The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS Maugham had been wholly engaged with the theater, but now his interest had waned. True, there were still minor commissions to be fulfilled: a preface for an edition of his plays to be published by Heinemann in September, and two adaptations from the French. Yet more and more he felt himself drawn toward the writing of a novel. “After submitting myself for some years12 to the exigencies of the drama I hankered after the wide liberty of the novel,” he wrote. “I knew the book I had in mind would be a long one and I wanted to be undisturbed, so I refused the contracts that managers were eagerly offering me and temporarily retired from the stage. I was then thirty-seven.” His theme was predominantly autobiographical, much the same as that attempted at twenty-four in “The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey,” the story of his childhood and young manhood and of a degrading sexual obsession. This time, however, with greatly increased maturity and confidence, it would be approached without flinching and with an uncompromising adherence to psychological truth. The subject began increasingly to absorb him, the compulsion he felt under to write different from anything he had previously known; his memories were literally forcing themselves upon him—“choking” was the word he used: “I had all that stuff choking me,13 occupying my thoughts by day & my dreams by night, and I wanted to be free of it.”

  In order to begin on the work undisturbed he went to stay at the Sunningdale Golf Club in Berkshire, from where he reported that he was making good progress.

  It is a great satisfaction14 to sit down to it every morning & peg away, without having to bother about whether it is long or dull, or whether this will get across the footlights or whether an actress will ever be able to say the other. I am afraid it will be much longer than I could wish, but there is no help for it: I have so much to say….

  From then on over the next two and a half years came regular reports that the book was almost finished—and yet somehow the end continued to lie just out of reach, an unfamiliar experience for Maugham, accustomed to completing a work in a matter of weeks. The novel was begun in the autumn of 1911, but it was not until the autumn of 1914 that it was delivered to Heinemann, scheduled for publication the following August.

  Such an unusually long period of gestation was due not only to the size of the project but also to Maugham’s reluctance to stay sequestered for more than a few days at a time: there were simply too many distractions. The winter season of 1911, the first after the coronation of George V, was particularly brilliant: The Russian ballet, with Pavlova and Nijinsky, was in London, and there were new plays by Sutro, Shaw, and Arnold Bennett, all attended by Maugham. Another diversion at this time was a brief love affair with a Russian woman, Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, the daughter of Prince Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist intellectual then living in exile in London. “Sasha” Kropotkin was a big, voluptuous woman, handsome, with high cheekbones, a wide mouth, and slightly protuberant dark eyes. Clever, serious, and intense, a friend of socialists such as William Morris and Bernard Shaw, Sasha moved in a circle of Russian artists and revolutionaries, and in this period of European fascination with all things Russian, Maugham found it exciting at her parties to make such close contact with Russian history and literature, to meet Diaghilev and Pavlova, to drink vodka and discuss Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with passionate intensity. The two of them went over to Paris for a few days where they stayed at a little hotel on the Left Bank; they visited the Louvre and the Comédie Française and went dancing in a Russian nightclub, and Sasha ate her way through a number of enormous meals with an appetite that slightly appalled her lover.* Maugham introduced her to his brother Charles, who was visibly impressed that Willie should be on such intimate terms with a real live princess. “He simply couldn’t believe15 I was fucking anyone so grand,” as Maugham somewhat indelicately phrased it. The affair provided a pleasant interlude, ending after a few weeks “without acrimony on either side,” leaving Maugham free to travel. In March 1912 he went to Spain for six weeks, and in August and September made a tour of the Continent, beginning in Paris and ending in Rome. He was back in London in November but left again the following month for New York in order to undertake an unusual piece of research, nothing at all to do with his novel, but for a new play. Entitled The Land of Promise, this was first staged in the United States in November 1913, opening in London the following February, where a successful run at the Duke of York’s was brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of war. It was only then that Maugham put the finishing touches to his novel.

  Of Human Bondage is a flawed and magnificent work, showing all the strengths as well as the weaknesses of Maugham as novelist. At three hundred thousand words and filling sixteen medium-sized notebooks in manuscript, it is the longest and also the most intensely personal of all Maugham’s novels, written with an astonishing vitality and drive. “The teeming memories”16 that had been so insistently pushing at his consciousness were of his own boyhood and youth, the story of which provides the main plot, a linear narrative told in a style deliberately spare and unadorned: there is none of the softening and prettification that found their way into “Stephen Carey.” The dominant theme is of the hero’s journey toward self-discovery, mainly through the terrifying experience of a masochistic sexual obsession; he believes his search to be for the meaning of life, for the figure in the carpet, which turns out to be as elusive as in Henry James’s famous story, although here the revelation that there is no meaning comes as an immense liberation. “His insignificance was turned to power17 … for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty.”

  The hero, Philip Carey, is a small boy and already fatherless when the story begins with the harrowing death of his mother in childbirth. The boy is put in the charge of his uncle, the vicar of Blackstable in Kent, a selfish, unloving man, and of his German wife, Louisa. As soon as he is old enough Philip is sent to board at the King’s School, Tercanbury, where he is wretchedly unhappy. At sixteen he goes for a year to Heidelberg, and then to study art in Paris, eventually returning to London to train as a doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital.

  Philip and one of his fellow students form the habit of dropping in at a nearby tea shop, and it is here that Philip first sets eyes on his nemesis. Mildred, one of the waitresses, is a pasty-faced young woman with an offensively offhand manner. At first annoyed by her snubbing indifference, Philip gradually finds himself perversely attracted, excited by her obvious contempt: “it was absurd to care18 what an anaemic little waitress said to him; but he was strangely humiliated.” And so his destructive obsession takes hold. He courts Mildred slavishly, begs for her attention, lavishes whatever presents and treats he can afford on her, and the more scornfully she treats him, the more abjectly he crawls back for more. The few times she carelessly allows him to make love to her, his desire, instead of being slaked, burns stronger than ever. He clearly sees that Mildred is stupid, vulgar, humorless, and avaricious; he despises himself for his passion but is helpless in its grip. Mildred taunts him, bores him, enrages him; they quarrel violently; sometimes he wants to kill her; but away from her he can think only of seeing her again, of begging her forgiveness, of meekly accepting the humiliations she heaps upon him. She leaves him twice for other men before Philip finally comes to his senses and leaves her.

  Ironically, although Philip has freed himself from Mildred, it is now that he reaches the nadir of his existence. Through an unwise investment of his tiny patrimony, he loses all his money and is left penniless. Not only can he not afford to continue his training, he cannot pay his rent, nor, after the few shillings in his pocket are spent, can he afford to buy food. Unable to find work and desperate with hunger, he starts sleeping rough, fortunately rescued at this point by a kindly character, Thorpe Athelney, who procures him a job in a large linen draper’s on Oxford Street. Philip endures months of drudgery on the shop floor, but then his uncle dies, he is left enough money to complete his medical training, and the story ends with his proposing marriage to Thorpe Athelney’s eldest daughter.


  Of Human Bondage is an extraordinarily compelling work, standing comparison with some of the best of Maugham’s contemporaries, with Bennett, Gissing, and George Moore, as well as with an important earlier influence, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, a novel much admired by Maugham. Throughout, it is evident that Maugham draws widely from his own experience: even apart from the boyhood sections and the dominant central theme of the affair with Mildred, there are numerous places, situations, and subsidiary characters recognizable from life. There is one vividly described sequence, however, which was created entirely from a secondhand account, the passage dealing with Philip’s job as a shop assistant. With no experience of such work himself, Maugham commissioned an account from Gilbert Clark, a young actor who had been employed at the Piccadilly department store Swan & Edgar’s. At Maugham’s request Clark wrote a six-thousand-word description of his experience, for which he was paid thirty guineas. “Willie used my stuff19 practically word for word,” Clark later recalled with satisfaction.

  There was no need for outside assistance, however, in treating the theme at the heart of the novel, that of Philip’s bondage, his masochistic obsession with the hateful Mildred. The identity of the original of this curiously androgynous character is a mystery: a Lambeth prostitute, according to one theorist, a tea shop waitress, in the view of another, while Maugham’s onetime lover, Harry Philips, who might be expected to know, definitely asserted that “she” was a boy. What is certain is that he or she once existed and that Maugham must have met her when he was very young, since her prototype is Rose in “Stephen Carey,” written as early as 1898. The likelihood is that in the later novel Maugham added to the portrait various attributes and incidents culled from subsequent experience. Harry Philips when he read the novel recognized one such incident, “undoubtedly an episode in our friendship not very creditable to me which he attributed to her [Mildred].” Every detail of Philip’s enslavement rings true. His degradation is relentlessly mapped out, his lust, his abject devotion, his tormented self-loathing. Mildred is diabolical, yet at the same time Maugham allows us to see that she is to be pitied. One of Maugham’s greatest strengths as a novelist is his ability to create three-dimensional characters, women as well as men, interacting with one another. Mildred, so cold and callous with Philip, is pathetic in her relations with other men. Equally, Philip himself is depicted with ruthless honesty, eager, vulnerable, tenderhearted, but also priggish, self-pitying, and capable of a subtle sadism; when wishing to hurt Mildred, “he exercised peculiar skill20 in saying little things which he knew would wound her; but which were so indefinite, so delicately cruel, that she could not take exception to them.”

  Despite its flaws, Of Human Bondage is a major achievement. Maugham, who usually cultivated a fastidious detachment, shows in this work a personal commitment that was unusual, sweeping the reader up in his own passionate intensity. Always an astute judge of his own work, Maugham knew that this novel was of a different caliber from anything he had previously produced. He also knew that his standing was such that he was now free wholly to please himself. As he explained to Heinemann,

  I am aware that in the past21 I have compromised too much with what others have thought the public taste…. Many writers are forced by poverty to consider whether this or that will hurt the sale of their books … but I think it would be disgraceful if I allowed any such thoughts to influence me. There are very few of us who can afford to break the bonds which the circulating libraries have placed on the contemporary English novel (bonds which have made it an object of contempt on the continent) and it behoves such as can to do so.

  The choice of a title proved difficult, and a list of several was compiled: The Road Uphill, Experience, The Broad Road, A Winter’s Day, The Day’s March, none of which seemed exactly right. Heinemann was in favor of Life’s Thoroughfare, which Maugham thought commonplace. “I am sorry to have been so fussy,”22 he wrote, “but the book is my ewe-lamb, and I want to get away from the obvious.” Eventually Maugham fixed on Beauty from Ashes, a misquotation from Isaiah 61 (“to give unto them beauty for ashes”), but finding this had recently been used, decided instead to take the title of one of the books in Spinoza’s Ethics. Of Human Bondage was published by Doran in the United States on August 12, 1915, a day later by Heinemann in England. George Doran expressed his unqualified admiration for the work, recording in his memoirs, “Were I given freedom of choice23 as to that book which I would first choose to have written had I the genius and wit, it would be Of Human Bondage.”

  In the press the critical reception was at first rather more muted. With Europe embroiled in war, readers were hardly in the mood for long, serious novels, and on both sides of the Atlantic, reviews were respectful rather than excited. Then at the very end of the year a notice appeared in The New Republic by the distinguished novelist Theodore Dreiser placing the work in a different bracket altogether. “Here is a novel24 … of the utmost importance,” Dreiser wrote, “unmoral, as a novel of this kind must necessarily be … a gorgeous weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end.” Somerset Maugham, he concluded, was indeed “a great artist.” From this point Of Human Bondage climbed steadily in terms of critical evaluation, although it was not until the 1920s, when it was rediscovered following the enormous success of Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence, that it attained canonical status, in 1934 made into a film with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, and for nearly half a century widely regarded as a classic.

  But this was all in the future. When Maugham began writing Of Human Bondage in 1911 his novels were considered a minor part of the oeuvre, his reputation based on his remarkable success as a playwright. His publishers, Heinemann and Doran, nevertheless regarded his name a prestigious addition to their lists. George Doran, who came over to London twice a year to buy books, numbering both Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett among his authors, regarded his association with Maugham and Heinemann as “two of the most notable, satisfying contacts of my publishing life.” Maugham’s dealings with Doran were solely about business, but with William Heinemann he was on more intimate terms, the two men having much in common. Like Maugham, Heinemann was small, with a slight stutter; he was a gifted linguist, with a passion for music, painting, and drama (both Pinero and Ibsen appeared under his imprint). It was often said that his genius for friendship was equaled only by his genius for publishing, a judgment supported by a list of authors that included Conrad, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Galsworthy, Beerbohm, Henry James, and H. G. Wells.

  The fact that Somerset Maugham would outsell them all could hardly have been predicted in 1915, although in the theater, both in the West End and on Broadway, he was undoubtedly regarded as a very valuable property indeed; his intention to abandon writing plays had not unnaturally been received with gloom by Charles Frohman. Three years earlier, in reply to a courteous inquiry from Maugham about his health, Frohman had replied he was unwell, “partly on account of the weather,25 but more especially because you are not doing any work.” Finally Frohman had decided to confront the issue. “I want a new play from you,”26 he announced. “All right,” said Maugham. “Why not rewrite The Taming of the Shrew with a new background?” The more Maugham thought about it, the more the idea appealed, and as he turned it over in his mind a memory came back to him of an aunt with whom he used to stay in Tunbridge Wells: Aunt Julia had had a paid companion who had moved to Canada to live with her brother on a farm. “I well remembered the shock27 it caused my elderly relative when her former companion (‘very well connected, my dear’) wrote and told her that she had married one of the hired men.” It was this recollection that provided the starting point, the idea explored further by Maugham’s going out to see for himself what that way of life was like. Perhaps it was Aunt Julia’s companion who herself acted as his hostess on her bleak prairie farm, where at the end of 1912 Maugham arrived from Toronto via New York to spend a month in the bitter winter cold of the Canadian midwest.

  Afte
r the comfort and modernity of Manhattan the primitive conditions encountered in Manitoba provided a harsh contrast, and yet Maugham could not help but be intrigued by his rough surroundings, reporting that despite “a good deal of discomfort28 and tedium” he found “that curious and intense life29 … most interesting.” Back in New York at the end of December, he described his experience in a letter to the actress Mabel Beardsley, sister of Aubrey:

  My God, what a life they lead30 … surrounded by the snowy prairie, cut off from their neighbours & absorbed with the struggle of getting three meals a day. Husbands & wives get to such a pitch of irritability that they will pass weeks without speaking to one another. In one house in which I stayed the wife had killed herself, in another there hung a strange gloom of impending madness. I was glad to get away. But it was an interesting experience, & the prairie, even under the snow, had a curious fascination which lingers in my memory.

  The resulting play was peculiarly topical, its title, The Land of Promise, a deliberate evocation of the phrase familiar from advertisements aimed at attracting British settlers to Canada. Norah, the “Shrew,” has for the past ten years led a wretched existence as a paid companion in Tunbridge Wells. When the play opens her employer has just died, and Norah, completely penniless, decides to join her brother on his farm in Canada. Here the refined Norah is so miserable that in despair she offers herself as wife to one of the hired men. Frank, the Petruchio figure, strong and manly, with an enjoyably sardonic sense of humor, agrees to take her, but only on certain conditions. “I give her board and lodging31 and the charm of my society,” he says. “And in return she’s got to cook and bake and wash and keep the shack clean and tidy.” Predictably, the first night of their married life is tempestuous, with Norah at first haughtily refusing to obey her husband’s orders and Frank determined to subdue her. Eventually he flings open the bedroom door and Norah, recognizing defeat, slowly walks through it. (When the film version of The Land of Promise was made in 1917, this scene was censored, with Frank spending his wedding night sleeping on the floor.) In the last act, six months have passed and we see the shack transformed, muslin curtains at the windows, flowers on the table, and Norah and Frank obviously on affectionate terms. Norah’s brother arrives with a letter offering her a place as companion to another old lady in England. “For God’s sake take it,”32 he urges her. But Norah has changed: here in this harsh land of promise there is struggle and hardship but also the hope of a worthwhile future; more important, she has fallen in love with her husband.