The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  The play, set in 1930, paints a bleak picture of postwar chaos and disillusion as symbolized by the Ardsleys, the family of a country lawyer living in a small village in Kent. The son, Sydney, awarded the Military Cross, was blinded in action; a daughter, Eva, lost her fiancé and now faces a frustrated middle age as the family drudge; another daughter has married beneath her to a heavy-drinking farmer; and the youngest girl, Lois, already twenty-six, regards her prospects as bleak. Only the head of the family, old Ardsley, is convinced that all is well, stupidly unaware of the misery that surrounds him. Harsh, bitter, and uncompromising, For Services Rendered is a powerful work, at one level dealing with the destructiveness of war and at another with the devastating results of self-delusion and of failure to take responsibility. In the Ardsley family it is the blind brother, Sydney, who sees the situation most clearly. “She wants a man,94 that’s all,” he states bluntly after a hysterical outburst from his spinster sister, Eva; and he understands his own position only too well:

  The day’s long past95 since I was a wounded hero for whom nothing was good enough. Fifteen years is a long time…. They say suffering ennobles. It hasn’t ennobled me. It’s made me sly and cunning. Evie says I’m selfish. I am. But I’m damned artful. I know how to make people do things for me by working on their sympathy.

  Maugham had no great expectations for his new work’s reception, which in the event was much as he had anticipated: despite a first-rate cast, the play closed after barely two months.* Decades later, For Services Rendered was to be recognized as one of Maugham’s finest dramas, but for the middle and upper classes of the 1930s such radical pessimism was unpalatable; at a time of political instability and acute economic depression, audiences were angry at what they saw as a lack of patriotism, and they were made uncomfortable by the author’s dismal prediction for the future. “We were the dupes96 of the incompetent fools who ruled the nations,” Sydney rages at his smug old father.

  They muddle on, muddle on, and one of these days they’ll muddle us all into another war…. It’s all bunk what they’re saying to you, about honour and patriotism and glory, bunk, bunk, bunk.”

  The play had its supporters, although many considered the author’s pacifism reprehensible, a piece “of malevolent propaganda97 against those who live with courage and hope,” according to an editorial in the Daily Express. Among Maugham’s friends, too, opinion was divided, the contradictions neatly distilled in an exchange of letters between two of his literary acquaintance, Louis Marlow and Llewellyn Powys. “My dear Lulu,” wrote Marlow,

  Somerset Maugham’s new play98 is remarkably fine…. Incomparably his best play … I was moved to tears and, for some hours afterwards, the area of my liver, spleen, kidneys and whatever else is thus affectible, remained disturbed & exhausted. I wish I could take you to see it. I have more free tickets for next Saturday—and long to see it again. Your loving Louis

  To this Powys replied,

  My dear Louis,99 For Services Rendered obviously has a grip of a kind but good heavens Louis I was astonished that you can think so highly of it…. God! I think it is a thoroughly banal and commonplace piece of work—utterly lacking in imagination, platitudinous, popular, melodramatic and without any distinction except a rather obvious Movie House Grip. If this is your idea of the tragic impact Good Luck to you! Yours, Lulu

  Unruffled by the reaction, Maugham continued calmly to carry out his plan, with his last play, Sheppey, unlike any other in the Maugham repertoire. The plot tells of a simple man, a barber, a contented husband and father, who dreams of retiring one day from London to a little cottage near the sea in Kent. Sheppey’s prospects are suddenly changed when he wins an enormous sum in the Irish Sweepstake. But instead of spending his winnings on himself and his family, Sheppey anounces he intends to follow Jesus’ teaching and give everything away to the poor; underlining his point, he brings into the house two destitute characters, a thief and Bessie, a local prostitute. Such a course of action naturally appalls his wife, who persuades the family doctor to declare her husband insane.

  Up to this point the play follows closely a short story, A Bad Example, that Maugham wrote nearly forty years earlier, but if it is extraordinary that this particular theme should have remained alive for so long in Maugham’s imagination, even more extraordinary is what he now chose to do with it. The short story ends with the protagonist about to be carted off to an asylum, but in the last act of the play, Sheppey, who we know is about to be certified, is left alone onstage, where he is visited by the figure of Death, in the outward form of the prostitute, Bessie. A surreal dialogue then takes place between the two, in which before the curtain falls the reluctant Sheppey is gently but implacably prepared for his imminent demise:

  SHEPPEY: To tell you the truth,100 I’m feeling rather tired. I don’t feel like making a journey to-night.

  DEATH: It’s an easy one….

  SHEPPEY: You know, I don’t feel at all well. I think I ought to see the doctor.

  DEATH: You’ll feel better presently….

  Sheppey opened at Wyndham’s Theatre on September 14, 1933, to a somewhat bemused response. Nobody had expected anything like this. To its author it was “a perfectly straightforward101 sardonic comedy … I cannot for the life of me,” he wrote, “see why it should puzzle because the theme is Jesus rather than adultery.” Yet puzzle it did, and it was not only the critics who were unsure what to make of it: both the producer, Bronson Albery, and the director, John Gielgud, admitted to a degree of bewilderment. During rehearsals Albery had tried and failed to persuade the author to change the last scene, “so as to make it more palatable102 to the audience,” while Gielgud admitted he was confused by the play’s generic identity. “It seemed to be conceived103 in an extraordinary mixture of styles,” he wrote, “with a first act of Pinero-esque comedy, a second of almost Shavian cynicism and drama, and a third of tragic fantasy.” Matters were made worse by problems over casting, and in the title role the choice of Ralph Richardson turned out to be far from ideal. Noël Coward in a heartfelt letter to Maugham described Richardson’s performance as “extremely false and theatrical”:

  I almost bowed in acknowledgement104 when he occasionally condescended to drop an aitch just to show he was of humble origin … his ringing, beautifully modulated voice was so dreadfully incongruous…. Oh Willie Willie how very very naughty of you to write a play filled with subtle implications and exquisite satire and then cheerfully allow dull witted lunatics to cast it!

  Sheppey ran for only eighty-three performances, a fact which perturbed its author not at all. “[It] was the last play105 I ever intended to write [and] I was perfectly indifferent to its success or failure,” he explained some years later. “Since then I have never had the smallest inclination to write a play. That they continue to be acted from time to time in various parts of the world, shows, I suppose, that I had some natural gift for the theatre.” So it was that after a phenomenally successful career spanning more than thirty years, during which he wrote twenty-seven original plays and three adaptations, Maugham with a sigh of relief shut up shop and left the whole business behind him. Shortly after Sheppey closed he wrote to Coward, “I cannot tell you106 how I loathe the theatre,” a view he continued to hold for the rest of his life. “With all its glamour,107 I found it a frustrating and maddening world, full of childish people,” and “I can never get over108 my astonishment that people remain enraptured with it till ripe old age.” (In a sentence deleted from his 1938 memoir, The Summing Up, he wrote, “I have never been able to look upon actors as human beings.”) Maugham made a great deal of money from his dramatic work, which would continue to be produced, translated, and adapted for cinema and television, but creatively he knew that that seam was exhausted and it was time to turn his attention elsewhere. “I want to write novels & stories109 & essays,” he told Bert Alanson. “[They give] one so much more scope to say what one wants to, & though of course the financial result can never be as great, it is surer; and aft
er all no one but an idiot would at my time of life do anything but what he wants.”

  Maugham once famously referred to the fact that only in his playwriting had he knowingly compromised, deliberately designing his work to meet the demands of a specific audience at a specific period of time. Now, released from any such obligation, he could do precisely as he pleased, and during the next decade and beyond, far from slowing down, he was to experience a surge of energy and inspiration that was to take him in some unexpected directions. There would be an immensely ambitious novel dealing with a realm of experience of crucial significance to its author; there would be essays and criticism, emanating from a lifetime’s attentive reading; and, perhaps most surprising from this most private of men, there would be works of autobiography, one of which in the eyes of many was to place him firmly and forever beyond the pale.

  * Nearly half a century later, little had changed: in Valentine Cunningham’s monumental British Writers of the Thirties (1988), published by Oxford University Press, the only work of Maugham’s to be mentioned—briefly, inaccurately, and in parentheses—is the short story “Rain.”

  * An inept and amateurish effort, later described by the scholarly Ben Abramson of the Argus Bookshop in Chicago, as “[a] dreadful work … full of errors” (written on an undated letter from Bason to Maugham, HRHRC).

  * “What does life matter to him who in his dreams has space and time at his disposal?” (from “Au Pays Musulman”).

  * “I have a secretary of whom I am very fond.”

  † “‘So you like France.’ … ‘I like living in France,’ he replied with his exquisite sense of nuance.”

  * Evelyn’s relations with Maugham remained tricky. Some years later he was taken to stay at the Villa Mauresque by Lady Diana Cooper, an old friend of Maugham’s. Describing the occasion to Harold Acton, Waugh told him he made “a great gaffe. The first evening he [Maugham] asked me what someone was like and I said: ‘A pansy with a stammer.’ All the Picassos on the walls blanched” (The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory [Ticknor & Fields, 1980], p. 372).

  * “[Maugham] was usually accompanied by his secretary, a young man of great beauty, athletic, intelligent and pleasant…. This youth was as extravagant, capricious, wasteful and over-indulgent as my friend appeared serious, frugal, sober, and controlled. They got on perfectly.”

  * From Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “… the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”

  * In 1939 an article was published in Germany entitled “Die Rassenfrage [The Race Question] in W. S. Maugham’s ‘The Alien Corn’” (Zeitschrift für Neusprachlichen Unterricht XXXVIII) in which the story was used to support the Nazi thesis that racial barriers are natural and that the Jews will always remain the alien corn in any country.

  * The title is taken from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: “Short, therefore, is man’s life; and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.”

  † In reality Bandanaira, a settlement on one of the Banda Islands, Indonesia, once part of the Dutch East Indies.

  * It fared even worse in New York, where it lasted only three weeks.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE TELLER OF TALES

  • • •

  WITH HIS CAREER AS A DRAMATIST BEHIND HIM, MAUGHAM’S working life temporarily took on a more leisurely pace. His name was constantly kept before the public, yet with relatively little effort on his part. During the 1930s several short-story collections were published, there was a Tauchnitz edition of his works, and a Pocket Edition was brought out by Heinemann, who between 1931 and 1934 also published the selected plays in six volumes. At the end of the decade, The Circle was being filmed in London for the new medium of television, which would have introduced Maugham to yet another audience had it not been for the order to close down the service on the outbreak of war. In 1933 Nelson Doubleday, excited by his world-famous author’s phenomenal sales, commissioned a massive anthology of English prose and poetry, The Travellers’ Library, with Maugham choosing the entries and writing a brief introduction to each section. Nelson’s hunch that this was just what the market required proved correct, encouraging him to commission a short-story anthology, Tellers of Tales, that appeared in 1939.

  But it was as a teller of tales, as a writer of short stories, that Maugham himself was most widely known and admired. With one single exception,* all his 122 stories appeared first in magazines, easily accessible on newspaper stands and station bookstalls even to people who would never dream of entering a library or bookshop. “Beloved by unliterary, unofficial,1 unacademic humanity,” as Glenway Wescott put it, Maugham, “the mahatma of middlebrow culture,”2 exerted a hold over the popular imagination matched by few of his contemporaries. “Mr. Maugham’s short stories3 are among the best now being written,” wrote William Plomer in a review of Ah King. There was something infinitely seductive in the persona he frequently adopted as narrator, a narrator who both is and yet is not part of the story, a man of the world with a clear eye and sardonic sense of humor, who in a leisurely manner over a drink and a cigar settles down to confide in the reader something pretty fascinating about the kind of ordinary chap encountered any day of the week in a bar or club. “His extraordinary knowledge4 of human beings is like that of an experienced confessor,” said Raymond Mortimer, and like a confessor, “he is never shocked.” The deceptive simplicity of Maugham’s method conceals a highly honed technique, as anyone who has tried to imitate it will know: in the opinion of the novelist John Fowles it is as necessary for a writer to have mastered the “Maughamesque short story5 … as it is for an artist to have mastered the art of drawing.” His hallmarks were the plain style, the absolute verisimilitude, the dramatist’s taut plotting and deftness with dialogue, and often the provision of the unexpected dénouement, the twist in the tale, that leaves the reader shocked and delighted. “His plots are cool and deadly and his timing is absolutely flawless,” said Raymond Chandler, himself an expert in the genre. Naturally there were critics quick to condemn him for what he was not: his stories were not remarkably profound; he was never particularly inventive; and he lacked the vision, the genius, “the transforming passion,”6 in V. S. Pritchett’s words, of a Conrad or a Chekhov; and yet what he did he did superbly well, and occasionally he approached perfection.

  It was with the short story that Maugham found his true métier. “I have never pretended7 to be anything but a story-teller,” as he stated more than once. He enjoyed the form, worked hard at it, and was always on the lookout for new characters and themes. Just as he had done all those years before in the East, he continued to encourage strangers and familiars alike to describe their experiences, even if there was sometimes a high price to be paid for the process. “I find it often8 a very tedious business,” he wrote in his notebook. “It requires a good deal of patience…. [Y]ou must be ready to listen for hours to the retailing of second-hand information in order at last to catch the hint or the casual remark that betrays.” Knowing his method, friends were helpful in putting material in his way. Rebecca West, for instance, wrote to recommend her sister, Letitia Fairfield, who was coming to the Côte d’Azur on holiday. “She is not mondaine,9 she doesn’t play bridge, and she is a devout Roman Catholic,” Rebecca warned him. “[But] she is a doctor and a lawyer, and has worked on the L.C.C. for twenty years, and has some good prison and asylum yarns, which she tells very well.”

  Curiously, Maugham never seemed to find in the south of France the wealth of inspiration he uncovered elsewhere. The Riviera, that “sunny place for shady people,”10 as he once memorably described it, serves as a background for only a handful of tales, among them “Gigolo and Gigolette,” “The Lion’s Skin,” and the exquisitely comic “The Three Fat Women of Antibes.” Perhaps he was wary of raising hackles so near home, as otherwise it is difficult to believe he would not have been tempted by the richly rewarding cast of characters dotted along the coast from Cannes to Monte Carlo. “He h
ad a certain dreadful circle11 along the Riviera,” said Dadie Rylands, “[a] group of very trivial, rich expatriates.” Dadie, dyed-in-the-wool Bloomsbury, had nothing but contempt for such a breed, yet there was a side of Maugham that reveled in the trappings of luxury and wealth, that enjoyed being lionized by a transatlantic millionairess with a fabulous villa and a famous chef. Among his regular hostesses, almost all American, were Charlotte Boissevain; Marion, Lady Bateman; Emily Sherfesee, daughter of a meat-packing king from Chicago; Daisy Fellowes, the Singer sewing-machine heiress; the sharp-tongued Princess Ottoboni—she and her homosexual husband were known as Pédéraste et Médisance; and the notorious Lady Kenmare, who was popularly supposed to have murdered four of her five husbands (“Lady Killmore” was Maugham’s nickname for her). “He was too much impressed by money,12 and by being able to associate with millionaires as a millionaire,” remarked Cyril Connolly with his customary perspicuity, “[but] he gave the Riviera point, so that it became more than just a rest-camp for Philistines.”

  During the winter many of the villas were closed and their owners departed to London, Paris, or New York, but during the summer social life became frenetic; the harbors were crammed with large yachts, the hotels were full, and chic-looking crowds shopped, strolled, sunbathed on the sand, and met for cocktails at the crowded little bars along the Croisette. With guests staying most of the summer, Maugham was glad to be able to take them to lunch and dinner at smart local restaurants such as the outrageously expensive La Réserve at Beaulieu, or, grandest of all, on the terrace of the casino in Monte Carlo, where there was dancing every night and a spectacular cabaret on the stage overlooking the sea. Although he rarely played at the tables himself (he left that to Gerald), Maugham dined at the casino, attended the galas, and was on excellent terms with the raffish father of the Principality’s ruler, the handsome, half-Mexican Prince Pierre of Monaco. It was at the casino one evening that Maugham saw the terrifying stunt that he later made the basis of his story “Gigolo and Gigolette.” In this he gives a decidedly sour impression of the clientele, so bored and blasé they turn up night after night in the hope of seeing the cabaret artist killed while performing her dangerous act. The group’s hostess is Eva Barrett, a wealthy American.