Most of June was spent in New York, with Maugham much involved with theatrical business, after which husband and wife left for a seaside holiday in East Hampton, accompanied by two-year-old Liza and a nanny. It was here on Long Island at the beginning of July that Maugham received an unexpected telephone call from a family friend, William Wiseman, asking if he was interested in discussing some possible war work. Maugham was instantly intrigued.
Captain Sir William Wiseman, a young English baronet still in his early thirties, had been recruited by Mansfield Cumming to work for the American branch of the Secret Intelligence Service. With the myriad animosities between the two countries, the position was a delicate one, but Wiseman, a charming and subtle diplomatist, was making a success of it. By the time the United States entered the war, on April 6, 1917, he had already built up a formidable network of contacts, establishing close links with his American opposite numbers in Intelligence as well as between the British Foreign Office and the Department of State in Washington. For both governments it was now an urgent priority to keep Russia in the war. Of the two revolutionary parties, it was the more moderate Mensheviks, under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky, who were committed to continuing the fight, while the Bolsheviks under Lenin were agitating for peace at any price. It was thus Kerensky and his coalition provisional government that the Allies were anxious to back. To this end Wiseman was mounting a secret operation designed to offer support to Kerensky, whose position, under attack by an increasingly vociferous Bolshevik minority, was beginning to look worryingly insecure. Wiseman needed to appoint an emissary who would go to Petrograd, hold talks with the prime minister and his colleagues, discreetly disseminate propaganda, and regularly report back on the volatile political situation. Somerset Maugham, with his experience in espionage, seemed the ideal choice.
Maugham was astonished by Wiseman’s suggestion, flattered, and immediately tempted by the proposal. The prospect of seeing for himself the country of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky was powerfully appealing; so, too, was the opportunity of involving himself once again in the war; and not entirely to be discounted was the additional satisfaction that such a mission would remove him at least for a time from his marital responsibilities. Against this was the fact that Maugham was far from well. Although his health had temporarily improved during the months in the tropics, it had deteriorated since his return, and now he was always tired, slept badly, was feverish, and frequently coughed up blood; recently an X ray had confirmed what he already suspected, that he was in the early stages of tuberculosis. Maugham was also worried about Gerald, from whom he had heard nothing since the young man had left the States to undergo military training in South Africa; the likelihood of any future communication from Haxton reaching him in Russia was extremely small. The opportunity now offered, however, was too good to miss, and after forty-eight hours’ reflection, Maugham accepted Wiseman’s proposal.
The next few weeks were busy, Maugham going by train from Long Island to New York to confer with Wiseman, book his passage, obtain visas, and make all the other necessary arrangements for travel. As before, Maugham was given the code name Somerville, his official identity again that of a writer at work, this time a journalist reporting for the British press. Before leaving, there was one final detail that needed clarification. “I do not know whether it is intended66 that I should have any salary for the work I am undertaking,” Maugham wrote to Wiseman.
I will not pretend that I actually need one, but in Switzerland I refused to accept anything and found afterwards that I was the only man working in the organization for nothing and that I was regarded not as patriotic or generous but merely as damned foolish. If the job carries a salary I think it would be more satisfactory to have it; but if not I am not unwilling to go without. I leave the matter in your hands.
Wiseman took the point, and agreed to provide both salary and expenses.
Having said good-bye to Syrie, Maugham left for San Francisco, where on July 28 he was due to embark. Concealed in a belt under his shirt he carried bills of exchange for the enormous sum of $21,000, to be disbursed as he saw fit in the furtherance of Allied interests. His traveling companions were three friendly Americans, en route to Petrograd to join the staff of the United States embassy there, as well as Emanuel Voska, a secret agent helping to organize Slav resistance to the Central Powers, and a trio of Czech associates who would act as liaison between Maugham and Tomás Masaryk, founder and future president of Czechoslovakia. During the journey it was understood that Maugham would pretend to regard the Czechs as complete strangers. It was also understood that “Somerville” was acting as a private agent who, as before in Switzer land, could, and undoubtedly would, be disavowed by his employers at the first sign of trouble. From California the ship sailed to Yokohama in Japan, giving Maugham his first sight of the Far East, a part of the world that in later years never failed to fascinate. “It was tantalizing,”67 he told Gerald Kelly, “to get no more than a brief glimpse of it.” At Yokohama he transferred to a Russian ship as far as Vladivostok, where he boarded a crowded trans-Siberian train for the eleven-day journey to Petrograd. On arrival in the capital, Maugham went with Voska straight to his hotel, the Europa on Nevsky Prospekt, in order to rest—he had been feverish and unwell on the train—and prepare for a meeting with the British ambassador on the following day.
When Maugham arrived in Petrograd at the end of August 1917, he found the city in a state of turmoil. Six months previously, the February Revolution had forced the abdication of the czar, since when there had been an anarchic period of riot and confusion. Along the broad streets tanks and armored cars had become a familiar sight, and there was often the sound of gunfire. With the relentless German advance against an army perilously short of arms and apparel, Russian soldiers were deserting in droves, many to be seen roaming the streets, desperate and dangerous. Fighting frequently broke out between the cossacks, loyal to the provisional government, and the Bolsheviks, demanding that the government should go. Crime was rife, restless crowds surged day and night along the city streets, and there was an acute shortage of all basic supplies; every morning from before dawn, long queues of women wrapped in shawls and head scarves waited patiently for deliveries of bread, milk, sugar, and tobacco. The great imperial capital, with its magnificent mansions, its canals and bridges, its gilded domes and spires, was already beginning to look dingy and dilapidated. Yet despite the crisis there was a level of normality: trams were running, and carriages and motorcars still plied up and down fashionable Nevsky Prospekt and Morskaia Street, with their shops and restaurants and grand hotels; theaters and concert halls were open for business as usual, and the cinematographs displayed huge posters of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford; cafés were jammed with customers, even if there was little on offer except a sandwich and a glass of tea.
Near the Hermitage on Palace Embankment, opposite the Peter and Paul Fortress, stood the British embassy, a magnificent eighteenth-century edifice built by Catherine the Great. It was here that Maugham duly presented himself on the day after his arrival. At Wiseman’s request, only the vaguest explanation had been provided by London for Maugham’s presence in Petrograd: according to the Foreign Office cable, “Mr. Somerset Maugham is in Russia68 on a confidential mission with a view to putting certain phases of the Russian situation before the public in the United States.” Despite this uninformative statement it was naturally expected that the embassy should offer him any assistance he required, specifically in the transmission of reports, to be sent in code to the British consul in New York. Shown into a sumptuously upholstered anteroom hung with massive portraits of Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V, and Queen Mary, Maugham was left to himself for a considerable period before the ambassador chose to make his entrance; by this time he had worked himself into a nervous state, his stammer intensified by the frigid courtesy with which he was received. Sir George Buchanan was a formidable presence. Tall and lean, with silver-gray hair, a monoc
le, and a mustache, Sir George in his black tail coat and gray trousers looked the perfect cardboard cutout of an ambassador. “In his cold and uninteresting way69 he was really a very handsome fellow,” Maugham grudgingly noted, smarting from the chilliness of his reception. For it was instantly and acidulously made clear that the well-known writer was a far from welcome visitor. Sir George, a skillful and distinguished diplomat, was under enormous pressure trying to keep a balance between the various warring factions as well as working to persuade a wavering Kerensky to stay in the war. Now here was this inexperienced amateur arriving on the scene, who not only was to be allowed direct access to Kerensky himself, but whose encrypted cables were to be sent on by the embassy in a code it could not read and without the ambassador’s being made privy to their content. It was this last in particular that Sir George regarded as a grave affront. “I realized,” wrote Maugham after the interview was over, “that I could not count70 on much help in that quarter.”
For Maugham the most pressing undertaking was to obtain entrée to the prime minister, and with this in mind he made contact with his old flame, Alexandra (“Sasha”) Kropotkin. Madame Lebedev, as she now was, had left England to return to Russia in order actively to involve herself in the revolution. An enthusiastic supporter of the provisional government, she knew Kerensky well and was more than willing to provide an introduction. The reality proved disappointing. Once a dynamic and effective leader, Kerensky, still only thirty-six, was a sick man; ensconced in his office in the Winter Palace, he had lost the vision and decisiveness that once defined his leadership, allowing himself to be easily influenced and constantly changing his mind. He knew he was losing his grip and was terrified by the prospect, which now seemed imminent, of defeat. “[Kerensky] looked very unhealthy,”71 Maugham recorded.
He seemed fearfully on edge…. His speech was rapid and emphatic; and his nervousness made me nervous too…. The final impression I had was of a man exhausted…. He was more afraid of doing the wrong thing than anxious to do the right one.
Maugham’s impression on this first meeting, that the Menshevik leader was unworthy of Allied support, was fortified by an incident he witnessed shortly afterward. Maugham and Sasha Lebedev were in the audience at a vast conference held one wet September evening in the Alexandrovsky Theatre. The theater was brightly lit and the boxes filled with foreign diplomats, while at long tables on stage sat members of the presidium. Toward the start of proceedings Kerensky strode out from the wings and began to address the audience; then suddenly he stopped as if struck as a voice in the audience started to heckle. According to one observer, “in the middle of his speech72 [he] rushed from the platform and burst into tears…. It seemed incredible that this man was holding the reins of great seething Russia.” Maugham was equally unimpressed. “I’ve never seen a man73 on a public platform whose face actually looked green,” he recalled. “If I’d been sitting closer I could have smelt the fear.”
This humiliating performance notwithstanding, Maugham continued to confer with Kerensky, their meetings taking place once a week at the Mjedved, the finest restaurant in the city. “With Sasha acting as hostess74 and interpreter,” he recalled, “I provided my guests with quantities of caviare at the expense of the two governments who had sent me to Petrograd, and they devoured it with relish.” Afterward the conversation would continue in Sasha’s apartment, with Kerensky pacing the room and haranguing Maugham as though he were at a public meeting. The situation facing the provisional government was growing increasingly desperate: abroad the Allies were pressuring Kerensky to continue with the war, while within the country the masses, facing famine and the approach of winter, were demanding peace. For Kerensky the Englishman was becoming an increasingly crucial contact in his dealings with the Allied powers. The American ambassador, an ex–grain merchant from St. Louis, rarely put his head above the parapet, while His Britannic Majesty’s representative was proving impossibly obdurate: at a recent meeting Sir George Buchanan had made it plain that no further help could be expected from his government until the disorganization in the army, and indeed in the country at large, was substantially resolved. Furious and frustrated, Kerensky had turned his back on the ambassador and stalked out of the room, a Napoleonic touch, as Buchanan drily described it, but one that if theatrical in effect was awkward in result, leaving the Russian leader with no direct line to Downing Street other than that provided sub rosa by Somerset Maugham.
Maugham, meanwhile, was diligently filing his reports, spending long evenings in his hotel encrypting information, an unwieldy process that it was impossible to hurry. According to the elaborate code with which he had been equipped, Kerensky was to be identified as “Lane,” Lenin as “Davis,” Trotsky as “Cole,” and Sir George Buchanan as “Dewar,” while the British government appeared under the guise of “Eyre & Co.”; if a password were asked for, it was “Friend of Mr. King in New York.” His briefings were highly rated by Wiseman, who knew he could rely on Maugham, now the chief British agent in the field, to send back assessments that were both accurate and politically astute. On September 24, Wiseman cabled in cipher to Sir Eric Drummond at the Foreign Office in London,
I am receiving interesting cables75 from Maugham…. [He] asks if he can work with British intelligence officer at Petrograd, thereby benefiting both and avoiding confusion. I see no objection…. He is very discreet….
As before in Switzerland, Maugham had a team of agents under his control, to be employed as he thought fit. He dispatched a couple of his men to Sweden and Finland to investigate rumors of an alliance between those countries and the Central Powers; and he made strenuous if ultimately unsuccessful efforts to infiltrate one of his agents into Bolshevik secret meetings, an aim eventually achieved by the Americans. He himself kept closely in touch with a wide range of contacts in Petrograd. There was Voska, of course, and the remarkable Tomás Masaryk, “gently spoken, absent-minded and undramatic,” whose Czech organization was run with impressive efficiency; Maugham recommended substantial financial support for Masaryk’s Slav Press Bureau, recognizing its importance as a front for anti-German propaganda as well as for more covert operations. Maugham also conferred at length with Boris Savinkov, Kerensky’s war minister. Described by Maugham as the most extraordinary man he ever met, Savinkov had been responsible for some spectacular assassinations of imperial officials, and was crucial to the Allies as a firm believer in the reorganization of the army and continuation of the war.*
At first Maugham was optimistic, believing in the resolve of those at the top and impressed by the general good humor of the crowds in the street, but it was not long before disillusion set in. By the end of September he was already convinced that the cause was hopeless: Kerensky was weak, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were rapidly gaining ground, and there was a general mood of defeatism among the provisional government that it was impossible to counter. Looking back, Maugham wrote, “The endless talk when action was needed,76 the vacillations, the apathy when apathy could only result in destruction, the high-flown protestations, the insincerity and half-heartedness that I found everywhere sickened me with Russia and the Russians.”
And yet, the political situation apart, there was a great deal to be learned and enjoyed, and Maugham was determined to make the most of his time, exploring the city and immersing himself in the language and literature of the country. Every morning he had a lesson in Russian, and he read avidly, the great novelists of the past as well as contemporary authors such as Kuprin, Korolenko, Sologub, and Mihail Artzybashev. He went to the ballet, to concerts, and to the theater. (Among the plays on offer was an unknown Russian comedy, which Maugham attended out of curiosity: as the plot unfolded it began to seem increasingly familiar, and glancing at his program he saw the author’s name listed as “Mum,” the title of the play Jack Straw.) In fine weather he took long walks, and one day, strolling around the precincts of the ancient Lavra monastery at the end of Nevsky Prospekt, he was overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of nostalgia:<
br />
I felt homesick.77 I stood on the steps of the great church, looking at the long line of the monastery buildings … but I saw the long nave of Canterbury cathedral with its flying buttresses and the central tower more imposing and lovely to my moved eyes than any tower in Europe.
The homesickness was made worse by the fact that letters were sparse, arriving at irregular intervals in the diplomatic bag. To his friend and fellow dramatist Eddie Knoblock, Maugham wrote,
I am longing for news78 of England & have very little; so pray give me half an hour of your time & send me all the current gossip. It seems incredible that one of these days we shall all settle down again to normal existence & read the fat, peaceful Times every morning, & eat porridge for breakfast & marmalade.
But the one friend of whom Maugham yearned to have news was Gerald Haxton, from whom he had heard nothing since before he left for Russia. All he knew was that Gerald had sailed for South Africa, but as the weeks passed without any word he began to fear the worst, that his ship had been sunk and that Gerald was dead. In fact Gerald was still at sea: on October 26, 1917, his ship, the Japanese Hitachi Maru, had been captured near the Maldives in the Indian Ocean by the notorious German raider Wolf. For the next five months Wolf, with her cargo of two hundred prisoners, sailed on a circuitous route north, finally reaching her home port of Kiel in the last week of February 1918. From here Gerald was transported to the prison camp at Güstrow in northern Germany, where he remained until the cessation of hostilities the following November.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 24