The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Aware that he must quickly capitalize on his current popularity, Maugham immediately set to work making the final alterations to the scripts he still had in hand, and on June 13, 1908, the curtain went up on his fourth play, The Explorer. Shortly also to be published as a novel, The Explorer after numerous rejections in the past had eventually been accepted by Lewis Waller, one of the most successful actor-managers of his day. Persuading Waller of The Explorer’s potential had not been easy, and the play had been submitted and substantially rewritten four times before it was eventually accepted. It was Maurice Colles who had dealt with the earliest version back in 1903, which he failed to sell, and when Maugham severed his connection with the agency he naturally assumed that Colles’s part in the business was over. But now here was Colles claiming commission, a claim that his ex-client felt was wholly unjustified. “Practically nothing remains36 of the play which you tried to place,” Maugham told him. “If you who are concerned with the Authors Society in protecting authors from dubious claims, consider you have one in this case, I shall lose my faith in responsible agencies.” But Colles did consider he had a claim and was not prepared to be put off, successfully suing for the money in court, the case of Colles v. Maugham heard in the High Court of Justice, King’s Bench Division, with the plaintiff awarded a payment of £21.10s.

  The trouble Maugham had with The Explorer closely followed on trouble he encountered with the publication of his new novel, although in this instance the affair was settled without legal intervention. The Magician, written in 1906, was inspired by the monstrous figure of Aleister Crowley, Gerald Kelly’s brother-in-law and one of the regulars at Le Chat Blanc. The work had been accepted by Methuen, with Maugham signing an agreement for three novels for each of which he would be paid an advance of £75. It was not until The Magician was actually set up in print that the head of the firm read it and was so profoundly shocked that publication was canceled forthwith. “I have always thought that publishers37 should never learn to read,” Maugham crossly remarked. However, he was sufficiently shaken by the reaction to remove the name of the book’s dedicatee, Gerald Kelly, from the manuscript in order to protect his friend from association with an obscene work. The book was then sold to William Heinemann, which proved to be a move of considerable consequence: Heinemann remained Maugham’s publisher for the rest of his life. At the time the Heinemann deal was struck, Maugham’s name was on hoardings all over London and it occurred to Methuen’s director that it might be timely to remind their author that he still owed them three novels. Maugham was outraged. “I, as you know, make a point38 of cultivating the beau geste,” he told Gerald Kelly, “& in a few moving words told him that he could go to hell.”

  Methuen’s rejection of The Magician cannot have come as a complete surprise, as Maugham had been uneasy for some time about the story’s reception. As early as October 1906 he had written to Pinker, “I wanted to consult you39 about taking out the chapter in the lunatic asylum. I do not want to horrify people more than need be.” The Magician is in the fullest sense a horror story, and there is little sign that Maugham reined himself in, on the contrary relishing going to the limits in terms of terror and taste. In Paris at the turn of the century there was a considerable vogue for the occult, a vogue greatly encouraged by the novels of the Decadent writer Huysmans. According to Maugham, “[The Magician] would never40 have been written except for the regard I had for Joris-Karl Huysmans.” Strong echoes can be found, too, of other practitioners of the genre such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, and, more recently, of H. G. Wells’s savage and sadistic story, The Island of Doctor Moreau.

  The dominating figure in the novel, the Magician himself, is Oliver Haddo, possessed of all of Aleister Crowley’s vanity and bombast. The story begins in Paris with Arthur Burdon, an English doctor, come to visit his fiancée, Margaret, who is staying with her friend, Susie, prior to her forthcoming marriage. The two women, together with a French savant, Dr. Porhoët, take Arthur to dine at their local restaurant. Here the lively company of writers and artists is suddenly silenced by the arrival of Haddo. Haddo, a man of “vast obesity,” immediately draws the attention of everyone in the room with his dramatic stance and flamboyant delivery, although he fails to impress Arthur with his ludicrous claims to be a master of the magic arts. When Haddo informs the company that he is known as the Brother of the Shadow, Arthur, looking at the man’s immense girth, makes a facetious rejoinder.

  This turns out to be a fatal mistake. Haddo, enraged by the ridicule, decides on a terrible revenge, casting a spell over Margaret so that she becomes obsessed by him, gripped by an overwhelming sexual passion. Helpless, Margaret leaves the heartbroken Arthur and marries Haddo. One night in London, Susie and Arthur find themselves at a dinner party, where it is clear that Margaret is in desperate need of rescue. Eventually, with the help of Dr. Porhoët, Susie and Arthur track her down to Skene, Haddo’s Staffordshire estate. True to tradition, the place is bleak and remote, with terrible rumors circulating as to what is going on inside the house. In the end the forces of evil are defeated, although Margaret dies in the process, and Skene, with its wicked Magician and the loathsome horrors it contains, is destroyed by fire.

  To those in the know it was obvious whence Maugham had drawn much of his inspiration, his portrait of the regulars at Le Chat Blanc (Le Chien Noir in the novel) depicted with little attempt at camouflage. “I hear that Maugham has crucified us41 of the White Cat in a new satirical novel,” the painter Roderic O’Conor, who appears as O’Brien, wrote gloomily to Clive Bell. But as might be expected, the most extravagant reaction came from the Magician himself, Aleister Crowley, who was infuriated (or pretended to be), and at the same time perversely flattered, by Maugham’s wicked caricature, describing the novel as “an appreciation of my genius42 such as I had never dreamed of inspiring.” He had come across the book by chance, he said.

  The title attracted me strongly, The Magician. The author, bless my soul! No other than my old and valued friend, William Somerset Maugham, my nice young doctor whom I remembered so well from the dear old days of the Chat Blanc. So he had really written a book—who would have believed it!

  In a review for Vanity Fair signed “Oliver Haddo,” and later in his memoirs, Crowley attacked Maugham, accusing him of plagiarism, of not only plundering his life but of transposing without acknowledgment long passages from books on the occult that Maugham had found in the studio of Crowley’s brother-in-law, Gerald Kelly. “I had never supposed43 that plagiarism could have been so varied, extensive and shameless.”

  Crowley had a point. The portrait of Haddo is undeniably drawn from life, and yet, repulsive though he is, it is Haddo who provides the novel’s powerful nexus. As to the rest, the adventure story works well enough, and as might be expected, the theme of sexual degradation is treated with enthralling veracity; but in artistic terms what sinks the story is exactly what Crowley objected to, Maugham’s incorporating hefty chunks from works on the Kabbalah, the Seven Genii, the Keys of Solomon, and “the many things in the East44 which are inexplicable by science.” None of this really interested him—he thought it all “moonshine”—and it shows, his lazy extracts making those parts of the book cumbrous and dull. When Maugham showed the manuscript to Violet Hunt she put her finger on just this fault, and in acknowledging her reservation he wrote, “I daresay you are quite right45 in saying that the trail of the lamp is over it all, but it was deliberately that I gave so many dates & authorities…. I wanted to impress upon the reader the fact that all those things had been seriously believed in their time, & I was very anxious to prevent the book from being a mere shocker.” Crowley’s detailed cataloguing of The Magician’s plagiarized passages did little to endear him to its author: after Gerald Kelly painted Crowley’s portrait, Maugham suggested he submit it to the Royal Academy, “with the title SON OF A BITCH46 (arrangement in black & green).”

  The Magician was published in November 1908 to mixed reviews, some castigating the author for
obscenity, others congratulating him for providing such “a real thrill of horror.”47 By this time Maugham’s reputation was standing high, very different from the position he had occupied only twelve months before. With Barrie, Pinero, Alfred Sutro, and other notable playwrights he was one of the founders of the Dramatists’ Club; he was made a member of the Garrick, the long-established gentlemen’s club in Covent Garden for actors and men of letters; and he was among seventy notable signatories, including Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Pinero, Yeats, and Wells, of a letter to The Times complaining about theater censorship. On December 1 that year, Maugham was one of 180 guests at a dinner held at the Ritz, the purpose to honor Robbie Ross, the loyal friend and executor of Oscar Wilde—and also, indirectly, to rehabilitate eight years after his demise the reputation of Wilde himself

  MAUGHAM’S PRESENCE THAT DECEMBER evening at the Ritz is significant, a gesture of homage to a figure whose impact on his life and writing, although largely unexpressed, was considerable. Maugham never wrote about Wilde—too dangerous a subject—and yet Wilde’s influence was formative: as a medical student at St. Thomas’s he had read Salome and The Picture of Dorian Gray and seen The Importance of Being Earnest; echoes of Wilde appear unmistakably in much of his early dramatic work; and in The Magician, a novel with an indisputably Wildean flavor, there is a substantial, if unattributed, quotation, “I am amorous of thy body,48 Iokanaan!” Wilde’s declared belief that “It is not for anyone to censure what anyone else does, and everyone should go his own way, to whatever place he chooses, in exactly the way that he chooses” was one to which Maugham wholeheartedly subscribed and that he constantly returned to in his work. The exposure of Wilde’s homosexuality and its terrible consequences, the loss of family, of home, of reputation, had made a deep impression on Maugham, who could hardly avoid seeing a number of potential parallels in his own situation. Haunted by the tragedy and fascinated by the man, he was strongly attracted by Wilde’s social and literary circles, many members of which were present that night at the Ritz, several of whom were to become important as friends of his own.

  Key among them were the guest of honor himself, Robbie Ross, and his old friend, Reginald Turner, who together had accompanied Wilde to France after his release from prison. Ross was a small, neat man with a tidy mustache, discreetly homosexual—he had been Wilde’s first male lover—with a roguish sense of humor and infectious laugh. As art critic of The Morning Post and director of a small gallery, the genial Ross was knowledgeable about paintings, in particular the French Impressionists, a subject guaranteed to interest Maugham, who found this recent acquaintance most engaging. “You are a perfect dear,”49 he wrote to Ross the day after the dinner, “and I’m so glad to have known you.” Reggie Turner had become a friend after Maugham had written to thank him for an appreciative review of Lady Frederick. Teasingly referred to by Wilde as “the boy-snatcher of Clement’s Inn,” Reggie was spinsterish by temperament and unfailingly decorous in mixed company, if capable of delirious promiscuity in all-male gatherings. “The most amusing man50 I have known,” according to Maugham. Max Beerbohm in describing Reggie’s wit remarked that he was not very responsive to other people’s humor, a comment that worried Reggie, who asked Maugham if he thought it were true. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,51 so I said, ‘Well, Reggie, you never laugh at any of my jokes.’ He blinked … & puckered up his ugly little face, & with a grin replied, ‘But I don’t [think] they’re funny.’” It was Reggie who had encouraged Beerbohm to join the Wilde circle, but while Max immensely admired Wilde, he never quite became an intimate: unlike Reggie Turner and Ross, he was not homosexual and had no wish to follow in that direction, although he was happy to join in the general talk of straight men as “mulierasts” and of man’s love for man as “the love that dares not speak its name.”

  Max and Reggie Turner had been inseparable since they were undergraduates at Oxford, and it was a compliment to Maugham that he was now invited to join their clique. Reggie had an apartment on the edge of Berkeley Square, only a couple of minutes’ walk from Maugham on Mount Street and the Beerbohm family on Upper Berkeley Street, where Max lived with his mother and sisters. It was at Reggie’s flat one afternoon that Maugham first met H. G. Wells, who had been lunching with Reggie and had returned to the flat to continue their conversation. Wells, regarded as one of the country’s leading intellectuals, was then at the height of his fame, and Maugham, uncomfortably aware of the trivial nature of his own celebrity, felt wrong-footed and subtly patronized. “I received the impression52 that he looked upon me with a sort of offhand amusement as he might have looked upon Arthur Roberts or Dan Leno.”* Some of the jolliest evenings in the company of Max and Reggie were spent with the eccentric Mrs. Steevens. All three young men had been regular visitors to Merton Place, which Mrs. Steevens had recently left, moving to Kensington, where her generous if somewhat chaotic hospitality continued undiminished. Maugham remembered her Tuesdays as particularly lively:

  They were very gay parties,53 chiefly because Reggie kept us all laughing our heads off. Max did not say much, but when he did, you remembered it. It was pretty sure to be witty or caustic. When the evening came to an end we drove on the top of a bus to go to our respective homes.

  An important friendship Maugham made among the “Oscarians” was with Ada Leverson, who had also been present the night of Ross’s dinner. A faithful friend to Wilde, who called her his “Sphinx,” Ada Leverson had stood by him when the scandal broke and was one of the few to greet him early in the morning on his release from jail. A fine-featured, soft-spoken woman in her forties, Ada, separated from her husband, was regarded as the Egeria of a mainly homosexual coterie that included Robbie Ross, Reggie Turner, Max Beerbohm, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Attracted by and attractive to effeminate young men—she had once tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce Aubrey Beardsley—she was much loved as a discreet and unshockable confidante, treasured as a gifted if somewhat eccentric hostess. “Her conversation was artificial,54 in several senses elusive, chaotic and often captivatingly absurd,” as one of her devotees described it. At her little house near Hyde Park, the Sphinx, though far from well off, held delightful soirées. Obliged to supplement her income, Ada had written a couple of novels, and she contributed articles to Black & White and Punch. One of her circle, Robert Hichens, author of The Garden of Allah, encouraged her to try her hand at writing plays. “Write a light comedy at once,”55 he wrote to her in 1908. “I wish it, I command it. Cut out Somerset Maugham.”

  There was little chance of that, but the friendship between Ada Leverson and Maugham soon became warm. As in the case of Violet Hunt, a strong emotional attachment developed on the side of the Sphinx, who found this handsome, clever young man disturbingly attractive: she wrote to him constantly, filled his room with flowers when he was ill, and gave him a lucky charm to keep about his person. “My dear Sphynx,” he wrote to her, using his own idiosyncratic spelling of the word, “It is too kind56 of you to send me that lovely horse-shoe. I will wear it on my watch-chain, watch-chain; & the flowers in my hair, my hair. You see your kindness throws me into a lyric rapture….” She invited him to dinner and the opera, attended all his plays, and relied on him to criticize her work. In 1908 she dedicated to him her novel Love’s Shadow, “a great honour,”57 as he rightly recognized. “[Maugham’s] visits were looked forward to58 eagerly,” her daughter recalled, “and a large photograph of him became part of her personal surroundings.” For his part Maugham was fond of the Sphinx, knew of her feelings, and played the relationship skillfully, indulging in a delicate flirtatiousness that scrupulously stopped just short of anything more serious. The two of them had a number of interests in common: the writing business—the Sphinx, too, was a client of J. B. Pinker—and also the theater. Her association with Wilde was of consuming interest to Maugham, who was touched when she gave him her own precious first edition of Wilde’s poem The Sphinx, in which, inscribing it for Maugham, she had written lines beginning “Oh dark to
rmenting face of beauty, loved …” Maugham was curious about Lord Alfred Douglas, unforgettably encountered thirteen years ago during his first visit to Capri, to whom he hoped Ada would introduce him. “I wish you would ask me59 to meet Bosie one day,” he wrote to her in December 1908.

  Shortly after this, in January 1909, Maugham’s next play opened, and the Sphinx, anxious to promote her friend’s career, wrote to Lord Alfred, who was then editor of The Academy, asking if she might review it for his journal. He agreed, on condition that there was to be no “log-rolling,” no writing “‘something nice’ … because the author60 happened to be a friend.” Unfortunately this is exactly what the piece turned out to be, and Douglas returned it with a sharp rebuke. “My dear Sphinx, I am very sorry,61 but this article won’t do at all,” he began.

  It is a much too obvious “puff” of a personal friend of yours…. Maugham’s play may be quite amusing and worth seeing and all that, but your criticism would have applied to a really great comedy like one of Oscar’s, the sort of thing that only appears once in 20 years…. When you asked me to dinner to meet him I began to be rather suspicious. I have been living in London on and off for the last 10 years, and if Maugham, whom I remember meeting years ago at Capri, was so anxious to meet me it is a pity he did not do so before I became Editor of a paper which is capable of being very useful to him.