Maugham’s first experience of the tropics took powerful hold of his imagination. In Pago Pago, Apia, Papeete, Suva, Savaii, wherever he went he was entranced by the exotic beauty of his surroundings while at the same time remaining intensely alert to the sometimes tragic, often mundane, unexpectedly suburban life of the colonial community. Pago Pago in Western Samoa, then under American jurisdiction, displayed exactly this juxtaposition. Once inside the barrier reef the ship entered a large and beautiful lagoon surrounded on three sides by a dramatic backdrop of towering volcanic escarpment covered in lush green vegetation. Along the shoreline were white sand beaches and slender coconut palms, beyond them groves of mango and avocado, interspersed with brilliant bursts of hibiscus, oleander, and white tiare. Here and there stood little groups of native huts, with their high thatched roofs like beehives; the Samoans themselves were tall and graceful, the men bare-chested, dressed in brightly colored pareos, while the young women wore their long black hair loose, often crowned with a wreath of heavily scented tiare. But also to be seen from the harbor were two or three trim little bungalows, a Protestant church, the local club, tennis courts, and a modest Government House standing in a neatly kept garden, the Stars and Stripes flapping languidly from a flagstaff.
Maugham’s exploration of Samoa and beyond coincided with the rainy season, and during their first few days in Pago neither he nor Gerald was prepared for the shock of a tropical climate, the stiflingly high temperatures, and the hours a day of deluging rain. With the rain came a breathless heat, sultry and suffocating. The two men dressed in the thinnest of thin shirts and suits of light linen duck, in the evening adopting the local habit of wearing only shirt and pareo. At night they slept naked under mosquito nets, though the nets were often full of holes that the insects diabolically penetrated. During the day, in between downpours, they swam in the freshwater pools, drove in a pony and trap along the wide grassy roads that cut through the plantations, and went to pay homage at Vailima, where Robert Louis Stevenson spent his last years. Maugham responded immediately to the languorous, numinous eroticism he had first seen in the paintings of Gauguin. Sex was everywhere: young couples made love in full view and without embarrassment, and at bedtime he often found a dark-eyed vahine lying naked and willing under his mosquito net—to be given a handful of coins and briskly shooed away. Everything was open and on offer, and after dark Gerald especially liked to prowl off in search of the all-night saturnalias regularly to be found taking place by the seashore.
While spellbound by the prelapsarian beauty of the islands, by the deep blue of the lagoon, the brilliant colors of the vegetation, the immensity of the southern sky at night, Maugham was at the same time intensely interested in the more domestic aspects of life in the tropics, his most valuable material coming from the traders, half-castes, planters, doctors, and missionaries with whom he fell into conversation. The dapper, dark-haired Englishman and his “rather handsome travelling companion”48 soon became familiar to the regulars who drank at the English Club or on the veranda of the local hotel. As on board ship, so here, too, it was Gerald who struck up the acquaintance, Gerald, hanging out in the billiard room or bar, who first got to know these often eccentric characters with their strange, sometimes terrible histories. Maugham was enthralled. As he expressed it in his memoir The Summing Up,
I entered a new world,49 and all the instinct in me of a novelist went out with exhilaration to absorb the novelty…. I was like a naturalist who comes into a country where the fauna are of an unimaginable variety…. Few of them had culture. They had learnt life in a different school from mine and had come to different conclusions…. They were often dull and stupid. I did not care. They were different…. They seemed to me nearer to the elementals of human nature than any of the people I had been living with for so long, and my heart leapt towards them as it had done years before to the people who filed into the out-patients’ room at St. Thomas’s.
Although he stayed in each place for only a matter of weeks, Maugham was quick to absorb the social and cultural nuances, the rivalries, the snobbishness, the delicate balance in relations between native and European, between native and half-caste. Everywhere he went he made detailed notes of the people he met: “I rarely went to my ship’s cabin50 or lagoon-side hotel room without writing down a description of a special scene … or of some conversation with a special character that I might be able to use in a future story”; and gradually, “from a hint or an incident51 or a happy invention, stories began to form themselves round certain of the most vivid of them.” Indeed it was now that his interest in writing short stories was strongly revived, and his collection of tales of the South Seas, The Trembling of a Leaf, eventually published in 1921, marked a triumphant return to the genre of which he was to become a master.
Maugham found inspiration at almost every turn, and as his detailed note taking makes clear, it was this search for inspiration that lay behind his lifelong passion for travel: his restlessness, his wanderlust was largely driven by an insatiable need to feed the voracious demands of his imagination. As he was to write years later, “the writer cannot afford to wait52 for experience to come to him; he must go out in search of it.” Again and again the first tracings of a story can be detected in the jottings in the notebooks, as in the four short paragraphs in which Maugham describes the American missionary couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Woodrow, and the brazen Miss Thompson, whom he had encountered on the ship from Honolulu. The missionaries were on their way back to the Gilbert and Ellice islands, and Maugham had been struck by the dour and cadaverous appearance of Woodrow, and by the vindictive intolerance of his wife.
[Mrs. Woodrow] spoke of the depravity53 of the natives in a voice nothing could hush, but with a vehement, unctuous horror; she described their marriage customs as obscene beyond description. She said that when first they went to the Gilberts it was impossible to find a single “good” girl in any of the villages. She was very bitter about the dancing.
In buoyant contrast to this proselytizing pair is Miss Thompson, “pretty in a coarse fashion … she wore a white dress and large white hat, and long white boots from which her calves, in white cotton stockings, bulged.” From these brief jottings Maugham constructed “Miss Thompson,”* the brilliant and terrifying story that was shortly to be retitled and known to the world as “Rain.” In Maugham’s own words, he wanted “to have Sadie [Thompson]54 and the missionary experience an emotional collision that would be as shocking in print as censorship at the time would permit,” an ambition that was to be amply fulfilled. Written with impressive restraint, the story is set within the claustrophobic confines of a shabby little guesthouse in Pago. The plot follows the grimly self-righteous missionary, Mr. Davidson, as with sadistic zeal he pursues the prostitute, his declared intention to save her immortal soul. Against the background of an unceasing tropical deluge the drama is played out, with the man of God bullying and hectoring his victim until she is at last convinced of her sinfulness and begs Davidson to bring her to the arms of Jesus. It is during his final interview with Sadie that the missionary, consumed by lust, succumbs, thus destroying himself and for Sadie all belief in the goodness of both God and man.
After leaving the missionaries and Miss Thompson in Samoa, the two men continued their voyage south, to Fiji, Tonga, and as far as New Zealand. By the time they turned north toward Tahiti they had sailed in many different kinds of vessels, from American steamship to open cutter to the rusty little traders laden with bananas and copra that regularly plied between the islands; once they spent seven days in an open rowing boat. Most memorable was the passage between Pago and Apia aboard a shabby schooner reeking of paraffin; in a dimly lit cabin the Chinese cook served a supper of meatballs and tinned apricots, followed by tea with condensed milk. “After supper we went on deck,”55 Maugham recorded.
After a while three or four members of the crew came up and sat down smoking. One had a banjo, another a ukulele and a concertina. They began to play and sing…. A couple of t
hem stood up and danced. It was a strange, barbaric dance … sensual, sexual even…. At last they grew tired and stretched themselves out on the deck and slept, and all was silence.
On February 11, 1917, they finally reached Tahiti in French Polynesia. This was the island that it had long been Maugham’s ambition to visit, impatient to see for himself the place where only fifteen years earlier the great Paul Gauguin had come to paint. In Papeete, the capital, they stayed at the Tiare Hotel, a somewhat eccentric establishment run by Louvaina Chapman, an immensely fat part-Tahitian woman known throughout the South Seas and beyond for her character and charm. The hotel was only five minutes’ walk from the waterfront, which pleased Gerald, who liked to hang about there eyeing the brown-skinned sailors in their scarlet loincloths while Maugham pursued his researches. At first it was difficult to find anyone who had much to say about Gauguin, though Maugham was able to talk to Émile Levy, a pearl merchant who had known the painter, and also Captain “Winny” Brander, who had discovered Gauguin’s body shortly after his death in 1903. But in fact the best source turned out to be Louvaina Chapman herself, who had befriended Gauguin and was able to provide Maugham with several interesting details as well as a crucial introduction to a female chieftain at Mataiea, about thirty-five miles outside Papeete, who proffered the astonishing information that there were paintings by Gauguin in a house not far away. The owner of what turned out to be a shabby two-room bungalow was “a flat-nosed, smiling dark native,”56 who was delighted to invite his visitors in. Maugham immediately recognized the artist’s work. It transpired that in 1892, Gauguin, ill with the syphilis that was eventually to kill him, had been taken in and cared for by a local farmer, and in gratitude had painted pictures on the glass panels of three interior doors. Two of the panels had been badly damaged, scratched and picked at by children, but the third, representing a sensual Tahitian Eve, dark-haired and half naked, a heavy green breadfruit in her hand, was still in a reasonable state of preservation, and it was this panel Maugham immediately offered to buy. His host, uninterested in the painting, was willing to sell, but only at a price that would cover replacing the door.
“How much will it cost?”57 I asked.
“A hundred francs.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll give you two hundred.”
I thought I had better take the picture before he changed his mind, so we got the tools from the car … unscrewed the hinges and carried the door away.
Once back in Papeete the door was carefully packed to be shipped via New York to London, eventually to be installed in Maugham’s writing room in the Villa Mauresque, where it remained, one of his most treasured possessions, until it was sold shortly before his death.
Maugham and Gerald left Tahiti on April 8, 1917, two days after the United States entered the war. In San Francisco there was a telegram from Gerald’s mother urging him to enlist. He and Maugham took leave of each other, not knowing when they would meet again, Gerald departing to join the United States Army, Maugham to be reunited with Syrie in New York.
Throughout his long liaison with Gerald Haxton, Maugham was to run the gamut of emotion—passion, love, tenderness, fury, frustration, boredom, misery, despair—but at this stage, after their sojourn in the South Seas, Maugham was happy, at the start of what one of his close friends described as “the first completely beautiful,58 completely appropriate love affair he had ever had.” Maugham had surrendered to this young man, who on almost every level had proved to be an ideal companion, adventurous, resourceful, easygoing, with a good sense of humor and, like Maugham, a vigorous sexual appetite. It was only Haxton with whom Maugham could talk through the stories he was evolving in his mind. True, Gerald was inclined to drink too much, and when intoxicated his temper could turn nasty, revealing a seam of anger that sober he kept buried. Like his fictional alter ego, Rowley Flint in Up at the Villa, when Gerald was drunk “he was noisy and boastful59 and vulgar and quarrelsome…. [A]fter two or three drinks there was no holding him…. Sometimes I couldn’t help flying into a passion with him and then we’d have an awful row.” But most of the time he was “kind and gentle and sweet,” and for both sides the relationship was rewarding. For his part Gerald looked up to Maugham, partly as a father figure, something crucially missing in his growing up, and also as someone who was more experienced, more sophisticated, and who would introduce him to the kind of life for which he had longed, a life as far removed as possible from the tedium and genteel poverty of his childhood with his mother in St. John’s Wood. Under Maugham’s protection he was indulged and doted on, he was financially secure, and also, by means of his natural sociability, his love of talk, he had found a purpose, a crucial role to play.
In his memoir Looking Back, Maugham acknowledged the importance of Gerald’s contribution. “But for him,” he wrote, “I should never have got60 the material on our journey to the South Seas that … enabled me to write the short stories which later I published in a volume called The Trembling of a Leaf.”* Of the six tales, which all appeared first in magazines before they were collected in book form, it was, ironically, “Rain,” by far the most successful, that was repeatedly rejected until finally taken by H. L. Mencken’s magazine The Smart Set only a few months before The Trembling of a Leaf appeared. All the stories, fluent, colorful, and dramatically succinct, proved popular, but “Rain” was to make a sensation: “a sheer masterpiece of sardonic horror,61 beyond criticism,” ran a typical notice. A showcase both for the author’s loathing of intolerant religiosity and for his unillusioned view of the weakness of human nature, “Rain” has been reprinted again and again, earning its author more than $1 million in royalties. It has been rewritten as a play, turned into a musical, nearly made into a ballet by Roland Petit for the Paris Opéra, and filmed no fewer than three times, with Gloria Swanson (1928), Joan Crawford (1932), and Rita Hayworth (1953) in the part of Sadie Thompson; in 1946 there was an all-black film version entitled Dirty Gertie from Harlem; and shortly before her death, Marilyn Monroe was signed to play Sadie in an adaptation for television. Among its many admirers was James Michener, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific.* “One of the evil limitations62 put upon anyone who wants to write about the South Pacific is that he must stop reading Maugham,” Michener wrote.
[But] I must admit that before I start to do any writing about this vast area I usually take down “Rain” and reread those first three paragraphs to remind myself of how completely one can set a physical stage in a few absolutely correct observations. I hold those passages to be about the best beginning of a mood story extant.
BUT IN 1917 THIS WAS yet to come. When Maugham parted from Gerald after their six months together he was faced with returning to New York and to Syrie. He had promised he would marry her, and now, reluctantly, he had come to fulfill that promise. Had he said nothing else on the subject, Maugham’s personal distaste for the concept of the married state could have been deduced from his work. The plot of his play Caroline, for instance, is posited on the assumption that love flourishes best outside wedlock and that the institution of marriage is a killjoy and a trap. In “The Fall of Edward Barnard,”* one of the short stories in The Trembling of a Leaf, we are asked to applaud the hero’s escape from marriage in Chicago to a blissful single life in the South Seas. And in The Moon and Sixpence, a novel shot through with anger, written only a year after Maugham’s return from Polynesia, he tells the story of the ruthless rejection of marriage and family by an artist whose creativity has been smothered by domesticity. “There is no object more deserving of pity,”63 the narrator feelingly remarks, “than the married bachelor.” But in fact there is no need to search for clues, as Maugham had little hesitation in making his feelings plain. In a letter written only three years into the marriage, he explained to Syrie his view of the situation at the time of their wedding with a candor bordering on the brutal:
I felt that I had been put64 in a position which I did not for a moment anticipate was a possibili
ty. I knew that I had made a perfect fool of myself, but I thought I had also been made a perfect fool of…. I married you because I was prepared to pay for my folly and selfishness, and I married you because I thought it the best thing for your happiness and for Elizabeth’s welfare, but I did not marry you because I loved you, and you were only too well aware of that.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that the wedding itself was an unjoyous occasion. The formalities took place before a judge in New Jersey at three o’clock in the afternoon of May 26, 1917, all arrangements having been made by Maugham’s friend and fellow playwright Ned Sheldon. Sheldon was one of the witnesses; the other was Alexandra Colebrooke, wife of a backwoods British peer and a friend of Syrie’s. The bride gave her age as thirty-two, instead of thirty-seven, but all the groom later recalled of the ceremony was of standing before the judge, “who first sentenced the drunk65 in front of us, then married us, then sentenced the drunk behind us.” During the brief exchange of vows Maugham felt so overcome with loathing for his bride that he could hardly bring himself to look at her. Afterward there was a small reception at the Brevoort Hotel near Gramercy Park, attended by a handful of Maugham’s theatrical acquaintances gathered to celebrate the “doomed entanglement,” as one of them termed it, after which the newly married pair retired to a suite at the Devon in midtown Manhattan.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 23