An ex-superintendent in the Indian police, Wallinger in 1915 had been brought in to work for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), supervising a network of British agents in Germany and Switzerland. So far his operation had met with little success: a keen reader of spy stories, Wallinger had adopted a number of familiar ruses, including disguising his agents as waiters, but such elementary ploys were quickly rumbled by the Swiss authorities, who, fiercely protective of their precious neutrality, were quick to arrest and expel any foreign nationals whose conduct threatened to undermine it. Recently Wallinger had suffered further losses, with one agent denouncing another to the police, who then betrayed two more in his turn; a fifth man had had to be withdrawn after suffering a nervous breakdown, and it was this man whom Maugham had been taken on to replace.
To Wallinger, Maugham appeared to have not only excellent credentials but the ideal cover, that of a writer retiring to the peace and quiet of a neutral country in order to write. His main function, Wallinger explained, would be to act as a facilitator rather than a producer of secret intelligence, relaying messages to and from a network of agents who were working within Germany, in Frankfurt, Koblenz, Trier, and Mainz. “If you do well30 you’ll get no thanks,” Wallinger warned him, “and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help,” conditions that Maugham accepted unquestioningly. The whole idea of becoming a spy appealed to him enormously. Long a master of disguise, happiest when he could remain undercover, Maugham had no difficulty with the prospect of playing a part; a diffident man, he always preferred listening to talking, and his fascination with other people’s lives had developed in him an unusual level of perception. His natural affinity for intelligence work was revealed to a wider public when after the war he wrote a series of stories about his espionage activities, known as the Ashenden stories after the name he gave his protagonist, closely modeled on himself.
In the late autumn of 1915 Maugham, code name Somerville, had arrived in Geneva, his base the imposing Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre on the banks of the lake. It was immediately obvious that the placid Swiss city had been turned by the war into a hotbed of international intrigue, packed with a moving population of spies and revolutionaries from the various warring nations taking advantage of the safety of the neutral country in their midst. The lobby of the Angleterre became at certain times of day a babel of European tongues, with a smattering of Russian, Turkish, and Arabic besides; and when Maugham dined alone in the evenings he enjoyed identifying other guests who like himself were not quite what they seemed: a Bulgarian working for British intelligence, a prostitute who reported back to Berlin, an Egyptian known to be engaged in anti-British activities, and a German count, Karl Gustav Vollmoeller,* whom Maugham had known as a playwright in London before the war.
Despite the somewhat feverish atmosphere, Maugham found that his own duties were on the whole fairly safe and routine, although he usually carried a small revolver in his pocket as a precaution. A large part of his job involved debriefing his agents on their return from sorties into Germany, issuing instructions, and paying their wages. Having made careful note of what he was told and adding his own observations, he would then write a detailed report that he transmitted in code. This was a cumbersome business. “I know nothing so tedious as coding31 and decoding,” says Maugham as Ashenden. In addition, on two mornings a week Maugham walked over to the market in the Place du Bourg-de-Four and bought half a pound of butter from an old peasant woman. As she gave him his change she slipped a piece of paper into his hand, the contents of which if discovered would have landed both of them in the dock; it was discreetly done, however, and for Maugham the only real moment of risk was the walk back to his hotel with the paper in his pocket, a distance he tried to cover as quickly as possible. More hazardous was the weekly journey he made on the little steamer across Lake Geneva to Thonon on the French side, where he met and conferred with a colleague and received orders from London. As this was a round-trip beginning and ending in Switzerland, it was conveniently not marked in his passport, but nonetheless Maugham could never be sure he was not being followed, either by an enemy agent or by the secret police, who would not hesitate to arrest and run out of the country any foreigner found to be engaged in espionage. To avoid attracting attention on these crossings Maugham resisted going below to the warmth of the saloon, preferring to remain on deck where he would be less noticeable. But even wrapped in a fur-lined overcoat and muffler, with his hat pulled well down over his ears, the bitter cold chilled him to the bone. In winter the lake was often stormy, and the gusts of sleet blowing down from the mountains cut right through him, and he would think longingly of the warmth of his hotel room, of a hot bath and dinner in front of the fire with his book and his pipe.
The regularity of his timetable led to a certain tedium in an existence that Maugham described as being in many respects “as orderly and monotonous32 as a city clerk’s.” This was not without advantage, however, as it left him plenty of time for his own work: his greatest anxiety while he was writing Caroline had been that he should be discovered and arrested before he had time to finish it. “Geneva, the centre of all rumours,”33 as he described it to Kelly a few weeks after his arrival, “is very quiet & peaceful, & there is nothing in the world to do…. I write every morning … I walk about or ride gently in the afternoons; & in the evening go to the play or make a fourth at bridge.” It was, as he admitted, a satisfactory way of life in many ways, sufficiently filled, sufficiently varied, with plenty of time to write and read; “it was absurd to think34 that under these circumstances he could possibly be bored and yet, like a little lonely cloud in the sky, he did see in the offing the possibility of boredom.”
There were occasions, however, when boredom was dispelled, and “Somerville” found himself required to play a more active role. His first mission, undertaken immediately on arrival in Switzerland, was investigating an Englishman, married to a German woman and living in Lucerne, who was suspected of being in the pay of the enemy. Under the pretext of taking German lessons from the man’s wife, Maugham observed him carefully for a couple of weeks before concluding that he was almost certainly a traitor. A trap was set: Maugham, following instructions, “indiscreetly” let slip to his new acquaintance that he had connections in the Censorship Department in London. As intended, this information was duly relayed back to German Intelligence by the Englishman, who then, pretending that he wanted to go back home to look for war work, asked Maugham to furnish him with an introduction to his friends in the Department. Shortly afterward the unsuspecting prey was arrested and dispatched to England for interrogation.
At another time Maugham was sent by Wallinger to Basle to check on an agent of whom there were suspicions of a different kind. “Gustav,” a Swiss businessman, was supposed to be making regular sorties into Germany under cover of his legitimate business, and on his return sending reports via Geneva to British intelligence. Again Wallinger’s suspicions were proved correct, as Maugham mainly by clever questioning managed to discover that in fact “Gustav” had never left the security of Basle, ingeniously concocting his reports from German newspapers and the gossip he picked up in restaurants and beer cellars. In February 1916 another job came through, this time on the instructions of none other than Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, head of the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau. Cumming passed on his suspicions to Major Walter Kirke, chief of covert operations, that “Bernard,” one of Maugham’s agents, “had been doing us down”35 by taking large sums of money without sending in a single genuine report. Again Maugham was dispatched to find out what was going on, a scene he was later to describe in his postwar collection of autobiographical spy stories, Ashenden. The two men meet as usual in a café:
[Ashenden] gave him his orders36 and was prepared to finish the interview.
“Very good,” said Bernard. “But before I go back to Germany I want two thousand francs.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, and I want them now, before you l
eave this café …”
“I’m afraid I can’t give it to you.” …
The spy leaned forward and, not raising his voice, but speaking so that only Ashenden could hear, burst out angrily:
“Do you think I’m going on risking my life for that beggarly sum you give me? Not ten days ago a man was caught at Mainz and shot. Was that one of your men?”
“We haven’t got anyone at Mainz,” said Ashenden, carelessly, and for all he knew it was true. He had been puzzled not to receive his usual communications from that place and Bernard’s information might afford the explanation. “You knew exactly what you were to get when you took on the job, and if you weren’t satisfied you needn’t have taken it. I have no authority to give you a penny more.”
“Do you see what I’ve got here?” said Bernard.
He took a small revolver out of his pocket and fingered it significantly.
“What are you going to do with it? Pawn it?”
With an angry shrug of the shoulders he put it back in his pocket….
What happened to these men, to the “Bernards” and “Gustavs,” once their deceptions were found out Maugham rarely had the opportunity to discover; he was, as he put it, “no more than a tiny rivet37 in a vast and complicated machine.”
Maugham remained in Switzerland for nearly eight months, returning to England in May 1916. By now he was in poor health; vulnerable to chest infections, he had suffered from exposure during his weekly crossings of Lake Geneva throughout the winter. He was also anxious and depressed: Wellcome was granted a decree absolute on August 30, and there was now no legal barrier to his marrying Syrie: ultimately, as he very well knew, escape was impossible, but at least he could postpone the inevitable for a little while longer. “I wanted to recover my peace of mind38 shattered through my own foolishness and vanity,” he wrote. “I was willing to marry Syrie,39 but, the circumstances being as they were, I was not prepared to be rushed into it.” Two plays of his, Caroline and Our Betters, were to be produced in the States, and so in October 1916 Maugham sailed to New York, intending to oversee rehearsals and also cope with the business of transferring his plays from Frohman’s firm, which had proved ineffective since the death of its founder, to John Rumsey, an associate of Maugham’s British play agent, Golding Bright.
New York six months before America’s entry into the war seemed curiously alien, the streets brightly lit, shops full of luxury goods, and theaters and restaurants doing brisk business. The war seemed distant, with most of the newspapers giving greater prominence to the defeat of the Boston Red Sox in the World Series than to the terrible slaughter of the Battle of the Somme. Maugham was taken aback by the prevalence of pro-German feeling, with many agreeing with President Wilson’s conviction that Britain’s imperialist ambitions were as objectionable as Germany’s. “There is a great deal of sympathy40 with Germans,” he told Kelly, “[especially] among the more intelligent part of the population, the professors, literary men, & such like. For the rest there is great admiration of the French, but none of the English…. I think if the Germans were fighting alone against the English sympathy would be for the most part on the side of Germany.” Maugham had wanted to find more war work, hoping to be sent to Russia, but by now his state of health was too precarious, what he called his “recurrent lung ailment” making it essential that he take some time, preferably in a warm climate, to convalesce. For many years he had wished to visit the South Seas, having long had an idea in his mind for a novel about Gauguin, and now, freed from his war work, here at last was the opportunity.
THE VOYAGE WOULD BE LONG and Maugham had no wish to travel alone. Despite their lengthy separation, he had stayed in touch with that dangerously attractive young man Gerald Haxton, currently at loose ends in Chicago, and he lost no time in suggesting that Gerald should accompany him to Polynesia in the nominal role of secretary, like Harry Philips before him, an offer that was enthusiastically accepted. Shortly before they were due to depart from Manhattan, a telegram suddenly arrived from Syrie announcing her imminent arrival, accompanied by child and nursemaid. Since his return from Geneva, Maugham for Syrie had been conspicuous by his absence, disappearing first to Paris, then to New York. Unsurprisingly, Syrie was beginning to panic: the decree absolute having been granted, there was no reason why they should not be married immediately,* and if Maugham intended to evade his responsibilities in that direction then she had no choice but to confront him and insist that he keep his word. In a cold fury Maugham went down to the pier to meet her. They were both tense, Maugham because Syrie was the last person on earth he wanted to see, she terrified that he was somehow going to give her the slip. Having escorted her back to her hotel, he told her at once that he was on the point of leaving, that he would be away for several months, and that he had no intention whatever of changing his plans. At this Syrie became hysterical and made a violent scene, which further repelled Maugham. When she eventually calmed down he assured her that he would not renege and that they would be married as soon as he returned. And with that Syrie was forced to be satisfied.
It was with an enormous sense of liberation that Maugham, accompanied by Gerald, boarded the train to San Francisco, where they were to embark on the first leg of their long sea voyage, the first of many to be undertaken together over the next quarter century. Maugham was in high spirits, setting off “[to look] for beauty and romance,”41 and, he added feelingly, “glad to put a great ocean between me and the trouble that harassed me.” Since boyhood, when he had read Melville and Pierre Loti and the Polynesian novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, Maugham’s imagination had been fired by dreams of the South Seas; later as a young man in Paris he had been mesmerized by the pictures of Gauguin’s Tahitian period, and while listening to Roderic O’Conor talking about Gauguin during those evenings in Le Chat Blanc he had become fascinated by the man as well as his work, for the past several years mulling over an idea for a novel based on the painter’s life. “I was convinced,” Maugham wrote, “that by going to Tahiti42 I could get just the material I wanted to enable me to set to work.” He had tried to go as early as 1913, when he had hoped to take Sue Jones with him as his wife, but those plans had come to nothing. Now he was setting off at last, and with a companion, Gerald Haxton, who was already the focus of his emotional life.
The distance to be covered was immense, and it was at sea that it first became clear what an important asset Gerald Haxton was to be. Gregarious by nature, Gerald effortlessly made friends with his fellow passengers, with whom he was more than happy to pass hours drinking, talking, and playing poker, afterward reporting back to Maugham the stories they had to tell. Maugham himself, intensely curious and ever on the lookout for good material, was nonetheless chary of intimacy and by nature reserved. “On a journey by sea,43 however long,” he wrote, “I would never have spoken to anyone unless someone had first spoken to me.” But with Gerald so “ebulliently, irrepressibly friendly,” Maugham felt released from the strain of social obligation, able to enjoy listening and watching, although he was always affable, always ready to stand his round and take a hand at cards. For Maugham a game of cards was an absorbing pastime, but for Gerald it was almost a way of life: a reckless, high-risk gambler, he was happy to spend most of the day in a fug of cigarette smoke gambling in the saloon, while Maugham joined the others only at meals and in the evening, spending much of his time on deck writing in his notebook and reading. The vast blue emptiness of the Pacific Ocean affected him profoundly, as mile after mile went by without sight of another living soul: “not a tramp, not a sailing vessel,44 not a fishing-boat … it is an empty desert45; and presently the emptiness fills you with a vague foreboding.”
Among the four hundred passengers there was one who made himself particularly agreeable, indeed who was to become a friend for life. Bertram Alanson, three years younger than Maugham, was from a wealthy German Jewish family, originally Abrahamson, that owned coffee plantations in Guatemala, where “Bert” Alanson had grown up and attende
d university. A gifted financier, Alanson in San Francisco had been the youngest man on the stock exchange floor; now a senior partner in the family firm of investment brokers, he lived in considerable style in a house overlooking the Bay. He was tall and distinguished in appearance, with a passion for golf and Italian opera, as well as for Spanish history and literature, all interests guaranteed to recommend him to Maugham. Alanson was by nature a hero-worshipper, and within days he became infatuated with Maugham, excited by his celebrity and impressed by the older man’s charm and sophistication. The two of them talked for hours, Alanson fascinated by the breadth of Maugham’s knowledge and experience, Maugham delighted to find someone whose financial expertise he could endlessly draw on. He was soon to assign to Alanson total control over his investments, a gesture of confidence that was to have enormous rewards. Their friendship began and remained entirely cloudless, and looking back on it many years later, Maugham wrote that no one could have had “a more devoted, generous,46 considerate friend than dear Bert.”
THE LONG SEA VOYAGE was to take in Hawaii and Samoa, then veer south to Fiji, Tonga, and New Zealand before heading north to Tahiti on the return leg to California. Their first port of call was Honolulu, where they arrived on November 14, 1916, and stayed for three weeks, awaiting the arrival of the Sonoma, a small steamship bound for Australia on which they had booked onward passage. Haxton and Maugham, with Alanson for a while in tow, took the opportunity to explore the island thoroughly. The two men were fascinated by the contrast between downtown Honolulu, a modern American city, and the rough red-light district of Iwilei, openly catering to every variety of sexual taste. On their last night, there was a police raid in Iwilei, and the following day, a few minutes before the Sonoma was due to sail, a young woman came hurrying up the gangplank, clearly in a state of panic. She was a Miss Sadie Thompson, it turned out, an Iwilei prostitute in flight from the law. Once at sea she quickly regained her equanimity, antagonizing her fellow passengers, among them a doctor and his wife and an American missionary couple, by playing loud ragtime on her gramophone and drunkenly keeping open house in her cabin for the ship’s crew. From Honolulu the Sonoma sailed to Pago Pago in Western Samoa, and here the new arrivals were obliged to remain for some days as there was an epidemic of measles in the town. Holed up together in the same squalid boardinghouse, confined indoors by the drenching monsoon rain, Maugham and his fellow travelers continued to suffer from the brazen behavior of the “hot lallapalooza from Honolulu,”47 as one of her boyfriends called her. The missionary was particularly enraged, eventually complaining to the governor about her, thus providing Maugham with a crucial episode in what was to become his most famous short story, “Rain.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 22