The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  The author’s six complimentary copies were sent to family and friends, first among them Walter Adney Payne, inscribed to “Adney, with the author’s love.” Another went to Maugham’s mentor, Wentworth Huyshe, and one to each of the Maugham brothers, none of whom expressed much pleasure in the present, Harry disparaging his brother’s literary talent while Charlie expressed himself disgusted by the novel’s content, an opinion shared by Freddie’s wife, Nellie, who noted in her diary that Liza of Lambeth was “a most unpleasant book.”32 A copy was also dispatched to the vicarage, but the Reverend Henry had no time to read it for he died a few days later, aged sixty-nine, having been in poor health for some time. Maugham and Harry went down to Whitstable for the funeral on September 21, an event that was well attended by the little town, whose respect, if not affection, the vicar had won over the years. For his part, Maugham felt neither respect nor affection. Like Philip Carey, “He had no feeling for the old man,33 he had never liked him; he had been selfish all his life, selfish to the wife who adored him, indifferent to the boy who had been put in his charge; he was not a cruel man, but a stupid, hard man, eaten up with a small sensuality.”

  Finally, in October 1897, Maugham received his diploma from St. Thomas’s qualifying him to practice as an MRCS (Member of the Royal College of Surgeons) and LRCP (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians). Somewhat to his surprise, the senior obstetric physician offered him an appointment, but with his ambition set on a career as a writer he turned it down. He had proved himself competent in medicine, and in later life he would always acknowledge the debt he owed to his training. “I think,” he wrote in old age, “I learned pretty well everything I know34 about human nature in the 5 years I spent at St. Thomas’s Hospital.” Had Liza failed, his plan had been to take a job as a ship’s doctor, which would at least have provided him with the longed-for chance to travel; as it was, the success of his novel gave him the assurance to leave medicine altogether. “I am sorry I abandoned medicine35 so soon,” he said. “It was idiotic. Absolutely idiotic. I could just as well have written at night and avoided the desperate financial struggle I had.”

  After graduating, Maugham went to see Fisher Unwin, who asked him what his plans were.

  I told him that I was throwing up medicine36 … and meant to earn my living as a writer. He put his arm round my shoulder.

  “It’s very hard to earn a living by writing,” he said. “Writing is a very good staff, but a very bad crutch.”

  I shrugged my shoulders with scorn. My first book was a success. I was full of confidence.

  Unwin was at his most genial, pressing Maugham to start work on another, much longer novel about life in the slums, which now his name was known would have an even greater success than Liza. Maugham was unenthusiastic. “I was no longer interested in the slums37 once I had written a book about them,” as he dismissively remarked. Instead he surprised his publisher by telling him he had already completed his next work, The Making of a Saint, a historical novel written during the previous summer on Capri.

  Leaving the manuscript with Unwin, Maugham shortly afterward departed for Spain, where he was to stay for nearly a year, confident that by the time he returned his reputation as a professional man of letters would be established. In this expectation he was to be disappointed.

  * A popular chain of tea shops run by the Aerated Bread Company.

  * The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 proscribed all homosexual acts between males.

  * A theme to which Maugham was to return nearly forty years later in his final play, Sheppey.

  CHAPTER 3

  A WRITER BY INSTINCT

  • • •

  AS A BOY READING IN HIS UNCLE’S LIBRARY, MAUGHAM HAD FOUND his imagination profoundly stirred by stories and travelers’ tales about foreign lands. Enthralled by The Arabian Nights and by several accounts of journeys through the Levant (the vicar liked to collect such works for their illustrations), he had longed to explore the exotic and unknown, a desire that remained unfulfilled while in Whitstable, where all he could do was gaze out over the cold North Sea and dream of escape. But now, done with his education, he was entirely independent, with nothing and nobody to constrain him or require his presence. “Life was before him1 and time of no account. He could wander, for years if he chose, in unfrequented places, among strange peoples…. He did not know what he sought or what his journeys would bring him; but he had a feeling he would learn something new about life and gain some clue to the mystery.” Intoxicated by this unfamiliar sense of emancipation, Maugham’s initial idea was to take off for a couple of years, beginning with twelve months in Spain, then going on to Italy and Greece, and finally to Egypt where he intended to become proficient in Arabic. Seductive although these plans were, however, he was levelheaded enough to realize that for a professional writer London was the marketplace, and to London he must return before too long an absence caused his name to be forgotten. Thus he decided to confine himself to the first part of his plan, an eight-month sojourn in Seville.

  During his time as a medical student Maugham had read widely in Spanish literature and had fallen in love with the idea of Spain, the country that to him more than any other represented romance. And for once reality exceeded expectation, the light and warmth of southern Spain producing in Maugham an intense feeling of happiness. He arrived in Seville on December 7, 1897, and immediately fell in love with the city, the people, and the Spanish dulcera de vivir, reveling in a sense of liberation which up to now he had never known. “I came to it after weary years2 in London, heartsick with much hoping, my mind dull with drudgery; and it seemed a land of freedom,” he wrote. “There I became at last conscious of my youth.”

  Maugham’s lodgings were at 2 Calle Guzman el Bueno in the fashionable quarter of Santa Cruz, at the house of the British vice-consul, Edward Johnston, probably arranged through diplomatic contacts of his brother Charles at the law firm in Paris. Here the narrow streets were lined with large, whitewashed houses, discreetly hidden behind wrought-iron gates through which could be seen patios dense with foliage. In the heat of summer, canvas awnings shaded the street, stretching from house to house until they were taken down at evening to let in the cooler air. Maugham was glad of the quiet in which to write, for it was a peaceful district and during the day there were few sounds except for the trickle of a fountain, the occasional cry of a beggar, or the delicate tap-tap of a donkey’s hooves on the cobbled paving. After he had finished his morning’s work, Maugham explored the city; he liked to walk through the gardens and orange groves of the magnificent Alcazar and into the great Gothic cathedral where he stood transfixed before the paintings of Murillo and Zurbarán; sometimes his route took him by the government-owned cigarette factory, famous as the location of Carmen, just as the raucous groups of gypsy girls, the “cigarreras,” came streaming out.

  As his Spanish improved, Maugham entered more into the life of the city. He grew a mustache, smoked Filipino cigars, learned the guitar, and bought a broad-brimmed hat with a flat crown; he hankered for a cape lined with green and red velvet, but decided it was too expensive and bought a poncho instead; he went to the theater and to bullfights, and drank sherry in dark taverns hung with strings of sausages and hams. He was invited to private houses for dinner, where he listened to heated debates over the conduct of the Spanish-American War being fought over distant Cuba, and he took part in country picnics, where he delighted in watching the girls and young men dance the flamenco.

  Maugham was captivated by the Spanish and by Spain. His perspective was highly colored and romantic, and during his months in Seville he responded eagerly to the erotic atmosphere, to the easy availability, in certain quarters, of sexual encounter. In Spain, as in France and Italy, anticlerical feeling had largely swept away the authority of the Catholic Church and the church’s ancient laws against sodomy, making possible a freedom unknown in the Protestant north; and nowhere more so than in Andalusia, where the legacy of eight hundred years of Mooris
h occupation was evident not only in the architecture but in the relaxed Arab attitude toward homosexuality. Beneath a surface formality, courtship rituals between men and women were also conducted with unusual license. Strolling the quiet streets at night Maugham looked enviously at the cloaked young men clinging to the barred windows while they whispered passionate enticements to their girlfriends within, often with disastrous consequences.

  In Spain the blood of youth is very hot….3 The Spaniard, who will seduce any girl he can, is pitiless … so there is much weeping, the girl is turned out of doors and falls readily into the hands of the procuress. In the brothels of Seville or of Madrid she finds at least a roof and bread to eat; and the fickle swain goes his way rejoicing.

  In The Land of the Blessed Virgin, an account of his experience of Andalusia, Maugham states that while he never fell in love, he nonetheless was infatuated by a girl, a certain Rosarito, about whom he writes in a ponderously highfalutin manner:

  But when I write of Spanish women4 I think of you, Rosarito … it is your dark eyes that were lustrous, soft as velvet, caressing sometimes, and sometimes sparkling with fiery glances. (Alas! That I can find but hackneyed phrases to describe those heart-disturbers.)

  Rosarito may well have been a Rosario, or indeed never existed at all except as a literary conceit; in a later account Maugham refers much more convincingly to conducting numerous lighthearted affairs, and also to a passion for “a young thing with green eyes5 and a gay smile,” gender carefully unspecified, whose charms were sufficiently magnetic to draw him back to Seville the following year.

  When describing this period, Maugham wrote that in Seville “life was too pleasant6 to allow me to give an undivided attention to literature”; nonetheless he was resolute in maintaining his usual habit of industriousness, in eight months completing a travel book, four short stories, and a full-length novel. It was with these in his luggage that he arrived back in London in the autumn of 1898.

  THE YOUNG MAN OF twenty-four who returned to resume his life in England was very different from the callow graduate who had left for Spain the previous year. Maugham had grown considerably in confidence: he had enjoyed himself immensely in Seville; he was personable, attractive to both men and women; and he was possessed of an enormous creative energy and appetite for hard work. Now he was intent on taking his career forward, determined to make of his writing a paying business. In the 1890s the literary market was rapidly expanding, focused on a large educated middle class, with dozens of new magazines and periodicals launched every year and more than four hundred publishing houses in London alone. However, Maugham’s start was discouraging: returning almost penniless and expecting to find waiting for him a substantial sum in royalties earned from Liza of Lambeth, he was taken aback to discover that the total came to no more than £20. The fact that Fisher Unwin was unlikely to have made more than that himself weighed not at all with his author, who remained convinced that the publisher had pulled a fast one. As he crossly remarked, with Liza “[Unwin] did me thoroughly in the eye.”7 Fortunately, he would be unlikely to have the chance to do so again, as Maugham before going abroad had appointed a literary agent, W. M. Colles, to act for him: it was Colles who would from now on negotiate with Unwin, and indeed it was Colles who had succeeded in obtaining an advance of £50 for The Making of a Saint, the novel written on Capri the previous summer.

  Maurice Colles, a big, burly, Falstaffian figure, was one of a new breed, the role of literary agent having only recently come into existence. Predictably it was looked on with disfavor by publishers, who were accustomed to dealing directly with their authors, many of whom had a conveniently limited understanding of financial matters. One of the first literary agents was A. P. Watt, who dominated the profession for many years, but at the turn of the century Colles was almost as well known, with a number of distinguished writers on his books, Hardy, Meredith, and Arnold Bennett among them. Colles was a decent, likable man, good-humored and easy to talk to, and for most of his clients, Maugham included, it was some time before they realized the extent of his incompetence.

  The Making of a Saint had made its appearance in Maugham’s absence during the summer of 1898, published in June by Fisher Unwin, who had sold it to L. C. Page in the United States. Maugham had been inspired to attempt a historical novel after reading an article by the prolific Andrew Lang, who posited that the form was ideal for the young writer as story and characters were ready-made and no experience of real life was necessary. “Seduced by this bad advice,”8 as Maugham put it, he set to work, basing his plot on an episode in Machiavelli’s History of Florence.

  In later years Maugham expressed unalloyed contempt for The Making of a Saint; he left it out of the collected edition of his work and went to considerable lengths to have it suppressed, and in the copy he gave his nephew, Robin, he wrote, “A very poor novel by W. Somerset Maugham.” According to its author’s gloomy recollection, the critics received The Making of a Saint with coolness and the public with indifference, although in truth the novel’s reception was far from unfavorable. One of Unwin’s readers, Edward Garnett, had reported with enthusiasm, “So far as we can see9 Mr. Maugham is going strong … the novel [is] a strong unusual piece of work, full of vigour.” As with Liza of Lambeth, a couple of reviewers professed themselves affronted by the explicit nature of the love scenes, but in the main it was judged a highly creditable effort. “[Mr. Maugham] has written a good novel,”10 said The Spectator, “and he ought some day to write much better ones.”

  Having given up his Vincent Square lodgings when he left for Seville, Maugham now moved into a small flat that he shared with his old friend Walter Payne, first in Albany Chambers, Westminster, near St. James’s Park. Shortly afterward they moved to another in Carlisle Mansions, an apartment block behind Victoria Station, employing a maid-of-all-work to cook for them and do the housework. It was an ideal arrangement in more ways than one. Maugham was devoted to and trusted Payne, who was amiable and levelheaded, providing a reassuring counterbalance to his friend’s more volatile temperament; they both had a passion for the theater and continued to go regularly to plays together; and Payne, a qualified chartered accountant with a good business sense, now agreed to take on as a job the handling of Maugham’s financial affairs, as well as dealing with all the correspondence with publishers, agents, and magazine editors that lay outside Maurice Colles’s remit. And there were other advantages to living with Payne: as he was out all day—he had recently given up accountancy to read for the bar—Maugham had the place to himself in which to write; and when Payne returned in the evening he often brought attractive company with him. As Maugham put it, looking back on this period with the cold and cynical eye of his extreme old age,

  He [Payne] was very good-looking,11 and had no difficulty in getting girls to go to bed with him … small-part actresses, shop-girls or clerks in an office. About one evening a week Walter would arrange to go out and the girl I was then friends with came and dined with me, after which we indulged in sexual congress. Later in the evening we dressed and went downstairs, I put her in a cab, paid the fare and made an appointment with her for the following week. There was no romance in it, no love, only appetite: on looking back, these experiences of mine seem dreadfully sordid, but after all, I was in my early twenties and my sexual proclivities demanded expression.

  Determined to make his mark as quickly as possible, Maugham energetically set to work, fortunately unaware that it would be nine long years before he was to achieve any substantial success. In those days, “I had a natural lucidity12 and a knack for writing easy dialogue … to write was an instinct that seemed as natural to me as to breathe, and I did not stop to consider if I wrote well or badly.” His immediate priority was to sell the works he had written in Spain, the first of which to appear was a short story, “The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian,” published in October 1898 in Cosmopolis, a journal printed in three languages, a third of it in English, a third in French, and a third in German.
Unsurprisingly, it failed to prosper, and it folded a month after Maugham’s story appeared, without paying its contributor. Bound by the terms of his contract, Maugham had no choice but to submit his work to Fisher Unwin, as the firm had first refusal of his next two books. Unwin expressed not the least interest in the sketches of Andalusia, The Land of the Blessed Virgin, and declined to pay the £100 Maugham was asking for his autobiographical novel, “The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey”; he was, however, prepared to issue the short stories as a collection, entitled Orientations, a decision which pleased Maugham who was anxious that these should appear before the novel. “It is true that ‘Stephen Carey’13 is finished,” he wrote to Colles, “but as it is a little strong I particularly wish to publish something milder first, so that I may not be known as a writer of the George Moore type.”*

  Of the six stories that make up Orientations, four were written in Spain, while two, “A Bad Example” and “Daisy,” were thoroughly reworked versions of stories Maugham had composed earlier. Edward Garnett had read the original “A Bad Example” and not cared for it, nor, with one exception, did he much care for what was put before him now. The stories, he reported, “are all a little flat,14 a little heavy [and] we feel that Mr. Maugham’s reputation will suffer if he publishes the present collection.” The exception was “Daisy,” to which Garnett responded with enthusiasm, describing it as “excellent … modern, done with insight & done with spirit.” If only Maugham could produce five more of this quality, “well, that will be a very different thing.”

  “Daisy” is set in Blackstable, Maugham’s fictional rendering of Whitstable, and is mainly of interest for the light it sheds on the author’s feelings about his boyhood. Significantly, the final version of “Daisy” was written shortly after the death of the Reverend Henry Maugham, when Maugham’s memories had been vividly refreshed by attending his uncle’s funeral. His portrait of Whitstable is vengeful, showing its people as mean-spirited and hypocritical; and yet there is an underlying grieving for something loved that was now lost, Maugham, like his heroine, overwhelmed by “the terrible sadness of the past.”