The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  As at school, Maugham craved popularity and acceptance, but he was still shy, still inhibited by his stammer, and although he was well disposed toward his contemporaries, there was little common ground. Those who had been to university were inclined to be standoffish, or so Maugham felt; he had no interest in the seemingly universal enthusiasm for cricket and football; neither did he wish to take part in the prodigious after-hours drinking bouts, having learned from unpleasant experience that more than a small quantity of alcohol made him sick. There were one or two handsome fellows with whom he became silently infatuated, envying their charm and high spirits, but by now he was adept at hiding his feelings. His guarded manner made any real intimacy impossible, and by his classmates he was regarded as an aloof, almost forbidding individual.

  The students at St. Thomas’s, like young men everywhere, talked exhaustively about sex and constantly bragged about their sexual exploits, a subject that interested Maugham a good deal. Until now his physical relations had been only with men and he felt ashamed of his lack of experience with women. One Saturday evening he walked up to the Strand to pick up a prostitute, who for £1 agreed to spend the night with him. Reassured by her youthful, almost countrified appearance, he accompanied her to a small hotel off Shaftesbury Avenue where he was led into a bare little room smelling of stale tobacco, furnished only with a chair, a washstand, and a big wooden bed with dirty sheets. The result of the encounter was a dose of the clap, necessitating a discreet visit to one of the house physicians for treatment. But far from embarrassment, Maugham felt pleased with himself, proud to be able to join in boasting with the other chaps, and perhaps privately relieved to discover he was able to function “normally.”

  Throughout his life an appearance of conventionality was of profound importance to Maugham. The fact of his bisexuality had to be kept secret from most sections of the society in which he moved, and this need for secrecy was something that subliminally he recognized early on. Learning in childhood how to live undercover, Maugham rarely revealed himself except to his closest intimates. His French upbringing and his stammer had set him apart from the boys at school, and now to be categorized as an invert, as the term then was, and thus a member of yet another unpopular minority, would have been painfully difficult to accept. At twenty he was well aware of his sexual orientation, of his feelings for men, although for years he tried to pretend that such feelings were no more than a minor aberration. “I tried to persuade myself,”5 he said in later life, “that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer—whereas really it was the other way round.” He was struck by an incident that took place while he was going over his dissected “part” with the demonstrator; he failed to find the specified nerve, and when it was pointed out to him, he protested it was in the wrong place. “I complained of the abnormality,6 and [the demonstrator], smiling, said that in anatomy it was the normal that was uncommon…. The remark sank into my mind,” wrote Maugham afterward, “and since then it has been forced upon me that it is true of man as well as of anatomy.”

  PRIVATE AND SELF-CONTAINED, Maugham took little part in the social life of the hospital. “[I] made few friends there,”7 he recalled, “for I was occupied with other things.” Certainly medicine was of small interest: he knew he needed to qualify, as that would provide him with a career on which to fall back if all else failed; but Maugham was determined to make his living by his pen, and single-minded in this pursuit, he allowed nothing and nobody to get in its way. A passionate autodidact and exceptionally disciplined and industrious, Maugham read prodigiously, not only in English literature—novels, plays, poetry—but also in French, German, Russian, and Italian. He copied out passages from Swift, Dryden, Jeremy Taylor, committing parts of them to memory. His head was filled with ideas and he covered page after page in his notebooks with outlines for stories and dramatic plots, with scraps of dialogue and with observations and reflections. “I was writing,”8 he said, “because I could not help it.” His immediate ambition was to write a play, and he continued to go regularly to the theater, often in the company of a good-looking young man whom he had first met in Heidelberg, Walter Adney Payne.

  Payne’s father, George Payne, was a leading figure in the London music hall, and as manager of the Tivoli in the Strand, the New Oxford on Oxford Street, and the London Pavilion in Piccadilly, he enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the West End. As Maugham, the medical student, and Payne, studying to be a chartered accountant, were both chronically short of funds, Payne senior was a valuable source of free tickets, enabling them to go nearly every Saturday afternoon to the halls. In the evening they went to the theater, where from their cheap seats in the pit they saw such memorable productions as Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and George Alexander’s staging of The Importance of Being Earnest. On January 5, 1895, they were among the fashionable audience at the St. James’s Theatre for the disastrous first night of Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, when the distinguished author while taking his bow was humiliatingly booed off the stage. It was an agonizingly distressing scene that Maugham never forgot. “[James] was greeted with such an outburst9 of boos and catcalls as only then have I heard in the theatre,” he wrote many years later. “He confronted the hostile audience, his jaw fallen so that his mouth was slightly open and on his countenance a look of complete bewilderment. He was paralysed. I don’t know why the curtain wasn’t immediately brought down.”

  Pictures were another passion of Maugham’s, and here he had a mentor in the eccentric form of one Wentworth Huyshe. A generation older than Maugham, Huyshe had been a distinguished war correspondent for both the New York Herald and the London Times. He had lived and worked in London, Paris, and New York and had married twice, eventually settling with his wife and nine children in Essex, where he led a bohemian existence in pursuit of his many and varied interests. A friend first of Harry Maugham, Huyshe saw considerable promise in Harry’s younger brother. He encouraged Maugham with his writing and took him to concerts, galleries, and museums, teaching him how to look at pictures and introducing him to new names in various branches of the arts. When Maugham’s first novel was published a few years later, he inscribed a copy to Wentworth Huyshe and sent it to him with a grateful letter. “I can never forget how kind10 you were to me when I was a stupid boy, & you took me about & showed me things, & inspired me with all sorts of new ideas. I can honestly say that I owe a very great deal to you, and now it is a great pleasure to me to be able to send you my firstborn.”

  Meanwhile at the hospital Maugham had moved on to study practical pharmacy and materia medica, subjects which he found marginally less tedious than anatomy, quite enjoying the business of rolling pills, mixing ointments, and grinding up powders. But it was not until he took his turn as a clerk in the Out-Patients’ Department that suddenly his attention was fully engaged. Here for the first time he found his work of consuming interest, fascinated not by the range of ailments but by the men and women themselves who day after day came to the hospital for help.

  Lambeth in the 1890s was one of the poorest and most overcrowded areas of London. Families tended to be large, and although infant mortality was high (deaths of the under-fives accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total mortality rate), many couples had ten, eleven, or even twelve children, with whom they lived in dark, cramped houses backing onto filthy courts with open sewers, or in overcrowded tenements where conditions were squalid in the extreme. Many of those fortunate enough to be employed worked in sweatshops, where sometimes seventeen or eighteen men and women were crammed into a tiny top-floor room, inadequately lit and heated, with water closets without water and the only ventilation coming from broken windows nailed shut, the empty panes filled up with canvas. Disease ran rife, and drink, easily available and comparatively cheap, was the most popular panacea, with the result that high levels of domestic violence were commonplace. Death from starvation was not infrequently the end for the elderly and
the unemployed. Such was the population that depended on St. Thomas’s for its free medical care, and with which Maugham was now in daily contact.

  From early afternoon the waiting room was thronged with men, women, and children, and despite the strong odor of disinfectant the stench of unwashed bodies grew sickeningly pungent as the day wore on. The men were seen first, most suffering from chronic bronchitis, or “a nasty ’acking cough,” as it was usually described, as well as venereal disease and every possible variety of drink-related disorder. With the women, aged prematurely by frequent childbirth, the main problems stemmed from malnutrition and from the split lips, black eyes, and broken ribs regularly dealt them by their drunken husbands. Maugham assisted the house physician, who allotted him the more straightforward cases to deal with on his own, and it was now that he heard the stories of these frequently harrowing lives. For the patients it was unusual to find among the hard-pressed medical staff someone who took such an interest in their personal problems, and they responded gratefully to this sympathetic young doctor with his gentle manner and expressive dark eyes. Unlike many of his colleagues, Maugham never patronized his patients: it was understanding they wanted, not pity, and through his genuine interest he came to learn more about their lives and of their teeming, claustrophobic world than did many of the highly qualified doctors who saw their patients only as medical specimens. Never before had Maugham been confronted by such a variety of character and of physical type, and he was enthralled by the narratives that day after day were spun out before him, excited by their indefinable potential. So absorbed did he become in these glimpses of life in the raw, of human nature at its most unguarded, that when he himself fell ill—with septic tonsillitis contracted after performing a postmortem on a badly decomposed corpse—in spite of being nursed in the private wing and “treated like a crowned head,”11 he could hardly wait to resume his duties.

  BUSY ALTHOUGH HE WAS at the hospital, and in his spare time immersed in his own reading and writing, Maugham nonetheless maintained his links with family and friends. One of the latter was John Ellingham Brooks, last seen in Heidelberg, who now came wafting in from the Continent, where he had been traveling extensively and writing flowery letters about love and art and the glories of Italy, particularly as seen through the eyes of Ruskin and Pater. As before in Germany, Maugham found Brooks’s company inspirational, and falling again under his influence he took the opportunity of his first Easter vacation, six weeks in the spring of 1894, to visit Italy. Already the previous year at Brooks’s instigation he had begun to study Italian, and now with £20 in his pocket he set off, spending a few days in Paris on the way in order to see two of his brothers, Charles and Harry, and to visit the Louvre. Fired by Pater’s essay on the Mona Lisa, he made excitedly for Leonardo’s famous portrait, but “I was bitterly disappointed.12 Was this the picture Pater had written about with such eloquence and in prose so ornate?” He continued on to Genoa and Pisa, and then to Florence, where he stayed for more than a fortnight. Eager to learn, Maugham made good use of his time. “I lived laborious days,”13 as he rightly recalled, beginning each morning with a couple of hours studying Dante before setting off to see the sights, Ruskin in hand. Only in the evening did he allow himself a little recreation, wandering out after dinner in search of adventure, but according to the account written years later, “such was my innocence,14 or at least my shyness, I always came home as virtuous as I had gone out.”

  Shortly after returning from Italy, Maugham had two family weddings to attend. The first, and much the more unexpected, was that of the Reverend Henry Maugham, who, a widower for not quite two years, had proposed marriage to Ellen Matthews, the fifty-year-old spinster daughter of a Gen. Henry Matthews of Bath. The wedding took place on June 6, 1894, after which the new Mrs. Maugham was brought to Whitstable, where she was soon discovered to be a merry creature, in every way a lively contrast to her predecessor. During Aunt Ellen’s occupation the vicarage became a much more cheerful house to visit, and it was clear that she made the vicar very happy.

  Two weeks later, on June 21, Charlie, eldest of the four Maugham brothers, was married in London to Mabel Hardy, daughter of the animal painter Heywood Hardy. For the past five years Charlie had been working in Paris, a junior partner in the family law firm, now Sewell et Maugham, and it was here that he had met his future wife, who was studying at the Conservatoire. They returned to Paris after the wedding, where they embarked on the kind of prosperous, sociable way of life that the Maugham parents had enjoyed a generation earlier. Like his father, Charlie was good-natured and clever, while Mabel, or “Beldy” as she was known, a talented amateur artist, was vivacious and fun, both popular members of Parisian expatriate society. For a time Charlie’s younger brother Harry worked with him at Sewell et Maugham, but the arrangement had not been a success. Harry was an unconventional character who had little interest in the law, his real ambition, like Maugham’s, to be a writer. Gentle, kindhearted, but also thin-skinned and neurotic, Harry spent most of his spare time composing lengthy verse dramas and sitting in cafés in company with like-minded young men, artists and poets; soon he gave up any pretense of pursuing a legal career, left Paris, and after a spell in London moved to Italy. He and his younger brother had much in common, aesthetically and intellectually; they were both outsiders, shy and insecure; they were both sexually nonconformist; they both wanted to write; and yet they never became close. They were separated geographically, but also by a lack of that fraternal bond that never had the chance properly to form between Maugham and his brothers.

  With Charlie and Harry living on the Continent, Maugham saw most of Freddie, the second oldest, who had remained in London and joined chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. Ironically it was their relationship that came to be most strained, the ultraconventional Freddie coming to regard his younger brother with a censoriousness deeply resented by Maugham, who with part of himself would have liked to have attained the ironclad respectability of his sibling. As young men, however, this mutual hostility was mild and intermittent, and they had enough of a shared past and interests in common—the theater, golf, looking at pictures—for them to enjoy each other’s company, at least in small doses. Freddie, in adulthood always addressed as “F.H.,” was a handsome, athletic man of dour demeanor, his icy reserve effectively concealing a sensitiveness and vulnerability that was rarely revealed, even within the family. In December 1896, F.H. would marry Helen (“Nellie”) Romer, daughter of a High Court judge. While F.H. appeared joyless and austere, Nellie was affectionate, gregarious, and high-spirited, possessed of enormous charm and a rambunctious sense of humor. If her boisterous jollity sometimes grated, F.H. nevertheless depended on his wife for the sympathy and warmth he craved but could not show. She and Maugham took to each other at once and quickly became close friends, Nellie inviting her brother-in-law to family occasions, including him in amateur theatricals, and often asking him to tea on her own, when the two of them would gossip amicably before her husband with his blighting presence returned to the house in the evening.

  When Maugham resumed his studies at the hospital after the summer of 1894, he moved from Out-Patients to working on the wards, accompanying the house physician on his rounds, carrying out tests, and writing up case notes. As before, Maugham enjoyed contact with the patients, and yet the wards lacked the drama and excitement of his previous post, and he welcomed the transition to surgical clerk, assisting at operations, standing beside the surgeon ready to hand him his instruments. If the operation were an unusual one, the theater galleries would fill up with observers, but on most days there was not more than a handful of students watching, which gave the proceedings a coziness that Maugham relished.

  Occasionally his sangfroid deserted him, as he recounts in a description of watching an operation that painfully brought back memories of his mother’s death. “The other day I went into the theatre15 to see a Caesarian,” he wrote in his notebook for 1897.

  The operation appeared to go very well a
nd Dr. C’s face beamed when he extracted the baby. This morning I was in the ward and asked one of the nurses how she was getting on. She told me she’d died in the night. I don’t know why, it gave me a shock and I had to frown because I was afraid I was going to cry. It was silly, I didn’t know her, I’d only seen her on the operating table. I suppose what affected me was the passion of that woman, just an ordinary hospital patient, to have a baby, a passion so intense that she was willing to incur the frightful risk; it seemed hard, dreadfully hard, that she had to die.

  The death of a mother in childbirth always touched Maugham deeply, and it was a theme that was to appear a number of times in his fiction.

  In both the Easter and summer vacations of 1895 Maugham went again to Italy, this time to Capri in the company of Ellingham Brooks. Describing the island as “the most enchanting spot16 I had ever seen,” Maugham was bewitched by the romantic beauty of the place, reveling in the warmth, the scented air, and the atmosphere of dreamy tranquillity that Capri possessed in those days when it was still a rural community with a small foreign population, visited by only a few tourists who tended to avoid the summer months. On this first visit Maugham and Brooks lodged in a modest pensione where four shillings a day bought board, lodging, and a view of Vesuvius from the bedroom window. Mornings were dedicated to study, after which at midday they swam off the rocks at the Bagno Timberino and basked in the sun before lazily wending their way uphill for lunch under a vine-covered pergola. Every evening after dinner they joined the throng at Morgano’s, the wine shop beside the Piazza Grande. Here the expatriate community gathered to exchange news and gossip, Maugham listening intently as Brooks and his new acquaintances, writers, painters, sculptors, held forth on art, philosophy, and literature. Lacking their learning and fluency, Maugham felt himself at a disadvantage; he sat smoking and saying little, never mentioning his own attempts at composition.