The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Under these idyllic conditions, Maugham found it difficult to get down to work. “I have not an idea in my head,” he told Kelly,

  & except that I’m rather afraid I shall never have any more in my life, I’m much pleased with myself. Only, being of a damned dissatisfied temper, it is only with difficulty that I prevent myself from making plans for the future. I find it one of the hardest things in the world to enjoy the present moment: my impulse is always to neglect it for the consideration of the wonderful things I shall do & see & feel three months hence.

  One whom Maugham had looked forward to seeing again was his old friend from Heidelberg, John Ellingham Brooks, but he was disappointed to find Brooks no longer the stimulating companion he once had been. The handsome, vibrant character, so full of ideas and enthusiasm, had developed into something of a bore, his innovative theories now seeming stale and old-fashioned; his hair was thinning, he had put on weight, and his blue eyes had a slightly watery look. Having squandered his small fortune, Brooks had been rescued from penury by a wealthy American painter, Romaine Goddard, who, herself homosexual, had taken pity on him and agreed to a marriage of convenience, imagining that Brooks might provide her with pleasant companionship when she was on the island while leaving her free to follow her own distinctively bohemian life in London and elsewhere. The marriage proved a disaster, however, with Brooks shocking his wife by his grasping attitude toward money, his dreadful manners, and his insistence on a ménage à trois with a sulky peasant boyfriend forever in the background. Having married in June 1903, they formally separated a year later, Romaine buying her husband off with an income of £300 a year, a sum which was more than adequate to provide Brooks with a comfortable life of lotus-eating on Capri. As his friend E. F. Benson phrased it, “In the process of making a complete failure65 of his life as far as achievement of any sort went, he made himself for many years very happy.”

  While Maugham was writing of his summer to Gerald Kelly in Paris, Kelly was describing a passionate love affair he had embarked upon with a young dancer; he was proposing to move her in with him but wanted to know what Maugham thought of the scheme. Not much, was the answer; he gives his reasons in a letter that clearly refers to a harrowing experience of Maugham’s own, and goes some considerable way to explaining his horror of the kind of relationship he depicts in both The Man of Honour and The Bishop’s Apron, a relationship between two people disastrously unequal in intellect and social station. “I’m sure a lot of people will think you66 a devilish lucky fellow,” Maugham wrote to Kelly,

  [but] you must not mind if I congratulate myself rather than you…. I cannot help rubbing my hands & gloating because I do not stand in your shoes…. You wait, my boy, till you are asked when you’ll be back each time you go out, & where you’ve been the moment you come in, till you have to put up with sulks if you don’t agree to the most unreasonable things, & quarrels for the absurdest trifles…. Ouf! I sweat when I think of it. Women can never leave a man his freedom, they use every imaginable device to load him with chains…. You’ll find every penny is important. Taking a woman about with one is not cheap, because one has to go in cabs instead of buses, & they have all sorts of little whims which have to be satisfied. And you’ll want more money, because you’ll go a great deal more to theatres & out in the evenings. You’ll find that when one lives with a person of no particular education … time hangs rather heavily on one’s hands; one racks one’s brains for conversation & at last is driven to going somewhere. … Having said all this I give you my blessing & wish you well…. For myself I only hope that I shall never again be imprisoned by any passion.

  The idyll on Capri failed to last the summer. At the beginning of August, Harry decided he had had enough and returned to his family in Staffordshire. “It was there I decided67 I was really getting nowhere & should he tire of me I would be pretty useless,” Harry recalled. “His cynicism distressed me [&] I found it difficult to live with someone who believed that no one did anything without a motive.” To gregarious Harry, intent on having fun, Maugham’s periods of moodiness and introversion were incomprehensible, their growing lack of communication something of which Maugham himself was miserably aware; as he wrote in his notebook,

  one places all one’s love,68 all one’s faculty of expansion on one person, making, as it were, a final effort to join one’s soul to his…. But little by little one finds that it is all impossible, and however ardently one loves him, however intimately one is connected with him, he is always a stranger…. Then one retires into oneself and in one’s silence builds a world of one’s own which one keeps from the eyes of every living soul, even from the person one loves best, knowing he would not understand it.

  The two men parted on good terms, however. Harry shortly afterward joined the army for a spell, before marrying a rich woman whose substantial fortune enabled him to live in idleness for the rest of his days.

  WITH HARRY GONE, Maugham expected to be heartbroken; but in fact he soon recovered. Having received the first payment from Chapman & Hall for his novel, he was gratified to realize that the sum was all his to do with as he pleased. “By the time I received the money69 the passion that I had thought would last for ever was extinct and I had no longer the slightest wish to spend it in the way I had intended.” Instead he spent it on travel, first to Tuscany with the dependable Walter Payne, then skiing in Switzerland, and in January the following year to Egypt for a couple of months. Passing through Paris only to tidy up his affairs, Maugham returned to London in the spring of 1906, extremely hard up but more determined than ever to make the breakthrough into fame and prosperity. While abroad he had written some travel articles as well as a couple of short stories, and Pinker, like Colles before him, was being urged to chase payments. “Has The Lady’s Realm70 or whatever it was stumped up?” Maugham was anxiously inquiring in July. “This is the season when my tailor & hatter send in bills.” Fortunately Maugham’s living expenses were minimal. Payne, who continued to handle his friend’s financial affairs, had taken rooms in Pall Mall, number 56, and as before, Maugham was able to make use of these, needing to rent only a bedroom next door. Here he set himself to work on a new novel, inspired by the grotesque figure from Le Chat Blanc, Aleister Crowley. The Magician was finished by the end of the year, but the horrific nature of its content shocked the publishers to whom it was shown, and Pinker failed to sell it.

  Beginning to grow financially desperate, Maugham now resorted to the quick fix of recycling old material. He had already excavated his rejected play The Explorer, digging out one of its subplots for use as the short story “Flirtation,” and now, like a thrifty housewife determined not to let anything go to waste, he sat down to rewrite the entire play as a novel. It was a tedious exercise, and Maugham was ashamed of the finished product. Suggested by the adventures of the great African explorer H. M. Stanley, the man who “found” Livingstone, the plot revolves around a young man’s noble refusal to clear his own reputation by breaking his word to a scoundrel. The Explorer, dedicated “To my dear Mrs. W. G. Steevens,” reads like the mechanical exercise that indeed Maugham had found it to be. “I do not like it,”71 he told Violet Hunt, while to Gerald Kelly, in whose copy was inscribed the words, “Gerald Kelly from W. S. Maugham, his worst book,” he wrote, “The people were too heroic72 for me to live with … I vomited daily at the exalted sentiments that issued from their lips, & my hair stood up on end at the delicacy of their sense of honour.”

  By the end of the summer of 1907 Maugham was exhausted and had seen little reward for his unrelenting industry. The Explorer had been accepted by Heinemann but would not appear until the following year; The Magician had still not found a publisher; and none of the plays that had been circulating around the London managements had found any takers, despite the tenacity of Maugham’s play agent, Golding Bright. But there was one glimmer of light. While in Paris Maugham had written a comedy, Lady Frederick, which he had designed specifically to provide a succulent part for a leading actr
ess. At first the play met with no greater enthusiasm than its predecessors, but then suddenly Maugham’s luck seemed to change: George Tyler, an American producer in Paris on the lookout for material, read it, liked it, and offered to buy an option on it for $1,000. Tyler invited Maugham to his hotel to discuss the proposition, telling him that the piece packed a hell of a punch, though it needed gingering up with a few more epigrams (within a couple of hours Maugham added twenty-four). He gave his visitor a couple of cocktails, the first of his life, “[and] Maugham told me afterwards,”73 said Tyler, “that, when he left me that afternoon with his check for a thousand in his pocket, he was stepping on his left ear with his right hind foot…. He struck me as a nice young fellow with a possible future.” Convinced he had a hot property, Tyler returned with the script to London, only to find that no actress, in the words of one to whom he showed it, would touch the part with a ten-foot pole. The problem was that the eponymous heroine, Lady Frederick, a fascinating adventuress not quite in her first youth, is required in the pivotal scene to appear literally and shockingly barefaced: brightly lit, wearing no makeup, and without the false hair that most fashionable women then used in considerable quantities. Under these conditions none of the big stars who might otherwise have leaped at the role would look at it: Ellis Jeffreys, the elegant and sophisticated comedienne, was appalled by the very idea; Mrs. Pat Campbell declared she had never been so insulted in her life; the American star Violet Allen said she wouldn’t consider it for a moment. Charles Frohman was approached but saw little merit in the play, and so reluctantly Tyler was forced to abandon the project, “feeling pretty melancholy74 on Maugham’s account and pretty sore on my own.”

  Dejected but resolute, Maugham immediately started on a new work, Mrs. Dot, also with a strong female lead, yet carefully designed to cause offense to nobody; this, however, was turned down on the grounds that it was too bland. “I began to think75 that I should never be able to write a piece that a leading lady liked,” Maugham wrote despairingly, “and so tried my hand at a man’s play … Jack Straw.” When this, too, failed to find favor, Maugham came near to giving up: there seemed to be nothing for it but to return to his abandoned medical career, go back to St. Thomas’s for a year’s revision, and then try to find a post as a ship’s surgeon, which would at least give him the opportunity to travel.

  It was at this point that interest was suddenly revived in Lady Frederick. Otho Stuart, manager of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, had had a play fail unexpectedly and was now faced with the theater dark for six weeks before his next presentation. Maugham’s comedy was not at all his kind of thing, but no doubt it would adequately fill the short time available. Maugham was on his travels when he heard the news. From Sicily he wrote excitedly to Golding Bright, “Your letter filled me with exultation,76 & now the likelihood of an early production makes me realise that the world is not hollow & foolish.” A courageous actress had been found, Ethel Irving, to play the lead, and rehearsals, which Maugham was desperate to attend, were due to start within a few days.

  It was a Sunday when Bright’s letter reached Maugham in Girgenti and he learned of the sudden change in his fortunes. Now he urgently needed to be in London the following Thursday. Almost penniless, he found he had enough money only for the train to Palermo and the evening packet to Naples. At Naples he disembarked on Monday morning.

  I went to Cook’s77 and found that a boat was going to Marseilles that afternoon and took a ticket, but when I offered a cheque in payment the agent firmly refused to accept anything but cash…. I expostulated, I raged, I stormed; and at last (I am not a dramatist for nothing) flung out of the office…. I went to the office of the steamship company and asked for a first class ticket to Marseilles … and without a word wrote a cheque for the amount due. The clerk, young and timid, looked a trifle doubtful, but my assurance was such that I think he had not the nerve to refuse; in a minute I was out of the office with my ticket to Marseilles in my pocket. But I had to get to London…. The shipping agents were also bankers, the banking part of the establishment being in another part of the building; I went in and walked boldly up to the desk. I took out my cheque book and the ticket I had just received.

  “I’m going to Marseilles on one of your boats this afternoon. You might cash me a cheque for a fiver, will you?” I smiled ingratiatingly….

  I did not linger in the bank long after I had the five sovereigns in my pocket…. I was in great spirits, for now I had enough money to take me to Paris, and I felt confident that I could get on from there without delay….

  When I got to London I still had a shilling for my cab. On Thursday morning at eleven o’clock I strolled into the Court Theatre….

  Lady Frederick, rejected by seventeen managements, was for Maugham the first step on the path to enormous celebrity and wealth. The play, written on the back of discarded typescript because, said the author, “[I was] very short of money78 [and] could not afford to waste pages of good clean paper,” opened on October 26, 1907. So great was its success that Maugham became famous almost literally overnight—“England’s Dramatist,” as he was dubbed by the press. Lady Frederick ran for more than a year, and by the following year, 1908, four of Maugham’s plays were running concurrently in the West End, a record that for a living playwright was to remain unbroken for a generation.

  * Now the Playhouse Theatre.

  † Never published, and no known manuscript exists.

  CHAPTER 5

  ENGLAND’S DRAMATIST

  • • •

  THE YEARS BETWEEN THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY AND THE beginning1 of the [1914] war,” wrote the distinguished theater critic James Agate, “mark a period of the greatest dramatic energy in this country since the Elizabethans.” It was in 1907, exactly in the middle of this productive period, that with Lady Frederick Maugham enjoyed his first great triumph and laid the foundations of his reputation as one of the most sought-after playwrights of the age. In an era dominated by Shaw, with Galsworthy and Granville Barker among the best known of the serious dramatists, it was Somerset Maugham and James Barrie who for a number of years and in terms of fashionable reputation were preeminent in the world of West End comedy, although Barrie, despite the annual revivals of Peter Pan, never quite approached Maugham’s popularity or earning power. This period saw the final phase of the type of society drama, witty and urbane, at which Maugham excelled: his acute intelligence enabled him to gauge what his audiences wanted; his expert craftsmanship delivered it. The staging of Lady Frederick at the Royal Court owed a great deal to luck, but its subsequent success was largely due to the care with which its author had weighed and measured his ingredients. Before beginning on Lady Frederick, Maugham explained,

  I reflected upon the qualities2 which the managers demanded in a play: evidently a comedy, for the public wished to laugh; with as much drama as it would carry, for the public liked a thrill; with a little sentiment, for the public liked to feel good; and a happy ending.

  Equally important, what kind of part would be most tempting to a leading lady? A beautiful adventuress with a title and a heart of gold, was the obvious answer. “Having made up my mind upon this the rest was easy.”

  A deft if ephemeral society comedy, Lady Frederick is light, sophisticated, and absolutely true to its well-established genre. Set in 1890, the action takes place in the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where we find Lady Frederick Berolles, a charming and attractive widow in her late thirties, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Pleasure-loving and extravagant, she is also, despite appearances and some scandalous rumors to the contrary, a woman with a strong sense of honor. Marriage to young Charlie Mereston, a marquess with £50,000 a year, would solve all Lady Frederick’s problems, and the young man is very much in love with her; but desperate though her situation is, Lady Frederick will not stoop to such a venal solution, bravely resolving to quench her youthful suitor’s passion by appearing to him in her natural state. Act III, the scene that had frightened off so m
any actresses, opens in Lady Frederick’s dressing room, the blinds pulled up to let in strong sunlight; the stage instructions describe her as “haggard and yellow and lined.” In full view of the audience and Lord Mereston, the transformation is then unflinchingly effected, the false hair, the greasepaint, rouge, pencil, and powder, each step in the process mercilessly explained to an appalled Charlie Mereston. “Now for the delicate soft bloom3 of youth,” says Lady Frederick gaily, picking up her pot of rouge. “The great difficulty, you know, is to make both your cheeks the same colour.”

  The ruse is successful: Mereston is persuaded to give up his pursuit and all ends happily, with the heroine agreeing to marry Paradine Fouldes, a wealthy old admirer, who as he takes her in his arms says sentimentally, “D’you suppose I don’t know4 that behind that very artificial complexion there’s a dear little woman called Betsy who’s genuine to the bottom of her soul?”

  Always fascinated by the feminine, Maugham was clearly intrigued by the subject of women and cosmetics, and by the moral implications involved: in the Edwardian era no respectable young lady would dream of using makeup, and even in the most sophisticated circles there was still an aura of questionable respectability about older women who were known to paint. With Lady Frederick Maugham had carefully calculated the impact the final act would make, and when the audience watched the leading lady, Ethel Irving, artificially construct her character’s girlish complexion, they were as shocked and thrilled as audiences sixty years later when first confronted with full frontal nudity on the stage in Hair.

  The elation and enthusiasm shown by the audience on the first night were echoed in most of the reviews. “Exhilarating entertainment,”5 said The Times, while Reginald Turner in The Academy wrote, “a delicious evening,6 full of delight from start to finish…. [The author] was completely, splendidly successful.” Such a reception naturally came as an immense relief to Maugham: when he had arrived at the theater that evening he had not known, he said, whether he should leave it “as an accomplished dramatist7 or an embryo bank clerk.” During the performance he sat, in white tie and tails, pale and silent at the back of a box; by the end of the first act, however, it was clear that he had a hit on his hands. At the supper party he gave at the Bath Club, he was seen to be in exuberant high spirits, warmly thanking the actors, especially Ethel Irving, unanimously praised by the critics, and also Charles Lowne, who played Paradine Fouldes. Throughout his life Maugham was to remember the first night of Lady Frederick as the most exciting moment of his theatrical career.