Meanwhile, in Petrograd, Maugham took pains to find agreeable society for his spare time. The Europa was filled with Allied agents and there was a good deal of cheerful congress between them, especially after the arrival of the English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who every afternoon kept open house, making tea on a Primus stove in her room for anyone who cared to drop in. With basic supplies growing increasingly scarce—an apple now cost $2.50, and bread was made mainly from acorns and straw—everyone was hungry and talked obsessively about food, about roast beef and roast lamb and real coffee with sugar and cream. Nonetheless, as Voska put it, “we in the Hotel Europa79 … managed at times to enjoy ourselves and forget the revolution…. [We] caught the Russian mood—‘Nitchevo!’ [‘it doesn’t matter!’]—and went about our business as calmly as the natives.”
The city was full of foreign visitors, diplomats, observers, journalists, and businessmen, including a large number of Americans. One of these was an American banker come to arrange a loan to the Kerensky government; garrulous, self-satisfied and naïve, the man was also curiously endearing, and Maugham came to enjoy his company, and was consequently distressed when the banker was killed in a street shooting, an incident recalled in the Ashenden story “Mr. Harrington’s Washing.” Also among those come to witness the revolution was a glamorous young American couple recently married, John Reed and Louise Bryant, both writers, both convinced Marxists.* Reed, who was to write a classic account of the October revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, had spent time in Mexico with the rebel leader Pancho Villa, and his articles on the subject had caught Maugham’s attention. Interested to learn more, he invited the pair to lunch and questioned Reed not only about Mexico but about his prosperous middle-class background and conversion to radicalism. Maugham was in a jocular mood and, glancing about with an air of mystery, whispered to Louise, “You won’t reveal you had lunch80 with a British Secret Agent, will you?”—a suggestion that struck her as so preposterous she burst out laughing. “It couldn’t have been funnier if he’d said he was an ambassador of the Pope,” she remarked afterward.
An acquaintance closer to home was the novelist Hugh Walpole. Classified unfit for military service, Walpole had first arrived in Russia to work for the Red Cross and was now heading a small intelligence-gathering service, grandly entitled the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau, of no great utility or efficiency although much relied on by the British embassy. Maugham and Walpole had first met in London in 1911, and both were now pleased to pursue the friendship. Walpole, possessed of the fatal facility of the second-rate, was astonishingly prolific; he was also insatiably ambitious, desperate to be accepted by the great and the good and determined to make his mark as a distinguished man of letters. Shameless at self-promotion, he flattered famous writers by sending gushing fan letters, always including a request for a meeting so that he could continue the blandishment in person; and when in receipt of a bad review he never failed effusively to thank the critic concerned for his helpful comments. Bumptious and vain he certainly was, also thin-skinned and embarrassingly sentimental, and many found irritating his craving to be loved; and yet Walpole was not a bad sort: he was friendly and enthusiastic and, except concerning the productions of his own pen, was a perceptive critic. Naturally he was thrilled to have come across such a well-known figure as Somerset Maugham, and he gleefully recorded their meetings in his diary. “Delightful lunch with Willie Maugham.81 He most amusing” was the entry for October 27, and after a concert a few days later, “Evening with Willie Maugham who was his old delightful self—amusing, clever and extraordinarily kind.”
Maugham also enjoyed these encounters. It was good to talk to someone who was so well read, who moved in much the same world, and with whom he had a number of friends in common. There was the added recommendation of Walpole’s rampant homosexuality. Pink-cheeked and bespectacled, Hugh pursued a vigorous sex life; “I am very sensual82 but pious and pure if that sensuality is gratified,” he observed of himself contentedly. He was always falling in love, and was famous in queer circles as the only man ever to have gotten Henry James into bed, a story relished and frequently dined out on by Maugham. Indeed, Maugham relished Hugh’s whole performance, if not quite in the way Walpole imagined. Flattered by his companion’s concentrated attention as he happily chattered away, boasting of his successes and confiding the highs and lows of his busy emotional history, Hugh failed to realize how closely he was being observed; aware he was making an impression, it never crossed his mind that that impression might be ridiculous. Later Maugham was to make devastating use of Walpole in his fiction, but for the time being all was harmonious between them, and Hugh was blissfully happy with his kind new friend.
Walpole was intrigued by Maugham’s observations on the rapidly changing political scene. “He watched Russia as we would watch a play,83 finding the theme, and then intent on observing how the master artist would develop it,” he wrote. But now the play was drawing to a close. By mid-October it was obvious to all that the Bolsheviks would soon be in power, and Wiseman, realizing that Maugham as “the secret agent of reactionary imperialism”84 was a marked man, decided to have him recalled. When Kerensky learned of Maugham’s imminent departure, he summoned him to the Winter Palace and charged him with delivering a message to the prime minister, Lloyd George. The crux of the message, which was to be memorized, not written down, was a plea that Britain should offer peace to Germany, but a peace without annexations or compensation—in other words, on terms which would make it impossible for the Germans to accept. By thus intensifying anti-German feeling, Kerensky believed he would have some chance of keeping his mutinous army in the field. “I must make the Russian soldiers understand85 what they are fighting for,” he said. “We haven’t got boots or warm clothes or food … I don’t see how we can go on. Of course, I don’t say that to the people. I always say that we shall continue whatever happens, but unless I have something to tell my army it’s impossible.” A couple of other clauses were added, including the usual request for more guns and ammunition, as well as a demand that Sir George Buchanan be replaced, as “the Ambassador does not seem able to get into sympathetic relations with the new conditions.” As soon as the meeting ended, Maugham sent a coded communication to London, and within hours he received the reply that to ensure total secrecy a destroyer would be sent to Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway to bring him home.
That same evening, October 22, 1917, Maugham left Petrograd by train from the Finland Station on the first stage of his journey. By this time he was more than ready to go. Not only was there little prospect of achieving anything with Kerensky—two days after his departure saw the outbreak of Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, “the ten days that shook the world,” during which Kerensky was overthrown—but he himself was seriously unwell. With his lungs badly infected, he was feverish and exhausted, and with the food shortages grown daily more acute he was also malnourished: arriving in Christiania with a day to wait, he bought a pound of chocolates, which he ate there and then in the street. After a rough crossing to the north of Scotland, he reached London on November 17 and immediately telephoned Downing Street to make an appointment for the following day. Lloyd George was extremely cordial, expressing his pleasure at meeting the distinguished writer whose plays he so much enjoyed. He talked about these a little, then moved on to expound on the war and the current situation, and Maugham began to form the impression that the prime minister had a shrewd idea of what he had to say and was determined not to let him say it. Finally, in desperation, Maugham took a paper out of his pocket on which, contrary to instruction, he had written down Kerensky’s message and thrust it at Lloyd George, who scanned it hastily. “I can’t do that,”86 he said, handing it back. “What shall I tell Kerensky?” Maugham asked. “Just that I can’t do it,” he repeated, then rising to his feet explained he had a cabinet meeting to attend and left the room.
Back in his hotel room, Maugham pondered what he should do next. His immediate concern was t
he state of his health, and from St. Thomas’s he obtained the name of an eminent lung specialist, who confirmed the diagnosis of tuberculosis and told him he must go immediately to a sanatorium. Scarcely had he had time to take in this information when on November 20 he was called to a debriefing, held in the office of the editor of the Times and chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, Rufus Isaacs; among others present were Gen. Sir George McDonough, director of British military intelligence; Gordon Auchincloss, secretary to President Wilson’s power broker, Col. E. M. House; and, to Maugham’s surprise, William Wiseman, recently returned from America. Frightened his stammer would get the better of him, Maugham handed his report to Wiseman to read aloud. It received little comment, for, as the Foreign Office representative, Sir Eric Drummond, noted on his copy, “I fear this [is] of only historical interest87 now.” Depressed by the fact that all his efforts had been in vain, Maugham wrote of his Russian mission, “I failed lamentably,”88 although in retrospect, he added, “it seems to me at least possible that if I had been sent six months before I might quite well have succeeded.” His superiors, however, were impressed by his performance and more than ready to give him further employment. Wiseman suggested he might act as liaison with Polish groups in London and Paris; but more immediately there was a job for him in Bucharest, where he would be required to undertake the same kind of work as before, lending support not to the Mensheviks but to the Cossacks, and encouraging Romania to continue the fight.
As before, Maugham was flattered to be asked and, excited by the opportunity, tempted to accept. This time, however, he knew he was in no condition to travel.
[I thought] that it was only sensible,89 since I might crack up, to say that I was suffering from tuberculosis and the doctors advised me to go to a sanatorium, but if they could find no one more trustworthy to do the job, I was perfectly willing to take it on. Rufus Isaacs looked at me. He smiled. “In that case I don’t think we ought to ask you to go,” he said. “Go to your sanatorium and I hope you’ll get well very soon.”
Maugham followed his specialist’s advice, repairing to a sanatorium in the north of Scotland. It was to be nearly two years before his recovery was complete, and there was no question but that he had begun treatment only just in time. Nevertheless, part of him regretted his decision to turn the Romanian offer down: “I knew … that I had made a bad mistake. I should have risked the danger and even though I hadn’t been of much use the adventure would have been interesting.”
* After the Battle of Vimy Ridge, for instance, this limerick went the rounds:
In his bath mused the Marquess of Byng,
Ah, Vimy Ridge such memories bring!
That lovely young trooper—
I mean, Gladys Cooper—
My goodness, that was a near thing!
* The legal term covering all homosexual acts with the exception of sodomy.
* Wellcome might have chosen to cite Gordon Selfridge, but Selfridge was married with four children, and, crucially, was a member of the same Freemasons’ lodge as Wellcome.
* You haven’t lost the right to be alone! … [Your mistress] isn’t jealous, obsessively curious…. She doesn’t lean over your shoulder when you’re writing a letter … she doesn’t insinuate with those vague little phrases which seem to mean nothing but which lower the spirits and undermine one’s courage…. And if by chance you go out to dinner without her, you don’t come back at midnight to find her awake in bed, her face expressionless but with a broken voice and an eye full of jealousy….
* Vollmoeller became best known after the war for his screenplay for the Marlene Dietrich film Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) and for his collaboration with Max Reinhardt on the play Der Mirakel (The Miracle).
* In Looking Back Maugham writes of this period, “The divorce had not been made absolute, and I could not have married Syrie just then even had I wanted to.” But in fact it had and he could.
* With his usual indifference to such matters, Maugham did not trouble to give the fictional version of Miss Thompson a different name.
* The title comes from a quotation of Sainte-Beuve: “L’extrême félicité à peine séparée par une feuille tremblante de l’extrême désespoir, n’est-ce pas la vie?” (“In life only a trembling leaf separates great happiness from extreme despair”).
* It was on Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific that Rodgers & Hammerstein based their phenomenally successful musical South Pacific.
* The plot of The Fall of Edward Barnard was later expanded and reworked in The Razor’s Edge.
* Savinkov makes an anonymous appearance in Maugham’s 1944 novel, The Razor’s Edge, in which the narrator describes himself drinking “a glass of Russian tea in a prim parlour in Petrograd while a soft-spoken little man in a black coat and striped trousers told me how he had assassinated a grand duke.”
* The 1981 film Reds, starring Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty, was based on Reed’s life with Bryant.
CHAPTER 8
BEHIND THE PAINTED VEIL
• • •
BY THE TIME MAUGHAM LEFT LONDON FOR SCOTLAND AT THE END of November 1917, he was a very sick man. Nordrach-on-Dee, just outside Banchory in Aberdeenshire, was a huge private sanatorium dedicated to the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. Opened in 1900, it was based on the German model, established at Nordrach in the Black Forest, which had pioneered the open-air treatment of TB. Although it was so far north, the winter climate on Deeside was relatively mild, and patients were exposed to the bracing Scottish air twenty-four hours a day, with the windows, overlooking smooth green lawns and a thick canopy of conifers, remaining wide open at all times. Besides fresh air, the basic tenets of the cure were bed rest, gentle, graduated exercise, large amounts of nourishing food, and a complete absence of stress. The founder, Dr. David Lawson, was insistent that the sanatorium must be a haven of tranquillity, with compulsory naps after meals, a nurse to each patient, and no unnecessary movement allowed: in severe cases even putting the arms behind the head was forbidden for fear of stretching the lungs. Visitors were discouraged, especially in the early weeks of a patient’s stay. Such ministrations were not cheap—around £3,000 a year; nor was the success rate impressive: many patients died, and others remained at Nordrach for years without visible improvement; but until the discovery of antibiotics in the 1940s it was the best treatment available.
Maugham would remain based at Banchory for over a year, and for the first few weeks he barely moved from his bed, exhausted by the symptoms of the disease that had killed his mother and that now had him in its grip. Gradually, however, his condition improved, and before long he was able to take pleasure in his peaceful invalid life, loving the hours spent lying in bed, relieved of all pressure and responsibility. “I delighted in the privacy1 of my room with the immense window wide open to the starry winter night,” he wrote. “It gave me a delicious sense of security, aloofness and freedom.” By degrees, as his strength returned, he began to enter more actively into the routine of the sanatorium. Between 11:00, when he rose, and when he retired to bed at 4:00, he mingled with the other patients, took some of his meals with them, played cards, and even, on fine days, sat outside wrapped in rugs on the veranda. Little did these men and women know of what consuming interest they were to the writer in their midst. To Eddie Knoblock, Maugham wrote cheerfully,
There is something that would appeal2 to your passion for the macabre in the way the tuberculous fall in love with one another, have scenes, scandals, & all the paraphanalia [sic] of the drama; & you cannot imagine the effectiveness of threatening your beloved that you will have a hemorrhage (I never could spell the damned word) if she does not turn a consenting ear to your entreaties.
During the first few months, Maugham found it impossible to work, but as usual he was avid for news from London, impatient to know what was going on, in the war, in the theater, among his colleagues and friends. “The post is always the great thrill3 of the day,” as he told Alfred Sutro, “& the recipients of l
etters are the envy of all around.” One interesting event was the opening of a new play of his on January 26, 1918, at the Globe. Written during the previous year, Love in a Cottage is an inconsequential little piece which treats with a familiar theme,* that of the rich widow who teases her mercenary suitors by allowing them to propose before revealing that if she remarries she loses her fortune. “Meant to be nothing4 but pure entertainment,” as the author admitted, the piece had been commissioned by Marie Löhr, who had started in management and was for the first time both producer and star. Described by Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman only a few years later as “a play so negligible5 that I am no longer sure of its name,” Love in a Cottage racked up a respectable run of 127 performances, largely thanks to Miss Löhr’s sparkling rendition.
Lacking strength for the physical effort of writing, Maugham was ceaselessly active in his imagination, thinking over his adventures of the past couple of years and planning new work. Closest to hand was the material gleaned from his fellow patients, a number of whose private dramas were eventually retailed in the short story “Sanatorium.” Yet richer by far were his own recent adventures, the people and situations he had come across, both mundane and extraordinary, during his work for the intelligence services in Switzerland and Russia. With the nature of that work so secret, and with the war still in progress, there was no question of publishing anything for some time to come. The matter nonetheless was much on his mind, and it was now that he began to compose that seminal series of spy stories, personal, factual, and realistic, based on the exploits of his fictional alter ego, Ashenden. The Ashenden collection, “a very truthful account6 of my experiences during the war when I was in the Secret Service,” was not to appear for another ten years, held up by “[Willie’s] mysterious bosses7 in the Foreign Office,” as his publisher explained it. According to a report there were originally thirty-one stories, but when Maugham showed them to Winston Churchill in draft, Churchill insisted that fourteen be destroyed, as he considered them in breach of the Official Secrets Act.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 25
