His financial situation may have been precarious, but Maugham nonetheless was regarded with respect as a promising young member of the literary intelligentsia, “an honourable condition,”19 he remarked, “which, some years later, when I became a popular writer of light comedies, I lost.” To his already heavy workload he was now invited to add the co-editorship of what was intended to be a prestigious annual anthology, a successor to The Yellow Book, a project on which he collaborated with the writer and illustrator Laurence Housman, a younger brother of the poet A. E. Housman. The Venture, subtitled An Annual of Art and Literature, boasted a distinguished list of contributors: John Masefield, G. K. Chesterton, James Joyce, Havelock Ellis, Thomas Hardy, and E. F. Benson, with illustrators Gordon Craig, T. Sturge Moore, and Charles Ricketts. In the first number Maugham included a piece of his own, Marriages Are Made in Heaven, the original English version of the curtain-raiser that had been staged the previous year in Berlin. The first issue appeared, a little late, in the autumn of 1903, followed by a second in 1905, after which no more was heard or seen of The Venture. “The whole thing was, of course,20 too highbrow to be popular,” Laurence Housman loftily concluded. “Perhaps had it been published at a guinea instead of at five shillings, it would have done better.”
Among the few women writers appearing in The Venture was the novelist Violet Hunt, whom Maugham had first met in 1902. A woman who inspired extremes of liking and loathing, Violet, now in her forties and notorious for her turbulent love life, was tall and thin with a mass of dark hair, large eyes, a beaky nose, and a pointed chin. Born in 1862, she had been brought up among artists and poets, her father, Alfred Hunt, a landscape painter, a friend of Ruskin, Burne-Jones, Millais, and Robert Browning. Violet had modeled for Burne-Jones and Sickert, and from childhood had been encouraged to regard herself as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty. At eighteen she had been admired by the young Oscar Wilde, who called her “the sweetest Violet in England,” and in her twenties had had a number of affairs with older men, including the diplomat and publisher Oswald Crawfurd, from whom she contracted syphilis; later she became one of the many mistresses of H. G. Wells and conducted a tormenting ten-year relationship with Ford Madox Ford, eleven years her junior. A novelist of the “new woman” genre, Violet was well known as a literary hostess, with her bimonthly luncheons at the Writers’ Club on Norfolk Street and her garden parties at South Lodge, her house on Campden Hill near Holland Park. Among the distinguished guests were Henry James, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and D. H. Lawrence, who strolled about the lawn sipping iced coffee and encouraging their hostess in her scandalous conversation. Indeed, it was Violet’s keen appetite for gossip that primarily appealed to Maugham, who was amused by her high spirits and malicious tongue; she, sexually voracious, was strongly attracted and lost little time in luring him into bed.
The physical side of the friendship was unsatisfactory and mercifully brief, Violet still suffering the aftereffects of her affair with Crawfurd. Yet the two remained fond of each other, and Maugham took to writing Violet long flirtatious letters, even confiding in her, up to a point, about his love life.
Much of the correspondence with Violet Hunt is devoted to a discussion of their literary enterprises, Maugham expanding on his own projects and offering a considered judgment of hers. In 1908 Violet dedicated to him her novel White Rose of Weary Leaf in graceful recognition of his dedication to her of his sketches of Andalusia, which were eventually published in 1905; unfortunately, he had neglected to ask her permission first and she had taken offense, “chiefly, I think, because it was called21 The Land of the Blessed Virgin & she could not imagine what the hell would be her business in such a country,” Maugham jokingly remarked. Violet soon recovered her good humor, however, and the friendship endured, she ebullient and demonstrative, he amiable and reserved. Nearly twenty years later Maugham was to draw her portrait in The Moon and Sixpence as Rose Waterford. “She combined a masculine intelligence22 with a feminine perversity…. No one could say such bitter things; on the other hand, no one could do more charming ones.” As she grew older, Violet grew increasingly touchy and tiresome, but Maugham always treated her with the greatest gentleness, and unlike many of her acquaintance refused to cold-shoulder her for her frequently outrageous behavior.
It was a sign of his confidence in Violet’s critical judgment that Maugham asked her to read his new novel, The Merry-Go-Round, before he submitted it for publication, at her suggestion cutting out several whole chapters as well as undertaking some minor pruning. The Merry-Go-Round, somewhat reluctantly accepted by Heinemann for a royalty of £60 and as part of a package with The Land of the Blessed Virgin, presents a reworking of A Man of Honour, with the addition of two subsidiary plot lines. The second, and much the more interesting of these, describes the helpless passion of a well-to-do married woman for a venal, caddish young man, several years her junior and very much on the make. Reggie Barlow-Bassett, like Gerald Vaudrey in Mrs. Craddock, has a sensual beauty that enslaves Grace Castillyon. From their first encounter, sitting next to him at dinner, Grace is smitten, and soon the besotted woman is lavishing money and every luxury on her worthless lover, risking her marriage and her standing in society, even though she knows he cares nothing for her and is only after what he can get. Eventually she is saved from ruin and persuaded to return to her husband by the stern intervention of Miss Ley, an outspoken spinster first encountered in Mrs. Craddock as standing in loco parentis to Bertha before her marriage.
Miss Ley’s original was an interesting woman, Mrs. George Steevens, widow of a Daily Mail correspondent who died while covering the Boer War. Plain of feature but stylish—she dressed always in severe black and white—she was elderly when Maugham met her, a bright-eyed old lady full of charm and vitality, as well as outspoken and capable of stunning rudeness to those she disliked. There was an air of notoriety surrounding Christina Steevens: during her first marriage, as Mrs. Rogerson, she had been barred from polite society after her scandalous involvement in the divorce case that ruined the career of the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke. She once startled Henry James by confiding that she had poisoned her first husband. “If she had been beautiful and sane,”23 James concluded, “she would have been one of the world’s great wicked women.” Mrs. Steevens lived at Merton Place in Surrey, on the site of the house that had once belonged to Admiral Nelson, where her precarious finances never prevented her from offering her wide circle of friends an abundant hospitality. Merton, near Wimbledon, was in easy reach of London, and a stream of visitors would drive out by hansom on Sundays for lunch or tea, in fine weather wandering through the garden and along the banks of the river. Among them were actors, writers, painters, and their hangers-on, a group that included Violet Hunt as well as others who were becoming important to Maugham, such as Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde’s disciple Reggie Turner, and the popular playwright Henry Arthur Jones.
It was Jones who told Maugham that when he read Liza of Lambeth he had immediately recognized Maugham’s potential as a dramatist, a flattering statement in direct contradiction of the opinion proffered by another of Mrs. Steevens’s guests. While strolling one afternoon on the lawn at Merton, Maugham had had a long talk with the gentle and charming Max Beerbohm. In those days Max had not yet perfected his supremely elegant sartorial style: in Maugham’s opinion, the dandyism “didn’t quite come off.24 His very narrow shirt cuffs, protruding a good two inches out of the sleeves of his tail coat, were generally a trifle grubby, the coat needed a brushing & the trousers pressing…. You had the impression of a small part actor in a provincial company dressed as a swell.” Max earnestly entreated Maugham to give up writing for the stage: in his opinion Maugham’s talents were primarily as a novelist, and that for one capable of such subtlety of characterization the drama was too crude a medium. Of course, Max continued, there was a great deal of money to be made out of the theater by some people, but “you, my boy, are not one25 of those people.” Maugham nodd
ed politely and Max, “sorry for him, yet conscious of having done a good afternoon’s work, briskly changed the subject.” But if Max believed he had influenced his companion, he was wrong. “He little knew,”26 said Maugham, “I was young, poor and determined.”
Despite such dispiriting advice, Maugham’s friendship with the witty and fastidious Max, begun at Merton, lasted a lifetime. Indeed, Maugham had much to be grateful for in Mrs. Steevens’s hospitality, and he responded warmly to the old lady’s liveliness and generosity, admiring her impatience with humbug and frankness in speaking her mind, both qualities he bestowed upon her fictional counterpart, Miss Ley. And in The Merry-Go-Round he drew on his own relationship with Mrs. Steevens in portraying that between Miss Ley and Frank Hurrell, a doctor, who both in appearance and character bears a striking resemblance to Maugham. Frank, we are told, was
a strong man, of no very easy temper,27 who held himself in admirable control. Silent with strangers, he disconcerted them by an unwilling frigidity of manner … an extremely reserved man, few knew that Frank Hurrell’s deliberate placidity of expression masked a very emotional temperament….
If The Merry-Go-Round is not among the most distinguished of Maugham’s novels, in autobiographical terms it is undoubtedly important. Not only is there a substantial element of self-portrayal in the drawing of Frank Hurrell but, more crucially, there is a revealing picture of Maugham’s emotional state. In describing Grace Castillyon’s passion for Reggie Barlow-Bassett, Maugham gives powerful expression to an obsession of his own, also for a much younger man. Shortly after he had completed the novel Maugham wrote to Violet Hunt, “Most of what one writes28 is to a greater or lesser degree autobiographical, not the actual incidents always, but always the emotions…. When one has to suffer so much it is only fair that one should have the consolation of writing books about it.” And years later he said of this period of his life that he urgently wanted to write a novel that would make money, “because I was at the time much taken29 with a young person of extravagant tastes … I determined to write a book that would enable me to … hold my own with my rivals. For the young person was attractive.”
Maugham was always careful to cover his tracks, and the young person in question is left unidentified, although evidence points firmly in the direction of a handsome youth named Harry Philips. Harry was the son of the rector of Hollington in Staffordshire, and intended for an ecclesiastical career. When Maugham met him he was studying at Oxford, where he was described by a fellow undergraduate as “quite the most dazzling figure30 for charm, good looks, and brilliant wit that I had ever encountered.” Harry, however, was proving a grave disappointment to his father. He had no interest in the church, and he regarded his time at the university as an opportunity to enjoy himself to the full and whenever possible to shock his college contemporaries by outré behavior. Like Oscar Wilde, who ten years earlier had haunted Oxford in pursuit of Lord Alfred Douglas, so Maugham became a familiar figure, strolling down the High with Harry or encountered sitting smoking in his rooms. “We took a great liking to each other,”31 said Harry, “& I invited him to stay with my parents in Staffordshire. My Father thought him clever but did not like his views on religion.” This was hardly surprising given Maugham’s agnosticism and his support of Harry’s determination not to enter the Church. No parental objection was made to the friendship, however, and the two men continued to see each other constantly.
In The Merry-Go-Round, Grace Castillyon, helplessly infatuated, is forever having to bribe Reggie to be nice to her. “She had a certain hold over him32 in his immense love of pleasure. She could always avoid his peevishness by taking him to the theatre; he was anxious to move in polite circles, and an invitation to some great house made him affectionate for a week.” As with Reggie, so with Harry; but providing the young man with entertainment did not come cheap, and Maugham had to work at full pressure, desperate to earn money. “Money was like a sixth sense,”33 he wrote, “without which you could not make the most of the other five.” Every penny counted, and in perusing the statements sent in by Colles he allowed no detail to escape his attention. “I see that you have charged me34 some 15/- for postage; this you have never done before, & I don’t see why you should suddenly begin,” he wrote tersely in August 1904. He was relying on the new novel to rescue his finances and he stressed to Colles the importance of having the book properly publicized and promoted. “I hope,” he wrote sternly, “you will impress upon Heinemann the necessity of advertising The Merry-Go-Round well.” Unfortunately its appearance on September 19, 1904, was a flop, and in spite of a few good reviews, sales were poor, an outcome for which Maugham blamed both publisher and agent. Heinemann did no better at the beginning of the following year with The Land of the Blessed Virgin; this, too, failed to sell many copies in spite of a couple of appreciative notices, including one, unsigned, in The Times Literary Supplement by the young Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf). “[Mr. Maugham] has his pen well under control,”35 she wrote, “and he has a sincere desire to find the right word for the beauty which he genuinely loves.”
As Maugham continued his ardent pursuit of the tantalizing Harry, the need for cash grew ever more pressing, and he continued to drive himself hard. “I wrote,” as he put it, “with jealousy gnawing36 at my heart-strings.” Dazzlingly attractive, Harry was much sought after, and it was mortifying to have to sit by while richer men treated him to suppers at the Savoy and lunches by the river at Maidenhead. Harry’s “frivolous soul” delighted in such spoiling; he saw no reason to deny himself, and his lover’s anguish was treated with an indifference that drove Maugham nearly to distraction. When in the summer of 1904 Harry came down from Oxford without a degree, vaguely inclining toward some kind of career as an artist, Maugham saw his chance and encouraged him to think seriously of training in Paris; he himself would leave London and take an apartment on the Left Bank that he and Harry could share. From the innocence of his country parish, Philips senior saw nothing wrong in the proposal: Maugham seemed a sensible chap, a hardworking writer with an established reputation who might well prove a good influence on his feckless son. Immediately Maugham put his plan into action, invigorated not only by the prospect of having his beloved boy to himself but also by the chance of breaking new ground. For more than six years he had struggled for success in London, and it suddenly seemed to look pointless and as though nothing would ever change. “It was all very nice,37 but I couldn’t see that it was leading me anywhere,” he wrote. “I was thirty … I was in a rut and I felt that I must get out of it. I talked the matter over with Walter Payne with the result that we got rid of the flat we had shared, sold for a song the little furniture we had and I, thrilled, went to Paris.”
THROUGHOUT HIS TWENTIES Maugham had visited Paris at intervals, sometimes staying with his eldest brother, Charlie, and his young family, sometimes in a hotel, neither entirely satisfactory, as he explained to Violet Hunt. “When I am with my brother38 I am somewhat overwhelmed by domesticity & when I stay at a hotel I am ruined.” Now in looking for somewhere to live Maugham enlisted the help of a new friend, Gerald Kelly, a young painter currently living in France whom he had met one Sunday in 1903 while staying with Charles and Beldy at the house they rented for the summer in Meudon.
Five years younger than Maugham, Gerald Kelly (of the family that published Kelly’s Directories) was the son of a well-to-do clergyman, the vicar of St. Giles in Camberwell. Possessed of abundant nervous energy and an irascible Irish charm, Gerald was short and stocky, with finely drawn features, eyes alert behind big round spectacles, and a head of thick, untidy black hair. The formative experience of his early years had been his visits to Dulwich Picture Gallery, which first inspired his love of painting. Lacking any formal training in art, Kelly had nonetheless moved to Paris in 1901, where he bought a large studio in the rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse, and, helped by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, began assiduously visiting the studios of Monet, Degas, and Cézanne, even succeeding i
n persuading the sculptor Rodin to take him on as an assistant. Concentrating on portraiture, with landscapes as a sideline, Kelly was beginning to become known. One of his paintings had been bought by the French government in 1903, and the following year, while still only twenty-five, he was made a member of the Salon d’Automne.
At Meudon, Maugham and Kelly had taken to each other at once, Maugham captivated by the younger man’s exuberant volubility, his passion for art and ideas, while Kelly was impressed by Maugham’s intelligence, his dry sense of humor, and his wide-ranging curiosity. He was also fascinated by Maugham’s appearance, which he longed to paint: “his whole face was just one colour39—very pale [and] his eyes were like little pieces of brown velvet—like a monkey’s eyes.” The two men were very different in manner. “While I have leaned on his patience and on his wisdom, he has often been exasperated by my verbosity,” Kelly wrote. Nonetheless they shared a number of common attributes: they were both tolerant and unshockable, both had a quick wit and a hot temper, although Maugham was better at controlling his; they both had a passion for travel; and they took pride in their intellectual integrity. “Both of us obstinately refused40 to pretend to admire what really we did not admire—even when we had been told we should admire it,” said Kelly. “Willie dared to find Meredith and Pater overrated; I was bold enough to love Ingres and Manet—unfashionable judgments at the beginning of this century.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 10