The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Now I am writing to you after a long soak in a pine bath. Gerald has just given me a Baccardi [sic] cocktail & I am breaking off this little letter to drink it in peace. It was delicious, made with fresh limes from the garden…. Here is Ernest to announce dinner…. The fleet is in [he subsequently continued] & I went down the other night to have a look see; but it was lateish, & there was nothing much to reward me…. We are rather thinking of going down again this evening….

  So encouraged was Maugham by Gerald’s good behavior that he began planning a journey to Central America and the Caribbean, the first long voyage since the two of them had returned from the South Pacific in 1926. However, it was at this point that matters started to deteriorate fast, and Maugham was soon confiding to Searle and Barbara his intense anxiety about Haxton: the situation was worse then ever, it appeared, with Gerald not only back on the bottle but suffering fits of delirium tremens. “Things are going very badly here35 & I do not know exactly what is going to happen,” Maugham wrote to Searle in April 1935. “I am restless & miserable & do not know what to do.” By July little had changed and Maugham admitted to feeling deeply depressed, writing to Searle in August that circumstances were desperate and that he was left with no choice but to issue Gerald with an ultimatum.

  The doctor tells me36 that G. is so unbalanced that I must take no notice of anything he says, but in another week he (the doctor) assures me he will be in a state sufficiently normal for me to be able to discuss the position reasonably with him…. I hope it will settle things for good & all. I am afraid it won’t, however, & that not much will come of it…. Anyhow, even if the worst comes to the worst, & I don’t really know what is the worst, the air will to some extent be cleared.

  The plan seemed to work: Gerald swore he would go on the wagon, and on November 3 they finally set sail for New York on the SS Europa, en route for the West Indies.

  The crossing was agreeable, Maugham pleased to have been allotted a large and luxurious suite, and Gerald in excellent form. “He has got off [had sex] twice during the journey & is very much pleased at having such a success,” Maugham reported to Alan. Each morning a sheaf of radio telegrams was delivered with invitations to events in New York, and on arrival a swarm of journalists and photographers came on board to question Maugham about his plans. Having hoped for a quiet few days with Nelson Doubleday and his new wife, Ellen, at their house on Long Island, he was slightly dismayed by the succession of large parties the Doubledays had arranged in his honor. Returning to Manhattan, comfortably installed at the Ritz-Carlton, Maugham was immediately caught up in a whirl of more parties, of theatergoing, newspaper interviews, photograph sessions, book signings, and insistent telephone calls from studio heads in Hollywood offering “fantastic contracts,”37 which, he said, “it gives me singular pleasure to turn … down.” Maugham was a celebrity, recognized everywhere he went. The biographer Leon Edel remembers his excitement at catching sight of this famous man simply strolling down Madison Avenue like anyone else, “small, neat, impeccably dressed,38 wearing a soft hat he sometimes had to hang on to while his other hand controlled the straining leashes of his dachshunds.” One of the few genuinely enjoyable social occasions was a small luncheon with Maugham’s old friend, the novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who had taken the opportunity of this visit to take a remarkable series of photographs of Maugham and Haxton together. And even with so much hospitality pressed upon them, Haxton remained resolutely abstemious. “Gerald,” Maugham reported, “has been behaving39 with great prudence & I have no complaints to make whatever.”

  Maugham had been looking forward to the three-month voyage in the Caribbean, counting on it to provide him with interesting new material for his fiction: Rudyard Kipling, who had been there five years earlier, had recommended its potential. The reality was uninspiring. Haiti was the first stop, but the island whose exoticism and decadence was later to enthrall Graham Greene* had little to offer Maugham. “The place is picturesque enough,”40 he told Alan, “[but] there are no amusements of any kind.” The next port of call, Martinique, was no better—“I see no sign of any material that I can make use of”—with Dominica and Trinidad equally barren. “The traders & planters can think & talk of nothing but rum which is their sole source of revenue [and] the wives are dull, dull, dull…. I ask you, what material can a novelist possibly hope to find in circumstances like these,” Maugham wondered, gloomily concluding, “There is not the romance & excitement in the life in these islands that there is in the South Seas & in Malaya.”

  A longer and more considered account of the voyage was sent to a relatively new friend, Lady Juliet Duff, at whose house in Wiltshire Maugham had stayed on his last visit to England. Lady Juliet, now in her fifties, was the daughter of the Earl of Lonsdale and a noted patron of the arts, with a wide circle of friends in the theater and ballet worlds. Maugham was proud of his acquaintance with Lady Juliet: “You can’t go higher in English society than [that],” he used to boast; and wishing to make a good impression, he took care with composing his letter, which gives an interesting picture of Maugham at work. “The West Indies are disappointing,”41 he begins.

  They are very pretty of course, though not nearly so pretty as the islands of the South Seas, & the people who live in them are in too close touch with England or the US to have acquired the oddness which makes them when they live in places out of the beaten track so fascinating…. I expected Martinique to be very romantic [but] I found only mean little French fonctionnaires whose only idea was to save as much money as they could so that they could get back to France & planters whose sole conversation was the sugar out of which they make their living. They were immensely kind to me. They asked me night after night to dinner parties of twenty people, when I was placed between the women … who were completely silent; I started a topic of conversation, it dropped, I started another, it dropped; by the time we had finished the fish I had run dry & could think of nothing more to say….

  During these dull weeks among the islands there was one brief period of absorbing interest. While staying on the South American mainland at Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, Maugham obtained permission to visit the great penal colony at Saint-Laurent-de-Maroni. This was much more to his taste. Saint-Laurent, more like a town than a prison, had a population of over six thousand entirely made up of convicts and their guards; all shipped out from France, a few were en route to far harsher conditions offshore, to one of the Îles de Salut, of which the Île de Diable (Devil’s Island) was the most notorious; the majority, however, had remained at Saint-Laurent for years, considered too passive and harmless to attempt escape. The governor lent Maugham a bungalow in which to stay for a few days, “& gave me a couple of murderers42 serving their sentence to look after me,” he told Juliet Duff. “The director of the gaol said to me, you know, they’re perfectly honest, you can leave anything about; but all the same I locked my door & my shutters when I went to bed at night.” At Saint-Laurent, Maugham had “a wonderful time,” conducted all over the camp and allowed to talk to the inmates. In his notebook he describes the layout of the settlement in some detail, including the sinister execution cell:

  The guillotine is in a small room43 within the prison…. To make sure that it will work well a banana stem is used for practice because it is of the same thickness as a man’s neck. From the time a man is strapped up to the time his head is off, it takes only thirty seconds. The executioner gets a hundred francs for each execution.

  In his interviews with the convicts, many of them murderers, the subject that interested him most was remorse, “[but] of all the men I questioned,”44 he said, “I only found one who regretted his crime.” Saint-Laurent-de-Maroni was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip. “I got one very good story45* out of my visit,” he told Alan. “Grim naturally, but I think uncommon. I must be one of the few Englishmen who have seen that place.”

  From Cayenne, Maugham and Haxton began the long journey home, first by banana boat up the Mexican
coast to California, staying for a few days in Hollywood, where Maugham was much fêted, then with Bert Alanson in San Francisco, before taking the train to New York, sailing from there at the beginning of April 1936. At Cherbourg, as so often before, the two men parted, Gerald and the heavy luggage returning to the Mauresque, Maugham going on to London.

  UPPERMOST IN MAUGHAM’S MIND was reunion with Alan Searle. “I have been thinking much of you46 lately, more than usual in fact,” he had written from New York, “& I have got suggestions to make to you which I hope will please you.” During the past five months Maugham had written every few days to Alan in England, describing the voyage (“My happiness would be complete47 if you were only here to share it with me”) but also and at length discussing plans for Alan’s future, offering advice on everything from his finances and his love affairs to his work in the prison service, and chivvying him about his health. Every page of this correspondence is permeated with Maugham’s own deep feelings for the young man, while at the same time and in a fatherly fashion he is careful to put Searle’s interests first, debating with scrupulous objectivity the pros and cons of Alan’s various plans and ambitions. There was, for instance, a marriage proposal made to Alan by a rich older woman. “I can quite see that the prospect48 of unlimited money & all possible luxury … must be exciting & tempting,” Maugham allowed,

  [but] remember that to be a rich woman’s husband is a whole time job. No woman that I have ever known fails to exact her money’s worth…. Further of course you must be prepared to give up your friends….

  And this last point revealed the crux of the matter:

  So far as I am concerned I should regret it if you did a thing which must necessarily separate me from you. We have been so intimate for so many years that I have got into the habit of looking upon you as a fixture in my life or what remains of it; but that is a purely selfish & personal view.

  The truth was that Maugham now looked longingly upon Alan as the ideal companion. He was attractive, efficient, and sweet-natured; he enjoyed travel, was musical, and knew about and had a very good eye for pictures; unlike Gerald, Alan never got drunk, never made scenes; above all he was biddable. First and foremost Maugham was a writer, and about his writing he was ruthlessly self-protective; he needed to guard his privacy, to keep the outside world at bay. For years the role of guardian and administrator had been Gerald’s, but Gerald could no longer be relied upon; not only was his behavior destroying the essential solitude and calm, but it was often he who had to be looked after, requiring an expenditure of time and emotional energy on Maugham’s part that was profoundly resented. For the moment all was well, but Maugham was skeptical of any lasting reform, and he dreaded a return to the horrific experiences of the recent past. It was Gerald whom he loved, Gerald who was in his blood, but Alan whom he needed; there was no question of Maugham’s abandoning Gerald, but he felt that Searle was essential to his work, and it was this strong instinct for artistic survival that was largely driving him now.

  Maugham arrived in London on April 10, 1936. “I am only coming to see you,”49 he had written to Alan before setting out on his transatlantic crossing. The most important topic to be discussed was that of the young man’s future. Alan loved his work with the Salvation Army in Bermondsey and for the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society at Wormwood Scrubs, and he kept Maugham well supplied with stories.* On several occasions he took him to see for himself the mean streets of the East End, and once even arranged for him to visit the prison. There was no immediate possibility of Alan’s working full-time for Maugham, but they talked about various schemes that in the future might allow Searle to come more often to the Mauresque. “Of course what I should like50 is that you should spend at least several months, a year if you thought you could, with me & making the Mauresque your headquarters…. It would be grand to have you there for an indefinite time & be able to go long trips here & there with you.” In the meantime, Maugham had to content himself with seeing Alan on his visits to London and for occasional holidays on the Riviera.

  On his way south Maugham stopped in Paris, partly at the request of Marie Laurencin, who had asked to paint his portrait. Mlle Laurencin had been to the Mauresque several years earlier to see the four pictures of hers, of graceful, pale-faced young girls, frivolous and sugary, that hung in the dining room. “Ses Laurencins étaient jolis51,” she said approvingly. In 1934 Maugham wrote an enthusiastic preface for the catalogue to a Laurencin exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in London, for which no doubt she felt indebted. He for his part was flattered by her suggestion that he should sit for her, “but felt it only right to remind her52 that I was not a young thing with a complexion of milk and roses … but an elderly gentleman with a sallow, wrinkled skin and tired eyes.” He posed in her studio during four afternoons, during which she told him the story of her life.* When she had finished she put down her brushes and looked analytically at the canvas. “Vous savez,” she said, “on se plaint toujours que mes portraits ne sont pas ressemblants. Je ne peux pas vous dire à quel point je m’en fou.”† With that, she lifted the canvas off the easel and handed it to her sitter as a present. Maugham expressed his gratitude but privately he considered his portrait was indeed a poor likeness, “lousy,” as he privately described it. Later his admiration for her work diminished further and he sold his Laurencins, causing the painter considerable pique when she heard of it: he had become “trop mondain” (“too worldly”), she said crossly. “J’ai dû être remplacée53 par un autre snobisme.”‡

  Arrived on the Riviera, Maugham spent only a few weeks at home before he returned to England. In April, Liza’s engagement had been announced, her fiancé Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Paravicini, son of the Swiss minister to the Court of St. James’s. Paravicini was delightful, a sweet-natured man of notable elegance and charm, but Syrie was furiously disappointed in her daughter’s choice and had “fought like a steer”54 against the match. In Syrie’s view Vincent was just another young man about town, and with neither money nor title was certainly not good enough for her daughter. On this occasion, however, Liza defied her: she loved Vincent and was determined to marry him, and Syrie had no choice but to give in. At first Maugham, too, had disapproved of Paravicini, referring to him as “Liza’s Swiss waiter,” but Vincent soon won him over by his charm and by a simple sense of humor that tickled Maugham immensely; it amused him, too, that his son-in-law was not remotely bookish, his preferred reading two magazines, Farmer & Stockbreeder and The Connoisseur.

  The wedding, a sumptuous society occasion, took place on July 20, 1936, at fashionable St. Margaret’s, Westminster, Liza, aged twenty-one, looking pale but beautiful in a white brocade dress by Schiaparelli. For the first time in years her parents appeared together, walking down the aisle arm in arm, Maugham in top hat and tails to give his daughter away. At the large reception afterward at the Swiss Legation, Maugham behaved toward his ex-wife with an immaculate courtesy. “I found myself positively in danger55 of falling in love with him again!” Syrie gushed. “It was the first time since our courtship that I ever knew Willie to be so wonderfully thoughtful towards me.” As a wedding present Maugham had bought the young couple a house on Wilton Street, off Belgrave Square, and for her contribution Syrie had decorated it. “A perfect decorator’s house,” Maugham dismissively remarked when he saw the finished result. “Nothing personal about it!” For their honeymoon the Paravicinis were lent the Villa Mauresque, the first time Liza had been there, Maugham and Haxton moving out to give “the young things” a chance to be on their own.

  RETURNING AT THE BEGINNING of September, Maugham settled down at the Mauresque for a brief period of intensive work before returning to London in October. His most immediate concern was to put the finishing touches to a novel, Theatre, the only one of Maugham’s fictional works to deal with the world in which he had been intimately involved for more than thirty years. Employing the favorite plot line of the older woman in love with a worthless and much younger man, Theatre tells t
he story of Julia Lambert, a celebrated actress married to a successful theater manager, who in middle age falls for a boy scarcely older than her schoolboy son. Tom Fennell is an accountancy clerk brought in to look over the theater’s books, and Julia’s husband, Michael, amused to see that the boy is stagestruck, invites him to lunch to meet his famous wife. Soon Julia is helplessly and humiliatingly in love, despite the fact that Tom is revealed to be a common little snob, regarding Julia, with all her grand friends, as a useful means of advancing his career. The climax comes when he asks her to give a part in her new play to a girlfriend of his, a pretty but overconfident young woman who, Julia quickly realizes, is nowhere near as talented as she believes. During a glittering first night it is Julia’s cunning upstaging of Avice, in the most literal sense, that effects the dénouement and brings the story to a satisfactory end.

  There is nothing bohemian in the theatrical world that Maugham depicts, which is solidly entrenched in the upper echelons of the West End. Julia has her clothes made in Paris, dines in the most expensive nightclubs and restaurants, and is much sought after in elevated social circles. As might be expected, the theatrical milieu is faultlessly drawn, with Maugham giving a particularly well-observed portrait of his leading lady, always performing whether onstage or off, and endowed with a number of characteristics drawn from actresses such as Ethel Barrymore, Irene Vanbrugh, and Marie Tempest. Theatre is not one of Maugham’s finest novels—he was perhaps too little engaged with the world he was depicting—but it is highly accomplished, and after its publication in March 1937 it sold well (in Britain over 22,000 copies in the first two months) despite a tepid reception by the critics.*