Orientations was published in June 1899, dedicated to Mrs. Edward Johnston, wife of the vice-consul with whom Maugham had stayed in Seville. The title of the collection was dreamed up by the author, who wanted to find something suitably sententious: the word “orientations,” as he rightly observed, “at the time was not very familiar15 to the general public.” After leafing through various French moralists and failing to find a suitably relevant quotation, he decided to invent one: “C’est surtout, par des nouvelles d’un jeune écrivain qu’on peut se rendre compte du tour de son esprit. Il y cherche la voie qui lui est propre dans une série d’essais de genre et de style différents, qui sont comme des orientations, pour trouver son moi littéraire.”*
Despite an unenthusiastic notice in the London Bookman, describing it as “an average book, fairly readable,16 but with no serious interest or promise about it,” Orientations was generally praised by the critics: “The best writing we have yet seen17 from Mr. W. S. Maugham,” according to The Athenaeum, while even the previously hostile Academy admitted itself impressed. “Mr. Maugham begins to be interesting.18 This book is much better than either the shrill and hysterical Liza of Lambeth or the rather mediocre Making of a Saint…. [Orientations is] trenchant, sincere, candid, humorous, witty, and flippant…. Mr. Maugham … has an abundance of vitality, which is perhaps the scarcest thing in modern literature.”
It was this abundance of vitality that was such a distinctive ingredient of Maugham’s magnetism as a young man. Although he was not tall, he was strikingly attractive, with his dark hair and mustache and his pale skin. As his earnings increased, Maugham was able to spend more on clothes, and soon developed an elegant sartorial flair. In retrospect he liked to represent himself as shy and socially awkward at this stage of his life, and it is true he was always self-conscious about his lack of height. “The world is an entirely different place19 to the man of five foot seven from what it is to the man of six foot two,” he wrote in his notebook. Yet by the time he returned from Spain, he was well able, despite his stammer, to hold his own in most company, and certainly had few inhibitions in pursuing his amorous adventures. Possessed of an urgent sexual energy, Maugham was always on the lookout for opportunity, and yet at the same time he was emotionally vulnerable, with a hunger for love and affection, “almost continuously in love,”20 as he described himself, “from the time I was fifteen to the time I was fifty.” He may have liked to see himself when young as tough and heartless, but the reality was different: in love affairs with both men and women he was almost too susceptible, and often suffered great anguish as a result. One woman with whom in his twenties he had a brief affair said of him, “He is a fearfully emotional man,21 sexually.”
Although no overt evidence survives, there are clear indications that when Maugham was in his late teens and early twenties he experienced some powerful sexual and emotional upheavals. In the early novels sexual passion is the dominant theme; and there is one work from this period that is closely autobiographical and revealing. “The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey,” written in Spain in 1898, was, as Maugham had warned his agent, “a little strong”22 as regards subject matter; and so indeed it proved, considered “too indecent for publication,”23 even after considerable toning down. After revising his original version Maugham told Colles that “finally I have erased24 all that might bring a blush to the cheek of the most modest journalist,” but even this was not enough to satisfy the Mrs. Grundys of the publishing world. In the event, however, Maugham came to feel profoundly grateful that the novel never appeared, as it would have made impossible the writing of the infinitely superior Of Human Bondage. “I should have lost a subject25 which I was then too young to make proper use of,” he explained with hindsight. “I was not far enough away from the events I described to see them reasonably and I had not had a number of experiences that later went to enrich the book I finally wrote.” When late in Maugham’s life he presented the manuscript to the Library of Congress in Washington, it was on the strict understanding that it could be neither quoted from nor copied.
In later years Maugham dismissed his third novel “as merely an insignificant curiosity,”26 an unduly harsh judgment of an immature but intriguing work that shows strong promise of a notable talent. “Stephen Carey” relates the story of the early years and young manhood of the eponymous hero, which closely, but not completely, follows the author’s own experience. An orphan, Stephen is unhappy at school and in young manhood bored by his job in a lawyer’s office in London. It is during his indenture that he meets and falls passionately in love with a waitress, Rose, a thin, plain young woman, good-natured and cheerfully promiscuous. Consumed by lust for Rose, Stephen is led into appalling levels of degradation, from which he eventually emerges to find salvation of a kind in marriage to an innocent and pretty cousin. “Stephen Carey” is an extraordinarily interesting document, pedestrian in the early sections, compelling once Rose enters the story, and the big central theme, Stephen’s obsession with Rose, must correspond to an experience undergone by Maugham while he was studying at the hospital. Here, Rose is presented as shallow and unrefined, and yet there is something engaging about her: she is placid and prepared to be pleased—a very different type from the malevolent Mildred, her reincarnation in Of Human Bondage. In the later novel Maugham is dealing with a scarring sadomasochistic affair, and it is no wonder that in the earlier version, written when he was only twenty-four, he was not yet prepared to reveal it; he softened the story, blurred the edges, and inevitably turned it into something else.
Despite his failure to win the critical attention he needed to advance his career, the name Somerset Maugham was beginning to be known, and Maugham soon found himself moving in wider social circles than before. After the publication of Liza of Lambeth, he had been asked to a couple of bookish salons, and he had come to the attention of that literary panjandrum, Edmund Gosse, who invited him to his famous Sundays at his house near Regent’s Park. Gosse, distinguished as both critic and author, wielded powerful influence; with many celebrated writers as friends, he also liked to make the acquaintance of promising newcomers, and an invitation from Gosse served as a ticket of entry to the inner circle of letters. His personal acquaintance with some eminent Victorians—Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Gissing—provided a fascinating link to a past age; he was formidably well read, and Maugham judged him “the most interesting and consistently amusing27 talker I ever knew.” At Gosse’s parties you might meet Henry James or Thomas Hardy, although often the room was uncomfortably overcrowded, which made it difficult to drink tea and eat cucumber sandwiches while listening intelligently to the conversation of the literati as they discussed publishers and agents and shredded the reputations of their absent colleagues. At such literary parties Maugham was particularly intrigued by the women, some dressed flamboyantly in loud patterns and big beads, others mousy little spinsters who hardly spoke above a whisper. “I never ceased to be fascinated28 by their persistence in eating buttered toast with their gloves on, and I observed with admiration the unconcern with which they wiped their fingers on their chair when they thought no one was looking.”
Outside these predominantly literary circles, one of the most influential of Maugham’s new acquaintance was that eccentric figure, Augustus Hare. Impressed by Liza of Lambeth, Hare had asked a clerical friend of his who knew Maugham to invite the young man to dinner. The evening had been a success, and shortly afterward an invitation was issued for a weekend in Sussex at Holmhurst, Hare’s house near St.-Leonard’s-on-Sea.
Augustus Hare, part scholar, part snob, part fussy old maid, had enjoyed his greatest success during the 1870s and ’80s, when his idiosyncratic guidebooks, in particular to Italy, France, and Spain (Walks in Rome, Days near Paris, Wanderings in Spain), had been widely read and admired. Formidably knowledgeable in his chosen subjects, Augustus nursed a lifelong passion for the aristocracy, and in England there was hardly a country house of importance at which he was not an appreciative
guest, his hosts flattered by the enthusiastic interest he took in their noble mansions and their contents. Now in his sixties but looking much older with his white hair and walrus mustache, Augustus divided his time between London, where he dined out grandly every night, and the country, where he led “a curious little home life29 very much centred on the befriending of boys.” As Maugham remarked of his new friend, “He was not what people call a man’s man”30 and, when entertaining, was much more at ease in the company of middle-aged ladies, preferably titled.
Maugham grew fond of Augustus, whom he saw as “innately and intensely frivolous31 [but also] kind, hospitable and generous.” The two men had a bond in that they were both survivors of wretchedly unhappy childhoods—Augustus’s appallingly so—and Maugham, touched by the older man’s kindness in taking him under his wing, genuinely enjoyed his weekends in Sussex. Holmhurst was far from being one of the great houses, but it was a gentleman’s residence and grander than anything Maugham had known before. Anxious to improve himself, he was quick to learn everything his host set out to teach him. In Augustus’s view Maugham lacked polish. It was not enough, he told him, just to sit and listen: he must make conversational contributions of his own and sharpen up his small talk. There were, too, some vulgar phrases of which Maugham must break the habit. Augustus was displeased to hear his young friend talk of going somewhere by bus: “I prefer to call the conveyance32 to which you refer an omnibus,” he reproved him; he winced at another ill-bred nuance: “Yesterday when we came in from our walk you said you were thirsty and asked for a drink … A gentleman does not ask for a drink, he asks for something to drink.” Hare had admired Liza of Lambeth but he was anxious that Maugham should now leave the subject of the lower orders and acquire a knowledge of the manners and customs of the nobility and gentry. To this end he started taking his protégé with him when he called on his well-born acquaintances, encouraging them to invite his promising young friend to their parties.
Among the hostesses who at Hare’s suggestion took Maugham up was Blanche Crackanthorpe, wife of the distinguished barrister and mother of the writer Hubert Crackanthorpe. At her salon in Rutland Gate, Mrs. Crackanthorpe specialized in entertaining literary celebrities, bringing together promising beginners such as Maugham with well-known figures like Hardy, Galsworthy, and Henry James. Somewhat higher up the social scale was the tuft-hunting Lady St. Helier, who at her house in Portland Place liked to mix aristocratic society with professional people, lawyers and doctors, as well as with artists and writers. A promising young writer such as William Somerset Maugham was an asset in such company, and Maugham for his part relished the opportunity to observe the upper classes in their natural habitat. It was at the end of a dazzling dinner at Portland Place that Maugham found himself sitting next to the elderly Duke of Abercorn. “Do you like cigars?”33 the duke asked him, taking out of his pocket a large cigar case. “Very much,” said Maugham, who could rarely afford them. “So do I,” continued the duke, selecting one and inspecting it carefully. “And when I come to dinner,” he continued, lighting up, “I always bring my own.” He snapped the case shut and returned it to his pocket. “I advise you to do the same.”
Another patron of Maugham’s was the wife of Basil Wilberforce, the archdeacon of Westminster who had preached a sermon on Liza of Lambeth. Since then Mrs. Wilberforce had taken a kindly interest in Maugham, including him in her lively parties at the house in Dean’s Yard and introducing him to several fashionable hostesses, who were delighted to ask the clever, attractive, and unattached young man to their luncheons, dinners, and dances. Maugham took pleasure in his grand new social life, even if it came at a cost: the people who entertained him were extremely well off, which he was not, obliged to economize where he could. Dining out meant dressing in white tie and tails, with kid gloves and silk top hat; as cabs were beyond his means, Maugham came and went by omnibus, with its upper deck open to the weather. When invited to the country for a Friday to Monday, greater expenditure was unavoidable, with half-sovereigns to be dispensed to the butler, to the footman who brought the morning tea, and often to a second footman who unpacked his bag and acted as valet. At a large house-party young bachelors were sometimes obliged to share a bed, which not infrequently led to sex. “Often it turned out to be very pleasant,”34 Maugham recalled.
Years later, pondering on what it was that these rich and worldly people saw in him, he put the question to one of the hostesses of his youth. “You were different35 from other young men,” she said. “Though quiet … you had a sort of restless vitality that was intriguing.”
A SUCCESS IN SOCIETY, Maugham found that success in his professional life continued to elude him. Discouraged by having had two books turned down and reluctant to spend the winter in England, at the end of 1898 he again went abroad, first to Rome, then back to Seville, where the young creature “with green eyes and a gay smile” was still much on his mind. Leaving Andalusia after a couple of months he continued on to Morocco—a natural step after immersion in the Moorish culture of southern Spain—before returning to London in April 1899. After the sensual seductiveness of the Mediterranean, London appeared particularly drab: the soot and fog, the muddy streets reeking of manure, the crowds, the clatter and jangle of trams. Even more lowering to the spirit was the fact that Colles had failed to place elsewhere either of the works rejected by Unwin, “Stephen Carey” and The Land of the Blessed Virgin; and on top of this, a one-act play Maugham had written while in Rome, “Son & Heir,” never produced or published and now lost, was also languishing from lack of interest, a particular disappointment as he was still determined on a career as a dramatist. Indeed, apart from a couple of short stories published in Punch, for more than two years little was heard from Somerset Maugham—until the appearance of a third novel in July 1901.
The Hero, completed between October 8, 1900, and January 14, 1901, was suggested by the Boer War, “the first rent,”36 as Maugham later saw it, “in that great fabric, the British Empire.” The war had broken out in 1899, and in 1900 with the sieges of Mafeking and Ladysmith was currently much in the news. The story tells of James Parsons, a gallant young soldier just home from the Cape, but the main theme of the novel is not war but a tormenting question of personal honor. Five years earlier, James had proposed marriage to Mary Clibborn, the girl next door, but while abroad he had become obsessed with the wife of a regimental colleague, and now feels that he would rather die than marry plain, priggish Mary when his thoughts are all of the wickedly seductive Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace. In the end, unable to resolve his dilemma, James shoots himself.
Here again the subject of physical desire was much on the author’s mind. Bossy, frumpish Mary, with her good works and sensible shoes, provides the perfect foil to the unscrupulous Mrs. Wallace, whose appeal to James, it is made very clear, is based entirely on sex. “The touch of her fingers37 sent the blood rushing through his veins insanely; and understanding his condition, she took pleasure in touching him, to watch the little shiver of desire that convulsed his frame….” In James’s view, marriage without passion “is ugly and beastly,”38 a trap to be avoided at all costs, a belief he certainly shared with his creator.
The novel, received by the critics with temperate approval, was published by Hutchinson, the three-book contract with Unwin, to Maugham’s relief, having finally expired. The Hero, for which an advance of £75 was paid, was the first of Maugham’s works to bear on its cover the Moorish sign against the evil eye, adopted by his father, Robert Maugham, after his travels in the Near East, and which was famously to become Somerset Maugham’s insignia—in this case unfortunately printed upside down.
Before writing The Hero, Maugham had finished another novel, one for which yet again he had experienced considerable difficulty in finding a publisher. The problem was, as before, that Maugham’s work was earning a reputation for impropriety, his content considered too sexually explicit, with the consequence that publishers were beginning to regard him as a risky proposition.
With the new work, Mrs. Craddock, he was again sailing very close to the wind: not only was the subject, of female sexual desire, considered shocking, but the language, too, was found offensively frank. Publisher after publisher turned it down, including the prestigious William Heinemann; fortunately, however, the renowned critic Robertson Nicoll, a partner at Hodder & Stoughton, recognized the book’s quality, and while acknowledging its unsuitability for his own imprint persuaded the more adventurous Heinemann to reconsider. This time it was read by the head of the firm himself, who agreed to take it on condition that some particularly inflammatory passages were excised. That the new novel was considered dangerously risqué had little effect in bridling Maugham, and more than a quarter of a century later the French critic Paul Dottin wrote, “Maugham will doubtless39 be recognised in time as one of the novelists who have contributed most to removing from the English literary vocabulary the word ‘improper.’”
Mrs. Craddock is a fascinating novel, the most mature and sophisticated of Maugham’s work to date. The story tells of Bertha Ley, a rich and beautiful young woman, cultured and well read, who marries one of the tenant farmers on her Kentish estate. Edward Craddock is strikingly handsome, and it is some while before the passionate Bertha realizes that although decent and well-meaning, he is also stupid, complacent, and sexually passive. The marriage quickly deteriorates, Bertha’s distaste for her husband intensified after she meets a charming young cad, Gerald Vaudrey, for whom she conceives an intense infatuation. When Vaudrey throws her over, Bertha, heartbroken and humiliated, returns home, where Edward is touchingly pleased to see her. His feelings, however, are now a matter of indifference to his wife, as is his death, which occurs shortly afterward as the result of a hunting accident. The novel ends with Bertha finally grieving, not for the loss of her husband, but for the loss of the love she had for him; and with this understanding comes a sense of freedom, the last scene Bertha settling down quietly by the fire to read her book, in tranquil preparation for whatever the next stage of her life may bring.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 8
