The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Not long after the return from Pau, in the spring of 1881, Edith found she was once more expecting a child, but by this time she was too ill for there to be much hope that such a remedy could save her. Toward the end of that year she realized she was dying and that her boys would shortly be left motherless. Although eight months pregnant and desperately ill, she summoned the last of her strength and somehow managed to dress herself, putting on the bodice of a favorite white damask evening gown over a black skirt. Quietly letting herself out of the apartment, she went to have herself photographed so that her sons would always remember what their mother looked like. On January 24, 1882, Edith gave birth to a son, who was quickly baptized Edward Alan before dying the following afternoon. Less than a week later, at the age of forty-one, Edith herself died, six days after Willie’s eighth birthday.

  WITH HIS MOTHER’S DEATH, the world in which Willie had been so safe and happy disappeared abruptly and forever. His brothers, who had been summoned to the deathbed, shortly afterward returned to England, and Willie was left to cope with his profound and terrible grief as best he could. The child’s love for his mother was passionate and unreasoning, and he was never able to come to terms with her loss. He kept her photograph beside his bed throughout his life, together with a long tress of her hair, his two most treasured possessions, and even in great old age Maugham would admit that he had never recovered from his mother’s death. His father, himself utterly crushed by the loss of his wife, did what he could to console him, but he had seen little of his youngest son and the two were comparative strangers. As before, Robert Maugham spent six days a week at his office, while Willie was looked after by his mother’s much-loved French maid, who now assumed the role of nurse. Willie was taken away from his little French day school, going instead to the English clergyman of the church attached to the embassy for his lessons. This gentleman, realizing that his pupil’s English was far from adequate, made the boy read aloud from police reports in the newspaper, details of some of the grislier cases haunting the child for years afterward.

  Only on Sundays did the boy spend any time with his father. Robert Maugham’s one indulgence was the building of a summer house at Suresnes, a few miles west of the center of Paris, close to the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne. On Sundays father and son, companions in grief, would take the bâteau-mouche downriver to inspect progress on the house, built in an eccentric style, part Japanese, part Swiss chalet, painted white with red shutters, and overlooking a splendid panorama of the Seine, the racecourse at Longchamps, and beyond them of the whole of Paris. Robert Maugham, described by his youngest son as having a “romantic mind,” had never forgotten the travels he had made in his youth, to Morocco, Greece, and Asia Minor, and in his imagination his little house near the Seine in suburban Suresnes was a villa on the Bosporus. To emphasize the exotic effect, he had the Moorish sign against the evil eye engraved on the windows, a sign which was famously adopted by the writer Maugham as his personal insignia. “My father was a stranger4 to me when he was alive,” he was later to say. “Yet somehow that sign against the Evil Eye seems to have bound us together.”

  Before long the building was complete, the garden laid out and furniture delivered; but Robert Maugham had no time to enjoy it. Since his wife’s death he himself had grown progressively weaker, his complexion more sallow, dogged by nausea, exhaustion, and pain, symptoms of the stomach cancer that was shortly to kill him.

  On June 24, 1884, two and a half years after losing his wife, Robert Maugham himself died. He was sixty years old, and despite his long, hardworking career he left behind him less than £5,000 to be shared among his four sons. “It was the end of a home,”5 Freddie Maugham sadly recalled. “My brothers and I were soon separated by the force of events, and therefore we did not see much of each other.” Appointed the boys’ guardians were the good-natured old lawyer from the London office, William Dixon, and Robert Maugham’s only brother and Willie’s godfather, Henry Macdonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable in Kent. These two men came briefly over to Paris to cope with the crisis. A three-day auction was held to dispose of the contents of the apartment, personal possessions were packed and labeled, servants paid off, and all necessary arrangements made to transfer the brothers’ domicile from France to England. For the three older boys, accustomed to life on the other side of the Channel, the change was not so great. But for ten-year-old Willie all was strange and unfamiliar, and it was impossible for him to imagine what he would encounter in the unknown country where he was to live from now on with his uncle and aunt.

  Willie made the nine-hour journey accompanied by his faithful nurse. After the Channel steamer docked at Dover, in the midst of all the bustle of disembarkation they saw waiting for them on the quayside the sombre figure of the Reverend Henry Maugham, black-coated, bewhiskered, and severe. As they covered the twenty-odd miles to Whitstable, Willie kept close to the kindly Frenchwoman, “[the] one link6 with all the happiness and affection I’d known in the Avenue d’Antin…. my last link with my mother and all that she had meant to me.” By the time they arrived at the vicarage, it was late and the travelers were exhausted. Before Willie went up to bed, however, his uncle had something to say: he announced that there was no question of being able to afford a nurse and that she was to be sent back to France as soon as possible. And the next day she was gone.

  FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE Maugham looked back on his childhood in England as a period of utter desolation. “I shall never forget the misery7 of those next few years,” he used to say, and even in old age the memory was so painful that it gave him the “cold shudders.” Indeed, in the circumstances it is hardly surprising the boy was wretched: orphaned at ten years old, still suffering agonies of grief for his mother, and placed in the care of strangers in what was in effect a foreign country. Instead of the cosseting and indulgence, of the warmth, gaiety, and lavishness of his parents’ life, of their comfortable apartment and sophisticated society, he found himself in a bleak and alien environment, unloved and of importance to no one. Forty years later there appears a telling entry in his notebook: “He had had so little love8 when he was small that later it embarrassed him to be loved…. He did not know what to say when someone paid him a compliment, and a manifestation of affection made him feel a fool.”

  Neither his uncle nor aunt was deliberately unkind, but they were a dull, unimaginative pair, childless themselves and with no experience of dealing with children; perhaps understandably, they were nervous about having their well-regulated existence disrupted by the presence of a small boy who might well turn out to be noisy, cheeky, and rough. Willie’s uncle in particular was selfish and set in his ways. As his nephew Freddie later said of him, “he was very narrow-minded9 and a far from intelligent cleric, and I cannot truthfully praise him as a guardian of boys.” Henry Macdonald Maugham had been vicar of Whitstable for the past thirteen years, a living that he found suited him well. A lazy man, he was fortunate in having a curate, Mr. Ellman, who took much of the work of the parish off his hands. He was fortunate, too, in that his wife, Sophie, was submissive by nature and accepted without question that the comfort and convenience of her husband be considered paramount. Plump and almost pretty, her blond hair coiled in thick plaits on the crown of her head, Sophie was the daughter of a German merchant, a quiet, modest woman, straitlaced and conventional, but while prim in manner and embarrassed by any display of emotion, she had a kind heart and wanted to do her best by her nephew, as long as he in no way impinged on the well-being of her husband or the smooth running of the household.

  The vicarage, two miles outside Whitstable on the Canterbury Road, was a gloomy place. The memory of the deep unhappiness suffered there weighed on Maugham for many years and provided the inspiration for his most famous work of fiction, Of Human Bondage. The figures of the vicar and his wife are recognizably portrayed in the novel, and much of the blame for the wretchedness of the motherless boy must be laid at their door. The Reverend Henry Maugham was not popular in the pa
rish; snobbish, blinkered, and magnificently self-centered, he was a man who inspired neither affection nor esteem; and his timid wife unquestioningly accepted her husband at his own inflated valuation. And yet they were not bad people: the vicar was no Mr. Murdstone; it would never have occurred to him for a moment that he was not satisfactorily fulfilling his obligations toward his brother’s boy. But Maugham’s feelings about him and about that period of his life were tightly entangled with grief over his mother’s death, with his rage at having been abandoned. Nobody could have replaced Edith Maugham, certainly not such a stiff and starchy couple as the Reverend Henry and his wife.

  Yet within his own narrow limits, it is clear the vicar made an effort to be kind. In Of Human Bondage the episode of the young boy’s arrival at the vicarage demonstrates his uncle’s parsimony, but it also shows a genuine attempt to make contact with the boy:

  The vicar, having said grace,10 cut the top off his egg.

  “There,” he said, handing it to Philip, “you can eat my top if you like.”

  Philip would have liked an egg to himself, but he was not offered one, so took what he could….

  “How did you like that top, Philip?” asked his uncle.

  “Very much, thank you.”

  “You shall have another one on Sunday afternoon.”

  Mr. Carey always had a boiled egg at tea on Sunday so that he might be fortified for the evening service.

  Nevertheless, if there was no deliberate cruelty, Henry Maugham was capable of an obtuseness that came very near it, as Maugham would describe in a later memoir, Looking Back. After church on the morning of his first Sunday at the vicarage, Willie is sat at the dining room table and told by his uncle to learn the collect of the day:

  “I’ll hear you say it at tea time,”11 he said, “and if you say it properly you shall have a piece of cake.” Then he went into his study to rest after the morning’s exertions and my aunt went to lie down in the drawing-room. I was left alone. An hour or so later she went into the garden to have a stroll and as she passed the dining-room windows peeped in to see how I was getting on. My face was buried in my hands and I was crying, crying bitterly. She hurried into the dining-room and asked me what was the matter. Crying all the more, I sobbed, “I can’t understand it. All those words, I don’t know what they mean.” “Oh, Willie,” she said, “your uncle wouldn’t want you to cry. It was for your own good that he wanted you to learn the collect. Don’t cry.” She took the prayer book away from me and I was left alone once more to sob my heart out. When the table was set for tea my uncle did not speak to me. I could see that he was cross. I think my aunt must have persuaded him that I was too young to learn a collect by heart; anyhow I was never asked to do so again.

  Sophie plainly was touched by the boy’s unhappiness and did what she could to make the situation better, but nevertheless she and Willie remained shy and awkward with each other. And he himself was not altogether easy: in Paris he had been spoiled by his adoring female coterie, and when crossed had quite a temper. Rather than spend time with his aunt, he much preferred to take his toys and play in the kitchen, an arrangement that suited everybody. “His aunt was not sorry.12 She did not like disorder, and though she recognized that boys must be expected to be untidy she preferred that he should make a mess in the kitchen. If he fidgeted his uncle was apt to grow restless and say it was high time he went to school.”

  The Whitstable living, worth £300 a year, included with the vicarage twenty acres of glebe land. This was not wealth, but it enabled the vicar and his wife to live respectably and in modest comfort. The household comprised a gardener, two maids, a cook, and a housemaid. In the cozy back offices it was the maids who provided Willie with a version of the warm feminine company with which he had been so happily surrounded in the Avenue d’Antin. In the two novels drawing most nearly on Maugham’s own experience, Of Human Bondage and Cakes and Ale, the kindhearted maternal figure in both instances is the cook, Mary-Ann, in real life Mary-Anne Tilley. In the novels it is she who looks after the boy and whom he comes to love; she, not his aunt, who nurses him through his childhood illnesses, gives him his bath, tucks him up in bed, and tells him stories. The storytelling was important, for while he listened Willie would become wholly absorbed, forgetting his misery and his longing for his mother. As he later wrote of himself at this period, it was when he was unhappy that he wanted stories most, a form of addiction that was to stay with him for life.

  As the days passed the sense of strangeness began to wear off, and by the end of the autumn of 1884 Maugham had largely grown accustomed to his new life. It was a lonely life, because his uncle considered himself a cut above most of Whitstable society, shamelessly toadying to the local squire while refusing to have anything to do with the tradesmen, or with the fishermen and their families; nor, as a pillar of the Church of England, would he speak to chapel folk, crossing the road rather than pass on the same side as the Baptist minister, Mr. Laurence, or the Wesleyan, Mr. Walter. “Old Maugham,” as he was referred to behind his back, was “a cracking snob” and considered few children suitable as playmates for his nephew. A Whitstable contemporary, one of the Board School boys, recalled how isolated the child appeared. “His guardians would rigidly take care13 that he should be kept apart from common people,” he said. “He was too remote from our way of living to encourage familiarity.”

  As a consequence of his enforced isolation and of the lack of love, Maugham changed from a child naturally sociable and outgoing to one guarded and withdrawn. Sometimes he was overwhelmed by sadness and a longing for his mother, but he soon learned to hide his emotions, particularly when hurt or unhappy, and could never bear to be seen crying. He spent hours playing on his own in the garden, fishing for roach in the pond or aimlessly swinging on the big five-barred gate at the end of the drive. Charlotte Etheridge, the doctor’s daughter, remembered glimpsing his forlorn figure, unsuitably clad in a Frenchified velvet suit with a white lace collar, standing alone and aimless outside the house.

  And there was another reason for Maugham’s apartness. He had developed a bad stammer which made him painfully self-conscious. In France there had been no sign of such an impediment. Yet since Maugham’s arrival in England the stammer was marked, and it caused him, and for much of his life continued to cause him, anguish and humiliation. Shy and unsure of himself, he now also had to cope with this added horror, only too well aware of how conspicuous it made him. For a child feeling his way in a foreign environment, it was particularly terrifying to be at the mercy of such a cruel encumbrance, never knowing when his speech, his chief medium of communication, might not be hideously distorted and he himself made to look slow-witted and ridiculous, laughed at as a figure of fun. Inevitably, his sense of anger and frustration was compounded by a deep, if irrational, feeling of self-disgust, a feeling unknown in his previous unclouded existence but which from now on was to remain with Maugham always. There was a memorably harrowing occasion when his uncle took him on the train to London for the day, sending him back on his own:

  There was a long queue14 outside the third-class ticket office, so I took my place in the queue. But when it came to my turn to ask for my ticket to Whitstable I couldn’t get the word out. I just stood there stammering. People behind me were getting impatient, but I still couldn’t say “Whitstable.” Suddenly two men stepped out of the queue and pushed me aside. “We can’t wait all night for you,” they said. “Stop wasting our time.” So I had to go to the back of the queue and start all over again. I’ll never forget the humiliation of that moment—with everyone staring at me.

  ONE OF THE STRANGEST aspects of Maugham’s life in Kent is the absence of any sign of communication between himself and his brothers. In Paris, it is true, he had lived like an only child and no strong bond had formed between himself and the three older boys. They had been sent to the newly founded Dover College, chosen mainly for its ease of access from France. From Dover College the eldest, Charlie, who used to take his small broth
er to the circus and theater during the holidays, had gone up to Cambridge to read law, while Freddie and Harry were still at school. Although Dover is only just over twenty miles from Whitstable, there seems to have been little contact with the vicarage. It is possible that the vicar discouraged visits, and entirely probable that Willie never thought to complain. Freddie was also living with a clergyman relation, the rector of Paston in Cambridgeshire, but this aunt and uncle were cheerful and affectionate and he was happy there, and it may have been only later that he discovered how miserable his brother’s situation had been.

  Daily life at the vicarage was strictly regulated and monotonous. The day revolved around four meals: breakfast, followed by prayers, then dinner at one o’clock, tea at five, and a cold supper (bread and butter and a little stewed fruit) at eight, followed by more prayers. This was the routine for six days of the week leading up to Sunday, the great day when the vicar delivered his sermon. This was an effort for which he required substantial bolstering in advance, a reverential hush during composition in his study, an egg beaten up in a glass of sherry at breakfast, and another egg for tea to support him through Evensong. Willie, who was not allowed to play on Sundays or make any noise, rode with his uncle and aunt to church in a hired fly that smelled strongly of stale straw. In the evening the boy again accompanied his uncle to church, this time on foot. “At first he was shy with his uncle, but little by little grew used to him, and he would slip his hand in his uncle’s and walk more easily for the feeling of protection.”

  Apart from attending church, Maugham left the house only to escort his aunt on her occasional trips into town. There was little for him to do on these excursions except trail after her while she did her shopping, or wait fidgeting while she conducted her business at the bank, but there was often something interesting to look at. In the 1880s Whitstable, on the windswept north coast of Kent looking out over the North Sea, was still primarily a fishing community famous for its oyster beds. The harbor was always full of activity, with the coming and going of fishing boats and oyster dredgers, of shabby little colliers bringing coal from Newcastle, and luggers carrying cargoes of hay and wheat up the Thames to Tower Bridge. Leading up from the harbor was a web of narrow streets of wooden fishermen’s houses, outside which on fine days the men sat smoking and mending their nets. Ocasionally Maugham was allowed inside one of these low-roofed dwellings and invited to admire some treasure brought back from the other side of the world, a lacquer box from Japan, a decorated dagger from the bazaars of Istanbul, whose owner would thrill the boy by telling him stories of the distant voyages of his youth. The lengthy high street was lined with shops displaying centuries-old Kentish names: Gann, Kemp, Cobb, Driffield. There was little wheeled traffic, and if Aunt Sophie stopped in the street to gossip with an acquaintance she rarely had to step aside for anything other than the doctor’s dogcart or the baker’s trap. In winter, Whitstable could be bitterly cold and the icy east wind drove people indoors. But in summer when the weather was fine the little town took on a holiday aspect, with visitors from London strolling down to the beach where they could hire a bathing machine, take a turn on the swing boats, and buy a shrimp tea for sixpence.