Upon returning to England it seems that Syrie made one final attempt to persuade Maugham not to leave her. She asked him to come once more to Le Touquet, in the hope that between them they might find some form of resolution less drastic than divorce. Little came of the meeting, except for a shocking incident involving Liza and Gerald Haxton. “I always hated Gerald Haxton19 and he always hated me,” said Liza. Their first encounter the previous summer had been uncomfortable, the child wary of this strangely powerful friend of her father’s, and he no doubt irritated by the spoiled little miss he saw being cosseted by her mother. On this second occasion Barbara Back was again staying with them, and she, Haxton, and Liza went for a drive, Liza taking with her an adored puppy she had recently been given. Suddenly in an act of possibly drunken, seemingly inexplicable cruelty, Gerald at the wheel scooped up the dog and hurled it out the window. “I was hysterical,”20 said Liza, “and tried to throw myself out of the car after it but was held back.” Months later the dog was found and returned, but the damage was done: the enmity between Haxton and the two women was irreparable, and Syrie made sure that while in her care Liza would never set eyes on Gerald again.
IT WAS AFTER THIS second visit of Maugham’s to Le Touquet that Syrie finally acknowledged that her marriage was over. Her friends were told that it was she who was pressing for a divorce, mainly for her daughter’s sake, it now appeared: it was painfully obvious, said Syrie, that Gerald was going through her husband’s money at a terrifying rate and soon there would be nothing left for Liza. During that summer, in 1928, Syrie was staying on the Riviera with her old friend and professional rival, the flamboyant Elsie Mendl. Lady Mendl, now in her sixties and recently married to the diplomat Sir Charles Mendl, had had a long and successful career in America as Elsie de Wolfe, the first woman interior decorator, much admired for her wide knowledge of French art and culture. While Syrie was staying with the Mendls at Antibes, Maugham was nearby at the Villa Mauresque. According to his version of events, he invited Syrie to lunch with no other purpose than to show her his house, sending his car to collect her and take her back. “We lunched tête à tête,”21 he recalled,
and after lunch I took her over the premises. She was becomingly appreciative. After she had seen everything … I put her in my car. An hour or two later the car came back with a letter. In it she said that she wished to divorce me and hoped I would put no obstacles in the way. It took me by surprise. I thought the matter over for a day and then wrote to say I would do what she wished if she would be satisfied with a French divorce … because divorce in France is a simple matter and there is no publicity attached to it. Syrie agreed and the lawyers went to work.
The lawyers must have had their hands full, with a multitude of complex negotiations to be carried out on both sides. According to Maugham family record, Syrie wanted to cite Haxton as corespondent, and there are other indications that she was prepared to use his homosexuality against him (“Your mother dragged me through the mud22 when she divorced me,” Maugham later told Liza). Eventually Syrie was persuaded to drop any such charge, a charge that would have had a devastating effect on Maugham, with the potential to ruin him professionally and socially and to prevent him from ever setting foot in England again. Evidence of his wife’s adultery may well have helped his case, but as Maugham knew very well, his most effective bargaining tool was financial, and he was willing to pay a substantial price for his liberty, making over to Syrie the house on the King’s Road with all its contents, the house on Glebe Place, which was put in Liza’s name, the car, a Rolls-Royce, and as well a generous annuity of £2,400, with £600 a year for Liza. Syrie filed suit in Nice that autumn, and the decree was granted, on grounds of incompatibility, on May 11, 1929. “Everything is absolutely finished,”23 Maugham wrote to Barbara Back of his twelve-year marriage, “and all there is for me to do is to hand over twelve thousand pounds and resign myself to paying six hundred pounds a quarter free of income-tax until Syrie marries again.”
Thus Maugham was finally freed from a union he had come to detest. “I made a mistake24 when I married her,” he wrote. “We, she and I, had nothing in common and by doing what was considered ‘the right thing,’ I brought happiness neither to her nor to myself.” As the years went by, instead of fading into indifference, Maugham’s feelings for Syrie grew increasingly corrosive; he hated her for the large sums of money she had cost and would continue to cost him, and he could not forgive her for the misery and humiliation she had inflicted. For a man who enjoyed the company of women, who in his fiction and his friendships was so understanding and compassionate toward them, his attitude toward his ex-wife is startling, indicative of a very deep wound indeed. Although after the divorce he seldom saw her, his distaste for Syrie turned into an active and visceral loathing. “She made my life utter hell,”25 he would say, bitterly referring to Syrie as an “abandoned liar26 … [the] tart who ruined my life,”27 describing her as “[opening] her mouth as wide28 as a brothel door” in her constant demands for money. His great hope was that she would marry again and thus relieve him of the pecuniary burden, and many joking references were made to this prospect in letters to friends. Yet Syrie never remarried, remaining financially dependent on her ex-husband until the day she died. The two of them communicated mainly through lawyers, and Maugham made it clear to interviewers that he disliked talking about his marriage; if questioned he testily dismissed the subject as “[a] very unimportant detail.”
Once the divorce had gone through, the Maughams closed ranks and shut their doors to Syrie; she was no longer welcomed by F.H. and Nellie at Cadogan Square, and Liza lost touch with her cousins. Yet if seldom discussed within the family, the Maugham divorce was a subject of intense fascination to their friends, especially among the homosexual coterie. “For those who seek a moral,29 one stands clear: / Don’t marry if you happen to be queer,” giggled the aesthete Harold Acton, while a number of other young men began jockeying for position, hoping that if they played their cards right the famous writer’s patronage would help their careers. One of the first in the field was Beverley Nichols. Originally a friend of Syrie’s, Beverley was pretty, intelligent, highly sexed, and drivingly ambitious. He had already begun to make quite a name as a journalist, had written a couple of novels, had big plans for himself as a dramatist, and in 1926 at the age of only twenty-five had published an autobiography, appropriately entitled Twenty-five. This he had persuaded Maugham to praise in The Sunday Times, a considerable achievement as Maugham almost never wrote book reviews. “He wrote it at my request30 after a very lavish dinner at the Café Royal and gave it to me as a birthday present,” Beverley recalled with satisfaction. Beverley, vain and unscrupulous, was more than ready to make himself sexually available in exchange for favors such as these; there was no reason why men like Maugham should not “help one up one’s little ladder,”31 as he whimsically phrased it. “Struggling to make a living from letters, one would be a fool to ignore the kindly attentions of the literary lions, particularly if they happen also to be extremely rich … [and] Willie’s attentions were very kindly indeed.” Naturally Beverley was unable to resist boasting of his conquests, to, among others, Cecil Beaton, who was frankly shocked by his revelations. “With drink Beverley’s tongue32 was wildly lubricated & I heard more that staggered me that evening than I have during the past few years,” Beaton confided to his diary.
I, who have not been to bed with anyone but myself since I was at school, had come to think that the amount of people who actually went to bed together was very small … but Beverley disproved my beliefs with the most hair-raising stories of the unceasing lusts of nearly all my friends…. [He] assured me, at first hand knowledge, of the homosexuality of Noël [Coward], Somerset Maugham, Avery Hopwood, Sydney Howard,* Edward Knoblock—a most disturbing evening & a great eye opener.
Another “tarty” young man who caught the eye of Willie Maugham at this period was a friend and colleague of Beverley’s, Godfrey Winn. Similarly ambitious, Godfrey,
too, was making a career in journalism, specializing in cozy pieces for women’s magazines about his cottage in Esher, his dog, “Mr. Sponge,” and such important topics as “The Girl I Hope to Marry,” “Why I Like Working with Women,” and “Should Wives Have a Career?” He, too, had brought out a novel, and as luck would have it, it was exactly at this moment that he met Maugham, introduced over a game of bridge, Winn being a player of championship standard. “I have been very fortunate33 in my life in regard to the sponsors whom I encountered at a crucial moment,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Soon after my first novel was published, I had the good fortune to come under the literary influence of Somerset Maugham.” Godfrey, like Beverley, was sexy and attractive, equally willing to oblige the great man, and equally unable to resist boasting about it afterward. Unwisely, he chose to brag of his triumph during a stay at the Villa Mauresque, while at a party at the house of a neighbor of Maugham’s, the beautiful Lady Kenmare, whose guests found Godfrey’s claim “that Willie had fallen for him34 in a big way and chased him all over London” distasteful in the extreme. It may be that ultimately Maugham came to hear of the betrayal: for some years he regarded Winn as a friend, invited him to stay, advised him on his writing, and brought his work to the attention of well-disposed critics. But then something happened to sour the relationship, and in Strictly Personal, a wartime memoir published in 1941, Maugham, in a passage excised from the British edition, drew a contemptuous portrait of Godfrey, who appears under the name George Potter.
Yet if men like Nichols and Winn were taking advantage of Maugham, he was far too shrewd not to understand what they were after. He liked young people, liked to be surrounded by good-looking boys, and was more than prepared to help them when he could. And he for his part had never been hesitant in making his own wishes known: the brother of Constance Spry, the fashionable florist, remembered being taken aback by the unvarnished nature of the older man’s approach, while the ballet dancer Anton Dolin had great trouble with him at a party of Ivor Novello’s at the Savoy: “Don’t be a fool,”35 said Novello as Dolin was trying to escape. “It will mean a gold Cartier cigarette case tomorrow.” The famously charming, famously charismatic young peer Napier Alington was another of Maugham’s conquests, “a delicious creature,”36 as Maugham described him after their night together. Beverley Nichols, who might be assumed to know what he was talking about, said of Maugham, “He was the most sexually voracious man I’ve ever known”; and Hugh Walpole, himself no laggard on the homosexual scene, told Virginia Woolf that in his view Maugham was lucky not to have been imprisoned. “You don’t know the kind of life37 that Willie has led. I do.” As Maugham was recognized wherever he went, his behavior inevitably became the subject of gossip, and not only within the queer world. It was at about this time that some disquieting information on the matter came to the attention of none other than the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard; alarmed by its content, the commissioner felt obliged to convey a message to F. H. Maugham, discreetly indicating that he should issue a warning to his younger brother. F.H., now a High Court judge and recently knighted, was acutely embarrassed by the situation; revolted by the whole subject of homosexuality, for years deliberately ignoring this aspect of his brother’s nature, he found himself in the distasteful position of having to tell Willie straight out that if he did not curtail his activities while in London he would almost certainly be arrested.
AND IN THE MAIN Maugham made his contacts discreetly, ideally in safe houses belonging to like-minded friends. It was in one of these, at a stag dinner in George Street given by a wealthy collector, Robert Tritton, that in 1928 Maugham met a young man who was to become of crucial importance in his life. Alan Searle was a very youthful-looking twenty-three, a working-class boy from Bermondsey, the son of a Dutch tailor and cockney mother. With his dark eyes and thick, curly black hair, Alan was well known in certain circles as “a modified version of rough trade,”38 a common, sexy boy who was also quick-witted, good-natured, and eager to better himself. “I was quite a dish,” as he himself said. His taste was for older men, and already he had an enthusiastic following among a number of distinguished figures. “He was wonderful with elderly gentlemen,”39 the critic Raymond Mortimer recalled. Lytton Strachey was mad about Alan, called him his “Bronzino boy”* and wrote him a series of erotic letters; Reggie Turner fell for him, as later did the composer Lennox Berkeley, and also Guy Little, a friend of Osbert Sitwell’s, who was besotted by “my starry eyed little friend40 … the darlingest pet in the world,” as he dotingly addressed him. Alan was currently working at a picture gallery on Brook Street, which is probably where he had met Bob Tritton. When on the day of the dinner one of Tritton’s guests failed at the last moment, Alan had been whistled in to take his place, seated next to Maugham, the guest of honor. Maugham was immediately attracted by the cheeky cockney, and as was his custom began to question him about his life and ambitions. Alan told him he longed to travel, which naturally struck a chord with Maugham, who at once offered to take him on a Continental tour, suggesting they leave the party together to discuss further plans. But Alan had already made an arrangement with another guest, Ivor Novello, and to Maugham’s frustration it was with Novello that he went off that night. Next day Maugham sent a wire claiming to have been very upset by Alan’s treatment of him, “but if you’ll have dinner with me41 tonight all is forgiven.” They dined at Quaglino’s, an evening that, said Alan, “changed the whole course of my life.” Not only did the two men become lovers (“Willie was the most marvellous lover I ever had”), but that night saw the start of an association of supreme importance to them both, one which was to endure for nearly forty years.
There was no question of Alan’s taking Haxton’s place. Yet Maugham frequently had reason to make short trips within Europe, sometimes to see one of his plays, more often just to wander around art galleries, and neither occupation was of particular interest to Gerald. Alan, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic traveling companion and he had a passion for paintings. As he was also extremely practical, Maugham engaged Alan to act as his secretary, to deal with his correspondence in London when he was in the south of France, and also to act as gentleman’s gentleman on his visits to England. Before the divorce from Syrie, whenever Maugham stayed at Glebe Place it was Alan who accompanied him. The two men kept very much to themselves: “the less Syrie knows42 about you the better,” Maugham had told him; but the King’s Road housekeeper remembered Searle, remembered remarking how young he was, and that “Mr. Maugham wouldn’t have43 anyone else to valet him and look after him.” Fascinated by Alan’s background and history, Maugham questioned him about them in detail, anxious also to meet Alan’s mother. But this proved impossible: she knew the kind of man who wants to take a young boy on a trip to Europe, she said, and declined the opportunity. Maugham was curious, too, about Searle’s lovers, and expressed a particular wish to meet Lytton Strachey. Alan Pryce-Jones, a mutual friend, arranged a dinner for the four of them, far from successful, as it turned out. Strachey was in a sour mood from the start and Searle remained silent, while Maugham failed to engage his audience with long-winded stories about Augustus Hare.
It was shortly after this awkward occasion that Maugham went to New York to oversee the production of a new play, The Sacred Flame. The plot involves a young married man, Maurice, who, badly wounded in the war, wishes only to die. His adored wife, Stella, no longer in love though loving her husband, has secretly been having an affair with her brother-in-law, Colin, by whom she has recently become pregnant. Suddenly her carefully concealed condition is brutally revealed by Maurice’s puritanical nurse, who announces it to the family early in the morning, having just discovered that her patient has died during the night from an overdose of chloral. She angrily accuses Stella of having administered the drug, but it turns out it was Maurice’s mother, Mrs. Tabret, who gave her son the sleeping draft, honoring a private promise to help him die when his life became unendurable. It then appea
rs that she had known all along of Stella’s affair with Colin, for both of whom she has the greatest sympathy. “Perhaps we should all look44 upon these matters very differently,” says Mrs. Tabret, “if our moral rules hadn’t been made by persons who had forgotten the passion and the high spirits of youth. Do you think it so very wicked if two young things surrender to the instincts that nature has planted in them?”
The Sacred Flame is a strong and compelling drama, particularly noteworthy for the broad scope of the author’s emotional intelligence. As ever, Maugham is on the side of love,* sexual, romantic, and maternal, and against the narrow-minded morality of conventional society. Quietly subversive, he demonstrates his belief in the supreme importance of tolerance, even if its exercise goes against the accepted rules. Each member of the family loves and is concerned for the others, and ironically it is only the professional carer, the nurse, with her steely adherence to “duty,” who shows herself to be narrow, vindictive, and lacking in compassion. For Maugham himself, a large part of his interest in the play was also technical, experimenting with a move away from a naturalistic style and toward more formal dialogue. “Stage dialogue has been simplified45 out of all relation with life but that of the cocktail bar,” he wrote with a sideways swipe at the rising star, Noël Coward.† It was his wish to redress the balance, “to make my characters use not the words and expressions that they would have used in real life on the spur of the moment … but words and expressions that they might have used if they had had time to set their thoughts in order.” In the event, this proved largely unworkable; at a time when Coward was delighting audiences with the brittle colloquialism of The Vortex and Hay Fever, the actors found Maugham’s style ponderous and declamatory and he was obliged to make substantial revisions.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 37