The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  AT THIRTY-SIX, Maugham was riding high and enjoying his life immensely. “I was happy, I was prosperous,86 I was busy,” as he rightly remarked; he was also famous, and everyone wanted to know him. Under a sedate exterior, the fashionable playwright was energetic and high-spirited, capable of a flippant gaiety that was as unsuspected as it was engaging. Described as “one of London’s wittiest bachelors87 and most indefatigable dancers,” he was deluged with invitations and seen everywhere: in white tie and tails at dances and first nights; two-stepping in Spanish fancy dress at the Chelsea Arts Ball; joining a vigorous barn dance at a charity evening at Covent Garden. He attended luncheons and dinners in Mayfair and Kensington, the next afternoon, immaculate in frock coat, top hat, and spats, calling, as etiquette demanded, on his hostess of the night before. Gerald Kelly brilliantly captured Maugham at this period in his portrait The Jester. Recently returned to London, Kelly had taken a studio in Knightsbridge, and here Maugham had called on him one day wearing morning dress and a gray topper. “[He] had started to dress himself88 in a very dapper way,” Kelly recalled, “and came in delightedly to show me his grey hat.” On a chair in front of an ornate Coromandel screen, the playwright is seen in the painting sitting bright-eyed and alert, one leg casually crossed over the other, hat slightly tilted, shoes shining, gloves immaculate, one hand resting on a slender gold-tipped cane, the perfect picture of the Edwardian dandy, the debonair man-about-town.

  With a substantial income at his disposal, Maugham had bought for £8,000 an eight-hundred-year lease of an elegant five-story Georgian house, number 6 Chesterfield Street, right in the heart of Mayfair, jokingly referred to as “the house that Frohman built.” Here he planned to move with Walter Payne, but first there was a great deal of work to be done on it and furniture to buy: “your house is being entirely redecorated,” he told Frohman. “You will not know 6 Chesterfield Street89 when you come.” Maugham’s greatest pleasure was in buying pictures for the house, including an Orpen, a couple of landscapes by Wilson Steer, and, on the advice of Sir Hugh Lane, the connoisseur and founder of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, a theatrical scene by Samuel de Wilde; this was followed by the purchase of a Zoffany, for £22, of David Garrick and Mrs. Cibber in Venice Preserv’d, and a small version of Reynolds’s Garrick Between Comedy and Tragedy, both paintings once owned by Sir Henry Irving. These two pictures were the first in what was to grow into a notable collection of over forty theatrical paintings, some picked up in junk shops for only a few pounds, eventually donated to the National Theatre.

  Between periods of intensely concentrated work, Maugham continued his busy and glamorous social life, as always fascinated to observe the morals and mores of the sophisticated circles in which he was invited to take part, all stored away as useful material for his fiction. As the critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote of him, Maugham moved through London society “with the reserve and detachment90 of a professional man of letters.” Maugham was intrigued to learn, for instance, that the upper classes “still talked as though91 to run the British Empire were their private business. It gave me a peculiar sensation to hear it discussed, when a general election was in the air, whether Tom should have the Home Office and whether Dick would be satisfied with Ireland.” Among his recent acquaintance was an ambitious political hostess, daughter of Lady St. Helier and wife of a wealthy member of Parliament. With Dorothy Allhusen, Maugham conducted the same kind of affectionate, flirtatious friendship that he maintained with other older women friends such as Ada Leverson and Violet Hunt. (“My dear Mrs. Allhusen, You are a faithless woman.92 You promise me with all the earnestness in the world that you will write to me, though you have left me without so much as a picture postcard…. I miss you very much.”) The Allhusens had a large country house at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, and here Maugham became a frequent guest at weekend house parties, where there was always an interesting mix of politicians, writers, and eminent members of the armed forces. “Thank you so much93 for my jolly week-end,” he wrote to his hostess after one such occasion. “It is just the sort of rest I like, getting so tired that you go to bed for the remainder of the week.”

  It was at Stoke Court that Maugham first met Winston Churchill, then a Cabinet minister in Asquith’s government and recently married to Dorothy Allhusen’s cousin Clementine Hozier. There was a golf course nearby and the two men often played together in the afternoon, returning to the house for a substantial tea followed by a glittering formal dinner. It was late one night when the ladies had retired to bed and the men, changed into smoking jackets, were talking over their brandy and cigars that Churchill was startled by an intervention of Maugham’s: a young man, very full of himself, had been holding forth at length, in the writer’s view talking complete nonsense, when suddenly Maugham broke in and with one sentence, witty but devastating, silenced him. Everyone burst out laughing, but the next morning Churchill came up to Maugham as he was peacefully reading the Sunday papers. “I want to make a compact with you,”94 he said. “If you will promise never to be funny at my expense, I will promise never to be funny at yours.”

  Gratified although he was to be in such demand, and much as he relished seeing this side of life, Maugham was by no means at everyone’s beck and call. In February 1910 he felt obliged to rebuke Ada Leverson, who had made the mistake of presuming too much on her intimacy by allowing a friend of hers whom Maugham did not know to approach him. “My dear Sphynx, Pray thank your friend95 for her kind invitation,” he began.

  I will not accept it. It is a very impertinent thing to invite a total stranger to dine with you. There are certain recognized methods of making the acquaintance of anyone one wants to know & I do not see why they should be neglected because I happen to be a writer….

  Three months later, on May 6, when the London season had barely begun, the death of Edward VII was announced, technically bringing to an end the Edwardian era, although it was to continue in all but name until 1914. Maugham was in Italy most of that month, writing to Violet Hunt that he was glad to be out of England “during the dreary time of public mourning,”96 when theaters were doing little business and society was in the doldrums. It was fortuitous that at this time he was preparing to make his first journey across the Atlantic. For some while Frohman had been urging him to come. Mrs. Dot, Smith, and Penelope had opened in New York, and Lady Frederick, as Maugham proudly told Pinker, “is one of the greatest successes97 they have had lately in America.” Originally having planned to go to the States the previous year, he had been forced by illness to postpone the trip. Now, however, he was ready. “I am sailing by the Caronia98 on the 22nd of October,” he wrote to Frohman, full of high spirits, picturing himself setting out to sea, he said, “like Christopher Columbus99 in conquest of America.”

  * Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), a popular French playwright.

  * Music-hall comedians.

  * Although born in the British embassy and thus technically on British soil, in literal terms France was Maugham’s native country, but he always regarded himself as English to the core.

  † “Mrs. Beamish,” about a respectable middle-aged couple forced into revealing the shocking fact that they are not married and that their priggish son is therefore illegitimate, was never produced or published and exists only in manuscript, in the Library of Congress in Washington.

  CHAPTER 6

  SYRIE

  • • •

  ON OCTOBER 22, 1910, MAUGHAM SAILED FROM LIVERPOOL ON the SS Caronia, one of the largest and most elegant vessels in the Cunard fleet. The days of traveling on the cheap were over: from now on, whenever possible during the next half century, Maugham was to journey en prince, enjoying a standard of comfort that nowhere was to be more sumptuously provided than by the European liners on the North Atlantic route. The crossing took six days, and on arrival in New York, Maugham went straight from the noise and bustle of the pier to his hotel, the deluxe St. Regis on Fifth Avenue in the heart of midtown Manhattan. Built in 1903, the
St. Regis was the first of the high-rise hotels, regarded as the last word in grandeur and modernity, with electric elevators, bedside telephones, and even a primitive form of air-conditioning. Nearby on Fifth Avenue the old order was imposingly represented by the monolithic mansions of the Astors and Vanderbilts, while all around was evidence of the new, with fast-rising skyscrapers, neon signs, honking motor traffic, the subway, electric trams, and an elevated railway.

  Maugham’s name was already familiar: four of his plays had been produced on Broadway with well-known actresses in the leading roles, Ethel Barrymore, Mary Boland, Marie Tempest, and Billie Burke. Thanks to Charles Frohman’s enthusiastic welcome and a number of prominent introductions, Maugham found himself invited everywhere. He quickly became quite a celebrity, with his courteous manners, “English” reserve, and exquisitely tailored clothes. The New York Times, taking note of the “host of social entertainments1 [given] in his honor,” observed that “Mr. Maugham [is] the most socially popular English playwright that has visited America in years.”

  One New Yorker on whom he made an unforgettable impression was his “Mrs. Dot,” Billie Burke. A vivacious redhead, Billie Burke had begun her career singing in music halls in England at the age of fourteen and was now a popular comedienne working to establish herself as a straight actress, an ambition considerably furthered by her success in Maugham’s play. To her, Maugham’s elegance was more Parisian than Bond Street, with his finely fitted suits, beautifully made shoes, and gray silk top hat. Maugham, who liked the company of pretty women, was entertained by the actress’s high spirits and flattered by her obvious admiration. After the show the two would often go dancing together, deciding one evening to go to the nightclub at the Astor. “We were not members2 and it was late, about 2 A.M.,” Billie Burke remembered, “[but] over we went [and down] the red-carpeted grand staircase of the Hotel Astor ballroom…. I can permit myself to say ‘made an entrance,’ for no actress in her right mind would attempt less in descending a great staircase on the arm of Somerset Maugham.” In her memoirs she recalled “his great smouldering brown eyes,” adding wistfully, “Ah yes, Mr. Maugham, so you had, and I was a little in love with you, sir.”

  Miss Burke was not the only one to be smitten. After all, here was a man, handsome, famous, and rich, whose subject was marriage, and yet he was not married. It was inevitable that a number of women came to consider Maugham as ideal husband material, and he was frequently teased by matchmaking ladies anxious to be the one to find the playwright a wife. But his private life was tightly guarded: his continuing relationship with Sue Jones was known only to a few, and he kept his penchant for members of his own sex even more of a secret.

  A friendship Maugham was particularly anxious to renew while in New York was with a fellow playwright, the twenty-four-year-old Edward (Ned) Sheldon, known as the Boy Wonder of Broadway. Sheldon, son of a wealthy Chicago real estate dealer, had made a sensation by writing two immensely successful plays, one while he was still at Harvard. Sheldon was clever, sensitive, charming, and urbane; he was also wealthy and very handsome; and he, like Maugham, was somewhat ambivalent in his sexuality. In 1909 he had visited Europe, which was probably when the friendship began. Maugham found him intensely attractive and hoped for a more physical relationship, but Sheldon was evasive, with the result that “there was never the least frankness3 between them upon the subject of sex.” Nonetheless the two men became devoted friends, with Maugham when in New York often staying at Sheldon’s exotically furnished apartment on Gramercy Park.

  From New York Maugham went for a few days to Boston, where he dined with Henry James, then staying with his recently widowed sister-in-law in Cambridge. Maugham had met James on a couple of occasions in London and had been intrigued by him, if slightly irritated by the atmosphere of “cher maître” that surrounded him, by the great man’s expectation of reverence and homage. Maugham’s attitude to James’s work over the years was to grow increasingly equivocal, a mixture of impatience and admiration, impatience with what he saw as a lack of that empathy essential to a novelist and admiration for a superb technique. “The great novelists, even in seclusion,4 have lived life passionately,” Maugham wrote. “Henry James was content to observe it from a window.” Nonetheless he found James good company, witty when in the mood, and he was pleased to see him again, enjoying the intimate evening à trois, although it was obvious that James on this occasion was in a nervous and unhappy frame of mind: grieving over the death of his brother, William, he was also pining to return to England, restless and ill at ease in the land of his birth. As Maugham prepared to leave, James insisted on accompanying him to the corner where he would catch the streetcar back to Boston.

  I protested that I was perfectly capable5 of getting there by myself, but he would not hear of it, not only on account of the kindness and the great courtesy which were natural to him, but also because America seemed to him a strange and terrifying labyrinth in which without his guidance I was bound to get hopelessly lost…. The street-car hove in sight and Henry James was seized with agitation. He began waving frantically when it was still a quarter of a mile away. He was afraid it wouldn’t stop, and he besought me to jump on with the greatest agility of which I was capable…. I was so infected by his anxiety that when the car pulled up and I leapt on, I had almost the sensation that I had had a miraculous escape from certain death. I saw him standing on his short legs in the middle of the road, looking after the car, and I felt that he was trembling still at my narrow shave.

  Upon his arrival in England in December 1910, Maugham was immediately faced with two conflicting demands: his work, and the decoration and furnishing of Chesterfield Street. The first and most urgent requirement was to put the finishing touches to Loaves and Fishes, which was due to go into rehearsal after Christmas. Written as long ago as 1903, Loaves and Fishes had failed to arouse any interest at the time, and having subsequently been reshaped as a novel, The Bishop’s Apron, was now returned to the form for which it had originally been intended. It opened at the Duke of York’s on February 24, yet despite a polished Frohman-Boucicault production and an enthusiastic first night, it ran for only a few weeks. “I think it possible6 that the public is just tired of me,” Maugham told Gerald Kelly.

  That is an eventuality to which I have always looked forward, & it leaves me calm. I can give them a rest for a year or two, & then they will have forgotten, & come back to my work with avidity. I have put into three years & a half what most dramatists would have given ten years to, & it would not be surprising if my characteristics have become tedious.

  Fortunately Maugham could easily afford to step back and consider his position. For the past fifteen years, since the writing of Liza of Lambeth, he had worked unceasingly, producing an astonishing quantity of material; now, thanks to the large sums coming in every week from both sides of the Atlantic and to Walter Payne’s prudent investments, he could allow himself some leisure. For such a prolific and successful writer, the failure of this recent production, regrettable, of course, was no serious matter. Frohman was unconcerned; indeed, was offering the enormous sum of £10,000 for a new play as a vehicle for Billie Burke, but Maugham was uninterested in the proposal and turned it down. Financially Maugham was well off, and as he told Kelly, “I shall still be able7 to pay for the house without touching my capital.”

  The workmen were finally on the point of leaving, and Maugham was anxious to give the house his full attention. He and Walter Payne were to continue their amicable arrangement of cohabiting, Payne having left the bar in order to take over his late father’s music hall and theatrical business. The two men, with the assistance of a decorator friend, a Mr. Howard, now threw themselves into the creation of an elegant town house. “Howard has been very kind8 to us,” Maugham reported to Kelly. “His advice has been extremely useful, & his taste seems excellent [although] I do not share his admiration for the massive & gilded: the only thing I am quite sure I like gilded is sin.” Kelly, who on his friend’s reco
mmendation was spending some months in Spain, received a stream of letters asking him to find various ornaments—pottery, glass, pictures, fabric. In pride of place opposite the fireplace in the drawing room was Kelly’s Jester, “one of the best things you have done,”9 as Maugham told him. “Everyone who comes expresses admiration of the house [, and] my own room, the long one upstairs, is a great success.” This was Maugham’s writing room, and in contrast to the lower floors was sparsely equipped, a wide, bare room with two narrow sash windows facing the street and in the center a rough deal table serving as a desk. The finished results were entirely satisfactory. “I have never been so comfortable10 in my life,” Maugham declared.

  With the house more or less completed, Maugham became aware of the familiar restlessness taking hold. At Easter he went to Paris, in June to Le Touquet, and then he made a short trip to the Balearics before returning to London to prepare for another visit to New York in the autumn. But now he was longing to go farther, his mind filled with visions of the Far East. One mooted project involved Kelly, who was planning a lengthy sojourn in Burma. “I have half a mind to join you in Burmah11 for a little,” Maugham wrote to him, “& shall try & persuade you to come on to China with me.” But escape was not to prove as easy as in his imaginings it seemed.