17

  The head of the junior school was R. G. Hodgson, a giant of a man with a jovial manner. He gave the newcomers a hearty greeting, after which the vicar immediately took his leave, abandoning his nephew to his fate. Maugham’s trunk and toybox were carried upstairs and he was shown where he was to sleep, in a dormitory of narrow, green-curtained cubicles each furnished with a bed, washstand, and chair. By now the day boys were assembling, and Maugham felt overwhelmed by the boisterous crowd surging into the house, all known to one another, pushing and shouting, excitedly bragging about their holidays and taking little notice of the new boy in their midst. By the end of the first morning, however, Maugham, as he had feared he would be, had become a target of derision. His stammer, immediately apparent and intensified by anxiety, was regarded as a huge joke, and in the playground boys fell over themselves imitating his stuttering speech, choking with laughter. Maugham desperately struggled not to give way to tears. “His heart beat so18 that he could hardly breathe, and he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life.”

  Even without his stammer Maugham was singularly ill-equipped for school life. Small for his age and far from robust, he suffered from a weak chest and was often unwell; indeed, he missed much of his first term through illness. Although longing to blend in, he was fatally different from the other boys: he had no parents and no friends, knew nothing of current schoolboy customs or slang, had never played cricket or football, and was still not entirely at ease with the English language. “I have never forgotten the roar of laughter19 that abashed me,” he wrote, “when in my preparatory school I read out the phrase ‘unstable as water’ as though unstable rhymed with Dunstable.” In this last area, his brothers’ experience had been similar: they, too, were mocked for their French accents, referred to as “froggies” by their schoolfellows. Yet for them the situation was easier: not only did they have one another for company but they were far sturdier than their little brother and all three excelled at sport. Maugham in contrast was not much good at games, the sine qua non at any boys’ public school, and at first was considered a dunce because his stammer made him appear inarticulate and stupid.

  By the time he arrived in Canterbury, Maugham had already grown accustomed to solitude. Wholly unprepared for communal life, he hated the lack of privacy and was awkward with the ragging, the easy banter and backchat of the other fellows. The torment and ridicule he suffered over his stammer caused him to shrink into himself, and although he longed to be popular he lacked the ability to make himself liked, lacked “that engaging come-hitherness20 that makes people take to one another on first acquaintance.” Despite these obstacles, however, Maugham did well at his work, and at the end of his three years at Hodgson’s was awarded a scholarship and the privilege of wearing the scholar’s black gown.

  IN THE SENIOR SCHOOL Maugham found the quality of life considerably improved. By now he was on comradely terms with a good many of the boys, to whom his disability had become of little interest, and although he made no close friend he was tacitly accepted as one of the herd. It was generally recognized that Maugham was no longer an easy target. He was exceptionally observant and had a sharp wit, much appreciated by those at whom it was not directed, and this was coupled with a fiendish instinct for homing in on others’ weakness. Time and again he would come out with some clever criticism to raise a laugh, not realizing that its very accuracy would cause it to rankle long after. Longing to be popular while knowing he was not, Maugham developed a singular habit, one which would eventually serve him well as a novelist. He would take as a model a boy he particularly admired and would imagine he was that boy, would talk with his voice, laugh with his laugh
, imitate his gestures and mannerisms. The impersonation became so vivid in his own mind “that he seemed for a moment21 really to be no longer himself. In this way he enjoyed many intervals of fantastic happiness.”

  In schoolboy terms Maugham was clever—he had an excellent memory and won prizes in music, divinity, history, and French—so that on the whole he had little to fear from the teaching staff, with the exception of one, the bad-tempered Reverend E. J. Campbell. Nicknamed “Scraggs” for his habit of “scragging,” or violently shaking boys by the neck, Campbell was a bully, both physical and mental, one of his favorite techniques being to seize a victim and force him to rub out his mistake on the blackboard with his nose. Campbell’s previous post had been in Devon, at Westward Ho!, where he had taught the young Rudyard Kipling, who in Stalky & Co. portrays him as the hated and irascible Mr. King. Maugham’s portrait is even more savage, and Campbell seen through the eyes of Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage is a terrifying figure:

  He began his work22 in a rage and ended it in a passion…. His large face, with indistinct features and small blue eyes, was naturally red, but during his frequent attacks of anger it grew dark and purple.

  The other masters, long set in their ways, Maugham regarded with a mixture of tolerance and contempt. He found much of the teaching uninspired, the curriculum having remained unchanged for generations, with heavy emphasis on the teaching of Latin and Greek, and modern languages regarded as unimportant. As might be expected, Maugham was particularly scornful of the lessons in French, taught by masters who although they had a good grasp of grammar made no attempt to reproduce what they considered an entirely unnecessary foreign accent. None of them, in Maugham’s disdainful view, could have “got a cup of coffee23 in the restaurant at Boulogne.”

  Fortunately not only for Maugham but for the entire school, in 1886 a new headmaster was appointed. At only thirty-two, the Reverend Thomas Field arrived at the King’s School full of energy and fresh ideas. A mesmerizing teacher, he was friendly and approachable, his conversation refreshingly wide-ranging and full of topical reference. As one of the high achievers, Maugham early came to the notice of Mr. Field, who was kind to him, talked to him as an adult, and encouraged him in his interests. Starved for approval and attention, Maugham eagerly responded, bestowing on Field a fervent hero worship. “I adored him,”24 he was later to say. Field became easily the most important figure in the boy’s life, and for a time his disaffection for the school diminished and he felt there was little he would not do to please such a sympathetic and imaginative headmaster.

  Maugham had a highly developed visual sense, all his life being passionately interested in painting and to a lesser extent architecture, and it was while at Canterbury that he became aware of the first stirrings of an aesthetic perception. As his mood lightened and he no longer needed to dread every aspect of his day, Maugham began consciously to respond to the beauty of his surroundings. “There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling25 about their dizzy and intoxicating antiquity…. The whole atmosphere was strangely light and airy, full of the sound of bells and the cries of jackdaws floating around the great Bell Harry Tower.” He loved the wide lawns and wisteria-clad walls of the school, the melancholy cry of the rooks in the elm trees, above all the sight of the famous cathedral grandly rooted in all its medieval magnificence. In adult life, Maugham, when in distant parts of the globe, was sometimes overcome by nostalgia when reminded of Canterbury Cathedral, when the sight of some great edifice in Russia, China, or Malaya would suddenly evoke emotional memories of his boyhood.

  As conditions improved at school, so did they at home. All holidays were spent at the vicarage, but Maugham was older now and disinclined to submit so completely to his uncle’s diktats. He was not in the least afraid of him, knew himself to be a great deal more intelligent, and was fairly confident of getting his own way when it mattered. For long periods now Henry Maugham was away from home, an increasingly fragile state of health obliging him to go off to the Continent for lengthy periods of recuperation. In his absence the atmosphere was noticeably relaxed and Maugham had considerable license to enjoy his independence. During the 1880s a craze for bicycling had gripped the youth of the nation, and Maugham, having persuaded his uncle to buy him one of the new safety bicycles, took a keen pleasure in riding about the countryside, exploring the network of little lanes and on warm days pedaling down to the beach with towel and bathing trunks for a swim.* By the age of fifteen Maugham, although not tall, had grown into an attractive boy, with thick dark hair, brown eyes, and a pale complexion. He had become quite a dandy, taking trouble with his clothes and priding himself on his elegant turnout in white flannels, blue blazer, and a black-and-white straw boater. Anxious to be considered grown-up, he smeared his top lip with Vaseline in the hope of encouraging a mustache, and resented being addressed still as “Master Willie.”

  In fact, I did not like either26 of my names, and spent much time inventing others that would have suited me better. The ones I preferred were Roderic Ravensworth and I covered sheets of paper with this signature in a suitably dashing hand. I did not mind Ludovic Montgomery either.

  Following the lead of his uncle and aunt, he “accepted the conventions27 of my class as if they were the laws of Nature.” Regarding himself as a superior youth, he took on their snobbish attitudes, adopting an air of lordly patronage with the tradespeople and complaining fastidiously of the holidaymakers from London who invaded Whitstable in the summer. “We thought London people vulgar.28 We said it was horrid to have all that rag-tag and bob tail down from town every year.”

  Both at the vicarage and at school there was a heavy emphasis on religion, and Maugham could not help but be influenced by it. His uncle’s speech was garnished with biblical reference, all the masters at school were ordained, and attendance at church both in Whitstable and Canterbury was frequent and compulsory. Imbibing the pious atmosphere surrounding him, Maugham, like many children, went through an intensely religious phase, serious and devout, reading and rereading the Old and New Testaments and taking a great deal of time and trouble over his prayers. According to the version related in Of Human Bondage, almost certainly derived from the actual event, Philip when a boy prays to God to cure his hated affliction, in his case a clubfoot. Having been taught to believe that true faith can move mountains, it never occurs to the boy that God will not grant his petition. “He prayed with all the power of his soul.29 No doubts assailed him. He was confident in the word of God.” In a state of rapturous excitement at the miracle about to be performed, Philip’s disappointment when it fails to take place is painful and profound; bitterly disillusioned, he feels betrayed, both by his uncle and by his uncle’s God. Such an incident marks the first step in Maugham’s loss of faith; and yet he retained throughout his long life a strong interest in religion, in all religions, his emotional attraction toward religious belief always at war with his intellectual rejection of it, subliminally searching for a spiritual resolution that he was never able to achieve. When soon after leaving school he finally abandoned the strong and innocent faith of his boyhood, he felt it as a liberation but also as a loss. At the time hardest to accept was the knowledge that with no expectation of an afterlife he would never see his mother again.

  THE KING’S SCHOOL may have prided itself on its close affiliations to the Anglican Church, but its student body was no more high-minded than any other group of boys shut up for weeks at a time with scarcely a glimpse of the opposite sex. Among the two hundred boarders it is inconceivable that there did not exist the usual sexual experiment between boys, and Maugham certainly participated in this. (In later life while dining with a close friend at the Garrick Club he pointed out an elderly gentleman respectably eating his dinner as “someone I went to bed with30 at King’s.”) In both versions of Maugham’s autobiographical novel, written more than twenty years apart, there is a section dealing with the hero’s intense infatuation with a classmate. In the earlier novel, which was never published, the reade
r is left in no doubt as to the physical aspect of the crush, although in the later version Philip’s sexual feelings are more obliquely conveyed, and in both instances it is his desperate need for affection that is paramount. In Of Human Bondage the object of his earliest passion is the handsome schoolboy Rose,* good-natured, easygoing, and popular, the antithesis of the solitary Philip, and when Rose casually befriends him, Philip is both amazed and grateful, his gratitude transmuting into a jealous love, to which Rose is completely indifferent. It is possible that Rose’s original was a boy named Leonard Ashenden, a classmate of Maugham’s, who in all probability would have been known to his schoolfellows as “Ash,” a single syllable, like “Rose.” Tellingly, the name Ashenden is that of the narrator in Cakes and Ale and also of the protagonist in Maugham’s collection of First World War spy stories. In a letter written in 1954 in answer to a query from the real Ashenden’s widow, Maugham tells her, “I chose the name Ashenden31 because like Gann, and Driffield, it is a common surname in the neighbourhood of Canterbury [and] the first syllable had to me a peculiar connotation which I found suggestive.”