The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  In his remarkable portrait of Bertha, Maugham created a vital, complex, captivating, and fully rounded woman, exigent and spoiled but also sympathetic and endearing. He knows her through and through, catches every nuance of her self-deception, of her skewed falling in love, sees through her wiles, gently mocks her affectations, yet at the same time identifies wholeheartedly with every surge and current of her passionate nature, almost as though he were her alter ego, his own divided sexuality giving him a kind of double vision, a deeper insight into the feminine psyche. The influence of Flaubert is evident, with Bertha Craddock in character a close cousin of Emma Bovary. Like her French counterpart, Bertha is sensual, willful, and highly strung, and like Emma suffers agonies of boredom in her husband’s company. Bertha, though, is well placed in the world, and her yearnings are not for social advancement but for romance. At the beginning she sees in Edward Craddock a romantic hero, and running parallel to her feelings of sheer carnality is her mistaken perception that the stolid farmer is a kind of noble savage whose innate sensitivity needs only to be awakened by the power of her love. Sadly, this is not the case. Edward, self-satisfied and unnoticing, ignores his wife’s demands for attention, treating her outbursts of furious frustration with irritating good humor. “Women are like chickens,”40 he is fond of repeating. “When they cluck and cackle sit tight and take no notice.”

  Bertha is drawn with the unerring psychological accuracy for which Maugham would become known, particularly in his treatment of women. Yet so, too, is Edward: if deserving of far less sympathy, he is nonetheless entirely credible, and the reader is shown fairly how the situation appears from his point of view. The man who supplants him in Bertha’s affections, Gerald Vaudrey, is also a three-dimensional figure, and of a type, sexy, rakish, and amusing, that was attractive not only to Bertha but to her creator. (In an interview given twenty years later, Maugham admitted that of all his fictional characters, “My recollection lingers with most pleasure41 on a youth called Gerald Vaudrey in Mrs. Craddock.”)

  [Gerald] was certainly not at all shy,42 although he looked even younger than nineteen. He was quite a boy, very slight … with a small girlish face…. His hair was dark and curly; he wore it long, evidently aware that it was very nice; and his handsome eyes had a charming expression. His sensual mouth was always smiling.

  Maugham knows, if Bertha does not, how dangerous such young men can be; and it is perhaps not wholly irrelevant that the novel was written very shortly after Maugham returned from his second visit to Seville, where he had gone, he said, to continue his affair with his green-eyed paramour.

  Written in 1900, in the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, Mrs. Craddock was published in Britain at the beginning of the Edwardian age, in November 1902, not appearing in the United States until 1920. The novel was widely noticed and generally acclaimed, although several critics felt it their duty to warn readers of the daring nature of the content. “[If] you are afraid to look life in the face,”43 said St. John Adcock in the Bookman, “you had better leave Mr. Maugham alone.” Indeed the cuts insisted on by Heinemann had done little to blur the candid fact of Bertha’s passion, and it is surprising, given the prudishness of the period, that so little was taken out. Yet even by Maugham’s pessimistic standards, his fourth novel was “a substantial success.”44 For its author, however, there remained a sense of frustration: his ambition was to write for the theater, and he still regarded his novels mainly as a means of making his name well enough known so that managers would look with favor on his drama, none of which had yet been accepted. Now, with Mrs. Craddock in the public eye, he was about to put this theory to the test with his first full-length play, for which he had the highest hopes.

  * Moore was known for novels of disturbing social realism.

  * “Above all it is through the new work of a young writer that one is made aware of the range of his abilities. It is here he tries out the genres and the different styles that best suit him, which act as directions guiding him toward his true literary self.”

  CHAPTER 4

  LE CHAT BLANC

  • • •

  IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK THE SUMMING UP, MAUGHAM, in typically self-deprecating mode, states that he began to write plays simply because “it seemed less difficult1 to set down on paper the things people said than to construct a narrative.” There was, of course, more to it than that, but with his finely attuned ear he was quick at picking up the rhythms of colloquial speech, and in his preferred role of listener he was as intrigued by the manner in which people expressed themselves as by the content. Since the age of sixteen Maugham had been passionately interested in the theater, had read widely not only the English dramatists but French, Spanish, German, and others in translation, and he went as often as he could to see plays. It had not escaped his attention either that a success in the theater brought more substantial and immediate financial rewards than were ever likely with a novel. Maugham was to become phenomenally popular as a dramatist, his playwriting extending over three decades, bringing him fame and glamour and making him an immensely rich man. Yet such an outcome would have been hard to predict. None of his early attempts at playwriting found favor with the managers to whom they were sent, and it was only a steely determination that prevented him from giving up during ten years of rejection and discouragement. The first dramatic work by Maugham actually to be produced was a one-act play, Marriages Are Made in Heaven. Failing to place it in London, Maugham translated the piece into German, and as Schiffbrüchig (Shipwreck) it was staged by Max Reinhardt’s company in Berlin, where it ran for a mere eight performances.

  Maugham’s first full-length work, A Man of Honour, completed in 1898, was strongly influenced by Ibsen, in his eyes the greatest of all modern dramatists. On his first visit to Italy, Maugham had taken with him a German version of Ghosts, familiarizing himself with the play by rendering it into English. The plot of A Man of Honour is recognizably Ibsenite in approach, dealing with the pressures of society, the struggle for personal integrity, and the disastrous consequences of ignoring instinct in a blind adhering to convention. But the West End was no more receptive to Maugham than it had been to Ibsen himself, and the play was turned down, first by the distinguished Johnston Forbes-Robertson and then by the American impresario Charles Frohman, who had recently taken over the Duke of York’s Theatre in St. Martin’s Lane. After this second rejection, Maugham made some extensive revisions before trying a completely different tack and submitting the play to the Stage Society, which to his delight accepted it for two performances in February 1903.

  The Stage Society had been founded in 1899, the successor to the short-lived Independent Theatre Club set up by the pioneering J. T. Grein. Playwright, critic, and manager, Grein saw it as his mission to produce plays of artistic merit that were unlikely to prove popular in the mainstream. West End audiences in the ’90s had been fed an almost exclusive fare of society drama, plays about the upper and well-to-do middle classes, preferably with a plot involving a parvenu and a shameful secret, usually that of a woman with a past. Typical titles of the period were Lady Huntsworth’s Experiment, Lady Gorringe’s Necklace, Lady Epping’s Lawsuit, and Lord and Lady Algy, with the plays of Oscar Wilde offering the supreme example, from Lady Windermere’s Fan to the guying of the genre in The Importance of Being Earnest. Jack Grein was interested in a different genre. It was Grein who in 1892 had put on Widower’s Houses, the first-ever performance of a play by George Bernard Shaw, and Grein the previous year who had staged a single performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, an occasion greeted with howls of outrage. In the words of its translator, William Archer, “The shriek of execration2 with which this performance was received by the newspapers of the day has scarcely its counterpart in the history of criticism.”

  With Grein’s acceptance of A Man of Honour, Maugham felt that at last he was within reach of the career for which he had been unsuccessfully aiming for nearly a decade. The Stage Society was a private members’ club and audiences
were small, but it was the only organization presenting experimental theater and consequently its productions attracted a good deal of attention. Maugham was further encouraged by the fact that a member of the committee, the eminent scholar and journalist W. L. Courtney, had offered to publish the script in the March 1903 issue of the prestigious Fortnightly Review, of which he was editor. This was a notable accolade: Courtney was widely respected for his flair in spotting new talent and under his editorship the Review was considered the leading literary journal of the day, counting among its contributors Meredith, Kipling, H. G. Wells, George Moore, and Henry James.

  Described by its author as a tragedy, The Man of Honour deals with the wretched consequences for an honorable young man of insisting on his moral duty by marrying beneath him, by making an honest woman of the barmaid whom he has seduced. Maugham attended rehearsals, delighted to see his work come to life in the hands of an accomplished cast led by one of the initiators of the modern movement, Harley Granville Barker, shortly to become known, both as actor and director, for his association with Shaw.

  The first night, on February 22, 1903, at the Imperial Theatre, Tothill Street, was well attended by friends and family and generally judged a success, although Maugham was in an agony of nerves throughout. His sister-in-law, Nellie, wrote in her diary, “Went to the first night3 of Willie’s play … Very enthusiastic audience, and it was quite well acted. Willie was pale with terror!” The production attracted a gratifying amount of attention, and on the whole the playwright was thought to show promise. J. T. Grein himself, writing in The Sunday Times, favorably compared Maugham to the eminent dramatist Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and expressed admiration for the author’s linguistic style. “Not for a long time4 had I heard such fine and nervous English,” he stated. “Simplicity is throughout the keynote of Mr. Maugham’s dramatic vein…. His drama is true.” Max Beerbohm, who had succeeded Shaw as theater critic for the Saturday Review, was only slightly less complimentary. “[The second act] is admirably conceived5 and written; and the third act is a fine piece of emotional drama,” he wrote. “[But] the rest of the play falls to pieces. Mr. Maugham becomes too bitter….”

  Maugham had learned some valuable lessons in stagecraft while watching rehearsals: how to shape dialogue, the importance of changing speed, how to get laughs in the right places and position the pauses; he was pleased with the level of response from the audience; and yet he was left with a feeling of frustration. The experience seemed to have advanced his career very little. The Stage Society was admirable in its way, but Maugham’s ambitions were focused on a much wider horizon: the commercial theater of the West End. “I was not satisfied6 with the appreciation of a small band of intellectuals,” he wrote. “I wanted no such audience as this, but the great public.”

  As a first step in this direction, Maugham sent a redrafted version of the play to Muriel Wylford, manager of the Avenue Theatre* at Charing Cross. Miss Wylford agreed to put it on for a four-week run in February 1904, together with a one-act farce Maugham had completed earlier, “Mademoiselle Zampa,”† as a curtain-raiser. The latter was a flop and had to be withdrawn, but A Man of Honour proved moderately popular. Max Beerbohm again wrote about it at length, considering that although it was notably inferior to the author’s novels, “There is no reason to suppose7 that anon Mr. Maugham as playwright will not be the equal of Mr. Maugham as novelist.” On the first performance the final curtain was followed by a storm of enthusiastic clapping and calls for the author. One of the actors standing by the pass door watched as Maugham took in what was happening, hardly able to believe his ears. “I can see now the shy young author,8 quite shaken by the cheers and prolonged applause, coming through to the stage but unwilling to take a call.”

  Of the three brothers it was Harry who showed the most interest in Maugham’s writing for the theater. Harry, too, had ambitions as a playwright, the author of a number of plays in verse which had unfortunately met with little success. Serious and intellectual, Harry was worried by what he saw as his brother’s superficiality, warning him that his ambitious social life would have a deleterious effect on his work. “Harry told me that my plays9 … were well constructed and neatly contrived but they were also trivial and shallow because the life I was leading was trivial and shallow.” Plump, handsome, and permanently disheveled, Harry had never felt at home in the world; he had become increasingly reclusive, drinking too much, struggling with depression, and finding it difficult to make friends. He was a bit of a bore, according to Maugham. “He needed a lot of understanding,”10 said Charlie’s wife, Beldy, “and very few people could understand him.” In 1899 Harry had left Italy, where he had been living since leaving the family law firm in Paris, and returned to England, taking rooms on Cadogan Street, Chelsea, where he led a largely solitary existence. “Very much homosexual,”11 according to a contemporary, Harry was nervous of women and much preferred the company of men. His few friends were drawn from the bohemian circle of writers and painters of which Maugham’s old mentor, Wentworth Huyshe, was the center. Years later Harry’s niece Honor spoke of a well-known writer, unnamed, who told her he had been a lover of Harry’s.

  Harry was too sweet-natured to begrudge his younger brother his success, yet it undoubtedly added to his own feelings of inferiority. Whether it was fear of failure, unhappiness over a love affair, the threat of scandal, or simply the engulfing nature of his chronic depression, in July 1904 Harry killed himself. Freddie Maugham, “F.H.,” briefly noted in his appointment diary the course of events, that on July 20 he was summoned by wire to Cadogan Street to find Harry in agony, blue in the face and gasping for breath, having swallowed nitric acid three days earlier. He took him to St. Thomas’s Hospital, where for nearly a week Harry lingered, dying on the evening of the twenty-seventh, shortly after the arrival of Charlie and Beldy from Paris. The inquest two days later determined that Harry had ended his life “while of unsound mind”; it was immediately followed by the funeral at Lambeth Cemetery. F.H. makes no mention of Maugham’s being present, yet in Maugham’s own version, recounted some years later, he states that it was he who was summoned, he who found Harry, he who took him to hospital. The probability is that both brothers were involved, that George Barlow, the friend who was the first on the scene, sent a wire to the two of them. Attempting suicide was a criminal offense, and as it would, therefore, have been risky to call a doctor, Maugham’s medical expertise was vital; so, too, was his familiarity with St. Thomas’s, where he could use his influence to persuade the authorities to keep the matter quiet. The week after the funeral Maugham went to France to stay with Charles and Beldy, and the brothers speculated endlessly about the reasons that drove Harry to his death. “I’m sure it wasn’t only failure12 that made him kill himself,” Maugham significantly concluded. “It was the life he led.”

  Afterward Harry’s suicide was rarely referred to within the family. All four of Robert Maugham’s sons suffered from depression: Charles was portrayed by his family as “pale and grave13 … melancholy … a rather sad man,” while F.H. in his appointment diaries regularly defines his own state of mind as “depressed” and “very sad”; Maugham was an unhappy child who evolved into a deeply melancholic man, “violently pessimistic,”14 as he described himself, and both he and F.H. in later life suffered frequently from nightmares. One of Maugham’s nieces wrote of her father and her uncle Willie that “perhaps they had insulated15 themselves as best they could from unbearable sorrows, which resulted at times in an icy coldness which could chill and sometimes destroy human relationships.” Maugham at least was fortunate in that his abundant vitality, his ambition and insatiable curiosity made his life for most of the time seem worth living. But for Harry it was not, and although Maugham could rarely bring himself to speak of it, his brother’s pathetic self-destruction was to haunt him for many years.

  Having turned his back on the Stage Society, Maugham believed he now understood what commercial managements were looking for, and already during the p
revious twelve months he had completed three plays which in his view were ideal for the West End: The Explorer, Loaves and Fishes, and, with Harry, The Fortune Hunters. And yet not one of them had been accepted. This was a grave disappointment not only in terms of establishing a reputation but also financially; at this period his only income, apart from his tiny patrimony, was generated by the occasional short story sold to a magazine. Sharing a flat with Walter Payne, Maugham was able to live modestly, but in both his professional and social life, appearances were important. He was making new friends, was admired as a promising young writer, and was beginning to be much sought after in the more intellectual social circles. Maugham liked to dress well, to give dinners on occasion, and recently he had joined a gentlemen’s club, the Bath Club in Dover Street. None of this was cheap, and Maugham grew increasingly frustrated by his financial insecurity. “Times are very hard16 & publishers very moneyless at present,” Maugham wrote to Wentworth Huyshe. “I cannot tell when the clouds will roll by!”

  The easygoing Colles was continually being nagged by his client to try to interest managers in his plays, solicit commissions from journals, reissue old work, explore new sources, press for payment from dilatory editors—anything, in fact, that would bring in some money. “If you hear of anyone17 wanting a play translated from French, German, Italian or Spanish, or adapted, I should be glad to do it,” ran a typical plea. “Also I wondered if you could get me an Arrowsmith Annual to do. I have sketched out a rather sensational murder story (quite proper!) somewhat in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe….” “Behold three short stories,”18 begins a businesslike communication written in July 1904. “‘The Criminal,’ 2300 words, somewhat better than the others, would do for Lloyds. ‘Flirtation,’ 300 words, might suit the D. Mail. ‘A Rehearsal,’ 3000 words, is bad enough to suit anything.”