The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  It was during this time, while he was living in Paris with Harry, that Maugham’s education in the visual arts was seriously begun, and much of it he owed to Kelly. It was Kelly who lent him books and taught him how to look at paintings, exploring with him the works of the Old Masters as well as introducing him to the new. Kelly inspired his friend with his own passion for Velázquez, Maugham responding with fervor to the Spanish master’s vision of Spain as well as to his uncompromising realism and profound humanity; and it was Kelly who first showed Maugham work by the Impressionists, taking him to see the collection at the Luxembourg. But despite Kelly’s energetic enthusiasm, Maugham at this stage remained unimpressed: “to my shame,”41 he wrote later, “I could not make head or tail of them.” When apart, the two men wrote at length to each other about art, and after Maugham became famous, Kelly was his principal portraitist, painting him a total of eighteen times. Despite Kelly’s superior knowledge, Maugham never hesitated to instruct his friend, candidly criticizing his work, pointing out where he was going wrong and taking advantage of his five years’ seniority to adopt the tone of an affectionate but bossy elder brother. “My dear Gerald,” he wrote in July 1905,

  I am very sorry, though by no means surprised,42 that you have fallen ill again. It is obvious to the meanest intelligence that if you lead such a life as you led in Paris you are quite sure to be ill…. I cannot write to you with any patience. By the stupidest carelessness … you are throwing away all your chances of becoming a better painter than Tom, Dick, or Harry. For the work you do when you’re not well is rotten….

  With Kelly, Maugham enjoyed the kind of fraternal relationship he had never formed within his own family, and although there were areas of his life that remained off-limits, his miserable childhood, for instance, and his brother’s suicide, he confided in Kelly freely about almost everything else. And Kelly did the same with Maugham, on several occasions turning to him for advice when his tempestuous affairs with women went wrong. Their friendship was close and it lasted a lifetime. After Maugham’s death Gerald Kelly’s words were reported in The Times: “Willie was a duck,”43 he said, “an absolute duck.”

  At Maugham’s request Kelly found him living quarters near his own in Montparnasse. The apartment at number 3 rue Victor Considérant was on the fifth floor, with a view over the cemetery where Maupassant is buried, and near the great bronze Lion de Belfort. There were two rooms and a kitchen, for which the rent was 700 francs a year, the equivalent of £28; some secondhand furniture and basic utensils were purchased and a bonne-à-toute-faire engaged to come in the mornings to make breakfast and do the housework and laundry. Kelly’s help had also been enlisted in recommending drawing classes for Harry Philips, “who has the ingenious idea44 of cultivating the smaller arts—costume, posters, illustration, & so forth,” Maugham had written from London. The version for general consumption was that the young man was accompanying Maugham as his secretary, but as Harry frankly admitted, “I cannot say that I was his secretary,45 although we used that nom de plume. I was his companion & wrote a few notes, social & otherwise for him.”

  Harry’s allowance was only £120 a year, and as Maugham’s annual earnings amounted to barely as much, the two men were obliged to lead a frugal existence, economizing where they could and feeding themselves as cheaply as possible at the local restaurants and cafés. Despite his poverty, Maugham wished to indulge his young companion, desperately anxious to keep him happy. “He was exceedingly kind46 in every way,” said Harry, remembering the many evenings at the theater, the excursions to Versailles, the afternoons in the Louvre and the Luxembourg. Although not much of a reader himself, Harry was impressed by Maugham’s knowledge of literature and even more by his gifts as a linguist, not only in French but in German, Spanish, and Italian. Harry had the sense, or perhaps the insensitivity, to respect Maugham’s reticence: vaguely aware that his early life had been unhappy, that there was a profound sadness over the death of his brother, he never probed, preferring instead to encourage the lighthearted side of his nature. “Maugham adored a laugh,” Harry recalled, “& had a generous sense of humour.”

  Paris may have been cheaper than London, but amusements still had to be paid for, and Maugham was inflexible in keeping to the strict working routine that he had long established. After writing all morning until 12:30, he and “the Gilded Youth,” as he somewhat drily referred to Harry, would go out for a modest lunch, on Sundays treating themselves to an apéritif first at the Café de la Paix.

  Most evenings the two men dined at Le Chat Blanc, a little restaurant in the rue d’Odessa. Here they became part of a group of painters, writers, and sculptors to whom Gerald Kelly had introduced them. A few were French, but most were English and American, and they dined together nightly at a communal table upstairs, where over an inexpensive couple of courses and plenty of wine the rival merits of the leading artists of the day were noisily debated. These gatherings were the nearest that Maugham, in later life always careful to conform to the outward appearance of respectability, came to the bohemian way of life. Conversation often grew hotly argumentative, carried on in a fug of cigar smoke in a mixture of English and French. Among the regulars were Kelly, who would sometimes bring in his patron, Rodin, bearded and pungent; Clive Bell, a young English art student; Ivor Back, a trainee surgeon and friend of Kelly’s; Penrhyn Stanlaws, the American “pretty women” painter; the Canadian Impressionist James Wilson Morrice, regarded with awe for his acquaintance with Bonnard, Matisse, Vuillard, and Lautrec; and the formidable Irish painter Roderic O’Conor, tall, swarthy, and misanthropic. “I suspect he was a tragic figure,”47 wrote Clive Bell, one of the few who succeeded in befriending the surly Irishman, “though he kept his tragedy to himself.”

  It was the Irishman who interested Maugham the most, mainly because of O’Conor’s friendship with Gauguin. In 1903 Maugham had been taken by Kelly to the famous Gauguin exhibition at the Galérie Vollard and had become fascinated with both the man and his work. Learning that O’Conor had spent some months with Gauguin in Brittany, Maugham was eager to ask him about it, “but unfortunately he took an immediate dislike48 to me which he did not hesitate to show.” One evening the two men had a furious row about the merits of the poet Hérédia, during which the Irishman remained “coldly and bitingly virulent.”49 Maugham refused to be cowed, however, and genuinely admiring O’Conor’s work, he called a few days later at his studio and asked to buy a couple of small still-lifes. O’Conor was taken aback. “After a moment’s hesitation,50 with a sullen look on his face, he mentioned a price, a very modest one, and I took the money out of my pocket and went away with the pictures in my hands.” This gesture did little to improve relations, however, and O’Conor was overheard comparing Maugham to “a bed bug, on which a sensitive man51 refuses to stamp because of the smell and the squashiness.”

  This disobliging remark was relayed by another member of the group, a big, bull-like man with a savage, sensual face, flamboyantly dressed in a bejeweled red waistcoat and large silk cravat, with an enormous ring on one pudgy white hand. Aleister Crowley had been at Cambridge with Kelly, and in 1903 had married Kelly’s sister, Rose. Claiming to be a master of the occult and recently created “Khan of the East,” Crowley was a compulsive showoff, declaiming dramatically and making fantastic boasts of his mental and physical prowess, and most sensationally of his supernatural powers: he himself, it appeared, had led many past lives, and was presently reincarnated as none other than the Great Beast of the Apocalypse; he liked to be known as Brother Perdurabo, under which guise he dabbled in satanism and had been much involved in the occult goings-on of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley had experimented copiously with drugs and was indefatigable in exploring his complex sexuality, avidly pursuing every kind of debauch with both men and women, preferably of a sadistic and sanguinary nature. As might be expected, this preposterous person fascinated Maugham. “I took an immediate dislike to him,”52 he wrote, “but he interested and amused
me.” Certainly Maugham had no wish to befriend Brother Perdurabo, but the mesmerizing performance and undeniably sinister aura caught at his imagination, shortly to emerge re-formed in the character of the infamous Oliver Haddo in The Magician.

  One of the few who saw good qualities in Crowley was the novelist Enoch Arnold Bennett, who in 1902 had moved to Paris, where he lived with his fox terrier, Fly, in a modest apartment in Montmartre. Like Maugham, Bennett had been introduced by Gerald Kelly to Le Chat Blanc, and had formed the habit of dining there once a week. Both Maugham and Gerald Kelly tended to patronize Bennett, or “Enoch Arnold,” as they referred to him between themselves. With his bristly mustache and rabbity teeth, they thought he looked vulgar, “like a managing clerk53 in a city office,” as Maugham snobbishly described him; behind his back they mocked his clothes and Midlands accent, found his manners uncouth, and dismissed his successful The Grand Hotel Babylon as populist tosh. Bennett’s French was clumsy, whereas Maugham spoke like a native, but at their very first meeting it was Bennett who, unforgivably, put Maugham in the wrong. As Kelly related it, at the end of dinner,

  Willie—with his impeccable French accent54—said to the waitress: “Vous me donnerez un anneau,” meaning that he wanted a napkin ring…. “You know, Maugham,” observed Bennett heavily, “the French don’t call it an ‘anno,’ they call it a ‘rong.’” (He meant a “rond.”) Willie became quite grey with rage; to have made this absurd mistake and thus laid himself open to correction by a quite unspeakable individual whose knowledge of French was rudimentary!

  A further cause for division was the embarrassing fact that Bennett, like Maugham, suffered from a bad stammer, and Maugham was well aware that the two of them at the same table struggling to get the words out ran a high risk of looking grotesque. As he admitted, “I am dreadfully afraid of being ridiculous.”55

  Fortunately the amiable Bennett either failed to notice or refused to be offended by Maugham’s de-haut-en-bas manner, enjoying his company and taking pleasure in the younger man’s style. Sometimes after dinner Maugham and Kelly would accompany Bennett home, where he would play Beethoven to them on an upright piano. On one of these occasions Bennett startled Maugham by making him an unexpected proposal: Would Maugham like to share in his mistress? She spent two nights a week with him and two nights with another gentleman, liked to take Sundays off, but was on the lookout for someone who would take the two nights she still had available. “I’ve told her about you,”56 said Bennett. “She likes writers [and] I’d like to see her nicely fixed up.” The offer was declined.

  Despite the unpromising start to the friendship, Maugham eventually became genuinely fond of Bennett, “a very lovable man”57 as he described him, and he greatly admired Bennett’s later masterpiece, The Old Wives’ Tale, which he thought in its author’s lifetime never received the critical accolade it deserved. Violet Hunt, also in Paris at that time, was one of Maugham’s circle whom he introduced to Enoch Arnold, and when Maugham was otherwise engaged, she promoted Bennett to the position of favorite escort.

  It was only to Violet, however, that he let down his guard and talked about his private life and emotions. At this period he was suffering a good deal of wretchedness over Harry Philips, and Violet, whose own love affairs were invariably passionate and unhappy, provided a sympathetic ear. “I never saw Maugham moved58 except one … time in Paris,” she noted in her diary, almost certainly a reference to Maugham’s unburdening himself about Harry’s behavior. Something had happened between the two men, most probably an incident of infidelity on Harry’s part, that had upset Maugham a good deal and that, as Harry later recounted, was to reappear in Of Human Bondage. Looking back Harry regretted his behavior. “I was somewhat ashamed,”59 he said, “as I realized that I had hurt his feelings more than I thought.” In May 1905 Harry decided to return to England for a while, leaving his lover despondent. In a letter to Kelly, temporarily absent from Paris, Maugham complained of his low spirits. “I miss you sadly,”60 he told Gerald, “[and] I know not how I shall do when the Gilded Youth has abandoned me…. I am sick to death of my work & seized by panic that all my imagination has left me: sometimes I fear that I shall never be able to do any good again. I feel like a well run dry.”

  The work with which he was having such difficulty was a novel, The Bishop’s Apron, a reworking of Loaves and Fishes, one of three plays, as yet unproduced, written after A Man of Honour. The Bishop’s Apron is a much improved version, more complex and substantial, of what in dramatic form is a rather formulaic comedy about a snobbish clergyman with some very worldly ambitions. Theodore Spratte, vicar of St. Gregory’s in South Kensington, is handsome, pompous, and vain (Maugham, it should be noted, rarely has a good word to say for the Anglican clergy). A widower, he lives with his sister and two grown-up children, devoting his energies to the busy pursuit of bettering the standing of himself and his family. If all goes as planned, his son and daughter will marry rank and money, and he himself be offered the see of Barchester, thus the reference to the episcopal vestment of the title. At first it looks as if none of his ambitions will be realized, but with typical contrariness Maugham reverses expectation, and by the last chapter the Reverend Theodore Spratte has everything he wanted and more: a bigger and better bishopric than Barchester, his daughter wed to a wealthy peer, and he himself betrothed to the well-endowed beauty his timid son failed to claim for himself.

  If The Bishop’s Apron reads a little like a novel-by-numbers, it is nonetheless an extremely efficient piece of work. Maugham was anxious to have it published as soon as possible, but not by Heinemann, condemned as culpably negligent in having failed to promote The Merry-Go-Round. A large share of the blame was laid also at the door of Maurice Colles, whose genial indolence had come to irritate Maugham intensely. Determined to put his affairs in the hands of someone more focused and businesslike, he talked the matter over with Arnold Bennett, another disaffected Colles client, who was now with J. B. Pinker, with whom he was much pleased; urging Maugham to follow his example, he offered to effect the introduction. “I think I have got you a new client61 in the person of W. Somerset Maugham,” Bennett wrote to Pinker. “He seems to me a man who will make his way.”

  James Brand Pinker had set up his agency in 1896, having worked for a number of years on newspapers and magazines, an experience that had gained him useful contacts and an intimate knowledge of the British literary world. From his office on Arundel Street off the Strand, Pinker, clean-shaven and rosy-cheeked, dealt with the rights and contracts of a growing number of distinguished writers including Wells, Galsworthy, Conrad, Gissing, Joyce, Jack London, and Ford Madox Ford. With A. P. Watt and Curtis Brown, he was regarded as one of the leading players in the field, respected by authors and publishers alike as much for his engaging personality as for his considerable business acumen. Even William Heinemann, who had been such a vigorous opponent of the literary agent, enjoyed cordial relations with him, and indeed it was at Heinemann’s suggestion that Henry James was added to Pinker’s list.

  Maugham’s association with Pinker was to make an important difference to his professional career, and he quickly came to appreciate his new agent’s dedication and expertise. Immediately, however, he was faced with the task of disengaging himself from his old agent, Maurice Colles, who was shocked and hurt by Maugham’s proposed defection and by his accusations over the handling of The Merry-Go-Round. But Maugham was adamant. “I think we must agree to differ,”62 he told Colles firmly. “I do not wish to enter into recriminations; but I cannot help thinking that what is obvious to me now your experience might have suggested to you then, namely, that when a publisher does not like a book & has made up his mind that it will not sell, one might just as well throw it in the Thames as let him publish it.” With the old connection severed, Maugham then wrote to his new agent: knowing exactly what he wanted, he took the trouble to set out his expectations, making clear that he intended to consign all his writing to Pinker with the exception of the plays,
which would be handled by the theatrical agent Reginald Golding Bright. As to The Bishop’s Apron, he suggested it should be offered to Chapman & Hall, who had already expressed an interest in publishing Maugham, “& I imagine they will63 give an advance of £150 & a good royalty.” But here Maugham’s imagination had run away with him: Arthur Waugh, the firm’s director, told Pinker there was no question of increasing his offer of exactly half that sum, £75, and with that Maugham was obliged to be content. Dedicated to Harry Philips, The Bishop’s Apron: A Study in the Origins of a Great Family was published in a small edition in February 1906, without Maugham’s evil eye insignia and with little advertisement, its critical reception, good-humored if somewhat sparse, along much the same lines as that accorded to The Merry-Go-Round.

  Much of the correspondence with Colles and Pinker had been written by Maugham from Capri, where, having patched up his relationship with Harry, he had gone with him in July 1905 for an extended holiday. The two men had taken a little house, the Villa Valentino, and Maugham was reveling in the Mediterranean warmth and indolence and in the return of Harry’s companionship. “We have been here nearly a week,”64 Maugham wrote contentedly to Gerald Kelly in early July,

  [with] nothing whatever to do from morning till night…. The Gilded Youth, somewhat overcome by the heat at present, cannot make it out: he murmurs plaintively that it is such a rush to do nothing…. We have both suffered agonies by lying out, naked, in the sun too long on our first day…. G.Y.’s snowy skin suffered terribly…. The bathing is of course delightful; the water so warm that one can play about in it the whole morning.