The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  During the Michaelmas term of 1888, when Maugham was fourteen, he suffered a bad attack of pleurisy and had to be dispatched home for the rest of the term. By Christmas he was better, but given his clinical history it was considered imprudent for him to return to school until the weather grew warmer, and so he was sent to Hyères, near Toulon in the south of France. Here he stayed with an Englishman who made his living tutoring convalescent boys; Hyères, like Pau, the town in the Pyrenees where he had been taken by his mother, was much prized for the health-giving properties of its mild climate. It was a strange experience for Maugham to be back in France, the country he had left four years before, whose language he had barely heard spoken intelligibly since.

  When Maugham returned to school after Easter the following year, 1889, he found himself out of step. A few months is a long time in the life of a school: his old friends had made new friends, and he had been moved up to a different class, where the work was unfamiliar and the bullying of the hot-tempered Campbell seemed intensified. Maugham’s hatred of the man possessed him. “I made up my mind,32 then and there, that I would never spend another term with that beast of a master.” The plan had been for Maugham to go to Cambridge, like his brothers, and in this he was warmly encouraged by Mr. Field, who had no doubt of the boy’s ability to win the necessary scholarship if he applied himself. But now his ambitions in that direction were diminished by his loathing for the school. His overwhelming desire was to leave as quickly as possible, and if that meant sacrificing his Cambridge career, then sacrifice it he would. “I was small for my age33 and frail, but cunning. I had no difficulty in persuading my uncle that with my delicate health it would be safer for me to spend the following winter again with the tutor at Hyères rather than take the risk of another winter in the cold and damp of Canterbury, with the happy result that at the end of that mortifying term I left the King’s School for good.”

  Maugham had got his way, but the indications are that his relief at effecting his escape did not bring him the happiness he had anticipated. Philip Carey, desperate to leave school, also gives up his chance of the famous university. Expecting to feel nothing but excitement on his final day, he is instead tormented by regret:

  His school-days were over,34 and he was free; but the wild exultation to which he had looked forward at that moment was not there. He walked round the precincts slowly, and a profound depression seized him…. He wondered whether he had done right. He was dissatisfied with himself and with all his circumstances.

  * “a charming woman, with countless friends in Parisian high society, in which she occupies one of the highest positions.”

  * “dear papa, dear mama, your little willie is happy on christmas day to give you his best wishes and grateful affection. Believe me to be, dear papa, dear mama, your respectful son, willie maugham.”

  * His youthful bicycling was to be vividly recalled nearly fifty years later in a crucial scene in Cakes and Ale.

  * The name Rose clearly had significance, as Maugham also gave it to the object of Stephen Carey’s passion and to the irresistible heroine of Cakes and Ale.

  CHAPTER 2

  AT ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL

  • • •

  WITH HIS FORMAL EDUCATION COMPLETE, MAUGHAM AFTER HIS second winter at Hyères returned home to the vicarage very much at loose ends. At sixteen he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, except leave Whitstable again as quickly as possible. It was Aunt Sophie, sympathetic to his situation, who suggested he go to Germany to learn the language, and she wrote to relations of hers asking them to recommend a family with whom her young nephew could stay. The vicar approved of the scheme, no doubt relieved to have the boy once more off his hands. “He did not much like me,”1 Maugham wrote, “for which I cannot blame him, since I do not think I was a likeable boy, and as it was my own money that was being spent on my education, he was willing enough to let me do as I chose.” Thus it was arranged that Maugham should travel to Heidelberg, where he would lodge with a professor and his wife who ran a pension for foreign students.

  Arriving in Heidelberg on a sunny May morning in 1890, Maugham was enchanted by what he saw of the city as he walked up from the station, following the porter with his luggage-laden barrow up through the narrow medieval streets and along a shady avenue to the large white house that was to be his home for the next year. The Herr Professor, a tall man in middle age with graying fair hair, was courteous and correct, addressing Maugham in formal, slightly archaic English, while his wife by contrast was a stout, red-faced little woman, bright-eyed and bustling, who chattered away in a mixture of German and broken English. At dinner the first evening Maugham came face-to-face with his fellow guests: a couple of American theology students, a Frenchman and a Chinese, both studying at the university, and a lanky New Englander, James Newton, who taught Greek at Harvard and had come to Germany to broaden his horizons. Maugham’s priority was to learn the language, and in this he was given daily tuition by the professor, who turned out to be an excellent teacher, hitting on the clever device of setting his pupil to translate into German one of the Shakespeare plays he had studied at school. With his retentive memory and good ear Maugham learned quickly, and as soon as he was reasonably proficient embarked on a study of Goethe, for whose work his teacher had a fervent enthusiasm. Maugham also enrolled in courses at the university, where he heard the distinguished philosopher Kuno Fischer electrify his audiences with his discourses on Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic theories—that the reason for human existence is unknown, free will is an illusion, and the afterlife does not exist—came to Maugham as a revelation, further undermining the last small vestiges of his religious faith.

  Maugham was a keen student and spent many hours reading and writing in his little turret room overlooking the treetops. He was very happy. After the tedium and restrictions of school and the vicarage, he reveled in his independence and responded eagerly to the stimulus of his new environment. He read not only the German authors to whom he was now introduced but French writers, unknown in Whitstable but whose works had filled the bookshelves at the Avenue d’Antin: La Rochefoucauld, Racine, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Anatole France. He began writing himself, ambitiously embarking on a centenary life of the composer Meyerbeer, but he destroyed the manuscript after it was rejected by the first publisher to whom it was sent. The other young men at the pension were by several years his senior, and Maugham was impressed by what seemed to him their exceptional intelligence and sophistication. They were friendly toward him and included him in their vigorous discussions on art, literature, and theology that often continued late into the night.

  The American, James Newton, paid Maugham particular attention, kindly offering to show him the best walks within easy reach of the city. Almost daily they set off together to explore the famous ruined castle or tramp up the Königstuhl to admire the view of the Neckar valley, of the tall roofs and spires of Heidelberg, and farther off the misty outlines of Mannheim and Worms and in the distance the glinting waters of the Rhine. Sometimes they took tea in a leafy beer garden and in the evenings strolled round the Stadtgarten listening to the band. When Newton planned a fortnight’s holiday in Switzerland, Maugham, having obtained his uncle’s permission, accepted the older man’s invitation to go with him, all expenses paid. It seemed an idyllic friendship; and Maugham later claimed it was only with hindsight he realized that his mentor’s interest in him had been primarily sexual, that Newton’s attentions were inspired less by generosity than by physical attraction.

  Soon after their return to Heidelberg, Newton left for Berlin, his place at the pension taken by an Englishman, John Ellingham Brooks. Brooks was recently down from Cambridge and, having wasted a year failing to study law in London, had come to Germany in search of culture. Handsome, with blue eyes, a wide, sensual mouth, and wavy fair hair, Brooks was charming, kindhearted, sentimental, and vain. Passionate about literature, he talked with hypnotic intensity about his favorite authors, all new to
Maugham, about Meredith, Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Omar Khayyám. He also wrote poetry himself, mostly of a pessimistic nature, which he recited while tossing back his blond locks and gazing into the middle distance with a vatic blue-eyed stare. Maugham was entranced. He sat spellbound as Brooks held forth on the glories of Italy and Greece, on Shelley and Plato and Oscar Wilde, on Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold. Avidly he read what Brooks told him to read, swallowed whole his unremarkable opinions, and was flattered when this charismatic character began to single him out, defending Brooks when the others ridiculed his arguments, as they not infrequently did.

  Before long Brooks, like his predecessor, was inviting Maugham to accompany him on walks, during which he would boast of his aesthetic sensibility, his indifference to worldly success, and his disdain for the pitifully humdrum lives he saw his contemporaries leading. Brooks had big plans for himself, and it was only lack of time that so far had prevented his writing the important work that would ensure his place in the pantheon. Such talk was heady stuff for a lonely and intelligent boy, and when it became clear that Brooks required more of him than to be simply an admiring acolyte, Maugham was happy to oblige. Years afterward Maugham confided to a friend that he had lost his virginity to Brooks, but it seems not to have meant very much, only taking one step further the kind of activity that had been common practice at school. Indeed, for Maugham at sixteen, an impressionable and highly sexed adolescent, it was intensely exciting to be the lover of such an apparently brilliant and original young man. In time he came to see through his mentor, dismissing him as a wastrel and poseur, and his embarrassment at having been taken in led him to treat him harshly both in life and in print. But during those early days in Heidelberg, Maugham’s relationship with Brooks was inspiring and added greatly to his sense of liberation, to his conviction that at last he was on the threshold of the real world.

  One of Brooks’s enthusiasms was for the theater, and when the winter repertory season began he and Maugham went two or three times a week to the little Stadttheater, animatedly discussing the production in the tavern afterward. Except at the age of seven when he had seen Bernhardt in Paris, Maugham before he arrived in Germany had never been to a play—the modest touring productions occasionally given in Whitstable had been considered unsuitable entertainment by the vicar—and he was now seized by a passion for the stage. The moment he entered the theater he felt excited and engaged, and the more drama he saw the more he became fascinated by the technique of playwriting, eagerly sketching out plots and writing down snatches of dialogue. Among much else, Brooks and Maugham saw several plays by Ibsen, a writer admired by the intelligentsia but regarded by most decent folk as outrageous and obscene. To Maugham, Ibsen’s plays were a revelation. During his time in Germany he went several times to Munich, where it is possible in January 1891 that he was present for the first-ever production of Hedda Gabler. It was also in Munich that he caught his one and only sight of the great Norwegian, peacefully reading his paper over a glass of beer at the Maximilianerhof. Heavily under Ibsen’s influence, he studied the dramatist’s technique by translating into English German versions of Ibsen’s plays, and he began experimenting with one-acters characterized by an unflinching realism and much concerned with shameful secrets and venereal disease.

  Shortly before Christmas, Brooks left Germany for Florence, where he intended to immerse himself in Dante and Boccaccio, and Maugham was able to resume his studies uninterrupted. But the influence of Brooks had unsettled him, and “the delights of those easy,2 monotonous and exciting days in Heidelberg” began to pall. Now he was impatient to go home, assert his independence, and begin earning his living.

  In July 1891, Maugham returned to Whitstable after his year’s absence to find his aunt and uncle visibly diminished: both had aged, his uncle stouter and balder, Aunt Sophie wizened and obviously unwell. With no idea what to do with himself—writing as a profession was considered out of the question—Maugham asked his uncle for advice. The vicar naturally favored the church, but even he accepted that his nephew’s stammer made this an unlikely proposition. Maugham’s brothers had followed their father into the law; but the law, too, demanded a high level of fluency. Eventually it was Dr. Etheridge, the family doctor, who came to the rescue by suggesting that young Maugham might do worse than to train as a physician at his own alma mater, St. Thomas’s Hospital. And so after a few weeks at a crammer’s preparing for the necessary examination, on October 3, 1892, Maugham at the age of eighteen entered the medical school as a student.

  IT HAD LONG BEEN Maugham’s ambition to live in London. Since returning from Heidelberg he had chafed more than ever at the dull domesticity of Whitstable, and recently the gloomy atmosphere at the vicarage had turned even gloomier. In poor health for some time, Aunt Sophie had gone to Bad Ems in Germany in the hope that the waters would restore her, and there at the end of August 1892 she had died. Maugham had grown fond of his aunt, but he had been too much away from home to feel her loss more than slightly. Moreover he had no wish to be reminded of the harrowing bereavements of his early childhood, and now was desperate to escape. Since his school days he had been aware of the lure of London, in his imagination a city of infinite promise. A couple of boys at school had been Londoners and Maugham had been intrigued by their boasted familiarity with the seamier sides of the capital, of “the glitter of cheap restaurants,3 bars where men, half drunk, sat on high stools talking with barmaids; and under the street lamps the mysterious passing of dark crowds bent upon pleasure.”

  Such sinister glamour was little in evidence at 11 Vincent Square, a large, slightly shabby Georgian square close by the Thames Embankment, only a short distance from the Houses of Parliament. For £1 a week Maugham had two rooms on the ground floor, a bedroom at the back, and a sitting room with a bay window in the front overlooking a row of enormous plane trees and the wide green expanse of the Westminster School playing fields that the square enclosed. Here he was looked after by his landlady, Eliza Foreman, a friendly soul, cheerful and energetic, who took pride in looking after her gentlemen lodgers, for whom she provided two meals a day, a substantial cooked breakfast and a rather more frugal dinner. Maugham took trouble to make his little parlor comfortable, hanging on the wall a print of a soulful peasant girl holding a mandolin that he had found as a special offer in a Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News. Later, as his taste grew more sophisticated, he replaced this luscious piece of kitsch with mezzotints of paintings by Perugino, Hobbema, and Van Dyck bought for a few shillings apiece from a shop in Soho Square.

  Classes at the hospital began at 9:00, and every morning Maugham woke to the sound of his landlady lighting the fire in his sitting room. Bathing hurriedly in the tin tub kept under his bed, he ate his breakfast and then walked briskly down to the Embankment, threading his way through the rush-hour crowds surging over Lambeth Bridge, then along Lambeth Palace Road to St. Thomas’s. From Monday to Friday he was fully occupied, but during the first few weekends the time hung heavy and Maugham was lonely. He wandered through the National Gallery, strolled around the West End, ate his modest meals in an ABC,* and most Saturday evenings he went to the theater. It was a relief when Monday morning dawned and he could return to regimented timetables and hospital routine.

  St. Thomas’s, one of the great London teaching hospitals, was founded as a charitable institution in the twelfth century for the purpose of treating the diseased poor, which seven hundred years later still remained its primary purpose. A notable distinction was conferred on the hospital when Florence Nightingale established her school of nursing there, and Miss Nightingale’s dominating influence not only over her school but over the running of the entire complex ensured that high standards were rigorously maintained. At the medical school most students took the Conjoint Board of the College of Surgeons and the College of Physicians, a course costing a little over £300 per annum and stretching over five years, the winter term lasting from October to March, the summer session from May
to the end of July.

  The subjects of study during the first months were anatomy, biology, physics, and chemistry, and most of this Maugham found ineffably tedious. Dutifully he attended the lectures, learned hundreds of requisite facts by heart, and having equipped himself with a microscope, a mahogany instrument case, and a copy of Heath’s Dissector, carried out his practical work in the dissecting room, which was painted an ominous red and reeked of disinfectant. This part of the course first-year students often found difficult to stomach, although Maugham never suffered from squeamishness and proved dexterous with the scalpel. The hospital provided the corpses, purchased at £5 each from the local workhouse and preserved with a mixture of vermilion and arsenic (the former to highlight the arteries, the latter to prevent putrefaction), and the students worked in pairs, clubbing together to buy their body parts, arms and legs 12 shillings and sixpence, abdomen seven and six, head and neck 15 shillings. As a guard against nausea, the lighting of cigarettes and pipes was encouraged, a privilege that naturally fostered a sociable atmosphere, and as a result “a good deal of gossip4 went on over the dissection of a ‘part.’” Indeed at the end of the morning, when the demonstrator had left and the mangled parts been returned to the students’ lockers, the dissecting room took on quite a cozy atmosphere, a home away from home where shirt-sleeved young men with a few minutes to spare could drop in for a quick smoke and a gossip.