[Then and Now] seemed to me … one of the most tasteless and unreadable books from which I had ever hoped to derive enjoyment, and nothing but the necessity of supplying this review could ever have taken me through it….
And so on. Maugham, who had always admired Wilson,* describing him in one of his wartime articles as “the most acute critic now writing in America,” reacted to this devastating attack with almost superhuman sangfroid. “He has always disliked me,”6 he told Ellen Doubleday. “[But] nobody can be liked by everyone and I bear Edmund Wilson’s dislike with good humour.”
On May 8, 1945, VE Day, the war in Europe was finally declared at an end, but Maugham at Yemassee was unable to feel any great exhilaration. “Everyone here is of course7 very much relieved & I am too,” he wrote to Alan, “but my chief feeling, I think, is one of sadness for all the death & misery it has caused, so that I haven’t been able to be as cheery about the surrender as most people.” At the front of his mind was the prospect of a return to the freedom he had known before the war. “I am hoping restrictions upon travel will be lifted soon & that we shall all be able to go wherever we want to & when we like.” He longed for Alan to come to him, and he longed to return to France, but neither was a possibility at the present.
Instead, with Robin having left to promote his journal in New York, Maugham was obliged to return to Hollywood on his own, his presence required for the filming of The Razor’s Edge. As the screenplay commissioned by the studio had been judged unsatisfactory and jettisoned, Maugham had been asked if he would write it, a job he took on with uncharacteristic enthusiasm because his old friend George Cukor was to direct. The two men had first met in 1923 when Cukor was a young stage manager on the American production of The Camel’s Back; six years later, Cukor had abandoned the theater for the film industry, where he had enjoyed some notable successes, among them directing Katharine Hepburn in Little Women and Greta Garbo in Camille. One of his few failures had been the film of Our Betters in 1933, about which Maugham had been most understanding. “[Willie] was very, very kind to me8 and took it philosophically, just as he did most things,” Cukor recalled. Now Cukor invited Maugham to stay with him at his house off Sunset Strip, ideal for Maugham as not only was Cukor charming and intelligent but, homosexual himself, he knew all the reliable pimps and whores and was generally recognized as master of revels throughout the Hollywood fraternity. Cukor’s poolside parties were particularly popular: glamorous female stars were invited to join the company for lunch, but after they left, a gang of good-looking young men, actors, waiters, motor mechanics, would arrive for an afternoon of all-male entertainment; as the wags put it, when the ladies departed the naughty boys came by to eat the leftovers. On Maugham’s previous visits to Hollywood both he and Gerald had enjoyed Cukor’s hospitality, and it was an additional pleasure for Maugham that he could talk about Haxton, whom Cukor had liked. Cukor for his part was fond of Maugham personally, admired him for his inimitable stagecraft, and, as he said once in an interview, always regarded it as to Maugham’s credit that “Willie liked Jews.”
The film rights to The Razor’s Edge had been bought for Twentieth Century–Fox by Darryl Zanuck for the very large sum of $250,000. Understandably, Zanuck was reluctant to spend more on having the script rewritten, but when Cukor explained the situation to Maugham, the author immediately offered to do it for nothing. “[His] script was wonderful,” Cukor recalled, and Zanuck, delighted, suggested the studio should buy Maugham a painting, worth anything up to $15,000. “I’d never bought a picture9 at such a price before and I was thrilled,” said Maugham. Nervous about spending such a sum on his own, he asked Monroe Wheeler to advise him, and the two men spent several agreeable mornings visiting dealers in New York. Eventually Maugham chose a Camille Pissarro, a view of the harbor at Rouen (Quai Saint-Sever à Rouen) that moved him because it was the view Flaubert must often have looked at when at work on Madame Bovary; Monroe, however, persuaded him instead to buy a Matisse, a snow scene, which he said was a much better picture. “But I could not get the Pissarro out of my mind,” Maugham wrote later. “I thought I should always regret it if I did not have it, so I exchanged the Matisse for it.”
Few projects in the film world run smoothly, and in the end Maugham’s script was abandoned, the film finally going into production in 1946 with Tyrone Power as Larry, Gene Tierney as Isabel, and some frightful painted backdrops of the Himalayas.
—
THROUGHOUT HIS STAY IN CALIFORNIA, Maugham continued to press for Alan to join him: he missed the comfort of his company, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to cope without a secretary. But civilian travel between Europe and America was still difficult and exit permits hard to obtain. Maugham appealed to everyone he could think of who might have influence, asking Frere to approach the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, on his behalf, and himself writing to Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington. As a graceful gesture, Maugham had offered to present to the Library of Congress the manuscript of his most famous novel, Of Human Bondage, “in grateful acknowledgement10 of the kindness and hospitality shown by the people of this country,” and who could better be entrusted with it than Alan Searle? “You would be doing me a great favour,”11 Maugham told Halifax, “if you would ask the Foreign Office to give my secretary … now released from war work, the exit permit which will enable him to bring the bulky package over.” Fortunately for Maugham his request was favorably regarded behind the scenes, his contribution to the British war effort standing him in good stead in Whitehall. “I know that at one time12 he was working privately and unofficially as a propagandist for us in the US,” a Foreign Office memorandum noted. “The national interest requires us to regard Mr. Maugham as in a special category … and do whatever we reasonably can to help him. I think that Mr. Searle should be granted an exit permit and that we should give him a moderate degree of priority in obtaining a sea passage.”
This was written in September 1945, yet it was not until December that Alan succeeded in making the crossing, docking at Hoboken, New Jersey, on Christmas Day. From there he made his way by train to South Carolina, where Maugham was waiting for him at the station. The two men had not seen each other for more than five years, during which time Maugham had written to Alan every week, had thought of him constantly, and had yearned for the presence of his sweet, sexy Bronzino boy. The first sight was something of a shock: during the war at his army canteen Alan had done himself well, and the figure that stepped down onto the platform was no longer that of the slender youth Maugham remembered but of a stout, round-faced, middle-aged man. “Alan arrived, very heavy13 with his chipmunk cheeks,” Glenway Wescott recalled, “[and] William was grief-stricken at the loss of his looks. ‘You may have looked like a Bronzino once, but now you look like a depraved Frans Hals,’” Maugham commented sourly. Nonetheless Maugham was happy and relieved to be reunited with Searle, who was to be his devoted companion for the rest of his life. Alan immediately took over all Gerald’s duties and more, writing letters, telephoning, shopping, dealing with the maids. “[Alan] is a great comfort to me,”14 Bert Alanson was told. “He is so happy to be here, & with me, that it is heart-warming.”
With the war over and Alan restored to him, all Maugham’s energies were concentrated on his return to France. At the end of March he and Searle went to New York, and then to Washington for a few days, where on April 20 Maugham presented his manuscript of Of Human Bondage to the Library of Congress. It was a prestigious occasion, every seat in the Coolidge Auditorium filled for Maugham’s address, in which he talked about literature, about his own career as a novelist, and about writing Of Human Bondage, revealing that recently when making a recording of it he had broken down and wept while reading the passage describing the death of Philip Carey’s mother: “it recalled a pain15 that the passage of more than sixty years has not dispelled.” The main purpose of his speech, however, was to record his gratitude to the people of the United States, in particular “for the kindness
and the generosity16 with which you received the women and children of my country when in fear of a German invasion they came to America.”
At last, on May 29, Maugham and Alan sailed from New York, arriving in Marseilles in the second week of June. Looking back, Maugham used to say that the day he set foot again in France was one of the happiest of his life. When later in the summer Ellen Doubleday pressingly invited him to return to South Carolina, he was firm in his refusal. “I am very grateful to you17 and Nelson for having given me Parkers to live in during the war,” he wrote, “but as you know I only looked upon it as a temporary residence, and though I am pleased that you should want me to come back I think it much better to tell you that I never shall. I hope occasionally to come to New York on brief visits during the rest of my life, but when all is said and done Europe is where I belong.”
He and Alan took rooms at a small hotel, the Voile d’Or, overlooking the harbor at Saint-Jean, a short distance from the Villa Mauresque. Although he had received occasional reports about the state of the house, Maugham had no real idea what to expect, but to his relief the depredations were less serious than he had feared. The villa had been occupied first by the Italians, then by the Germans, who had mined the garden but otherwise done little harm; the only significant damage had been caused by the Royal Navy while attempting to shell a semaphore positioned at the top of the Cap. By paying some heavy bribes, Maugham soon assembled a team of workmen to repair the holes in the roof and to replace the shattered windows; indoors there was much repainting to be done, as well as the replacing of moth-eaten carpets and almost all the fixtures and fittings: after the Germans left, the local French, it appeared, had taken everything they could lay their hands on, including crockery, cutlery, and even the bolts from the bathroom doors. Soon the work was sufficiently advanced for furniture and pictures to be brought out of storage, and to Maugham’s great gratification most of the staff returned, with Annette, who had remained at the Villa throughout the war, rejoined by Ernest, the butler, Jean, the chauffeur, and Louis, one of the gardeners.
An immediate concern of Maugham’s was to fulfill Gerald’s bequest to Louis Legrand. Loulou had escaped conscription because of a tubercular infection and had spent the first couple of years of the war running in and out of the Mauresque, where he had made himself not altogether popular with Annette. Now he had gone to Paris, Maugham having given him permission to live in Gerald’s flat until it was sold, when the proceeds would be made over to him. Maugham had felt very tender toward Loulou, the boy so adored by Haxton, but now he found to his extreme annoyance that the young man had been up to some distinctly underhanded behavior. In compiling a list of losses incurred during the war, Maugham had included the contents of his substantial wine cellar, which had been emptied, he assumed, by the Italians. Now he learned from Annette that it was Loulou who had sold the lot to a local wine merchant. And not only that: Loulou had pocketed some personal items of Maugham’s, including two favorite wristwatches. These, Maugham told him sternly, must be returned. With his confidence in Loulou shaken, Maugham felt uneasy about leaving him unsupervised in the Paris apartment, and with reason, as it turned out: the enterprising Louis was already carrying on a brisk trade. “Cher Lulu,” begins a besotted letter, postmarked London, from an American army officer, “Voilà votre Colonel d’Amérique18 votre grand ami … TRES TRISTE—car son Louis est à Paris bien loin d’Angleterre….”* That autumn Maugham himself was in London, and from there he wrote to Loulou informing him that David Posner, a young student friend from the States, would shortly be arriving in Paris and would stay in the flat until he found a place of his own. For his part, Posner had been well briefed. “[I lived] in Maugham’s Paris apartment,”19 he recalled, “ostensibly to have digs when I first arrived in France; but actually to ‘spy’ upon the boy who was living there, Gerald Haxton’s former pickup, whose activities Maugham was afraid of (rightly, as it turned out).”
David Posner was an extraordinary episode in Maugham’s life. In the spring of 1943, Posner, then a seventeen-year-old schoolboy in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, had written Maugham a letter describing himself as a poet and expressing an ardent admiration for Of Human Bondage. Intrigued, Maugham had invited the boy to call on him at the Ritz in New York, where he instantly found himself overwhelmed by a tidal wave of emotion, a powerful mixture of fascination and lust. David Posner was sensual and swarthy, tall, very handsome, with thick lips, olive skin, and dark curly black hair. He frankly set out to seduce the older man, and Maugham succumbed utterly, later delightedly boasting that he had been raped by this “gigantic Jewish poet20 … a sort of satyr.” Glenway Wescott, an interested observer of the relationship, said Maugham had believed he was finished with love affairs and then “along came this little storm and he rode it in…. Willie was very proud of himself because this great poet violently booted sprang on him.” Maugham invited Posner to stay at Yemassee, and Posner, infinitely ambitious, eagerly accepted. “I was starry-eyed,”21 he later recalled. “I was hoping this would happen.” Maugham as a lover “wasn’t particularly virile,” he recalled, “[and] was rather businesslike about sex, but it’s equally true that there were occasions when we would spend a long time just fondling…. When we were alone he could be the world’s most enchanting conversationalist.” Maugham was so taken by the young man, and so impressed by his love and knowledge of literature, that he offered to pay part of his tuition at Harvard. They continued to see each other, and after the war, Posner, in France to study at the Sorbonne, visited the Mauresque on several occasions, until Maugham eventually became irritated by the young man’s pushiness and self-regard and turned against him. “Willie just cut his head off,”22 said Westcott. “[Posner] came and stayed at the Villa and Willie couldn’t stand him.”*
WHEN MAUGHAM ARRIVED in London in September 1946 he found a city seemingly drained of all vitality. Buildings stood unpainted and unrepaired, the streets were full of potholes, and bomb craters, thickly overgrown with loosestrife and willow herb, were everywhere. Life in the capital was grim, he reported to Nelson Doubleday. “People are strangely apathetic23 and do not seem very much interested in anything [and] the food is awful.” However, most of his old friends had survived, the happiest among them Barbara Back, since her son, feared dead, had just returned from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. The family, too, was intact, Robin much improved in health, F.H. visibly aged but in manner as dry and withering as ever: he and Maugham had had some sharp exchanges after Labour’s landslide victory the year before, with F.H., an entrenched Tory, vehemently opposed to his brother’s socialist views. Liza had been reunited with Vincent, who had left the army as a full colonel, having been awarded the DSO for bravery under fire in North Africa; however, after such a long separation, relations between husband and wife had become strained, and now they had decided to divorce. “I hope I shall like her next husband24 as much as I liked the last,” her father told Bert Alanson. “She pretends that she will never marry again, but I don’t for a moment believe her.” Liza meanwhile had gone to Switzerland to install her mother in a sanatorium, “said mother, aged 67,25 having contracted T.B.,” Maugham wrote unfeelingly. “I am told that to get it when you are as old as that gives little hope of recovery, but my own impression is that said mother is indestructible.”
Even with the punitive rates of postwar taxation, Maugham was by any standards a rich man. Since his first success as a playwright, Maugham, an honorary member of PEN since 1933, had been generous to writers, young and old, who were down on their luck, often helping anonymously when appealed to for funds; and he nearly always responded to requests from impecunious friends with a sizable check—unless, as happened on occasion, he felt they were taking advantage, when a sharp snub would be administered instead. The appeals were constant and increased in size and number as his celebrity grew. “In the last week I have had requests26 for loans amounting to £36,000,” he complained in 1960, and a few months later, “By every post demands come by the
dozen for gifts, loans, guarantees and financial assistance of every kind. I am bewildered and harassed by it all.” Now that he was growing old, money was much on his mind. He had provided liberally for Liza and her children and for Robin, and when Peter Stern and then a widowed Barbara Back fell on hard times he provided for them, too. Nonetheless Maugham was complicated about money. He loved talking about it, would boast about how much he himself made, and was acutely aware of the effect his wealth had on other people. Money gave him freedom and privacy and the ability to do as he pleased, but it also gave him considerable power—power that toward the end of his life he was to wield with devastating effect.
IT WAS NOW, shortly after the war, that Maugham finalized arrangements for the establishment of a literary prize. “Millionaires & such like27 are always ready to give money to universities [and] hospitals … but will never do anything for the arts,” he explained. “I was disappointed that neither Kipling nor Barrie did anything, & I suppose Shaw will leave his fortune in the same foolish way as his wife did.* So I think I should do what I can, but not after I am dead, now.” Worth £500 and administered by the Society of Authors, the Somerset Maugham Award was to be presented annually for a work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry written by a British subject under the age of thirty-five, the money to be spent on travel. In 1947 the first announcement of this glittering prize attracted the attention of Evelyn Waugh. Mr. Maugham’s proposal “of giving £500 yearly to a young writer to be spent in foreign travel” was cruelly tantalizing, Waugh complained in a letter to the Daily Telegraph:
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 55