Maugham landed in Boulogne on October 19, reporting with other uniformed volunteers to the Hôtel de Paris, where the Red Cross had set up headquarters. Rows of canvas-covered ambulances were parked along the quays, and the whole town was seething with khaki; everywhere groups of men roamed the streets in an aimless attempt to pass the time before orders were received. Fierce fighting was taking place only a few miles away at Ypres on the Belgian border, and the sound of gunfire rumbled and thundered intermittently day and night. With the British Expeditionary Force engaged in a desperate struggle to hold back the German advance, the casualty rate was appalling, the numbers of dead and wounded quickly reaching the tens of thousands. Maugham’s unit was moved out of Boulogne almost at once to join up with an American Red Cross group in the French zone, its job to transport the wounded from the field to the casualty clearing stations just behind the line; from there they would be taken to base hospitals in towns a few miles farther away, to Doullens, Amiens, Montdidier. The weather was cold, the rain relentless. “There are no candles59 & nothing but tallow dips,” Maugham reported to Gerald Kelly, “the roads are horrible, pavé with three feet of mud on either side so that if a convoy forces you down nothing but a team of horses will drag you up again.” The makeshift clearing stations, set up in churches and barns on the edge of the battlefield, were overcrowded and chaotic, but the conditions in the hospitals were little better, all of them overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of wounded, staffed by exhausted medics, with inadequate supplies and a basic lack of hygiene that made them breeding grounds for infection.
For Red Cross volunteers like Maugham, frequently required to go on to the field of battle, sometimes under fire, the work was demanding and dangerous. Often the call came at night, when in the freezing cold a convoy of ambulances would have to make their way without headlights in the pitch dark, along muddy, cratered roads lit only by the flare of gunfire, to pick up their casualties, six stretchers stacked in the back of each vehicle, to be unloaded as gently as possible on arrival at their destination. Maugham’s duties were various, as stretcher bearer, driver, and interpreter, his knowledge of both French and German proving invaluable in communications between the English medical staff and their patients. On one such occasion he found himself in a hospital housing two or three hundred wounded, its overcrowded wards airless and stinking of blood and excrement.
There was one German prisoner60 with whom I talked a little. He had had his leg cut off and was under the impression that it would not have been amputated if he had been French. The dresser asked me to explain to him that it was necessary to save his life, and with graphic detail explained to me in what a state the leg was.
On another night, after a period of intense fighting near Montdidier, orders came to bring the ambulances to the village church. As the darkened vehicles drew up one after the other and the stretchers were unloaded, the already dead were thrown on a heap outside the door, while the living were laid in rows on the straw-covered floor. The only light came from candles placed on the altar.
Conversation mingled with groans61 of pain and the cries of the dying. One young boy, horribly wounded and desperately afraid, kept screaming “Je ne veux pas mourir,” while three soldiers standing by him tried to comfort him: one whose hand he held caressingly passed his other hand over the boy’s face…. “Mais non, mon vieux,62 tu guériras.” … But he went on screaming, “Je ne veux pas mourir” till he died.*
Some of the volunteers were severely shaken by the constant shelling and traumatized by the sights they were forced to witness, the horrific wounds sustained by many of the casualties, torn apart by the murderous weaponry employed by both sides. But Maugham, brave and unsqueamish, was often exhilarated by enemy action. “I saw a battle between aeroplanes63 the other day which was the most horribly thrilling thing I have ever seen,” he told Alfred Sutro, while to William Heinemann he wrote from Dunkirk, “I was lucky enough64 the other day to witness the shelling by the Germans of some French batteries…. It was splendid to see the bursting shells & the great eruption of earth as the Jack Johnson* buried itself in the ground…. On the way home they were shelling the Ypres road which I had to drive down, but missing it with admirable regularity. I went & looked at one of the holes. It was positively enormous.” The carnage was frightful, after one engagement alone three hundred dead and sixteen hundred wounded; but with his medical training Maugham never flinched, his practical attitude combined with a notable gentleness and compassion resulting in his soon being asked to apply his long-forgotten skills, cleaning wounds, painting on iodine, and tying bandages. “I had done no work of this kind65 for many years,” he recorded in his notebook, “and at first felt embarrassed and awkward, but soon I found I could do the little that it was possible to do…. I have never seen such wounds.”
IN THE SAME UNIT with Maugham was the critic Desmond MacCarthy, a charming, indolent, erudite companion, only three years younger, with whom Maugham was to form a valued friendship. Elected an Apostle at Cambridge, MacCarthy knew such influential figures as Bertrand Russell and E. M. Forster, and through his friendship with Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell had early become involved with the Bloomsbury group. His theater reviews, particularly his writings on Shaw, were widely admired, as was his introduction for Roger Fry’s famous Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910. MacCarthy was to become a shrewd critic of Maugham’s fiction, which he admired, the only one of the Bloomsbury intellectuals to pay it any serious attention. Writing on Maugham in the 1930s, he perceptively noted, “The war had a most important influence66 on the development of his talent…. He learnt then how good it was for his talent to travel and to be alone.”
Maugham and MacCarthy had crossed over from England together, and on arrival in Boulogne had been warned, as writers, against sending back reports to the press, although neither had the least intention of doing anything of the sort. Eager for action, they found that between periods of intense activity were long periods of idleness, and both were grateful to find in the other a kindred spirit. “We are either rushed off our legs67 or bored & idle,” as Maugham explained, and it was a great resource to have MacCarthy for company. When they could get away the two men dined together or pottered about sightseeing in the various towns and villages in which they were billeted. Maugham had a lucky escape one day in the Grande Place in Ypres: he had just moved to look more closely at the ruins of the medieval Cloth Hall when the wall against which he had been leaning was blown up by a German shell. “It makes sightseeing a matter68 of some delicacy,” as he remarked in a letter to Gerald Kelly. Their unit was constantly on the move. Near Ypres the men stayed in a convent, fifteen to twenty in a room sleeping on straw pallets on the floor; at Doullens, Maugham was more comfortably installed in the house of a retired shopkeeper and his wife; at Steenvoorde near the Belgian border the accommodation was a grim little hotel with disgusting food and no bath. Yet Maugham found he was nonetheless enjoying himself.
The work was hard and tedious.69 But what a delight it was to have no responsibility! I had no decisions to make. I did what I was told, and having done it my time was my own…. I enjoyed my liberty. There was a sensual, almost voluptuous, quality in the pleasure of it.
He was not, however, entirely cut off from his professional duties. While stationed at Malo near Dunkirk, MacCarthy walked into Maugham’s tiny bedroom and found him marking the proofs of his novel by the light of a single candle. MacCarthy, himself congenitally disorganized, was struck by the neatness of the scene, the long strips of paper tidily arranged on the narrow bed, the very few corrections that had been made. “When I remarked on it,70 he replied that he always went over his work carefully [in manuscript] before he sent it to the printer.”
By the end of November it was clear that the war was not going to be over soon, and Maugham wrote to Syrie urging her to think again about terminating her pregnancy, now into its third month, as this was no time to have a baby. “She took no notice71 of my letter,” he recor
ded grimly. “She was determined to have the child.” Reluctantly Maugham decided he must return to England, heavyhearted because he had no wish to involve himself further with Syrie and her situation—but even more because he had recently met the man who for the next thirty years was to be the center of his life.
* Maugham drew on this episode for his short story “Love and Russian Literature” in the Ashenden collection.
* After Brooks’s death on the island in 1929 Maugham wrote a story, “The Lotus Eater,” which was largely based on Brooks and his life on Capri. “He was of no use to anybody,” he writes of the Brooks character, “but on the other hand he did nobody any harm. His only object was his own happiness, and it looked as though he had attained it” (Collected Short Stories, vol. 4 [Vintage, 2000], p. 221).
* Conscription, for unmarried men between eighteen and forty-one, was not introduced until January 1916.
* “I don’t want to die” … “No, old chap, you’ll get better.”
* A German artillery shell named after the American boxing champion.
CHAPTER 7
CODE NAME “SOMERVILLE”
• • •
SHORTLY AFTER ARRIVING IN BOULOGNE IN OCTOBER 1914, MAUGHAM’S unit had joined with a group of American Red Cross volunteers, among whom was a young man of twenty-two. Gerald Haxton, with his gray-blue eyes, sleek light brown hair, and neatly trimmed mustache, was a slender, handsome youth. Speaking flawless French with no trace of an American accent, Haxton was a charming, gregarious fellow, out to enjoy himself. In common with many of his transatlantic contemporaries, he had volunteered for the ambulance service because, unlike the military, it offered excitement and risk without the necessity of a long, dull period of training first, its members classed as officers but without the responsibility of command. By chance he and Maugham were both working in the same makeshift hospital in one of the local châteaux, and Gerald recognized the well-known playwright whose picture he had seen in the paper. Maugham was trying to soothe a badly wounded British soldier who was crying out for water, which the doctors had forbidden him to have. “I’m sorry, but is there anything else1 I can do to help? Can I write a letter home for you?” “Raite a lettah?” the soldier sneered in a ghastly imitation of Maugham’s accent. “Not on your life!” It was at this point that Gerald intervened, walking over to give the man a cigarette and tell him a few dirty stories to distract him from his pain. That night he and Maugham found themselves standing on a balcony overlooking the garden, talking of what they would do when the war was over. Maugham said he wanted to write and to travel: what did Gerald want? “From you or from life?”2 the young man asked provocatively. “Perhaps both,” Maugham replied. “They might turn out to be the same thing.” Haxton unhesitatingly made clear that what he was interested in was “fun and games … someone to look after me and give me clothes and parties.” The two of them then went up to Gerald’s room, where he had a bottle of gin, “and that’s how it all began.”
Although it was brief, both knew their meeting had been significant. Maugham was immediately smitten by this attractive young man, who in both looks and personality was precisely the type he found most irresistible, a bit of a chancer, raffish, self-indulgent, and good-natured. Like Reggie Barlow-Bassett in The Merry-Go-Round and Gerald Vaudrey in Mrs. Craddock, Haxton was a sexual opportunist, well aware of the potency of his own animal magnetism. In an atmosphere charged with danger, emotions ran high, with the ethos of close male camaraderie fostering intense friendships, friendships that in the trenches, as with boys at school, not infrequently led to something more.* It was in such an electric atmosphere that Maugham’s long love affair with Gerald Haxton started.
FRUSTRATINGLY, THERE ARE FEW records relating to Gerald’s life and circumstances before they met in 1914, and Maugham was careful to conceal or destroy as much as he could that referred to their subsequent relationship. What is certain, however, is that that relationship was the most important of his life, although among Maugham’s friends and family, opinion would always remain sharply divided as to the character and influence of Gerald himself. Even in appearance there was something paradoxical, his face tantalizingly hard to read, with one eye cheerfully mischievous, the other full of threat. Some saw him as a benevolent charmer whose good humor did much to counter the older man’s irritability and bouts of depression: “[he] charmed the birds from the trees3 … [and] Willie was always enraptured by him,” said the writer Arthur Marshall, while the critic Raymond Mortimer found Gerald “jolly and delightful,4 always the life and soul of the party.” There were others, however, who regarded Gerald Haxton almost as the devil incarnate. “Shifty,” “disreputable,” “a cad,” “just this side of being a crook” are the words and phrases that repeatedly occur; the writer Peter Quennell, who memorably described Haxton as being “very masculine … with a hard tarty face,”5 was one of many who judged his influence to have been wholly deleterious, holding him responsible for introducing the previously fastidious Maugham to some of the most sordid areas of the homosexual underworld. But perhaps most revealing is the portrait Maugham himself drew of Gerald as Rowley Flint in the 1941 novella Up at the Villa. “He had an air of dissipation6 and people who didn’t like him said he looked shifty [but] what Rowley Flint had which explained everything was sex appeal … there was something that swept you off your feet, a sort of gentleness behind the roughness of his manner, a thrilling warmth behind his mockery … and the sensuality of his mouth and the caress in his grey eyes.”
Born on October 6, 1892, in the same month that Maugham started his studies at St. Thomas’s Hospital, Gerald Frederick Haxton was the son of a leading writer and editor on the San Francisco Examiner, who with his second wife left California to settle in Paris, where Gerald was born. When the boy was still very young his parents separated and his mother, Sara Haxton, moved to London, where she and Gerald led an impoverished existence in lodgings in St. John’s Wood. It is probable that Gerald never saw his father again. Certainly money was in short supply, and in letters to a woman friend Sara complains that she has no one to advise her over Gerald’s education, which plainly indicates the absence of a father figure in the boy’s life. This was a deprivation from which he must have suffered, especially as his mother was in poor health and rarely had the energy or resources to go out or entertain. Sara did her best for her son, but it was a dull existence, and no doubt by adolescence Gerald was fretting to escape, oppressed by his mother’s anxiety, her constant complaints of colds and neuralgia, and her suffocating dependence.
Apart from these few details, no other traces have emerged of Gerald Haxton’s early years. The next sighting is in 1915, when, a year after meeting Maugham, Gerald got into trouble. On November 13, while Maugham was abroad, Gerald, aged twenty-three, was arrested with another man in a Covent Garden hotel and charged with six counts of gross indecency.* Both were acquitted, but the judge, convinced that Gerald was a bad lot, had him registered as an undesirable alien, forced to leave the country and banned from ever setting foot in Britain again.
But for now this was all in the future. At the beginning of January 1915, Maugham, summoned by Syrie, left his unit and returned to England. The two of them met in Dover, and from there went by train to neutral Italy, to Rome, where Maugham had decided Syrie could give birth “without anyone knowing anything7 about it.” An apartment had been found near the Pincio, and here they settled to await the birth of their child. It was not a happy time for either. Maugham had no wish for a child by a woman he did not love; and painfully missing Gerald and worried about his exposure to danger at the front, he felt not particularly inclined to respond sympathetically to Syrie’s complaints and constant demands for attention. He at least had his writing—he was at work on a play—and there was golf when the weather permitted, whereas Syrie, shut up in the apartment all day, was wholly dependent on his company: she spoke no Italian, showed no interest in reading, sewing, or sightseeing, and apart from Maugham saw no one except f
or the English doctor. To both the days seemed interminable. “It is bitterly cold here,8 raining & miserable, & I regret the pleasant hardships of Flanders,” Maugham wrote gloomily to Heinemann, while to Gerald Kelly he expressed more specific anxieties: “If only I am able to write here9 & under these conditions. Oh, what a perfect fool I am! But the only thing is to set my teeth & go through with it.”
As the time for Syrie’s confinement drew near, Maugham wrote to her mother, asking her to come out to Rome. He had yet to meet Mrs. Barnardo, and he was apprehensive about her reaction to his living in sin with her daughter, but there was no need for disquiet: during her years in the East End the Begum had seen it all, and later while staying in York Terrace she had grown accustomed to turning a blind eye to certain aspects of Syrie’s behavior. “She took it as the most natural thing10 in the world,” Maugham reported with relief. During the evening of May 4, Syrie went into labor: it was soon clear that all was not well, and at midnight the doctor was so worried he called an ambulance to take her to hospital in the Via Lancisi. Here, on May 6, under the name “Mrs. Wells,” Syrie was delivered of a daughter by cesarean section: Elizabeth Mary, always known as Liza after Liza of Lambeth, her father’s first novel. A few days later the doctor told Syrie that she would never be able to conceive again, news that reduced her to despair: despite her age, nearly thirty-six, and her uncertain situation, she longed for more children, a longing intensified by the painful separations from her son, Mounteney. “She cried bitterly,”11 said Maugham. “I did my best to console her. That was all I could do.” Three weeks later Syrie had recovered sufficiently to travel, and on June 9 the four of them arrived back in London, Maugham returning to Chesterfield Street and Syrie, the Begum, and baby Liza to a nearby hotel, as the house in York Terrace had been rented out.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 20