Maugham’s immediate concern, after a few days’ necessary respite, was to return to his war work. He made a series of propaganda broadcasts, for both home and overseas transmission, their purpose to bolster Anglo-French relations. He was also commissioned by the Ministry of Information and by Redbook magazine in America to write a series of articles about the war effort and life on the Home Front. On at least one occasion he took the opportunity to combine duty with pleasure by visiting Alan Searle, currently based at a military camp in Yorkshire, where he was helping to run a canteen and leisure facilities for troops off duty.
It was now that Maugham, aged sixty-six, for the first and only time in his life tried to find a cure for his stammer. Realizing that he would be increasingly called upon to speak in public and on the radio, he consulted a Dr. Leahy, a hypnotist, to whom he had been referred by his old acquaintance, Christabel Aberconway. After several sessions with Dr. Leahy, in which he was taught a method of self-hypnosis, he was surprised to find that up to a point the treatment worked: he continued to stammer in private conversation, but when performing in public he was able to speak on the whole without stumbling. Unfortunately the Leahy effect wore off after a while, but nonetheless it gave Maugham confidence, and from this time on he spoke far more fluently before an audience than when at home with his friends.
Meanwhile, in London, daily life carried on as near normally as possible under wartime conditions. Barrage balloons floated high overhead, Hyde Park was scarred with trenches, sandbags were piled against storefronts and around the statue of Eros in Piccadilly, and mailboxes, lampposts, and trees had been striped with white paint to help pedestrians find their way in the blackout. Maugham had booked a suite on the top floor of the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, a conveniently central location. Over the last few months this modern hotel had been experiencing a boom: built of reinforced concrete and boasting a gas-proof shelter in the basement, it was popularly supposed to be indestructible; several cabinet ministers had taken up residence, and rooms were much in demand by people coming up from the country or returning from abroad, or by Londoners too nervous to remain at home. The Daily Express reported that now the Dorchester bar “is to London what the Ritz bar33 used to be to Paris—crowded with business men, socialite women, diplomats, spies.” Maugham was constantly running into old friends in the busy lobby, and a couple of days after disembarking in Liverpool he found himself face-to-face with Syrie. “Willie!” she cried, rushing up to him. “Thank God you’re safe!34 I’ve been so worried!” “So I should hope,” Maugham drily responded. Syrie, too, it turned out, was staying at the hotel, having left Paris shortly before the Germans arrived. News of this public encounter between the famously embattled Maughams was naturally seized upon by the gossips, who came up with any number of hilarious versions of the frightful snubs and insults that had been traded.* But in fact during this one short period, under the strains and surreal conditions imposed by war, the two managed to resume genuinely friendly relations. They met almost every afternoon for tea, where they were often joined by Liza, she and her mother fervently hoping that this is how it would be from now on. “But it didn’t work that way at all,”35 Liza sadly recalled.
At the beginning of September the air raids began, at first by day and then night after night, often starting at dusk and continuing until dawn. For the first two nights of the Blitz, Maugham stayed on the top floor, but the pounding of the antiaircraft batteries only yards away in Hyde Park became unendurable, and so from the third night he went down to the basement after dinner, joining the other residents who were camping out in pajamas and dressing gowns, huddled together on the floor with pillows and eiderdowns, sleeping as best they could until the all clear sounded between five and six in the morning. “After my three weeks36 on an iron deck on the Saltersgate this was luxury and I slept like a child,” Maugham wrote. During the day, as he walked along the familiar streets of the West End, he saw the “grim sight” of the bomb damage, the pavements covered in broken glass, the gaping, smoking holes where a house or row of houses had stood, including the building in Portland Place where previously he had stayed with Alan. One afternoon with Nellie and F.H. he went to look at the mangled remains of a Messerschmitt that had crashed down into the forecourt of Victoria Station. When other duties permitted, Maugham arranged to meet friends, eagerly seized upon by that dedicated hostess Sibyl Colefax, who invited him to lunch together with Lady Diana Cooper, the journalist and secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, Moura Budberg, and H. G. Wells. Wells was garrulous, delivering a tedious monologue on the subject of God. “Willie Maugham was palpably bored37 and chewed the string of his eyeglass cord most of the time,” Bruce Lockhart noted in his diary. One night, returning from a dinner party in Westminster, Maugham and Virginia Woolf were walking up Whitehall when a couple of bombers came over. “[I] shouted at [Virginia] to take cover38 but in the noise she couldn’t hear,” Maugham recalled. “She made no attempt to take cover but stood in the middle of the road and threw her arms into the air. She appeared to be worshipping the flashing sky. It was a most weird sight to watch her there, lit up now and then by the flashes from the guns.” Yet on the whole, dinner engagements were rare: few cared to venture out in the evening, and the bar and restaurant at the Dorchester were always packed, everyone steadying their nerves with stiff drinks, the resulting party atmosphere providing a welcome insulation from the constant raids. “You know we’ve had some air raid warnings39 here,” Maugham told Alan Searle. “The Dorchester is very gay while they last…. [I] spent such a nice evening, with Diana & Duff [Cooper] & Juliet [Duff].”
Duff Cooper had recently been appointed minister of information, and shortly after Maugham arrived in London he had proposed a propaganda mission to the United States, a mission which by its nature had to be very hush-hush. For Britain it was a matter of paramount importance to win American support for the war, a tough proposition as the majority of the American population was isolationist and Anglophobic and nursed a deep suspicion of anything that smacked of foreign propaganda. Memories remained vivid of the last European conflict, and most Americans were darned sure they wanted nothing to do with this one. Clearly it would be a hard task to convert an essentially unsympathetic nation into a loyal and active ally, and in furthering their cause the British government had to step extremely carefully, as any overt attempts at propaganda would be deeply resented and deleterious: since the signing in 1935 of the Neutrality Act, it had become illegal for foreign agents to conduct propaganda within the United States. In order to avoid the appearance of any suspicious activity, Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, had urged the use of well-known authors on the lecture circuit; and for this a writer such as Maugham, with a long-established reputation in the States, was considered ideal. During the nearly two and a half years before America entered the war, numbers of well-known British writers toured the country, many to great effect, but few worked harder, made more of an impact, or proved as valuable as Somerset Maugham.
Maugham agreed with alacrity to Duff Cooper’s proposal. To provide himself with cover, he contacted Nelson Doubleday, who sent him a letter stating that he was urgently required in New York to arrange for the publication of his next book, a ruse that in the event deceived nobody: “W. Somerset Maugham is in this country40 as a British agent,” blithely begins an interview in The New York Times that appeared soon after his arrival. Maugham left London one afternoon at the very end of September, spent the night in Bristol, and next morning caught the plane for Lisbon, taking off with an escort of Spitfires. Capital of a neutral country, Lisbon was imbued with an almost holiday atmosphere, warm and sunny, crowded with people of all nationalities, the shops stocked with food and other merchandise long unobtainable elsewhere. None of this was much enjoyed by Maugham, who found himself billeted in a filthy little pension, obliged to spend hours queueing to have his papers examined and passport stamped prior to his departure for the United States. Finally, on October 7, after several
frustrating days, he was free to go, boarding the Pan Am clipper, a luxurious flying boat, for the sixteen-hour flight, via the Azores and Bermuda, to New York.
As on previous occasions Maugham stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, at Sixty-fourth and Madison, where he proposed to remain until Gerald, now making his way to Portugal, was able to join him. Currency restrictions imposed on British subjects abroad were extremely tight, but as Maugham was in America to promote the British cause it had been discreetly arranged with the Treasury that he be allowed to draw on a portion of his American royalties, thus enabling him to enjoy a rather higher standard of living than would otherwise have been the case. Almost immediately he was put to work, writing articles, making speeches, giving interviews, attending fund-raising dinners, and helping sell books for the British War Relief Bookshop. He also made a number of radio broadcasts, his first with Edward Weeks on NBC, during which, in answer to a question about great war novels, Maugham said, “Just as the best novel41 about the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front, came out of Germany’s defeat, so I hope and believe that the best book about this war will come from the same source, and for the same reason.” It was an emotive reply and it received an outburst of applause from the studio audience. During the first month Maugham addressed gatherings that varied in size from three thousand in a flag-draped hotel ballroom to a hundred ladies at tea in a private house. Sometimes he was the sole speaker, at other times part of a panel with other writers, among them Louis MacNeice, Robert Sherwood, Thomas Mann, and the Austrian novelist Franz Werfel. Whatever the occasion, Maugham was careful to emphasize the ineradicable links between Britain and America. “When, in this war,42 we British are defending our culture, the rich and fertile culture of the English-speaking peoples, we are defending not only what is ours but what is yours,” he told a large audience one night at the Waldorf-Astoria. Another reiterated theme, carefully chosen to counter the New World’s dislike of the Old with all its arrogance and imperialism, was the future partnership of the two great democratic countries. The war, Maugham repeatedly stressed, was having a democratizing effect: “the crisis was destroying43 the class consciousness which has been one of the evils of English life…. [After the war] the country shall be much more democratic than ever before. Some accept it with resignation, some with joy. I myself accept it with joy.” Such sentiments, genuinely held, were also directly in line with the briefings Maugham regularly received both from the embassy in Washington and from the British Information Services in New York. His masters were pleased with him. “On his arrival Maugham was given44 widespread and favourable publicity,” it was reported to the Foreign Office in London. “He is apparently well-liked by the Press [and] is widely quoted in out of town papers.”
In his free time, and while waiting for Gerald, who was currently cooling his heels in Lisbon while trying to get a seat on the flying boat, Maugham saw friends, news of them retailed in long letters to Alan Searle, to whom he wrote devotedly every week. There were the Doubledays, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Carl Van Vechten, H. G. Wells, “looking old, tired and shrivelled,”45 and the playwright Ned Sheldon, now paralyzed and blind but as saintly and charming as ever. A fellow guest at the Ritz was Emerald Cunard, “my girl Emerald” as Maugham affectionately referred to her; she had a suite five floors above his, “[where] she managed to create46 the nearest thing to a salon that New York has ever had”; every afternoon he went up to take tea with her, “& hob-nobbed with all the fantastic people she gathered about her.”
It was with Emerald one day that Maugham met again the writer Glenway Wescott, first encountered in 1928 when Wescott had been brought to lunch at the Mauresque. On that occasion, Maugham, in a surly temper, had snubbed the young man, but now he was enchanted by him, much taken by his blond, youthful good looks and quickly finding much in common: like Maugham, Wescott was intensely interested in sex and literature and other people’s lives; he was a novelist; he had lived in France, and with his lover, Monroe Wheeler, a director at the Museum of Modern Art, knew everyone in literary and artistic circles in Paris and New York. For his part, Wescott enormously admired Maugham, and the two men soon became close friends, developing an almost father-son relationship. Wescott sensed that Maugham would have liked something more, and he was grateful for the elder man’s tact in not making this an issue: “though frequently complimenting me47 on my youthfulness, etc., he has never felt, at least never let me feel the least strain in this way. His discretion never fails.” Glenway invited Maugham to spend a weekend at Stone-blossom, the country house in New Jersey he and Monroe shared, providing a welcome respite for Maugham from the pressures of war work in the city. Here they had long discussions about books, and about Glenway’s writing—Maugham had reservations about Wescott’s first novel, The Pilgrim Hawk—and Maugham encouraged Glenway to describe his sex life.
I said that for my part48 I am never as eager to have intercourse with a new lover as with one I have already enjoyed, again and again and again. Somewhat to my surprise Willie said that oh, indeed, it was so for him as well.
Also in New York were Liza with her little son, and Syrie. With Vincent away in the army, Liza, newly pregnant, had come over in July and almost immediately fallen ill, for a time so ill that her hostess, Nelson Doubleday’s sister, had panicked and cabled for her mother. Immediately all the old bitterness flared up between Maugham and his ex-wife: he thought his daughter should live quietly, preferably in the country, at least until after the baby was born; Syrie, on the other hand, was determined that Liza should be with her in Manhattan, and saw no reason, once she was well again, why she should not lead as active a social life as she chose. At the back of her mind was the thought that Liza, so chic and pretty, might meet a rich man who would eventually take the place of the impecunious Vincent. Liza felt torn apart. She was touched by her father’s concern: “I had the feeling49 that he wanted to be and to remain friends with me”; but she hated the position of being yet again the cause of quarrels between her parents. “It was a very painful situation,” she said. “In the end I chose to share an apartment with my mother at the Sulgrave Hotel … though I must say there were times when I would have preferred to be independent.”
Finally, at the beginning of December 1940, Gerald arrived in New York; after several weeks in Lisbon he had eventually made the crossing by sea, having despaired of obtaining a passage on the clipper. Maugham was relieved to see him safe, but his heart sank when it immediately became obvious that Gerald was back to his bad old alcoholic ways. “I can’t bear this,”50 Maugham declared, pacing up and down. “Haven’t I done enough for him? Why do I have to go through more?” If only Alan could come over and take his place; but there was no chance of that with the world in its present state.
Within a couple of weeks of Gerald’s arrival, he and Maugham left for Chicago, where there were further propaganda talks to be given—to audiences that were notably less sympathetic, as Chicago was a bastion of the noninterventionist America First Committee. During the month that they spent in Illinois, the two men took off a couple of days to go to Oregon to visit a handsome, hard-drinking ex-lover of Gerald’s, Tom Seyster. They took with them on the trip a thirteen-year-old English boy, Daniel Farson,* a godson of Seyster’s, who had been entrusted to their care by his aunt, with whom he was staying in Chicago as an evacuee. Farson remembered the occasion vividly: he had no idea that Maugham was a famous author and chattered brightly to him all the way on the train, Maugham listening politely, Haxton palpably bored by the child’s presence. Both men seemed at a low ebb, Farson said later, and it was plain that Haxton was drinking heavily, the impression that lingered of Gerald “a large ginger moustache51 and violent temper when he was not mute from hangover.” During their stay in Oregon, Seyster and Haxton quarreled furiously, Seyster still besotted by Gerald, who was permanently intoxicated, while Maugham remained silent and detached. Dutifully the three adults bought the boy popcorn and took him bowling and to the
cinema, a strange little group to be wandering the streets, as Farson remarked: “in this small … town our appearance must have been disconcerting to the point of shame.” When they finally returned to Chicago, Maugham drew Farson’s aunt aside and warned her that Seyster was not a suitable companion for a boy of Dan’s age.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 51