With Theatre finished, Maugham in October went again to London, where as usual his diary was crammed with appointments. He spent a weekend at Renishaw with Osbert Sitwell and David Horner, and another at Bulbridge in Wiltshire with Juliet Duff, where H. G. Wells was also staying. On October 13 he attended a dinner at the Savoy, organized by PEN,* to celebrate H.G.’s seventieth birthday, the toast proposed by Bernard Shaw. At the end of the month he attended a large dinner party given by the recently widowed Sibyl Colefax, her last before moving out of Argyll House. The guests were old friends, among them the Winston Churchills, the Duff Coopers, Artur Rubinstein, Harold Nicolson and Desmond MacCarthy, and the talk was all of “the great Simpson question,” as Harold Nicolson described it, “[and the] very serious rumours56 that the King will make her Duchess of Edinburgh and marry.” The Prince of Wales’s affair with Mrs. Simpson had been the subject of scandalized gossip for the past couple of years; it was bad enough that the heir to the throne was involved with an American divorcée, but now he was insisting on marriage, which momentarily opened up the appalling possibility of this twice-married foreigner’s becoming queen. Since the death of George V in January, the matter had become of urgent constitutional importance, and with the coronation only weeks away it had been made clear to the new king that he must end the relationship. Instead, he decided to abdicate. Maugham had known Wallis Simpson for years—she and her husband had had a flat off Bryanston Square—and he was distressed by the violent hostility provoked by the future king’s decision to give up his throne for the woman he loved. “I am a writer &57 it is my instinct to put myself in other people’s shoes,” he told Juliet Duff,
& I have been strangely harassed by the thought of that wretched man, unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, kicking the doors & beating his head against the walls, that people who have seen him describe; & I am shocked by the suddenness of that fall, from such an amazing popularity to such a universal contempt. Now the man in the street, who worshipped him, calls him a mess & says, a good riddance to bad rubbish.
On December 11, in a corner of the public lounge at Claridge’s, Maugham, Eddie Marsh, Osbert Sitwell, and Graham Greene listened to the abdication broadcast on a radio borrowed from one of the porters. By this time Wallis Simpson had left the country and fled to the south of France, where she would wait out the stressful months before her divorce was finalized and she and the Duke of Windsor, as he now became, could marry. On Christmas Day, Maugham, who had returned to the Mauresque, invited Wallis and her aunt, Bessie Merryman, to lunch, together with Bob Boothby, a slightly raffish, slightly renegade member of Parliament. Despite the obvious tensions, it was a cheerful occasion, and in the afternoon there was a game of bridge, with Maugham partnering Wallis. “I’m afraid I am not a very good partner,”58 he said putting down his hand. “I’ve only got a couple of k-k-kings.” “What’s the use of them?” Wallis wisecracked. “They only abdicate.” Throughout the following weeks, Maugham, sensitive to the pressures and problems of her situation, continued to be attentive, inviting Wallis to meals and to stay for a weekend. “I think she had a very difficult role59 to play,” he said, “and I doubt whether any woman could have played it successfully.” Finally, in March, Wallis prepared to leave Cannes to be reunited with the duke at the Château de Candé in Tours, where they would marry. “I am leaving Cannes tomorrow,”60 she wrote to Maugham, “and I wanted to tell you again how very much I have appreciated your kindness to me since I have been here.” “What many people did not understand,”61 she said later, “was that Willie was at heart a very kind man. That Christmas I felt in the wilderness, and I have never forgotten his sympathetic understanding in those especially difficult, lonely days.”
Perhaps fortunately, Gerald had not been in evidence on Christmas Day. “Gerald is in bed62 with a bad attack of malaria, which is awkward since there is [my lunch party] tomorrow,” Maugham with a certain irritation had written to Alan Searle on Christmas Eve. “But still I shall manage, & in a day or two more he should be quite well.” Yet Gerald did not get well, indeed became so desperately ill that a nurse was employed and a specialist called in, and the local doctor was obliged to drive over three times a day. For a while it was feared he might die, but then very gradually Gerald began to grow stronger. Maugham, despite his frequent fury and exasperation, had been desperately worried, and was grateful to be consoled by Alan, who came out to stay for a couple of weeks. Searle’s presence at the Mauresque impressed on Maugham the contrast between the young man’s gentle, if somewhat colorless, personality and Haxton’s. “[Alan] is being very sweet,”63 Maugham told David Horner, “[but] he is never what you could call the life & soul of a party; so there is no one for me to be funny about—or with—& I wander about the garden & long to laugh.” In Alan, dependable and comforting, he missed the wickedness and wit, the sheer excitement, of being with Gerald. “Searle was more pussy-cat,”64 said one friend who knew them both, “whereas Haxton was bristlingly abrasive, like a bulldog about to break his lead.”
One beneficent result of Gerald’s illness was a renewed resolution on his part to keep his drinking under control. “So far as I am concerned65 I can do no more,” Maugham told Barbara Back in a letter whose tough stance is belied by the tenderness of the final sentence:
I have told him, & he knows it himself that if he starts drinking again he will kill himself; & if he does, it will mean that he has come to the conclusion that he would rather drink & die than not drink & live. If he really comes to that conclusion that is the end of it, I shall pension him off & resume my domicile in England; I cannot spend the few remaining years of my life acting as nurse & keeper to an old drunk. But, I have no need to tell you, I hope with all my heart that it will not come to that.
In order to keep himself busy and amused, Gerald bought a boat, a small yacht with just enough room belowdecks for a couple of bunks. The weather was beautiful, and Gerald spent nearly every day sailing, entranced by his new toy. Equally entrancing was the young cabin boy who regularly accompanied him. Louis Legrand, known as “Loulou,” was a ravishing sixteen-year-old male whore, slender, blond, tanned, with a soft mouth and a sweet smile; he wore gold bangles on both wrists and spent most of the day dressed only in a minute pair of faded swimming trunks. Gerald was infatuated with him, and when not on the boat Loulou passed much of his time at the Mauresque, at the disposal not only of Haxton and Maugham, who grew very fond of the charming boy, but of any male guest who desired his services, Gerald afterward discreetly settling the bill. Both Harolds, Nicolson and Acton, became appreciative customers (“Mon cher Lulu,”66 wrote Nicolson from Paris, “merci pour la soirée délicieuse”); and so, during the course of the summer, did Maugham’s nephew, Robin.
Under pressure from his father, Robin had gone up to Cambridge to read law, but in his spare time continued to write, sending his compositions to his uncle for criticism. Maugham saw little evidence of talent—“quite the worst play I have ever had to look at” was his opinion of a dramatic sketch—but he was determined nonetheless to help Robin and instill in him as much as he could of his own philosophy. The play, he told him on this occasion,
is a ghastly mess67 [and] I think you should prepare your mind for the possibility that it will be a failure. You are so monstrously conceited that I am afraid you will find failure very difficult to bear [but] to bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give…. My last piece of advice is not to let anyone see your mortification.
Robin, fascinated by what he had heard of the high life at the Mauresque, had asked if he might come and stay during his long vacation, ostensibly in order to concentrate on his writing. But when he arrived he found himself alone with his uncle, Gerald having left for Paris to collect a new car, and any hopes he might have had of plunging into glamorous Riviera society soon disappeared in the actuality of the daily routine, with Maugham, intent on his work, spending all morning in his study, in the afternoon walking around the garden with the dogs,
and disappearing to bed fairly soon after dinner. There was plenty of opportunity for some frank discussion, however, with Robin particularly anxious for reassurance about his homosexuality. His uncle was both practical and bracing, advising him to accept what he was and to have as much fun as he could. “You are quite attractive,”68 he told him. “Don’t waste your assets. Your charm won’t last for long.” That having been said, it was important that Robin should bear in mind that being queer was no impediment to marriage, and as the only son it was his duty to marry and propagate.
This was a theme that Maugham returned to repeatedly, impressing on Robin that of the next generation it was only he who bore the family name, a responsibility that became of crucial importance when in 1938 Robin’s father was appointed lord chancellor. Maugham, who for all his socialist beliefs was far from impervious to the benefits of rank, was delighted. He was intensely gratified by the prestige conferred on the family, and impressed that F.H. entirely by his own efforts should have achieved such an exalted position. “It is very wonderful,69 if you come to think of it,” he wrote to Bert Alanson, “that an obscure young man, without money or influence to help him should by sheer merit in his profession achieve … the highest office in the British Empire that any lawyer can attain.” As a law lord, F.H. could not pass his title on to his descendants, but as lord chancellor he was sure to be offered a hereditary peerage, an offer that Maugham was anxious he should accept, his visions for Robin’s ermined future as the second Viscount Maugham revealing a profound reverence for the old aristocratic order. “There is no reason why your father70 should not live another ten or fifteen years,” he wrote to Robin,
& in that time you might easily have gained a considerable experience as a member of parliament & then, as a peer, would have … a great chance to get office or a governorship … to be the son of a deceased Lord Chancellor is to be very small fry, to be a peer is always to be something.
Toward the end of Robin’s stay, Gerald arrived back from Paris. By chance he and Robin had run into each other in Salzburg earlier in the summer and renewed their friendship. Cheerful and relaxed, the older man had made an irresistible impression. “Well-dressed, attractive and slim,”71 Robin recorded, “very European though he was an American … Gerald exuded vitality and charm and money.” Friendly as ever, Haxton had taken Robin to the opera and afterward to a bierstube. Here they drank schnapps while Gerald gave him a knowledgeable summary of the local rent boys lined up along the bar before disappearing with his personal favorite, a winning fourteen-year-old always available for “Onkel Gerald.” Now returned to the Mauresque, Gerald generously determined to give Robin a night to remember before he returned home. Beginning the evening at the casino in Nice, the two of them went on to a couple of backstreet bars, where they got pleasantly drunk, and then to a brothel, where Gerald paid for the young man to be expertly entertained. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, it was decided to drive over to Villefranche to look at the boat. Here they found Loulou on board, lying on one of the bunks, “his hair tousled, his limbs sprawled out in sleep, his lips slightly parted.” Gerald immediately saw that Robin was smitten. “Have a good time,” he winked at him, and lurching up the gangplank, he left. “Good night, ducks,” he called out. “See you both in the morning.”
Gerald continued, just, to keep his drinking within limits, Maugham having made plain that if he wished to retain his position he would have to make some radical reforms. The situation was not a happy one, however, and the tensions and uncertainties now inherent in the relationship made Maugham restless and uneasy, so much so that for a while he even contemplated giving up the Mauresque. But for the moment such drastic plans were shelved as he concentrated on preparing for a Far Eastern journey, this time to India, proposing to depart at the end of the year, returning the following spring. “I am tired & want a change,”72 he told Charles Towne, “& besides, I want to get some material for a novel I have in mind to write in the future.” Meanwhile, the summer passed in trips abroad—the usual visits to Munich, Salzburg, and Badgastein, as well as a disappointing excursion with Peter Stern to Scandinavia (“Sweden … such a boring place”)—and in entertaining at home. “Yesterday Anthony Blunt & a friend73 Burgess came over to lunch & are coming for the week-end,” Maugham reported to Searle. “Do you remember Anthony? You met him once or twice at Cambridge. He is (or was) a fellow of Trinity & is an authority on baroque.”
BEFORE LEAVING FOR INDIA, Maugham was determined to finish a book of great personal importance to him, a form of memoir on which he had been working intermittently for some time. “I have put into it74 all I know,” he told Charles Towne; but if his readers were hoping for details of a personal nature, they were to be disappointed. In its author’s own words, The Summing Up “is not an autobiography nor is it a book of recollections”: rather it is an overview of his professional career and intellectual development, and of “the subjects that have chiefly interested me during the course of my life.” The first half of this personal credo deals with his boyhood and youth, and, at greater length, with his development as a writer. Here he argues for his three favorite tenets, lucidity, simplicity, and euphony, and discusses some of the authors whom he most admires: Dryden, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Voltaire, Stendhal, Colette, and Maupassant, who exercised such influence over his own style of short story. Maugham also addresses his career in the theater—“I caught the colloquial note75 by instinct”—paying his respects to his fellow playwrights, in particular Ibsen (“the greatest dramatist the last hundred years have seen”), Chekhov, and Shaw. And with admirable detachment he analyzes his own strengths and weaknesses as a practitioner of the art to which he had dedicated his life. “I am a made writer,” he states unequivocally. “I do not write as I want to; I write as I can…. I have had small power of imagination … no lyrical quality … little gift of metaphor … [but] I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed.” Clear-sighted about his abilities, he yet shows a certain sensitivity to the fact that he has been largely ignored by serious critics. “There are but two important critics in my own country [Desmond MacCarthy and Cyril Connolly] who have troubled to take me seriously,” he complains; the rest by contrast have either ignored or dismissed him. “In my twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties they said I was flippant, in my forties they said I was cynical, in my fifties they said I was competent, and now in my sixties they say I am superficial.”
The second large theme in The Summing Up is the author’s lifelong exploration of philosophy and religion, which had absorbed him since boyhood. Always curious, always searching, ever eager to find a pattern or purpose to his life, Maugham for years had read diligently in the works of the great philosophers, from Plato to Bertrand Russell, from the Christian mystics to the Upanishads, looking for but never finding the certainty that would bring consolation. Here Maugham the autodidact comes to the fore, the intelligent inquirer, hopeful of enlightenment on the great questions that have preoccupied man through the ages: “what is the value of life, how he should live and what sense he can ascribe to the universe.” Unable to regain the faith he lost in boyhood, he yet remains unsatisfied, puzzled by the frustration experienced by his rational self in failing to take comfort in religion. “It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with.” Unable to integrate his perceptions in an all-inclusive creed, he states his conviction, in characteristically uncompromising terms, that “There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.”
Although the author is at pains to remain at a dignified distance—“Never have I read an autobiography76 which contains so little auto,” complained Peter Stern—The Summing Up is shot through with a sometimes startling candor. Of his experience of love he says, “Though I have been in love a good many times I have never experienced the bliss of requited love,” and “I have most lo
ved people who cared little or nothing for me, and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed,” and “there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.” Writing of sex, enthusiastically described as “the keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible,” he states it is his great regret that because of “a native fastidiousness” he never indulged enough, a surprising admission from one who was so deeply interested in the subject, wrote about it with such feeling, and was so tireless in its pursuit. Throughout, the writer is revealed, not always consciously, as a sensitive, vulnerable, passionate man, aloof, unillusioned, a realist rather than the cynic he was so often taken to be; he is solitary by choice (“I find social intercourse fatiguing…. It is a relief to me when I can get away and read a book”), a depressive capable of some happiness and much enjoyment. As one of his critics was to write, in this book there is revealed “an injured and defensive heart behind the fluent mind of the impervious man of the world.”
Anxious that The Summing Up should be as good as he could make it, Maugham sent proofs to both Eddie Marsh and Dadie Rylands for criticism. Eddie Marsh was particularly relied upon for detailed textual editing. Recently retired from the Civil Service, Marsh had made a speciality of correcting the work of well-known authors, Winston Churchill among them. Referred to as his “diabolization,” it was a process this pernickety, scholarly, kindhearted character relished. There was no question of payment, for it flattered his vanity to be consulted by famous writers (“There’s glory for me!”77 Marsh noted in his diary after he was first approached by Maugham); he was proud of what he called “my morbid eye for detail” and loved showing off his exhaustive knowledge of grammar, derivation, and the finer points of style. Maugham’s first meeting with Marsh had been during the war at a luncheon* of the Winston Churchills’, but the first books of his to be diabolized were Don Fernando and Theatre. “I think you must know grammar78 better than anyone in England,” Maugham had written gratefully after receiving back the corrected scripts. “I can’t tell you how wonderfully useful I’ve found your notes, but, my word, some of them have made me sweat.” On The Summing Up Marsh went to work with gusto: “p. 28 Has ‘massivity’ any advantage79 over the usual ‘massiveness’? … p. 110 Surely three infinitives are too many? … p. 113 Your argument here is tantalizingly incomplete….” Not all his suggestions were accepted, but most of them were, and his sharp eye demonstrably saved Maugham from error, inelegance, and some impossibly tangled lines of argument. In gratitude Maugham made a present to Marsh of some beautiful eighteenth-century emerald buttons from India to use as cufflinks. “I like to think they may have adorned80 the sleeve of one of the Moghuls’ page boys,” he told him.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 47