The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Increasingly, Maugham was growing uneasy about his wife’s methods: there was in Syrie’s character a moral coarseness that shocked her fastidious husband. It was one thing to charge outrageous prices—she was hardly unique in the trade for that—but there were more serious suspicions about her conduct. Already there had been a couple of lawyers’ letters demanding reimbursement for a fake passed off as an antique, and she was beginning to earn a bad reputation among her professional colleagues. “She was tricky in business,”40 an American decorator remembered; “I knew Syrie slightly41 and hated her as did anyone who had business dealings with her: she was dishonest,” said another; while a third remarked of her that Syrie was “a tough old rogue42 who never paid for anything unless she had to”; “she was a schemer, hard as nails.” Needless to say, Maugham distanced himself as far as possible from his wife’s business transactions, but there was one occasion when her lack of integrity was forcefully brought home to him. The magnificent jade and gold necklace he had brought back for Syrie from China in 1920 had become a great favorite and she wore it often, having first insured it for a considerable sum. One evening she returned to the house from a buying trip to Paris and immediately burst into tears. “I don’t know how to tell you,”43 she sobbed. “I’ve lost my jade string.” It appeared that she had been in the Louvre, absorbed in matching silks, and in the crowd some clever thief must have slipped it off her neck. Maugham consoled her as best he could, Syrie put in a claim, and the insurance company paid up. A few months later one of the company’s employees walking down the rue de la Paix spotted the very same necklace on display in a jeweler’s window, and on inquiry learned it had been sold to the shop by a Madame Maugham. Fortunately Syrie escaped prosecution as the company, having been reimbursed, was persuaded not to pursue the matter further.

  At about the same time as the affair of the necklace, Maugham began to have suspicions of further duplicity on Syrie’s part, suspicions that were confirmed by one of her girlfriends. This was almost certainly Barbara Back, wife of the surgeon Ivor Back. Barbara had originally been a supporter of Syrie’s, but she had been shocked by the way Syrie talked about her husband, spreading scandalous gossip about his private life, and so she had come more and more to sympathize with Maugham. When Barbara warned him that Syrie had taken not one but two lovers, he was unsurprised. “I knew them both,”44 he wrote sourly, “and had a very poor opinion of either.” In fact Maugham cared very little how his wife conducted herself; if anything, he was pleased, recognizing that her adultery strengthened his position: she could hardly make such a fuss about his relationship with Gerald if she was in much the same position herself. But the discovery of her unfaithfulness, coming so soon after the attempted fraud over the necklace, fired his imagination, and on three separate occasions in his writing he was to use a necklace, in each case of pearls rather than jade, to stand as a symbol of sexual licentiousness and betrayal. The theme first appeared in 1925 in the short story “Mr. Know-All,” then in a play in 1932, and finally in another short story about ten years after that.

  The subject of divorce was now being seriously discussed between the Maughams. From Maugham’s point of view there was no future in the marriage and the sooner they effected a clean break the better: he had made it clear there was to be no question of his separating from Gerald, and that he was more than happy for Syrie to divorce him, after which they could both go their separate ways. But Syrie did not wish to divorce. She enjoyed the prestige of being Mrs. Somerset Maugham, she still loved her husband, and she still hoped that somehow an amicable compromise might be found. With this in mind the obvious next step was for Syrie and Haxton to meet, a suggestion she had previously refused to consider. Thus it was decided that in August the two men should spend a week with Syrie at her house in Le Touquet. Liza, who was a silent witness to this momentous encounter, recalled it as “a disaster from the start.45 I shall never forget the terrible atmosphere of those few days…. Syrie and my father were completely and tragically incompatible in every way and that Le Touquet episode was the real beginning of the end.”

  THE ARRANGEMENTS HAVING BEEN MADE, Maugham did his best to feel optimistic about the proposal. Le Touquet “is really a very charming little place46 … and all kinds of amusing people go there for the summer so that I think we ought to have a very pleasant time,” he wrote tentatively to Bert Alanson. Meanwhile he fortified himself for the ordeal by taking Gerald off for a couple of weeks’ holiday on Capri to stay at the Villa Cercola with John Ellingham Brooks. The island was as seductive as ever, and Maugham, not for the first time, was much taken with the idea of buying a house there, a refuge to which he could retreat to work in peace; he asked Brooks to look for one in his absence, arranging access to his bank for any necessary deposit. From Capri he and Haxton went on to a spa at Brides-les-Bains in the French Alps, where they followed a strict teetotal regime and took vigorous exercise on the golf course and tennis court.

  Fit and rested, Maugham and Haxton arrived at the Villa Eliza in the second week of August 1925 to find a house party in progress: Noël Coward and his handsome American lover, Jack Wilson; the former musical comedy star Gertie Millar, now the Countess of Dudley; Barbara Back; the glamorous Delavignes, brother and sister; Frankie Levesson, a Danish decorator whom Syrie was shortly to take on as manager of her shop; and Beverley Nichols, a good-looking young man with literary ambitions, very much on the make. As soon as the two newcomers entered the house the tension in the air became almost tangible. Syrie, dressed in white and heavily made up, was overvivacious, trying to conceal her nervousness by gushing embarrassingly—“darlings!” she greeted the couple, dramatically flinging up her arms. Maugham, in blue blazer and pale blue trousers, remained courteous but remote, while Gerald in open shirt and shorts made a point of being elaborately relaxed, lounging about smoking and picking his teeth or hovering absorbedly over the cocktail tray. “Gerald makes the best sidecars47 in the world!” Syrie complimented him anxiously, blowing him a kiss that he ostentatiously disregarded. After tea, Syrie, accompanied by Beverley Nichols, Haxton, and Liza, drove off to see an antiquaire who had a Provençal armoire she had her eye on. “She’ll pickle it48 before you can say knife,” Noël joked. Arriving back at the house, Haxton, accidentally on purpose, gave Liza a sharp push as she climbed out of the car, causing her to fall and scrape her knee.

  In the evening several people came in for dinner, including the Swedish multimillionaire industrialist Ivar Kreuger, who had founded his vast fortune from matches. Watching Kreuger fumble with his lighter, Maugham made everyone laugh by saying as he proffered a matchbox, “Mon cher ami, il paraît49 qu’il vous manque une allumette?”* After dinner Noël, much relied on to make the party go, entertained at the piano, then at around midnight Haxton, already fairly drunk, took the younger guests off to the nearby casino, among them Beverley Nichols, who later described the scene. Gerald at the tables was “still very decorative,” though his cheeks were flushed and his eyes glazed, and there was cigar ash all down his dinner jacket. “He caught my eye and shouted,50 ‘Come over here, you pretty boy, and bring me luck.’ Which,” Beverley added prissily, “is not how I cared to be addressed.” It was after three in the morning when Nichols returned to the villa, but no sooner had he crept into bed than he was joined there by Coward’s boyfriend, Jack Wilson, their lovemaking terrifyingly interrupted by Coward himself crashing open the door, a furious figure in a green silk dressing gown, looking, Nichols recalled, “like the wrath of 49,000 Chinese gods.” Next day Nichols felt so humiliated by what had happened that he told Syrie he had to return home at once, and to his surprise she promptly decided to leave with him, pouring out while on the boat train to London her feelings of fear and loathing for Gerald Haxton. Haxton, she said, was poisoning her husband’s mind against her; he was a liar, a forger, and a cheat; he had no morals at all, and “if he thought it would be of the faintest advantage to him he’d jump into bed with a hyena.”

  This is Nichol
s’s version, produced more than forty years later. By that time all three principals, Maugham, Syrie, and Haxton, were safely dead and Nichols was focused on revenging himself on Maugham, with whom at the end of the old man’s life he had fallen out. His book, entitled A Case of Human Bondage and purportedly an analysis of the Maugham marriage, gives some telling detail of the week at Le Touquet and of Syrie’s emotional state: she and Beverley were fond of each other and he was undoubtedly one of the many in whom she confided. In essence, however, the book is untrustworthy, fueled by spite and warped by deliberate distortion: for instance, Nichols in his book asserts that it was Haxton, not Wilson, who came into his room, and Maugham, not Coward, who caught them at it, a falsification he later admitted in a letter to Coward’s secretary, Cole Lesley. Certainly his is a more coloratura rendition than that given at the time by Maugham, who clearly believed that the visit, despite the tense atmosphere and numerous unspoken anxieties, had not been unsuccessful. “Syrie was as nice as nice could be & is evidently eager to turn over a new leaf,” he wrote to Eddie Knoblock. It appears that Maugham noticed nothing odd in Syrie’s early departure with Nichols; it is plain there had been some serious talks between husband and wife, and equally plain that Maugham was determined not to move one inch from his stated position. “I hope,” the letter continued, “[Syrie] will cease her complaining about me to all her friends … but if she complains to you, you will do me a service by reminding her that she has only to say the word & I am willing to let myself be divorced. I cannot change & she must either bear with me as I am, or take her courage in both hands & make the break.”

  BY THE TIME THIS letter was written, in October 1925, Maugham and Haxton were on their way back to the Far East. “I am so thrilled at getting [away]51 that I can think of nothing much else,” Maugham had written to John Ellingham Brooks on the eve of his departure. They arrived in Singapore at the beginning of November, where they stayed for more than three weeks before traveling on to Bangkok, then to Borneo and Brunei, Maugham en route giving courteous interviews to the local press, which respectfully kept track of his progress. To accompany them on their travels Maugham had employed a servant supplied by an agency in Singapore. Ah King, a sweet-natured young man of twenty, turned out to be a marvel.*

  He could cook, he could valet,52 he could pack, he could wait at table. He was quick, neat and silent…. Nothing surprised him, no catastrophe dismayed him, no hardship ruffled him, no novelty took him unawares. It was impossible to tire him. He smiled all day long. I have never met anyone so good-humoured.

  There was only one drawback: although Ah King was able to speak some English, he understood hardly a word, which made communication difficult. When at the end of six months Maugham paid him off, he saw to his astonishment that Ah King was crying.

  I stared at him with amazement … he had always seemed to me strangely detached … as indifferent to my praise as he was unconcerned at my reproofs…. That he had any feeling for me had never entered my head…. I felt a little uncomfortable. I knew that I had often been impatient with him, tiresome and exacting. I had never thought of him as a human being. He wept because he was leaving me. It is for these tears that I now give his name to this collection of stories that I invented while he was travelling with me.

  The two collections of Far Eastern stories garnered during Maugham’s expeditions in the 1920s, The Casuarina Tree, published in 1926, and Ah King in 1933, contain some of his finest work in the genre at which he remains an acknowledged master. Fluent in style and apparently effortless, the stories are tightly constructed and minutely observed, amply demonstrating the three virtues that he himself prized highest, of lucidity, simplicity, and euphony. As a writer of fiction, Maugham was a realist: his imagination needed actual people and events to work on, and these his travels amply furnished, enabling him to explore the imperial theme from an intimately personal and domestic standpoint. During those months spent listening to strangers telling him their private dramas, “I seemed,” he said, “to develop the sensitiveness53 of a photographic plate.” He wrote about ordinary, fallible people, the kind of people he knew and understood, the white professional middle classes, and when challenged about why he never attempted to depict native life, he replied that it was because he did not believe any European could get to the inside of it.

  I felt that all the depictions54 that had been made of either Chinese, Indians, or Malays were merely superficial impressions combined with a lot of conventional prejudices. It is very nearly impossible for an English author to create a French character so that French readers would accept him as real. How much more difficult then would it be for an English writer to create a Chinese the Chinese would accept as plausible.

  It is his oriental tales that many readers most associate with Maugham, and they were and are widely admired in his day by such distinguished literary figures as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Angus Wilson, and Anthony Burgess. Burgess, describing these two collections as containing some of the finest examples in the language, wrote, “The width of observation55 was something new in English fiction, as was the willingness to explore moral regions then regarded as taboo”; while Cyril Connolly, who selected The Casuarina Tree for his influential compilation 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement,* particularly praised the author for “his mastery of form,” going on to say that

  Maugham achieves an unspoken ferocity,56 a controlled ruthlessness…. He tells us—and it had not been said before—exactly what the British in the Far East were like, the judges and planters and civil servants and their womenfolk at home….

  MAUGHAM RETURNED TO EUROPE in March 1926, having spent most of the voyage confined to his cabin with a recurrence of the malaria from which he had been so ill during his first visit to Bangkok. “The journey on a French boat57 from Saigon to Marseilles, over thirty days, has seemed terribly long,” he wrote to Alanson, “& I am thankful as I write to you to see out of the window of the smoking-room the shining, sunny coast of Corsica.” A letter from Syrie had just reached him, containing the information that she was currently on business in New York and had again rented out the house in Bryanston Square, news that left him feeling both angry and depressed. “I am tired of wandering about & would gladly remain quietly at home, but at present I have no home,” he told Alanson; “a domestic disturbance, whether permanent or temporary I do not yet know, has left me without a roof to my head.” Still feeling unwell, Maugham with Haxton retired to a comfortable hotel in Aix-en-Provence to recuperate, but the more he brooded on the situation, the more intolerable it seemed that he should be denied access to his own home, that Syrie was treating Bryanston Square as hers to do with entirely as she pleased regardless of his wishes. The plan to purchase a property abroad now became a priority, a house where he could live with Gerald and to which Syrie would have access only by invitation. Reading between the lines, he was even cautiously optimistic that his wife was beginning to come around to the possibility of a judicial separation. “I cannot but think58 that she has at last determined on a break,” Maugham wrote hopefully to Knoblock, “though I cannot imagine what has made her reverse her very definite desire to have nothing of the sort with which I left her last autumn. If you hear anything of interest to me I am sure that you will let me know.”

  Maugham’s arrival in London on May 3, 1926, coincided with the beginning of the general strike, when the industries of the entire nation were closed down in an attempt to force the government to increase pay for coal miners. During the ten days it lasted, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was provided for the educated classes to play at being train drivers, bus drivers, newspaper editors, and policemen. Even to those of a left-wing bent the chance was irresistible, and Maugham, through a friend in the Public Prosecutions Department, landed a job in Scotland Yard, “sleuthing,” as he described it to Arnold Bennett. With the strike ended, the house vacated by its tenants, and Syrie returned from New York, negotiations between husband and wife began i
n earnest, and for once appeared to result in an agreement acceptable to both: Bryanston Square would be sold, and with the proceeds Syrie would buy a house of her own in which she would live with eleven-year-old Liza, while Maugham would look for a permanent base abroad: not on Capri, which on reflection he concluded was too difficult to reach, but in the south of France. “I have made a very agreeable arrangement59 with my wife,” Maugham wrote to Alanson.

  She is to have her house in London & I my house on the Riviera & we are going to stay with one another as guests when it suits our mutual pleasure and convenience. I think this is the best thing for both of us & it will give me the opportunity which I need to work in pleasant surroundings & without interruption.

  But instead of house hunting, he was first caught up in a series of professional projects. There were talks in progress about a film version of “Rain,” a revival of Caroline had just opened at the Playhouse, and Maugham had a new play, The Constant Wife, that he was anxious to see staged; there were as well frequent requests from Ray Long for stories for Hearst magazines, and there was also some complicated business to sort out with his New York publisher, George Doran. While Maugham was abroad, Charles Towne had arranged a new contract with Doran that, to his client’s irritation, appeared to tie him to the company not only for life but also on much less advantageous terms than before. “I will not conceal from you60 that I am extremely vexed at your having signed an agreement with Doran which gives me nothing that I wanted but on the contrary takes away what I value most dearly, my freedom of action,” Maugham crossly complained.