The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  The play in question was Penelope, with Marie Tempest again in the title role. Witty and urbane, the plot centers on the worldly wiles employed by a doctor’s wife to win back her husband from his tiresome and tenacious mistress. The theme was not original: Barrie had used something like it the year before in What Every Woman Knows, as had Sardou in his popular 1883 farce, Divorçons!; but according to Maugham, Penelope was chiefly inspired “by the young woman … with whom I was having an affair,” a statement that opens up the intriguing possibility that Sue Jones dealt with her lover’s extramural liaisons in a similar manner. Whatever the actuality, it provided an excellent scenario, and with its topical relevance presented audiences with a work that was thoroughly up to date. In Penelope, and in his next play, Smith, Maugham for the first time dealt with the modern woman in the modern age, exchanging the grandeur, opulence, and Victorian values of Lady Frederick and Jack Straw for bridge parties, telephones, mansion flats, and light, bright sitting rooms furnished in floral chintz.

  Penelope, which was to prove yet another popular success, had been commissioned by Charles Frohman, who was now to figure significantly in the promotion of Maugham’s reputation as a dramatist. For Frohman the theater was his life, and within the profession he was both liked and respected, regarded as a fair man whose word was his bond. It was largely as a result of his efforts that a system of exchange for successful plays was set up between London, Paris, and New York, with the emphasis on London as the source of all that was best in contemporary drama: a much-repeated saying of Frohman’s was that he would rather earn £15 in London than $15,000 in New York. By the early 1900s Frohman held a virtual monopoly on importing British drama to the United States, responsible for bringing to America works by Barrie, Pinero, and Oscar Wilde. Thus his enthusiasm for the plays of Somerset Maugham was crucial to Maugham’s establishing himself across the Atlantic. The collaboration between the two had begun well, with Frohman producing Lady Frederick in New York and Mrs. Dot in London, followed by his commissioning of Penelope. “I want to tell you how glad I am62 that Penelope is a success,” Maugham wrote to him three weeks into the run. “It is always rather nervous work to accept a commission.”

  At this period of his life Maugham, while never stagestruck, found he enjoyed his involvement in the process of putting on a play. He liked attending rehearsals, where he appeared always immaculately dressed, and he was one of the few authors whose presence was welcomed, as he was prepared to settle quietly in the stalls without interfering, always willing to pencil in any changes that might be required. Maugham loved the pared-down working atmosphere, with the auditorium in darkness and the stage bare; and he relished the easy camaraderie, the gossip and banter in stuffy gas-lit dressing rooms, “the hurried lunch at a restaurant63 round the corner with a member of the cast, and the cup of strong bitter tea, with thick bread and butter, brought in by the charwoman at four o’clock.” The only moment to be dreaded was the first night, when Maugham always suffered agonies from nerves. “I tried to go to my own first nights64 as though they were somebody else’s,” he wrote, “but even at that I found it a disagreeable experience…. Indeed I should never have gone to see my plays at all, on the first night or any other, if I had not thought it necessary to see the effect they had on the audience in order to learn how to write them.” The opening night of Penelope was the last time he took a bow in response to cries of “Author!,” as he had recently been stung by a newspaper article complaining that he was promoting himself too energetically. “I read that I had neither decorum65 nor decency [and] I determined not again to appear before the curtain.”

  Maugham counted among his friends a number of playwrights, Henry Arthur Jones, St. John Ervine, Alfred Sutro, and, after a less than promising start, Harley Granville Barker; he enjoyed “talking shop” with colleagues and discussing the techniques of the trade. He and Sutro, for instance, regularly read each other’s plays and proffered advice, Sutro proving particularly helpful over the writing of Smith, while Maugham gave good advice with Sutro’s comedy, The Perplexed Husband. In actors, on the other hand, Maugham was never much interested outside the confines of the theater. He admired the profession’s talent and courage and was frequently amused by a gift for mimicry or anecdote, but in private life he found the companionship of actors unrewarding. In a sentence deleted from his 1938 memoir, The Summing Up, he wrote, “I have never been able66 to look upon actors as human beings.”

  The one exception, of course, was the beautiful Sue Jones, to whom he remained passionately attached. Sue was as delightful and alluring as ever, and yet there was something elusive about her, and Maugham found it frustrating that he seemed to be making little progress, that sweet and generous as Sue was to him, she appeared to be equally sweet and generous to everyone else. However, Maugham did what he could to keep Sue happy: having failed to land a role for her in Jack Straw, he now used his growing influence to secure the part of the maid, Peyton, in Penelope. Maugham had no illusions about Sue’s capabilities: “she was not a particularly good actress,”67 he said, “but good enough for me to be able to get her understudies or small parts”; and as Peyton she looked adorable in her maid’s uniform, even winning a pat on the back from The Sunday Times, which referred to “the stoic and impeccable maid68 of Miss Ethelwyn Arthur Jones.” Her lover had done her a better turn than he realized: this modest success resulted in Sue’s being asked to join Beerbohm Tree’s Shakespeare season at His Majesty’s. Here she soon caught the roving eye of Tree himself, who in an attempt to undercut his rival told Sue over supper at the Savoy one evening that she was wasting her time with Maugham as “he’s a queer,” information that left Sue remarkably unfazed.

  Gerald Kelly’s friendship was crucial to Maugham in his affair with Sue, fond as Kelly was of Sue and closer than anyone else to Maugham. The affection between the two men remained undented even after Maugham discovered that Kelly had slept with Sue, his friend’s “odious treachery” referred to by letter in a self-consciously jocular tone. Increasingly it was being impressed upon Maugham that Sue was by nature promiscuous, and that she regularly slept not only with him but with a dismayingly large number of his acquaintances, including not only Kelly but also Walter Payne and Ivor Back, Kelly’s chum from Le Chat Blanc. “All my friends had been to bed with her,”69 Maugham wrote, with understandable exaggeration. “That sounds as though she was something of a wanton. She wasn’t. There was no vice in her…. It wasn’t lasciviousness. It was her nature.” Quite simply, Sue enjoyed sex, had no moral inhibitions about it, and took it for granted when a man invited her to dinner that she would go to bed with him afterward. As Kelly put it, Willie “[was] the only man she ever really loved70 [but] this did not keep her from continuing her promiscuous ways.” But now Maugham, who, as he justly admitted, was fairly promiscuous himself, began to believe that he might want to marry Sue. For a while he had been passionately in love and he still adored her: Did it matter that she was not exclusively his? Now that the physical side of the affair had become over time less urgent, was sexual jealousy really an issue? “There was no one I liked better,”71 he reasoned, “[and] why should I bother … that she had been to bed with so many of my friends? … [N]otwithstanding her moral looseness, she was a very good and a very sweet woman.” He was now in his mid-thirties, and if he was going to settle down, he should do it before long; Sue had recently obtained a divorce from her husband, and without exactly putting it into words gave the impression she would not be averse to marrying again; so the time seemed to be right.

  It was a courageous decision to make, but like most men of his class and generation whose sexual tastes were unorthodox, Maugham set enormous store by an appearance of conventionality. While by no means wishing to suppress his homosexual tendencies, he was encouraged by the fact that he could also find women attractive, and this misled him into believing that he was, as he put it, three-quarters “normal” and only a quarter “queer.” Marriage might swing the balance further in
the desired direction, and would at least allow him to pass as straight in polite society. Sue’s accepting nature was an important part of her appeal, and so was the fact that she was from a theatrical milieu, with the theater’s traditional tolerance of the irregular and nonconformist, a tolerance Maugham knew very well he was unlikely to find among his own kin. Both his surviving brothers, Charles and F.H., were solidly established husbands and fathers, both hardworking lawyers, both pillars of bourgeois respectability. After Harry’s shocking suicide, all evidence of undesirable friendships in that quarter had been successfully hushed up, and clearly it was unthinkable that anything of the kind could be allowed to surface again within the family. Maugham, ever the outsider, had little wish to lead the life his brothers led, six days a week in the office and a bucket-and-spade holiday once a year; and yet there was a part of him that felt a strong urge to conform, to play the role of English gentleman, with a wife to run his home, entertain his friends, and provide him with children.

  In conventional society Maugham’s ambidexterity was unsuspected, and his good looks, growing fame, and attractive diffidence in manner charmed many. Both men and women found his appearance intriguing, and women were particularly fascinated by him, by his way of seeming to give them his undivided attention, apparently absorbed in their every word. There was, too, a slight air of mystery about his personality and his emotional focus that unquestionably added to his glamour. Ada Leverson in one of her novels drew a portrait of him at this period remarkable for the acuteness of its observation. In The Limit, the character closely based on Maugham is “Gilbert Hereford Vaughan,” known to his friends as “Gillie”:

  He behaved like anybody else,72 except that perhaps his manner was a little quieter than the average. Unless one was very observant … he did not at first appear too alarmingly clever. He had one or two characteristics which must have at times led to misunderstandings. One was that whatever or whoever he looked at, his dark opaque eyes were so full of vivid expression that women often mistook for admiration what was often merely observation.

  Discreet reference is made to a secret private life, the nature of which is of great interest to many an unattached young lady hoping to ensnare him, and the Sphinx deals cleverly with the subject by inventing an entanglement with an innkeeper’s daughter, which has to be kept from the public gaze. The appearance in the story of Gladys, “who is coarse and common,”73 may well indicate something of Ada’s feelings about Sue, who was likely to have been resented as the young and beautiful object of Maugham’s affections.

  Like Penelope, the theme of Maugham’s next play, Smith, has echoes of a work by Barrie, his 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, in which the servant turns out to be an infinitely superior being to his masters. In Smith it is a pretty young parlormaid whose integrity is in such striking contrast to the venality and selfishness of her employers that she wins the heart of the hero, the young man of the family. Smith, produced by Frohman at the Comedy Theatre, had its first night on September 30, 1909, the third Maugham play to be staged that year; Penelope had opened in January, and in March The Noble Spaniard, an adaptation by Maugham of a French farce, Les Gaietés de Veuvage, by Ernest Grenet-Dancourt.

  WITH SO MANY DEMANDS on his time, Maugham found it increasingly necessary to leave London in order to write. Sometimes he would run down to Brighton for a few days and put up at the Metropole, and there was an inn at Taplow in Buckinghamshire that he liked as it was near a golf course, and golf had become something of a passion. With writing such a sedentary occupation, Maugham was aware that exercise was important: he was vain about his figure, but more important, he needed to keep fit in order to bolster the fragile health that had been his since childhood and that left him vulnerable particularly to respiratory and lung infections. To this end he rode, he walked, he played squash at the Bath Club once a week, but there were few pastimes he enjoyed more than a game of golf. When working on Penelope he had found a hotel in an idyllic setting, Varenna, on the shores of Lake Como, which became a favorite location mainly on account of its excellent golf course.

  Maugham’s desire to travel, his wanderlust, was to be one of the great driving forces of his life, as necessary to his writing as solitude and quiet. In a letter to Kelly he described it as “that aching to be off & abroad which I know so well.” It was a theme that constantly recurs in the correspondence between them. “I am neither so happy,74 nor so amused, nor so comfortable on my travels as I am in London,” Maugham told him, “& yet I cannot get over the restlessness that drives me forth.” Right into extreme old age, it was this restlessness which compelled him to be frequently on the move, and whenever he could spare time from his professional commitments he would take off. In 1908, as well as to Varenna, he went to Madrid, Constantinople, Bursa, Capri, and Corfu; in 1909 to Paris, Antwerp, and Brussels, and for a walking holiday in the Peloponnese; in 1910, the year of his first visit to the United States, he was also in the south of France, Milan, Athens, and Venice. “Really it is with the greatest difficulty75 that I can keep that purple patch out of my letter,” he wrote to Kelly from Greece. “Birds are singing all round me. There is a wood just below, olive-trees & cypresses, poplars breaking into leaf, & fig-trees; & then rolling hills, ramp upon ramp, snow-capped in the distance & all rosy in the setting sun…. it is all beautiful.”

  Sometimes Walter Payne went with him, but more often he was on his own. In cities he liked to go to the theater and spend hours in picture galleries, the contents of which would be discussed at length in letters to Kelly. Other matters were touched on, too. In their different ways both men fully appreciated the freedom of being out of reach of the pressures of English society. Kelly in Paris reveled in the intoxicating sense of liberty brought about by escape from what he described as “the fantastic conventions and prejudices76 that surrounded people’s sex-experiences in London.” For obvious reasons this applied in even greater measure to Maugham. Brought up in France, he was frequently reduced to a state of exasperation by English prudishness. “To me England has been a country77 where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfil and responsibilities that irked me,” he wrote. “I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native* country and me.” Whenever the chance offered he took it. “An amiable person has offered78 to take me on a motor tour through France,” he wrote cheerily to Kelly in 1907, confident his friend would understand the situation. At sea en route to Naples in 1907 he had reported, “I met an Egyptian pasha79 who fell a victim to my charms & made me proposals of a nature which could not be mistaken…. [Though] I declined with a haughty gesture, I could not remain insensible to the compliment.” In 1909 he went with Reggie Turner to Florence, like Capri home to a sizable community of homosexual expatriates; they stayed in an apartment on the Lung’Arno, where they were joined by the novelist Louis Marlow and a young friend of Marlow’s, and Reggie held center stage with his stories about the late, great Oscar. Reggie, “a living link with Oscar80 and all those ancient buggeries,” as Marlow described him, liked and admired Maugham. “He’s very good,” Reggie would allow. “But not as good as Oscar. Not like Oscar. Oh, no, he’d never be like Oscar!”

  It was in Varenna in October 1909 that Maugham wrote most of his next play, The Tenth Man, which was something of a departure from form. With the exception of A Man of Honour and The Explorer, all Maugham’s dramatic work so far had been lighthearted social comedy. Only one play, “Mrs Beamish,”† had failed to find a producer; the others, from Lady Frederick to Smith, had been popular with audiences and highly rewarding in financial terms for their author. Maugham had been candid, perhaps too candid, about his facility in turning out this kind of material, not troubling to conceal how effortlessly ideas came to him, how easily and quickly the plays were written. Rather rashly he had given a newspaper interview in which he expressed his impatience with tragedy and with the weighty play of ideas, lightheartedly arguing that it was most unwise for playwrights to take themselves
seriously as the first, perhaps the only, aim of the playwright was to entertain. Such self-deprecating mockery was misplaced, and was widely misunderstood by the critics. Max Beerbohm was one of several who went on the attack. “If light comedy is the only form81 that he cares to practise now, let him devote himself to that, by all means. But it is hardly gracious in him to gibe at other men who, conscientiously, but unremuneratively, are treading the path to which his own first ambitions led him.”

  But Maugham knew what he was doing: he understood his audiences and knew how to provide them with what they wanted. As the critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote of Maugham’s plays, “They were just cynical enough82 to make the sentimental-worldly think themselves tough-minded while they were enjoying them, and just brilliant enough to satisfy a London audience’s far from exacting standard of wit.” Popular success, however, did not mean he was unaffected by adverse criticism, and over the years he repeatedly returned to a defense of his stance. “The critics accused me83 of writing down to the public,” he wrote in his autobiographical work, The Summing Up. “I did not exactly do that [but I] wrote my comedies with those sides of myself only that were useful to my purpose. They were designed to please and they achieved their aim.” It was during the early years of his fame as a dramatist that he believed his rejection by the intelligentsia began, a rejection that continued to rankle, despite frequent denials, through the rest of his life. “The intelligentsia, of which84 I had been a modest, but respected member, not only turned a cold shoulder on me … but flung me, like Lucifer, headlong into the bottomless pit. I was taken aback and a trifle mortified.” In an attempt to redress the balance, with his next two plays, The Tenth Man and Grace, he deliberately set out to change tack and return to more serious treatment and themes. Unfortunately, neither was successful, and it was over two years before Maugham felt able to return to playwriting. “I am tired & bored,”85 he wrote to Golding Bright at the end of 1909. “After this I am going to give play-writing a rest for some time. Four plays in the last two years & eight productions! I really think I have the right to slack off for a few months.”