I thought it all grand.17 Art, art for art’s sake, was the only thing that mattered in the world…. They were all agreed about this, that they burned with a hard, gem-like flame. I was too shy to tell them that I had written a novel and was half-way through another and it was a great mortification to me, burning as I was too with a hard, gem-like flame, to be treated as a philistine who cared for nothing but dissecting dead bodies and would seize an unguarded moment to give his best friend an enema.
Inhibited in conversation he may have been, yet the tongue-in-cheek reference to giving his best friend an enema indicates confidence in other areas. Maugham at twenty-one took care with his appearance and had begun to dress with a certain flair; with his slim build and expressive features he was an engaging young man, sexually magnetic and well aware of the glances he attracted. The powerful creative impulse, which inspired so many ideas and drove him to write for hours every night, materialized also in a sexual energy that, even while he was sitting mainly motionless and silent as during the evening sessions at Morgano’s, was potent. The fact that he and Brooks were lovers would have caused little comment on Capri, where irregular relationships were accepted almost as the norm. The island had long enjoyed a reputation for tolerance toward its foreign community, many of whom were drawn there as much by the good-looking Capresi youth as by the beauty of the setting. As a later inhabitant, Compton Mackenzie, wrote of Capri, “Its reputation as a decomposer18 of character was classic.” A blind eye was turned to the conduct of most of these exotic imports, for instance, the notorious Count Fersen, pedophile and opium addict, or the ex-vicar of Sandringham, who had arrived suddenly after trouble with choirboys at home, or Oscar Wilde’s nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas, trailing clouds of infamy and seen openly misbehaving with a pretty cabin boy on his yacht. Only occasionally did one of them go too far, like the arms magnate Friedrich Krupp, reports of whose behavior with underage boys were beginning to cause alarm, eventually resulting in his having to leave the island. In general, however, the moral climate was unusually relaxed, and to those who found the laws and attitudes of northern Europe a serious hindrance to their preferred way of life, Capri was a welcome haven. Such a one was John Ellingham Brooks, who within a couple of weeks felt so entirely at ease that he decided not to return to England but to remain on Capri for good.
Brooks’s decision was timely. In the same month that he and Maugham first visited Capri, April 1895, the trial was taking place in London of Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s was not the only, nor indeed the first, such trial to be exhaustively reported since the passing ten years earlier of the Criminal Law Amendment Act,* but it made a greater impact and reached a far wider audience on account of the fame of the accused, the social status of the accuser, the Marquess of Queensberry, and the headline-grabbing wit, flamboyance, and panache with which Wilde, fatally, conducted himself in court. Here a world was revealed of rent boys and male brothels and perverse sexual practices hitherto undreamed of by the majority of the nation’s newspaper-reading population. Wilde’s subsequent sentencing to two years’ hard labor struck terror in the hearts of many men who had imagined that a modicum of discretion was all that was necessary to keep them out of trouble. A significant number decided there and then to leave for the Continent, and it was said that on the night after Wilde’s arrest, instead of the usual sixty or so crossing from England to France, six hundred gentlemen took passage on the Channel steamers. The trial of Oscar Wilde was to cast a long shadow, and for seventy years Maugham’s generation had to live with the very real fear of blackmail, exposure, public scandal, and arrest. It is unlikely that Maugham at only twenty-one fully understood the relevance of these events to his own life, but the Wilde case could not fail to increase his determination to keep areas of his private life undercover, to encourage the habit of concealment.
Back in London, on the occasions when he was seen by one of his fellow students outside the hospital it was noted that he was always with the same young man, almost certainly his theatergoing friend, Walter Adney Payne. Payne, “dear companion of my lonely youth,”19 as Maugham described him, was the first in a series of close male associates on whom throughout his life Maugham heavily depended. There is a visible pattern that runs through these relationships, beginning with a sexual affair which then evolves into an intimate friendship, with the onetime lover becoming part secretary, part companion and facilitator. Although nothing remains of any personal correspondence (on Payne’s death, all letters between them were, on Maugham’s instructions, destroyed), the two men were close for more than twenty years. Crucially, Payne provided an essential service: he enabled Maugham to make contact with strangers. Because of his stammer, Maugham found it next to impossible to initiate the kind of exchange so easily struck up with others in public places, and thus, knowing that he could not speak without the risk of making a fool of himself, Maugham liked to rely on someone else to start the conversation. In this respect Payne, with his good looks and pleasant manner, was the ideal companion.
Maugham was irresistibly drawn to the sexual underworld. He soon learned that a man about town never went to the music hall before nine, as that was the hour when prostitutes of both sexes arrived to ply their trade, strolling enticingly up and down among the gentlemen smoking and drinking in the promenade bar. But Maugham’s early attempt at picking up a tart here, an alarmingly self-possessed young woman, ended in humiliation when she simply turned her back and walked contemptuously away from his stammered offer to buy her a drink. Outside in the Strand, trade was relatively cheap, the pricier rent boys and “daughters of joy” concentrating on prosperous Piccadilly. A slender figure in his hat and dark overcoat, Maugham, fascinated, would watch them as they sauntered along looking for custom, invisible to the ordinary couples and family parties making for omnibus and underground after an evening’s blameless entertainment.
IN OCTOBER 1896 Maugham arrived at the final stage of his training at St. Thomas’s, the study of obstetrics and gynecology. The first morning’s lecture was memorable. “Gentlemen,” the instructor began, “woman is an animal that micturates20 once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity.” Recently a new requirement had been introduced, a course in practical midwifery, for which students were expected to be on call for a period of three weeks, and within a mile’s radius of the hospital, to attend a minimum of twenty confinements. During his tour of duty Maugham was called out on sixty-three occasions. Temporarily lodged in a room opposite the main gates where he could be quickly summoned by the porter, he was rarely able to snatch more than a couple of hours’ sleep, and yet he was almost unaware of his exhaustion, so absorbed was he in what he witnessed of his patients’ lives. It was the first time he had worked outside the hospital precincts, and it was only now that Maugham saw for himself the frightening reality of the poverty in which large numbers struggled to exist, experienced at close quarters the noise, the stench, the overcrowding, the filthy, verminous conditions from which for many there was no chance of escape. If the head of the family were employed, then life was tolerable; if not, then the situation was desperate, and in such cases the arrival of another baby was regarded with despair. “Accidents” were not infrequent: mothers rolled on their babies while they slept, and errors of diet were not always the result of carelessness.
In a passage written fifty years later, Maugham recalls his induction into the slums of Lambeth. It was usually the husband or a small child of the expectant mother who led him through the dark and silent streets,
up stinking alleys21 and into sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate, but where your black bag protected you from harm. You were taken to grim houses, on each floor of which a couple of families lived and down into a stuffy room, ill-lit with a paraffin lamp, in which two or three women, the midwife, the mother, the “lady as lives on the floor below” were standing round the bed on which the patient lay. Sometimes you waited in that r
oom for two or three hours, drinking a friendly cup of tea with the midwife and going down in the street below now and then to get a breath of air. The husband was sitting on the step and you sat down beside him and chatted.
In cases of emergency Maugham could summon help from the senior obstetric clerk, but by the time the SOC arrived it was often too late: the baby had failed to breathe or the mother had bled to death and there was nothing to be done. After nights like these it was a relief to come out at dawn into the fresh air and walk beside the Thames watching the sky turn pink and the early morning mist dissolve over the water.
It was during Maugham’s training in midwifery that the idea came to him for a novel. Over the past few years he had experimented with a number of projects, his chief ambition being to write for the theater. The plays he had submitted, however, had been rejected, and so he planned instead to complete two or three novels in the hope that if these were published, managers would look more favorably on his dramatic work.
This was an exciting time in publishing. During the 1890s a number of lively new publishing houses had been founded, among them Heinemann, Hutchinson, Methuen, and the Bodley Head; and as the sway of the three-decker novel and the circulating library had recently collapsed, the way had been left clear for young writers to experiment with different and shorter forms. While browsing in the bookshops Maugham had been attracted by the Pseudonym Library, a popular series of cheap paperbound books published by the enterprising Thomas Fisher Unwin. Unwin had set up his own business in the 1870s and was notorious both for taking risks and for driving a hard bargain. Supported by, in the words of Ford Madox Ford, a “heaven-sent” team of readers that included the influential Edward Garnett and, briefly, G. K. Chesterton, Unwin had made some notable discoveries, numbering among his authors Yeats, Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, George Moore, and Joseph Conrad. Maugham sent in a couple of short stories, one of which, “A Bad Example,” about a good man whose goodness leads his selfish family to regard him as mentally unbalanced,* was passed to Garnett, who advised against publication. “There is some ability in this,22 but not very much. Mr. Maugham has imagination and he can write prettily, but his satire against society is not deep enough or humorous enough to command attention. He should be advised to try the humbler magazines for a time, and if he tries anything more important to send it to us.” As a result of this report Unwin rejected both stories, on the excuse that they were too short to stand on their own; he added, however, that if in the future Mr. Maugham chose to submit a full-length novel he would be pleased to read it. Intensely excited by this morsel of encouragement, Maugham immediately set to work.
Liza of Lambeth, or A Lambeth Idyll, as it was originally titled, is set in the slums with which Maugham’s medical training had lately made him so familiar. Eighteen-year-old Liza Kemp is a factory girl living in a small single room with her alcoholic mother. Pretty and spirited, Liza is fond of a good time and not yet ready to settle down to a life of marital drudgery and years of childbearing. Full of ill-defined longings for love and something greater than her narrow world can offer, she allows herself to be seduced by an older, married man, by whom she becomes pregnant. Eventually she goes into labor while helplessly drunk, dying as she miscarries, with her tipsy mother watching over her, assisted by a garrulous midwife who has witnessed such a scene many times before.
As Maugham’s literary taste over the past few years had been strongly influenced by John Ellingham Brooks, he might well have chosen to model his style on Brooks’s beloved Pater, or on one of the fin-de-siècle Decadents, such as Huysmans or Wilde; but in the event it was the French realists whom he chose to follow, Zola and Maupassant, the latter in particular, whose vernacular style of narrative exactly suited the unromantic nature of his subject. In an introduction to a later edition of Liza, Maugham wrote, “I had at that time a great admiration23 for Guy de Maupassant … who had so great a gift for telling a story clearly, straightforwardly and effectively,” three adverbs which may justly be applied to Liza, by any standards an accomplished work of fiction and impressive indeed for a first novel. In writing Liza, Maugham explained, “I described without addition24 or exaggeration the people I had met in the Out-Patients’ Department at the Hospital and in the District during my service as an Obstetric Clerk…. My lack of imagination … obliged me to set down quite straightforwardly what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.” He was later to claim that Liza was “the first of the realistic descriptions25 of the London slums that the English public had had a chance of reading,” although in fact it was only one of a number published in that period giving an authentic depiction of the lives of the urban poor.
Liza of Lambeth, written in three French school exercise books, was completed in six months, and on January 14, 1897, the manuscript dispatched to Unwin. Of the three readers who were shown the text, one, Vaughan Nash, disliked it—vulgar, revoltingly frank, and lacking in romance—but the other two, of whom one was Edward Garnett, declared enthusiastically in its favor. “A very clever realistic study26 of factory girls and coster life,” wrote Garnett. “If Fisher Unwin does not publish A Lambeth Idyll somebody else certainly will…. Mr. Maugham has insight & humour, & will probably be heard of again…. N.B. The conversation is remarkably well done.” On the strength of these recommendations and after only one requested alteration—the changing of the word “belly” to “stomach”—a contract was signed in April between T. Fisher Unwin and William Somerset Maugham of St. Thomas’s Hospital. Liza of Lambeth was to be published not, as originally intended, in the Pseudonym Library, but under Maugham’s own name. The terms of the contract were hardly generous, but neither were they unusual: Unwin was taking a risk with an unknown author at a period when it was customary for advances to be small and royalties frequently deferred until production costs had been recovered, a slow process in this instance as Unwin failed to sell the book to the United States. The American publisher Charles Scribner, reporting back to his firm in New York, wrote, “Unwin is indeed a most troublesome person27 and I am glad I escaped him in London until the last day. Of the projects submitted to us by him, I myself declined the slum story.”
Liza was published in September 1897, the same year as Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, and What Maisie Knew by Henry James, yet despite such formidable competition the unknown W. Somerset Maugham attracted considerable attention, critics on the whole applauding the author’s talent while regretting his shocking subject matter. “The whole book reeks of the pot-house28 and is uncompromisingly depressing,” wrote the reviewer in the Daily Mail, “but it is powerfully and even cleverly written and must be recognized as a true and vivid picture of the life which it depicts.” An enthusiastic entry appeared in The St. Thomas’s Hospital Gazette, which made a point of noticing books written by members of staff. After a review of Dr. Anderson’s Deformities of Fingers and Toes, William Somerset Maugham was congratulated on a “great and well-deserved success29 [with Liza of Lambeth, whose] uncompromising vigour of both plot and style will appeal strongly to all lovers of realism.”
Unwin, a sharp operator who thoroughly understood the value of publicity, sent the book to a number of high-profile personalities who he hoped might bring it to a wider notice, among them Basil Wilberforce, future archdeacon of Westminster, who obligingly made it the subject of his sermon one Sunday at the Abbey. Another recipient was Joseph Conrad, whose The Nigger of the Narcissus was also published by Unwin that year. “I’ve just finished reading Liza30 of Lambeth,” Conrad wrote to Unwin. “There is any amount of good things in the story and no distinction of any kind. It will be fairly successful I believe, for it is a ‘genre’ picture without any atmosphere…. He just looks on—and that is just what the general reader prefers. The book reminds me of [George] Du Maurier’s drawings—same kind of art exactly, only in another sphere.” Maugham was delighted with the attention his book was receiving, and even more delighted when aft
er only a couple of weeks following publication he called at Paternoster Square and was told that the first edition of two thousand copies was sold out and a second already printing.
It was at this point that Liza came under attack. An unsigned article appeared in the literary journal The Academy, accusing Maugham of plagiarism, pointing out similarities between Liza and another “slum” novel published at the end of the previous year, A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison. Quick to defend himself, Maugham wrote to The Academy, “I have not yet had an opportunity31 of reading Mr. Arthur Morrison’s books, so I cannot tell what similarity there may be between them and my own…. It is perhaps a little annoying to be charged with plagiarism, when my book was finished three months before the Child of the Jago appeared.” Maugham was always notoriously vague about dates, and his statement is not strictly accurate: A Child of the Jago was published at the end of 1896, when Maugham had not quite completed Liza; yet it is unlikely he would have read Morrison’s novel before finishing his own. Moreover, apart from the setting, there are few true parallels to be drawn, since Morrison’s work, with its pathetic child hero, portrays a desperation, a hopelessness and violence far more savage than anything depicted by Maugham. There is, however, a strong possibility that Maugham was influenced by an earlier work of Morrison’s, Tales of Mean Streets, a collection of short stories published in 1894, in the first of which, “Lizerunt,” there are clear similarities to the later Liza.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 6
