Over the next two decades the name Syrie Maugham was to become synonymous with elegant modernity. Her artistry and sense of style were to make a considerable impact on interior decoration in both Britain and the United States, with her famous all-white rooms copied widely, from Mayfair to Manhattan. “With the strength of a typhoon,”51 wrote the photographer Cecil Beaton, “[Syrie] blew all colour before her … turning the world white…. White sheepskin rugs were strewn on the eggshell-surface floors, huge white sofas were flanked with white crackled-paint tables, white peacock feathers were put in white vases against a white wall.” Syrie was even paid the compliment of being caricatured by Evelyn Waugh: in A Handful of Dust there are undeniable similarities between Syrie and the ruthless Mrs. Beaver, who desecrates the Gothic gloom of Hetton Abbey with natural sheepskin and white chromium plating. Syrie’s emphasis on neutral color and the importance of space was regarded as exciting and new, especially in England, where the prevailing taste tended toward violently contrasting schemes in black and orange, or else tea-cozy travesties of Tudor design complete with bogus beams and inglenooks. Syrie made a workshop for herself in one of Liza’s nurseries where she could practice her techniques, and soon she was pickling and bleaching tables and chairs and stripping the black lacquer off Coromandel screens with a gusto that delighted her clients and provoked shocked accusations of vandalism from the more traditional sections of the trade.
If not altogether pleased to find his wife running a shop, Maugham was relieved that Syrie’s formidable energies had found an outlet other than in marital rows. And he had always admired her flair for color and design. “She has exquisite taste,”52 he wrote in his notebook in 1922, before going on to list further good qualities:
She is clever. She has charm…. She is generous and will spend her own money, to the last penny, as freely as she will spend other people’s. She is hospitable…. In sickness she will show herself an admirable and devoted nurse. She is a gay and pleasant talker. Her greatest gift is her capacity for sympathy. She will listen to your troubles with genuine commiseration and with unfeigned kindliness will do everything she can to relieve them…. There is real goodness in her.
But on the other side of the coin,
She is not only a liar, she is a mythomaniac…. She is grasping and will hesitate at no dishonesty to get what she wants. She is a snob…. She is vindictive, jealous and envious. She is a quarrelsome bully. She is vain, vulgar and ostentatious. There is real badness in her.
At this period, however, the good appeared to outweigh the bad, and while he did not entirely approve, Maugham did nothing to stop his wife’s new venture. It is telling that Syrie had not turned to her wealthy husband for the capital to fund it, preferring instead to borrow from friends, less as a statement of independence than from a conviction that he would almost certainly refuse her. For when it came to his wife, Maugham kept a tight hand on the purse strings; her willful extravagance infuriated him, and refusing her money was an effective method of punishment and control. He gave her a generous annual allowance of £3,000 for clothes and personal expenses, which she was always exceeding, and her profligacy in housekeeping drove him to distraction: the gallons of cream, the case upon case of champagne, the enormous numbers of dishes prepared, never eaten, and then thrown away. One summer, having rented a house for a family holiday in Brittany, Maugham became so enraged by the food bills Syrie was running up that he refused to pay them, even though there were guests staying at the time, and Syrie was forced to borrow in order to settle the accounts. With regard to Liza, now seven, the fact that the little girl was so wrapped up in her mother eased his conscience, protecting him from feeling that he might be failing in his duties as a father; he himself in childhood had had only a tenuous relationship with his father, which may go some way to explaining a curious statement made later that year: “I have a notion that children53 are all the better for not being burdened with too much parental love.”
While thankful that the atmosphere at Wyndham Place was less turbulent, Maugham still was not prepared to spend much time there, and at Easter he left for Italy to meet Gerald Haxton, who had been parked in Florence while awaiting the next departure for the Far East. On his return from Java, Maugham had written to his old friend Reggie Turner, who had been long settled in an apartment on the Viale Milton, asking him to take the young man under his wing. Haxton, “my constant companion54 on all my travels [is] a very dear friend of mine for whom I hope you will do everything you can….” When Maugham arrived, he and Haxton joined a group containing Turner, Hugh Walpole, Eddie Knoblock, and the Italian publisher Giuseppe (“Pino”) Orioli, who at the time was living with that crusty, charismatic figure, Norman Douglas. Douglas, admired as the author of South Wind, notorious as an unregenerate pedophile, was now in his fifties and after many years on Capri and then in England had settled in Florence in an attempt to recoup his fortunes after a long period of poverty and several run-ins with the law for molesting young boys. “I left England55 under a cloud no bigger than a boy’s hand,” he used to quip. His financial situation had recently become so desperate that a secret appeal had been launched by the writer Rebecca West; when she approached Maugham, he told her he would assume total responsibility, depositing enough money to provide a roof over Douglas’s head for life on condition that his identity as benefactor was never revealed: Douglas, he joked, had a habit “of attaching himself56 to the hand that feeds him.” With such dazzling conversationalists as Douglas and Reggie Turner, the three weeks in Florence passed swiftly. Turner in particular was delighted to see Maugham again, his only criticism that his old friend could be “a little arid”57 when it came to tipping. Haxton, the new boy, was liked by all, Walpole recording in his diary that Maugham’s chum was “charming, full of kindness58 and shrewdness mixed.”
There was no question of Maugham’s staying away long, as his presence was required in London for rehearsals of his new play, East of Suez, a prospect regarded without much enthusiasm. “You cannot think how impatient I am59 to be on the wander again,” he wrote to Alanson. “London is very nice to come back to, but to my mind flat & unprofitable to live in…. It is like an artificial comedy, amusing enough to sit through for a period, but apt to grow tedious if it lasts too long. I am feeling very much as though it were time for the curtain to fall.” Far from falling, the curtain was about to go up on a costly extravaganza, a show embellished with all kinds of expensive novelty, including a spectacular Peking street scene with shops, rickshaws, sixty Chinese extras, a real Ford motorcar, and an onstage orchestra playing some twangy “Chinese” music especially commissioned from Eugene Goossens. The play, in some respects a looking-glass version of The Painted Veil, is set among the British colony in Peking, and in an undeniably melodramatic tone offers a rich mix of adultery, racism, suicide, and attempted murder. Produced by Basil Dean at His Majesty’s, East of Suez opened on September 2, 1922, in London and almost simultaneously in New York. Audiences loved it, but critics on both side of the pond derided it. The Spectator, describing the work as crude and pretentious, declared itself shocked that Mr. Maugham could have written anything so amateurish. “Another piece of work like this60 and his reputation as a serious playwright will be gone!”
Fortunately for his peace of mind, Maugham had left London a few days before these notices appeared. He narrowly escaped another unpleasant press report, of a very different nature, when shortly after his departure Syrie was involved in a fatal accident. Driving down Park Lane one evening she knocked down a woman cyclist, who subsequently died of a fractured skull. Giving evidence at the inquest, Syrie swore she had never seen the cyclist, and to her enormous relief it was ruled that the death was not her fault.
BY THIS TIME MAUGHAM was thousands of miles away, again headed for the Orient. His destination this time was Burma, a British dominion rather less docile in mood than the Federated Malay States: Burma was administered not as a separate colony but as a province of India, thus relegated to second
-class status in the imperial order, a fact much resented by the Burmese. Maugham had been warned to expect trouble, from headhunters, tigers, and snakes as well as from native insurgents. “We have got quite an arsenal with us,”61 he wrote to Bert Alanson, although as it turned out the expedition, if arduous, passed off without threat. In his account of the journey, published under the title The Gentleman in the Parlour, Maugham makes no mention of any political issue, an omission for which he has been censured by some. By contrast, George Orwell, who was in Burma at exactly the same period, working in the Burmese police, was intensely alive to the seething resentments around him, coming to loathe what he regarded as the despotism of British rule. Orwell portrayed the colonial oppressors as at worst vicious, at best stupid and dull: a dull people, “cherishing and fortifying62 their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.” He clearly foresaw the end of empire, while Maugham appeared not so much unaware of as indifferent to the subject. In his introduction to The Gentleman in the Parlour he introduces the matter in a tone of slightly awkward facetiousness. “I cock a snook63 at the historian of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire,” he writes, after rehearsing the arguments he supposes lined up against him: “Did he go through Burmah and not see how the British power was tottering?” To such detractors, though, the reply is simple: the fall of empire was not his topic. Much of the enormous popularity of Maugham’s stories stems from the fact that he knew his limitations, perfectly understood the range of his engagement: it was not the big picture that appealed to his imagination, but the small lives of unremarkable individuals struggling to create the reassuringly ordinary out of an extravagantly exotic environment.
Maugham and Haxton arrived in Rangoon from Colombo in Ceylon, sailing up the Irrawaddy on a hot, bright morning, dazzled by the sight of the great golden spire of the ancient Shwedagon pagoda glinting in the sunlight. The plan was to journey from Rangoon to Mandalay, then north into Siam and on to Bangkok, thence into Indochina and finally to Hanoi and Haiphong, where they could board a ship to Hong Kong, and from there they would sail home. Rangoon, Mandalay, Bangkok, their names so full of mystery and promise, turned out to be disappointing, hot and dusty, all three noisy modern cities with European restaurants and hotels, their crowded streets jammed with traffic, with trams, cars, gharries, and rickshaws, and little sign of the mysterious East, of the “narrow alleys [and] devious ways64 down which the imagination may wander.” Once out into the country, however, the modern world disappeared, as they slowly progressed north and into the Shan States. Here the going was hard, as they traveled through jungle and up mountain passes, riding, or trudging along on foot, sometimes rowing upriver on ramshackle rafts, or jolting uncomfortably along mud-rutted roads in the back of a bullock cart.
The most difficult part of the journey was from Taunggyi, capital of the Shan States, to Keng Tung on the border with Siam, a distance of nearly seven hundred miles, which was to take twenty-six days to cover, Maugham and Haxton astride surefooted Shan ponies at the head of a caravan of mules transporting the luggage and equipment. As well as the team of porters, there were two Indian servants, a Ghurka manservant, Rang Lal, and a Telugu cook. Rang Lal was well trained and efficient, but the cook proved to be a problem, dirty, frequently drunk, and his cooking inept and monotonous: dinner, preceded by gin and bitters, was either curry, tinned sardines, or a stringy bird shot by one of the two white men, inevitably followed by trifle or cabinet pudding, “the staple sweets65 of the East.” After a while, desperate for change, Maugham took matters into his own hands and showed the cook how to make corned beef hash. “I trusted that after he left me66 he would pass on the precious recipe to other cooks and that eventually one more dish would be added to the scanty repertory of Anglo-Eastern cuisine.” Progress was slow, especially when it came to persuading the mule train across a river, the Salween or Mekong, or pushing through dense thickets of bamboo, or on foot while pulling their ponies knee-deep in mud along a forest trail. Sometimes it was suffocatingly hot and steamy, while high in the mountains it was misty and cold. Nights were spent either in circuit houses, one indistinguishable from the other with their shabby teak furniture and years-old copies of The Strand magazine, or in monasteries, their camp beds and mosquito nets placed among golden Buddhas brooding on their great lotus leaves in the gloaming. The journey was exhausting and occasional rest days were a necessity, instead of rising at dawn a late lie-in with tea and a cigarette, peaceful hours spent lounging in pajamas, playing patience and reading. A favorite work that Maugham had brought with him was Du Côté de Guermantes, and for fear of finishing it too quickly he rationed himself to thirty pages a day. “A great deal of course was exquisitely boring67 [but] I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by anybody else.”
Once they had crossed the small stream that marked the boundary with Siam, the landscape changed completely, and they found themselves in open agricultural country, with rice fields on either side of the road, neat little villages, and gentle hills covered with well-husbanded teak forests. Then, riding into a village at noon, Maugham suddenly felt a familiar perfumed warmth, “the harsh, the impetuous, the flamboyant”68 air of the south, and realized with a shock of delight that he was in the tropics. Once in Siam, everything was easy: they were welcomed by a polite village official who insisted they stay in his own spacious house, putting at their disposal a bright red Ford motorcar in which they drove off at what seemed a vertiginous speed of eight miles an hour to the nearest station to catch the train to Bangkok.
The heat in the capital was overwhelming, and soon after settling into his hotel Maugham succumbed to a bad attack of malaria, recurrences of which would dog him for many years. A doctor was called who immediately administered quinine, but at first this had no effect and Maugham’s temperature soared dangerously, to over 105 degrees. But eventually the crisis came, and drenched in sweat, the patient began to recover: soon he could breathe easily, his head ached no longer, and he was free from pain. “I felt extraordinarily happy,”69 he recalled.
From Bangkok the two travelers continued by sea to Kep on the Cambodian coast, and from there to Phnom Penh and Angkor, where the ruined, overgrown Khmer temples deep in the forest, “looming gigantic and black70 in the moonshine,” made a powerful impression. One of the last cities on the itinerary was Saigon in French Indochina, a charming place with the air of a little provincial town in the south of France. From Saigon their route took them to the royal city of Hué, where they had an audience with the emperor, then to Hanoi, and finally to the big French naval base at Haiphong, where they boarded a steamer to Hong Kong, from there making their way via Shanghai, Yokohama, and Vancouver to New York and the welcome comfort of the Aquitania.
The Gentleman in the Parlour,* Maugham’s account of his adventure, is notable for the author’s obvious enjoyment, his high spirits, the exuberance with which in a prose both lucid and relaxed he writes of his experiences. Maugham loved to explore, loved to be on the move, and he always found in travel not only a source of inspiration for his writing but an enormous sense of freedom, freedom from social, domestic, and moral constraints, and freedom as well from the limitations of his own sometimes suffocating sense of self. “I am often tired of myself,”71 he wrote, “and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.” On this occasion he returned with copious notes on which to base his book, the result an attractive mix of simple yet vivid descriptions of the land and the people, with a number of intriguing histories gleaned from characters met on the road, among them a saintly Italian priest living in a remote jungle village, a degenerate figure who had been a fellow student of Maugham’s at St. Thomas’s, and an eccentric American couple, the Wilkinses, proprietors of a tiny traveling circus. The Wilkinses, whom Maugham years later still remembered as the oddest people he ever encountered, were fellow passengers aboard a squalid little steamer plying along the Cambodian co
ast between Bangkok and Kep, and during the long hot hours on deck they tell Maugham about their animals, all of whom they regard as family:
“I guess Egbert would like72 a sip of your lemonade, my dear,” said Mr. Wilkins.
Mrs. Wilkins slightly turned her head and looked at the monkey sitting on her lap.
“Would you like a sip of mother’s lemonade, Egbert?”
The monkey gave a little squeak and putting her arm round him she handed him a straw….
“Mrs. Wilkins thinks the world of Egbert,” said her husband. “You can’t wonder at it. He’s her youngest.”
Mrs. Wilkins took another straw and thoughtfully drank her lemonade.
“Egbert’s all right,” she remarked. “There’s nothing wrong with Egbert.”
There are also some mild philosophical reflections and literary musings and a few brief passages of autobiography, and as always in Maugham’s accounts of his travel abroad there flows a small subterranean stream of nostalgia for the Kentish countryside of his boyhood: in Petrograd he was moved by the resemblance of the Lavra monastery to Canterbury Cathedral; in China, “the bamboos, the Chinese bamboos,73 transformed by some magic of the mist, look just like the hops of Kentish fields”; while in Burma a distant tributary of the Mekong recalls the little stream where as a child “[I used] to catch minnows74 and put them in a jam-pot.” On its publication in 1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour was widely acclaimed. “Never was Mr. Maugham more readable75 or so wholly delightful as in this,” declared the New York Herald Tribune, while Desmond MacCarthy in an essay on Maugham described the work as “sombre and beautiful,76 entertaining and sincere.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 32