Lady Frederick quickly became the talk of the town, transferring from the Royal Court to the Garrick Theatre, then to the Criterion, the New, and finally the Haymarket, where it completed an impressive run of 422 performances. The American impresario Charles Frohman, who had originally turned the play down, now “ate crow”8 and bought the U.S. rights for twice what he would originally have had to pay, putting it on in New York to great acclaim the following year with Ethel Barrymore in the lead.
Suddenly Maugham was much in demand as a dramatist, and his play agent, Golding Bright, was inundated with requests from eager managers for scripts that previously they had had no hesitation in declining. In quick succession Bright sold three plays that had been written earlier and turned down—Mrs. Dot, The Explorer, and Jack Straw—and was kept busy fielding requests for Maugham to undertake commissions. Exhilarated by this sudden turn in his fortunes, Maugham felt that finally he had arrived exactly where he wished to be, as a playwright, not a novelist. This moment of epiphany came to him one evening while walking past the Comedy Theatre in Panton Street:
I happened to look up9 and saw the clouds lit by the setting sun. I paused to look at the lovely sight and I thought to myself: Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it. I meant then never to write another book, but to devote myself for the rest of my life to the drama.
To this end he wrote to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, to sever the association between them, explaining that he now had so many requests for plays he would no longer have time to write stories—a letter that Pinker sensibly chose to ignore.
Maugham’s next play, Jack Straw, opened at the Vaudeville in the Strand on March 26; this was quickly followed by Mrs. Dot at the Comedy on April 27; and lastly, on June 13, The Explorer at the Lyric. Maugham was now in the astonishing position of having four plays in the West End, with only The Explorer failing to make a respectable run, with a mere 48 performances against Lady Frederick’s 422, Jack Straw’s 321, and 272 for Mrs. Dot. “My success was spectacular10 and unexpected,” Maugham recalled with satisfaction. His name and the titles of his plays, “the Maugham quartet,” were everywhere: Walter Payne leafing through the sporting pages even came across two racehorses called “Lady Frederick” and “Mrs. Dot.” “I was much photographed11 and much interviewed. Distinguished people sought my acquaintance…. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.”12
Predictably, Maugham, as the celebrity of the moment, was much pursued by theatrical and society hostesses. Among them was Lady St. Helier, who had originally taken Maugham up in the nineties at the request of Augustus Hare and who now began to pursue him with vigor. “Great ladies,” Maugham cynically observed, “cultivate those13 occupied with the arts as in former times they kept buffoons.” It was at Lady St. Helier’s house in Portland Place that he had his sole encounter with two great literary figures, Edith Wharton and Thomas Hardy. Invited to a luncheon given in the American novelist’s honor, he was led up to talk to her. Beautifully dressed and magnificently condescending, Mrs. Wharton lectured him for twenty minutes with exquisite refinement on a range of well-chosen cultural topics, until Maugham, feeling suffocated by her intellectual patronage, blurted out a question about the thriller writer Edgar Wallace. Mrs. Wharton looked at him with distaste.
“Who is Edgar Wallace?”14 she replied.
“Do you never read thrillers?”
“No.”
Never has a monosyllable contained more frigid displeasure … her eyes wandered away and a little forced smile slightly curled her lips.
“I’m afraid it’s getting very late,” said Mrs. Wharton.
Thomas Hardy was far more congenial. The occasion was a large, formal dinner party of eminent figures in politics and the arts.
When the ladies retired15 to the drawing-room I found myself sitting next to Thomas Hardy. I remember a little man with an earthy face. In his evening clothes, with his boiled shirt and high collar, he had still a strange look of the soil. He was amiable and mild. It struck me at the time that there was in him a curious mixture of shyness and self-assurance. I do not remember what we talked about, but I know that we talked for three-quarters of an hour.
Mrs. Wharton, living in Paris, may have been unaware of Maugham’s celebrity, but in London his name could hardly be avoided. J. T. Grein in The Sunday Times wrote, “One has to go back16 to the early days of Sardou* to find a popularity similar and so sudden”; Punch ran a cartoon by Bernard Partridge showing the ghost of William Shakespeare scowling enviously at the sight of a wall covered in posters for Maugham’s four plays; and Max Beerbohm in the Saturday Review hailed Somerset Maugham as “the hero of the year17 [whose] name is a household word even in households where the theatre is held unclean.” With four plays running, why not five? Max speculated. “Five plays running simultaneously! Stupendous! … Yet, after all, what are five theatres among so many? Why shouldn’t all the theatres in London be Maughamised?”
It was Grein, an energetic supporter of Maugham’s since he had first produced A Man of Honour at the Stage Society, who wrote one of the most enthusiastic reviews of the next play, Jack Straw, which he described as “light as a feather18 and as saucy as a sparrow.” An exuberant, intricately plotted piece, Jack Straw had been dashed off in a couple of weeks during Maugham’s sojourn in Paris in 1905. The plot was suggested by a story told him by Harry Philips about some people he knew back home in Staffordshire. Thomas Twyford, a wealthy pottery manufacturer, had been cold-shouldered on moving into the neighborhood until he was taken up by Grand Duke Michael of Russia, who was leasing a house nearby. After this, according to Harry, the Twyfords “suddenly became much sought after.”19 In the play some details were changed but the parallels were not difficult to draw, and after the play opened Harry found himself in hot water, banned from a number of houses in the locality. This experience was an early instance of what was to evolve into a familiar pattern: a story relayed to Maugham by a third party, then redesigned by him in fictional form but with so little attempt at disguise that the work’s appearance frequently resulted in shocked recognition and hurt feelings. Harry Philips may have been the first but he was certainly not the last of these purveyors of tales to suffer from the furious fallout consequent upon publication, a fallout that generally left Maugham himself singularly undisturbed.
AT THIS POINT in his career, Maugham as the author had little say in the matter of casting, and indeed had failed in the one attempt he made to secure a part for a friend. In Jack Straw, “I tried to get a small part20 for Sue, but could not manage it,” he had written to Kelly in February 1908.
Ethelwyn Sylvia Jones, known as Sue, was a young actress, daughter of the playwright Henry Arthur Jones, who, like Maugham, had become one of Mrs. Steevens’s regular visitors at Merton Place. Jones, an amusing, energetic man in his late fifties, was a farmer’s son who by sheer determination had established himself in the theater; he had enjoyed considerable success during the 1890s, although his career was now on the wane. As Jones had much admired Liza of Lambeth, he and Maugham quickly established a rapport, with Jones voluble on the subject of the drama, talking energetically of his vision of the founding of a national theater and eager to involve the younger man in his campaign to abolish the Lord Chamberlain’s punitive system of censorship.
It was one afternoon in 1906 that Jones had arrived at Merton accompanied by Sue, then a ravishing young woman of twenty-three with pale gold skin, fair hair piled high on her head, blue eyes, and a voluptuous figure. Sue had first walked on in one of her father’s plays at only fourteen, after which she had served her apprenticeship in the provinces without making much of a mark. Unhappily married, she was living apart from her husband and trying to find work in the West End. Maugham was immediately captivated by Sue’s luscious beauty and entrancing smile: “she had the most beautiful smile21 I have ever seen on a human being,” he wrote; she was generous and tenderhearted and had a delicious gurgling laugh which was irresistibly sexy. The
two of them flirted and talked, and Sue agreed to dine with him; after a further couple of evenings at inexpensive restaurants, Maugham took her back to his single room in Pall Mall and made love to her. While he escorted her home in a hansom afterward, she asked him how long he thought the affair would last. “Six weeks,” he teasingly replied. In fact Maugham was to fall seriously in love with Sue, and their affair would continue for nearly eight years.
When he met Sue Jones that afternoon at Merton, Maugham had only recently come to the end of his relationship with Harry Philips. Reserved in manner and apparently detached, Maugham took pains to conceal the fact that he was a man of powerful, often turbulent feeling: a largely loveless childhood had made him adept at disguise. Sexually passionate, Maugham also desperately craved love, and until well into middle age was given to a series of intense infatuations. His misfortune lay in an inability ever to find affection equally returned: magnetically attractive to both sexes as a young man, he was much pursued—“I have often acted a passion22 that I did not feel,” he admitted—and frequently in the position of having to extract himself from unwanted entanglements, “with gentleness when possible, and if not, with irritation.” The irony was that he himself never experienced what he described as “the bliss of requited love.” Expert at covering his tracks, Maugham left little documentary evidence of specific attachments; nevertheless there are numerous signs—references casually made in letters, fictional versions lightly disguised—of his love affairs and of an emotional neediness only partly hidden behind the reserve. When looking back in old age, Maugham declared that he had never completely let down his guard, never surrendered wholly to anyone; and yet there are indications that this was not entirely true, and that for a time with Sue Jones his carefully erected defenses were thoroughly undermined.
Apart from her sex appeal, Sue had a number of qualities which to a man as highly strung and vulnerable as Maugham were infinitely seductive. Wholly at ease with herself, she was totally accepting, possessed of a benign tranquillity, an unruffled calm that was wonderfully soothing to his spirits. She was good-humored, too, with an endearingly childlike sense of mischief; she loved to laugh, yet at other times was happy to sit in silence, not needing to be talked to or entertained. Despite her failed marriage and undistinguished career, Sue had a tremendous zest for life, her optimism and vitality a welcome counterbalance to those moods of depression and uncertainty to which her lover was prone. Most important, she possessed in abundance a maternal warmth, which for obvious reasons was irresistible to Maugham.
Unfortunately no correspondence between Maugham and Sue Jones has ever come to light, but an indelible impression has been left of Sue as the lovely, warmhearted Rosie in the novel Cakes and Ale. Over the years Maugham made a number of references to Rosie as the portrait of “a woman of whom I had been extremely fond23 for years,” plainly pointing to Sue, and Gerald Kelly, in whom full details of the affair were confided, once in an interview confirmed the identification. Sue, said Kelly, “came of common family24 … and had married at the age of nineteen…. She led a miserable life … & then met Willie, the only man she ever really loved.” It was his impression, Kelly added, that Willie and Sue “had a very happy love affair25 together…. She was one of the most delightful women I have ever known, I thought her wonderfully beautiful.” To Maugham himself he wrote that Rosie was “the most perfectly realized woman26 you ever got into a book.”
In Cakes and Ale Maugham’s love affair with Sue is naturally transposed, and yet its essence is unmistakable. Here is the passage describing the first night the lovers spend together, during which the nameless narrator, a very young man at this point, takes Rosie back to his London lodgings:
I opened the door27 and lit the candle. Rosie followed me in and I held it up so that she should be able to see herself…. The room was very small and the dressing-table was by the bed. She raised her hand and softly stroked my cheek….
… A sob broke from my tight throat. I do not know whether it was because I was shy and lonely … or because my desire was so great, but I began to cry. I felt terribly ashamed of myself; I tried to control myself, I couldn’t; the tears welled up in my eyes and poured down my cheeks. Rosie saw them and gave a little gasp.
“Oh, honey, what is it? What’s the matter? Don’t. Don’t!”
… She rocked me back and forth as though I were a child in her arms. I kissed her breasts and I kissed the white column of her neck; and she slipped out of her bodice and out of her skirt and her petticoats and I held her for a moment by her corseted waist; then she undid it, holding her breath for an instant to enable her to do so; and stood before me in her shift. When I put my hands on her sides I could feel the ribbing of the skin from the pressure of the corsets.
“Blow out the candle,” she whispered.
It was she who awoke me when the dawn peering through the curtains revealed the shape of the bed and of the wardrobe against the darkness of the lingering night….
“I must get up,” she said. “I don’t want your landlady to see me.” …
We dressed in silence. She did not put on her corsets again, but rolled them up and I wrapped them in a piece of newspaper. We tiptoed along the passage and when I opened the door and we stepped out into the street the dawn ran to meet us….
I kissed her and I watched her walk away.
Intoxicated by his new love affair, Maugham went over to Paris to see Gerald Kelly; he told him he was “desperately in love”28 and that he wanted to commission Kelly to paint Sue’s portrait. The result is the beautiful Mrs. Leveaux in White, painted in 1907, in which Sue is shown standing full length, voluptuous in a low-cut evening dress, her mouth half open, her eyes gazing languidly into the middle distance. Equally striking is a second Kelly portrait, even more candidly erotic, of Sue sitting on a sofa, again in décolleté evening dress, looking straight ahead with an expression of heavily sensual promise on her lovely face. “She posed beautifully29 for the picture, so patiently,” said Kelly later, “and both of us did our best, and I think Willie loved the portrait.”
JACK STRAW HAD BEEN RUNNING for barely a month when Mrs. Dot opened at the Comedy. The play was produced by the American Charles Frohman, whose theatrical empire in London was fast expanding. Frohman was one of the seventeen managers who had rejected Lady Frederick, and not wishing to make the same mistake twice was quick to make an offer for Mrs. Dot, securing Marie Tempest for the title role and the well-known producer Dion Boucicault to direct. Witty and stylish, the play opened on April 27, 1908, to a favorable reception from the critics, nearly all of whom singled out Marie Tempest for particular praise.
No one interested in the theater could now be unaware of Maugham’s prominence, a prominence that inevitably attracted a certain amount of envy. Arnold Bennett, who had had a play produced for the Stage Society earlier in the year, wrote in his journal for April 29, “Noticed in myself:30 A distinct feeling of jealousy on reading yesterday and to-day accounts of another very successful production of a play by Somerset Maugham—the third now running.” And one evening when dining alone in his club Maugham overheard two men at the next table discussing him. “D’you know him at all?”31 said one. “I suppose he’s about as swollen-headed as he can be.” “Oh, yes,” said the other. “He can’t get a hat big enough to fit him.” The truth was rather different: in fact Maugham was remarkably unchanged by his success, although inevitably his levelheaded manner struck some observers as a form of vanity. He was pleased by the acclaim, of course, but he had worked hard through ten long years to achieve it and he saw very clearly the nature of that achievement: he had discovered a knack, a facility for writing light comedy that audiences found amusing; it was not an ability he rated very highly, nor did he see himself continuing with it for very long, but while there was a demand and he enjoyed the exercise, he planned to make the most of it: after all, the effort involved could hardly be described as arduous when a play could be turned out in less than a month. “I regularly
wrote one act32 in five days,” he recalled, “took the week-end off, and wrote the second and third acts in the same time. Then I gave five days of the fourth week to revising what I had written.”
For Maugham the most significant change brought about by success was financial: for the first time in his life he was free of money worries, and the relief was enormous. His plays had not yet made him rich, as they were soon to do, but the popularity of Lady Frederick marked the point at which he left poverty behind him. “I hated poverty,”33 he wrote in his notebook for 1908. Fond of his creature comforts, he had never been attracted by the colorful squalor of bohemian life, and being in debt had always troubled him. On a number of levels money meant a great deal to Maugham, and few people in his opinion fully understood “the great, the insinuating34 … the overwhelming significance of money in the affairs of life.” Money ensured his artistic independence, insulated him from unwelcome intrusion, enabled him to travel where and when he pleased, and provided him with the considerable level of luxury in which he chose to live; more than that, for a man who from childhood had been wholly lacking in emotional security, financial security became a vitally important substitute. That it was a subject that interested him profoundly is shown by the many references to money in Maugham’s work, in his correspondence, and also in his conversation. “Sometimes after an evening with Willie,”35 said the writer Beverley Nichols, “one felt that one had been dining with a stockbroker.” In 1908, the immediate result of his newly affluent status was that he could afford to leave his single room in Pall Mall and, still with the faithful Walter Payne, move into a smart little flat in Mayfair, at 23 Mount Street, off Park Lane.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 13
