During the previous summer at Hindhead, Maugham had held long discussions with Syrie about their future. Their marriage was an incontrovertible fact; it was far from ideal, but, considered calmly, the arrangement held advantages for both sides: for Syrie, propriety and financial security, for Maugham the façade of respectability that one side of his nature craved; also, as parents there were important responsibilities which had to be shouldered together. Surely the two of them could work out a tolerable modus vivendi? Syrie had wanted to live in her house in Regent’s Park, originally paid for by Gordon Selfridge, but Maugham, squeamish about the association, insisted that they settle on Chesterfield Street. However, what had provided a commodious bachelor establishment for himself and Walter Payne now seemed uncomfortably cramped. The house was five-storied but narrow, and in order to make space for a nursery, Maugham had had to give up his airy top-floor study, instead making do with a small parlor on the first floor overlooking the street; this was not perfect and he was vulnerable to interruption, but at least there was just enough space for the big writing table to which its owner was so attached.
It was here in the house in Mayfair that the Maughams’ married life properly began, and at first it appeared that the couple were making a success of it: they were seen together at parties, galleries, and first nights—including, in 1919, the first nights of two of Maugham’s own plays—and they frequently entertained at home. The Maughams “gave dinner parties to end all,”27 recalled one of their friends. Naturally enough, Maugham’s brother F.H. and his wife, Nellie, were delighted to see him settle down, the last of the surviving brothers to marry, and Syrie was made warmly welcome in Rutland Gate. The three nieces, Kate, Honor, and Diana, had always felt fond of their uncle Willie, who was kind, talked to them as equals, and tipped a generous half sovereign at every meeting, and now they were fascinated by their aunt and dazzled by her chic. The girls’ clothes were bought off the peg at Bourne & Hollingsworth, whereas Syrie’s were made in Paris by Lanvin and Chanel, and it was thrilling when she gave them her barely worn castoffs and taught them about style. “I had naturally bad taste,28 running to pleats, bows, frills and rosebuds,” Kate recalled, “[and] Syrie tried to train my eye.” Even F.H. had a soft spot for his sister-in-law. Frigidly polite toward his wife and a forbidding figure to his children, F.H. was a different character altogether with Syrie, gallant and charming. The two of them sometimes lunched together, and when Maugham was abroad, F.H. would sometimes dine with Syrie at Chesterfield Street.
Yet if in public the Maughams behaved as though on the best of terms, in private all was not so serene. The basic problem was twofold: the couple had almost nothing in common, and Syrie had made the fatal mistake of falling in love with her husband. This complicated everything, for it placed an added strain on the relationship that it was quite unable to bear. Maugham was shy, reticent, and highly disciplined, and shrank from any form of emotional demonstration; Syrie by contrast was emotional, volatile, and self-indulgent, and enjoyed nothing more than making dramatic scenes, preferably last thing at night. “Don’t make me a scene!” became a familiar plea of Maugham’s. Extravagantly sociable, she adored parties and hated being alone, completely insensitive to her husband’s desire for periods of silence and solitude. “Syrie simply didn’t understand29 how important his writing was to Maugham,” said a woman friend of hers. “She would try to get him to take her to Henley or some such place when he wanted the morning completely to himself.” Nor did she realize how taxing a day’s work could be: sometimes after Maugham had been writing all day he would come down to dinner dead tired, only to find a noisy group of his wife’s friends, none of whom he knew, who had been invited in for the evening. Once the guests had gone, the rows would begin, sometimes continuing until two or three in the morning, Maugham eventually retreating to bed exhausted before having to get up early the next day to write amusing dialogue for the current play, while Syrie, if she chose, could lie in until luncheon. With her remarkable eye for décor and design, Syrie loved buying pretty things for the house, and she spent a fortune on clothes, two subjects about which she was happy to chatter for hours. “You have driven me to talk to you30 practically about nothing but frocks and furniture,” her husband exploded in one of his many fits of exasperation, “and if you knew how sick I am of both these subjects!”
She loved smart, rather raffish society, and was ill at ease with many of her husband’s old friends, Gerald Kelly chief among her dislikes. When she moved into Chesterfield Street she had insisted on the removal of The Jester, Kelly’s glorious portrait of Maugham as a young man, which had hung over the fireplace in the drawing room;* she had the painting returned to the artist, and made no secret of the fact that she found the man himself a fearful bore: when Kelly came to dine Syrie often slipped away in search of more amusing company elsewhere. And indeed, when in the company of her husband’s fellow authors she tried to join in the literary talk, faking her way with all-purpose expressions of enthusiasm, which set Maugham’s teeth on edge, irritating him beyond measure when he heard her gushing about books he knew perfectly well she had never opened. He found it infuriating that she neither could nor would leave him in peace and seemed stubbornly to resist every attempt on his part to find something to occupy her time: she never read, had no interest in cards, quickly gave up on the notion of charity work, and the traditional feminine occupations of knitting and needlework held no appeal for her whatsoever.
What Syrie wanted was her husband’s approval and attention, and one of the few areas in which she got it was the theater. This was an interest shared, and here Syrie briefly came into her own. When at work on a play Maugham often read aloud passages of dialogue to her, and he was pleased when she occasionally attended rehearsals, more than once taking her with him when he had productions opening in New York. He particularly valued her advice on sets and costumes: during the preparations for Caesar’s Wife, for example, it was Syrie who took Fay Compton shopping for her clothes. “I didn’t have a voice in it31 at all,” the actress recalled. “Syrie took over and that was that. Maugham had perfect faith in her taste in dress and he was quite right.” Before an opening, Maugham was always in an acute state of nervous tension, leaving it to Syrie to make final arrangements for the cast party after the performance. And it was she who took pity on the first-night queues, sending down sandwiches and thermoses of soup to people waiting for long hours to buy cheap tickets in the pit and gallery.
The frequent scenes Syrie staged, the endless reproaches, the daily testing and questioning of Maugham’s feelings for her, maddening to him, were all symptoms of her emotional insecurity, her huge desire to be loved. As a friend of Maugham’s later remarked, “I think that if Syrie hadn’t fallen in love32 with him, the marriage would have lasted.” The fact that she was in love made her desperate for any show of affection. It also made her physically demanding, demands which her husband found increasingly difficult to satisfy. For Syrie, Maugham was the best lover she had ever known, but she had long lost any attractiveness for him. His wife’s sexual demands, he told a man friend, “were insatiable, intolerable,” and to another he confided that he found physical relations with Syrie a great effort and when in bed with her was obliged to draw heavily on his imagination. Faced with his wife’s increasingly bitter reproaches, which were undoubtedly fueled by intense sexual frustration, Maugham was driven to lay some uncomfortable facts before her. “I was forty-three when we married33 [and] you were not very young either,” he bleakly reminded her.
You cannot forget the circumstances under which we married. I think under these circumstances you should be very well satisfied if you get from your husband courtesy and consideration, kindness and affection; but really you cannot expect passionate love.
Underlying all these scenes and arguments was of course the absent figure of Gerald Haxton. In February 1919, Haxton, released from his POW camp in Germany, had illicitly arrived in London hoping to see Maugham, but he had been quickly pic
ked up by the authorities and deported before the two men could meet. He would never set foot in the country again. Haxton was nonetheless an enormous, and profoundly threatening, presence in the Maugham marriage, the true basis of all their rows. Whereas Sue Jones had known about Maugham’s homosexuality and tolerated it, Syrie knew and was tormentedly jealous. Had the object of her husband’s affections been a woman, she might have found a way of dealing with her; had he been a gentle, effeminate young man, she might have befriended him; but as Syrie sensed long before she met Gerald, this charismatic young cad with whom her husband was so obsessed was a dangerous enemy, and one whom she had small chance of defeating.
While recuperating in his Scottish sanatorium, Maugham had spent much time planning a voyage with Gerald to the Far East, and now that the war was over he was increasingly impatient to be off. His lucrative theatrical business, however, kept him in London throughout most of 1919, with the first night of Caesar’s Wife in March, Home and Beauty opening in August in both London and New York,* and The Unknown soon to go into rehearsal.
In addition, there was the upheaval of moving. The confined quarters of Chesterfield Street had finally been exchanged for a much larger house, 2 Wyndham Place in Marylebone. Here at last Syrie was able to give free rein to her restless energy and decorative talents, overseeing the furnishing of a house primarily intended as a setting for an ambitious program of high-level entertaining. Maugham did his best to keep out of the way, spending much of his time at the Garrick when not writing or at rehearsal, or wandering around the auction houses looking at pictures; occasionally he brought an old friend, such as Sutro or Walpole, back to the house for dinner. One such evening was noted by Walpole in his diary. The evening had been pleasant, he wrote, but “[Willie] looks ill and bored.34 I’m afraid the marriage is not a great success.”
Away from the domestic arena, however, Maugham was riding high, much in the news with the opening at the end of August of his new play. A fast, frivolous, and brilliantly funny farce, Home and Beauty turns on its head a particularly unhappy aspect of the time, that of women deprived of husbands by four years of war. It was precisely the right play to entertain a war-weary public, hungry for frivolity and fun. The topical themes—rationing, the black market, the scarcity of servants—the glorious silliness of the farcical situations, and the wit and rapidity of the repartee delighted London audiences;† even the cynicism implicit in the absolute refusal to take anything seriously was accepted as a tremendous joke. This was just as the author intended, any darker, more personal relevance a matter for himself alone. “The difference between men and women,”35 says the heroine’s mother, “is that men are not naturally addicted to matrimony. With patience, firmness, and occasional rewards you can train them to it just as you can train a dog to walk on its hind legs. But a dog would rather walk on all fours and a man would rather be free.”
“A delightful entertainment,” was the critical consensus, a play of “style, wit, elegance36 … a little masterpiece of polite merriment.” The leading role of Victoria was taken by Gladys Cooper, a thirty-year-old actress whose cool, classical beauty concealed a sterling common sense and an excellent head for business. Although she had been on the stage since she was seventeen, Gladys had no great natural talent; as one of her colleagues put it, for Gladys acting was simply something she did for a living; she worked hard at it, however, was utterly reliable, and eventually, as Maugham wrote later, “succeeded in turning herself37 from an indifferent actress into an extremely accomplished one.” She was to portray three further Maugham heroines, in The Letter, The Sacred Flame, and The Painted Veil. The two became firm friends, Maugham a great admirer of Gladys’s self-discipline and determination as well as of her luminous blond beauty. The roles of Leslie Crosbie in The Letter and of Stella in The Sacred Flame were both written with Gladys in mind, and as Maugham himself admitted, the knowledge that she would be playing these parts “more or less unconsciously”38 colored his depiction of them.
ONCE THE PLAY WAS settled into its run, Maugham felt able at last to depart for the long-planned expedition to the Far East. The journey, of which he kept detailed notes, was to take more than six months. Leaving from Liverpool in August 1919, he went to New York, then by train across country, collecting Gerald in Chicago before continuing to the West Coast for embarkation. They sailed first to Hong Kong, after which they traveled on to Shanghai and Peking and finally to Mukden in the north, returning home by way of Japan and the Suez Canal.
China was fascinating territory for Maugham, a country that “gives you everything,”39 as he was later to declare. At the time of his visit the nascent republic was in a state of flux: since the overthrow of the imperial dynasty in 1912, most of the country had fallen into the hands of feuding warlords, with a deep division opening up between on the one hand an almost medieval feudal economy and on the other a rebellious student movement committed to modernization and reform. The government in Peking was precarious and ineffective, largely ignored at home although officially recognized abroad, with all the major powers maintaining embassies in the capital. For Maugham this was his first experience of being in a foreign country unable to speak the language, and outside the major cities he was largely dependent on the services of an interpreter, a restriction of minimal importance in his case, as his consuming interest was in the expatriate milieu, in the behavior of Westerners living uprooted within Chinese society. As before in Polynesia, the Americans and Europeans he encountered, the lives of doctors, diplomats, traders, missionaries, and their women, were the subject of his closest scrutiny, and his notes are full of their stories: the consul, the taipan, the desperate-to-be-married spinster, the missionary who had come to hate his calling, the agent of British-American Tobacco driven half mad by homesickness, the saintly mother superior in her white-walled convent who talked nostalgically of her family home in the south of France. One of the few exceptions was an interview with a Chinese, a renowned scholar and expert on Confucius. Long retired, this ancient gentleman with gray pigtail and discolored teeth had for many years been secretary to one of the empress dowager’s greatest viceroys; educated at Oxford and Berlin, he spoke fluent English, and he sufficiently unbent, after some lavish flattery, to discourse on history, on philosophy, and with considerable fervor on the relationship between his country and the West. “You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us,”40 he fiercely harangued his somewhat startled visitor, “[but] do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? … What will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white?”*
Although travel within the country was often cumbersome and slow, Maugham and Haxton covered vast distances. Accompanied by a team of bearers, blue-clad coolies in big straw hats carrying their luggage balanced on poles over the shoulder, they experienced a wide variety of transport. Sometimes they were carried by litter, or jogged along astride tough little ponies; for days at a time they walked, at night putting up in rough country inns, sometimes sleeping on the bare earth floor; and for fifteen hundred miles they sailed by sampan along the upper reaches of the Yangtze, on as far as Chengdu, from whose crenellated walls could be seen the snowy mountains of Tibet. Maugham was entranced by the beauty of the country, by the vivid green of the paddy fields, the little tree-covered hills, the graceful bamboo thickets that lined the side of the road. He transcribed his impressions while they were still fresh in his mind, often while actually on the move, scribbling his notes while being carried in a chair or moving downriver in a sampan. On their way the two men visited shrines and temples, they sat in teahouses and opium dens; they watched peasants in the fields plowing with lumbering water buffalo, passed women on the road tottering along on tiny bound feet; by the river at night they saw fleets of junks, their sails ghostly in the moonlight; and once in remote country a group of Mongol tribesmen clattered by, dressed in black silk coats and trousers and boots with turned-up toes.
On occasion the sight was less picturesque. Wal
king up to inspect a hillside graveyard they came upon a little tower, gruesome evidence of the Chinese custom of disposing of unwanted baby girls. “At its foot were a number41 of rough baskets thrown about in disorder,” Maugham wrote.
I walked round and on one side saw an oblong hole, eighteen inches by eight, perhaps, from which hung a stout string. From the hole there came a very strange, nauseating odour…. It was a baby tower. The baskets were the baskets in which the babies had been brought … let down gently by means of the string. The odour was the odour of putrefaction. A lively little boy came up to me while I stood there and made me understand that four babes had been brought to the tower that morning.
The contrast between rural China and the great cities of Peking, Shanghai, and Hong Kong could hardly have been more marked. Hong Kong, the first port of call for Maugham and Haxton, was emphatically British, clean, efficient, and redolent of home, with its clubs, race course, tennis courts, and comfortable, chintz-covered sitting rooms where white-coated servants brought in cocktails and olives on the dot of six. Shanghai, commercial and cosmopolitan, was very different in character, with the great banks and businesses lining the Bund, streets jammed with motor traffic, with a busy nightlife centered on the restaurants and nightclubs run mainly by a glamorous White Russian population in flight from the recent revolution. Here, as in the other major metropolises, every kind of sexual delicacy was provided, the famous boy brothels in particular popular with Europeans. The ancient walled capital, Peking, was yet another world altogether, “an experience that really enriches the soul,”42 as Maugham testified, “one of the pleasantest places43 in the world to spend the rest of one’s life.” Here there were cities within cities, the Forbidden City, the Imperial City, the Chinese City, each enclosed by its own massive wall surrounding temples and palaces, lakes, gardens, pagodas, and a rabbit warren of houses. In each, the broad tree-lined streets and imperial palaces were surrounded by an infinite network of tiny hutungs, or alleyways; a doorway in a blank wall might open onto a series of cool courtyards fragrant with flowering shrubs, or onto an overcrowded slum stinking of rotting refuse. As Maugham remarked, “very nasty smells”44 were often overwhelming: sewers were a rare luxury; instead, open drains ran in the street and the night soil was wheeled out every morning to be spread outside the city walls and used as fertilizer. Unlike noisy Shanghai, there were few cars in Peking, the most common form of transport the rickshaw, silent on its pneumatic tires and the soft-shod feet of its runner. Most foreigners lived within the legation compound, where there were clubs and a couple of European-style hotels. Expatriate social life was frenetic, with racing, day-long picnics, dances, and luncheons, as well as diplomatic dinner parties, to many of which, as a distinguished visitor, Maugham was naturally invited, their pomposities and protocol meticulously transcribed.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 27