Some years after Maugham’s death, his friend the art historian Kenneth Clark recalled that “[Maugham] often spoke8 about the Intelligence Service, which he greatly enjoyed. I suppose he liked the light that it shed on human nature.” The truth of this remark is emphatically borne out by Ashenden. Maugham was fascinated not so much by action and adventure as by the effect of these unusual situations on the people involved. He was never tempted to glamorize his assignments, never lost the cool clinical eye that rested so dispassionately on his surroundings. Similarly, although a committed patriot unquestioningly dedicated to his country’s cause, Maugham was well aware of the moral double standards involved. In “The Flip of a Coin,” he describes a mission of Ashenden’s that, if successful, will result in the deaths of a number of innocent men; it is he, the man on the ground, who will have to do the deed, obeying the instructions of superiors who choose not to know how the deed is done. He reflects with disgust on their hypocrisy:
They desired the end,9 but hesitated at the means…. Though ready enough to profit by the activities of obscure agents of whom they had never heard, they shut their eyes to dirty work so that they could put their clean hands on their hearts and congratulate themselves that they had never done anything that was unbecoming to men of honour.
It is this clear-eyed vision that largely accounts for the extraordinary impact that Ashenden made on the writing of espionage fiction. The spy story as a genre had emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, with Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands still standing as one of the supreme examples of its class. Among the most popular practitioners were John Buchan with The Thirty-nine Steps, and the hugely bestselling William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, both of whom specialized in tales that were unashamedly escapist and melodramatic. Their protagonists are superman-heroes, invariably engaged in missions of terrifying importance, foiling political assassination or delivering international spy rings to London, frequently dodging violent death in their desperate struggles against the diabolical enemies of king and country, whom they always brilliantly outwit. These are highly charged adventure stories with no interest at all in representing reality, and the contrast with Ashenden could hardly be greater. Ashenden himself is an engaging character, in almost all respects the exact reflection of his creator—he even gives his address as Chesterfield Street, Mayfair—a solitary man, private, detached, but also incurably inquisitive. Unlike other storybook spies of his era, Ashenden is a very fallible human being, fond of his creature comforts, at times irritable, sometimes scared, and although an experienced traveler an inveterate sufferer from train fever. Crucially, Ashenden, like Maugham, enjoys the opportunity of acting a part:
He was travelling with a brand-new passport10 in his pocket, under a borrowed name, and this gave him an agreeable sense of owning a new personality. He was often slightly tired of himself….
With the possible exception of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which is more a political than a spy novel, Maugham was the first to write about the business of espionage as in actuality it was. He was also jointly first, with his fellow novelist, Compton Mackenzie, in having himself worked as a spy; but whereas Mackenzie recycled his Secret Service experiences in Greece as unalloyed farce,* Maugham depicted the world of undercover intelligence as not only morally dubious but frequently monotonous and dull. Although this approach was to come as a shock to many readers, Maugham set the tone for an entirely new generation of British spy fiction. “The modern spy story began11 with Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden,” wrote the critic and crime writer Julian Symons, a statement with which many distinguished followers of the genre agreed, writers such as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene (who described Ashenden as “that witty and realistic fiction”), Len Deighton, and John le Carré. Ambler stated that he was “strongly influenced by the Ashenden ethos,” while le Carré wrote, “The Ashenden stories were certainly12 an influence in my work,” adding, “I suppose that Maugham was the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality.” Across the Atlantic, too, Maugham’s unflinching realism attracted admirers. In 1950 the crime writer Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe, wrote to Maugham,
Ashenden is unique….13 There are no other great spy stories—none at all. I have been searching and I know…. There are a few good tales of adventure with a spying element … but they always overplay their hand. Too much bravura, the tenor sings too loud. They are as much like Ashenden as the opera Carmen is like the deadly little tale that Mérimée wrote.
Ashenden: or The British Agent was eventually published in 1928, by Heinemann in England, and Doubleday, Doran, in the United States. Dedicated to Gerald Kelly, the book was slow in winning the acclaim it was eventually to achieve; this was partly due to the fact that for a war-weary public, interest in the war was slow to revive (Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End were not to appear until the following year); and also because at that era few aficionados of the genre were prepared for such a low-key treatment. Most critics agreed with The New York Times, whose reviewer judged Ashenden to be “a specimen of Somerset Maugham14 writing in second gear,” although there were one or two more forthright expressions of disapproval. The least charitable notice appeared in Vogue, written by D. H. Lawrence. Maugham’s characters, if well observed, are fakes, Lawrence wrote. “We find they are nothing15 but puppets, instruments of the author’s pet prejudice. The author’s pet prejudice being ‘humour,’ it would be hard to find a bunch of more ill-humoured stories, in which the humour has gone more rancid.” Despite such lack of enthusiasm at its first appearance, Ashenden has gone on to flourish: it has been published in numerous editions, translated into many languages; it has provided the basis of a play (to date unproduced), and a film, Secret Agent, by Alfred Hitchcock, with John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, and Madeleine Carroll; most intriguingly, it was used as a handbook by the intelligence services, for several years required reading for entrants into MI5 and MI6, as well as apparently inspiring a study of British spy fiction on the part of Soviet military intelligence: as its author remarked, “a strange outcome for a series16 of tales that were written merely to entertain.” But perhaps the ultimate accolade was awarded during the Second World War, when the stories were referred to in a broadcast by Dr. Goebbels, the German minister for propaganda, who cited them as a typical example of British cynicism and brutality.
Meanwhile, as the long Scottish winter gave way to spring, Maugham gradually felt his health improve, and to his great delight he was given leave by his doctors to go south for the summer, on condition that he return in the autumn for further treatment. “Madame,” as Maugham referred to Syrie, came up to Banchory to visit him, full of the news that she had taken a house in the country for three months. Charles Hill Court was handsome and spacious, with a large garden and a pleasant study in which Maugham could work undisturbed. The house was near Hindhead in Surrey, an attractive area of woods and heath and gentle hills, within easy reach of London. But there was another reason why the location had been chosen: fifteen-year-old Mounteney was at school in Hindhead, and his mother, who continued to suffer acute anguish at the separation imposed by her ex-husband, hoped that being so near might give her an opportunity of seeing him. She had continued to petition for increased access, but her requests were always refused by Wellcome, even though he himself was continuously abroad and Mounteney obliged to spend his holidays with one of the masters. Great emphasis was laid by Wellcome’s lawyers on the importance of ensuring that Mounteney should never in any circumstances come into contact with Maugham, a prohibition that achieved little except to make circumstances even more difficult for Syrie. At least she now had her daughter, three-year-old Liza, whom she adored. Maugham, too, was fond of the little girl, despite his frequently expressed disappointment that she had not been born a boy, and during their summer in the country the three of them m
anaged to enjoy a relatively amicable time together, Syrie happy to have her husband returned to her, he delighted to be released from the sanatorium. Privately, however, he saw little to look forward to in his marital situation. “What will happen in the future17 I cannot tell,” he wrote resignedly. “I can only hope for the best & leave it at that.”
Although he was still weak and tended to tire easily, Maugham was pleased to discover one or two congenial Surrey neighbors, in particular the writer Robert Hichens, whom he had come across previously in London. Hichens, a novelist, playwright, and music critic, was a friend of Max Beerbohm and had known Henry James and Oscar Wilde; The Green Carnation, his novel satirizing Wilde and the aesthetes of the 1890s, had been a great succès de scandale, although he had made his fortune with a bestselling romance, The Garden of Allah. Recently Hichens had set up house with a Swiss novelist, John Knittel; Knittel had a wife and children, but to Hichens this was no obstacle, and like a number of confirmed bachelors of the period, E. M. Forster for one, Hugh Walpole for another, he was content for his emotional and domestic life to revolve around a married man whose wife and offspring became part of the extended family. Maugham was delighted to see Hichens, and he, Hichens, and John Knittel rode together almost every day. They played tennis and croquet, with Syrie making up a foursome, and in the evenings the two couples dined together, cheerfully animated after drinking John Knittel’s terrifyingly strong cocktails.
Now and again visitors came down from London, including Hugh Walpole, who spent a couple of nights at Charles Hill. After getting to know Maugham in Petrograd, Walpole was surprised to see what kind of a woman his friend had married. She was nice enough, Hugh recorded in his diary, but it was difficult to understand what Maugham saw in her, “[as] I should have thought18 that she was over-sentimental for his cynicism.” What interested him more on this occasion, however, was the fact that his friend was hard at work on a novel.
The novel Maugham was working on while at Charles Hill in the summer of 1918 was The Moon and Sixpence, the story inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin. The similarities between Gauguin and Charles Strickland, the artist in the book, are marked: like Gauguin, Strickland is a respectable stockbroker with wife and children who abandons his family to live in poverty for the sake of artistic freedom; both painters settle in Tahiti, remaining in the South Seas for the rest of their lives; Gauguin, ravaged by syphilis and drug addiction, was eventually killed by a heart attack, while Strickland dies of leprosy. To tell his story Maugham employs a first-person narrator, a device he had not used since The Making of a Saint twenty years earlier, but one on which he was increasingly to rely, especially in his short stories. Here the unnamed “I” has only a minor part in the action, his main function to comment and observe. A young writer closely modeled on Maugham himself, with the same youthful priggishness, dry humor, and enjoyable streak of malice, he is taken up by Mrs. Strickland, an ordinary woman of limited means with ambitions as a literary hostess. When to everyone’s astonishment her dull stockbroker husband suddenly abandons his family and career to live as an impoverished artist in Paris, it is the narrator to whom Mrs. Strickland appeals for help.
Arrived in Paris, the narrator finds a very different Strickland from the man he had met in London, ruthless and irascible, unmovably set on his course and with no interest whatever in the life he has left behind. The narrator has an artist friend in Paris, Dirk Stroeve, a foolish fellow and an abominable painter, who is nonetheless generous and kindhearted. Just as the penniless Gauguin was selflessly cared for by his friend Émile Schuffenecker, and repaid him by seducing his wife, so Strickland is cosseted by Stroeve, whom he similarly traduces. Some years later the narrator travels to Tahiti, and it is here on the island he learns that the painter has recently died; in the South Seas, Charles Strickland had at last found fulfillment, living with a native girl and creating the disturbing but glorious masterpieces for which he was to become posthumously famous. Back in London, meanwhile, Mrs. Strickland enjoys her role as keeper of the flame, since her husband’s death living comfortably on the sale of his pictures while tastefully displaying a few colored reproductions of his work on her sitting room wall. “They must be very pleasant19 to live with,” says one of her guests politely. “Yes; they’re so essentially decorative,” she complacently replies. (Understandably, this depiction of the artist’s wife caused some distress to Mme Gauguin when she read it.)
The phrase “essentially decorative” was a dig at Gerald Kelly, whom Maugham used to tease by declaring that his, Maugham’s, prime interest in art was decorative. Indeed, the novel owes a great deal to Kelly, as it was Kelly who had introduced Maugham to Gauguin’s work, and it was with Kelly that he had first met Roderic O’Conor, who had known Gauguin well and whose snarling aggressiveness is faithfully reproduced in the character of Strickland. Kelly suspected that he himself had served as the inspiration for Stroeve, the chocolate-box painter. “I am always sure,”20 he cheerfully admitted, “that all Willie’s bad painters are portraits of myself.” But in this he was wrong: the character of Stroeve is modeled on Maugham’s fellow novelist, Hugh Walpole, who fortunately failed to recognize himself in the plump, silly creature, whose work was “hackneyed and vulgar beyond belief.”21 Had Walpole discovered his contribution, no doubt there would have been a squeal of anguish, if nothing like the anguish he suffered later when coming face-to-face with himself as Alroy Kear in Cakes and Ale.
Published by Heinemann in April 1919, The Moon and Sixpence is a minor novel that has always found greater favor with the general reader than with the critics. The exotic Tahitian setting made an obvious appeal to a world only recently emerged from war, and the theme was an interesting one, that of the nature of genius, of the conflict between the ruthlessness of the creative artist and the bourgeois society he escapes. In the book this society is portrayed with a delicately satirical touch, Maugham drawing on his own experience as a young writer at Violet Hunt’s salon on Campden Hill. His portrait of Violet as the novelist Rose Waterford is essentially affectionate, which is not something that could be said of his portrayal of Mrs. Strickland, depicted with a subtle venom that betrays much about the author’s own feelings of entrapment by marriage and the conventions of society. Mrs. Strickland, we are told, “had the true instinct22 of the nice woman that it is only really decent for her to live on other people’s money,” while the misogynistic anger in many of Strickland’s outbursts lies close to strong buried feelings in Maugham. This being so, it is disappointing that the novel’s greatest flaw lies in the portrayal of Charles Strickland himself, who comes over not only as a brute but a bore, and in whose sudden transformation from dutiful paterfamilias to blazing, foul-mouthed genius it is difficult to believe. As Katherine Mansfield wrote in The Athenaeum, “We must be shown something23 of the workings of his mind; we must have some comment of his upon what he feels, fuller and more exhaustive than his perpetual: ‘Go to hell.’” Despite such reservations, when in July the book came out in America its success was immediate and overwhelming: with an initial print run of only five thousand copies, it had sold close to a hundred thousand by the end of the year, its success resulting also in a huge and unexpected revival of interest in Maugham’s earlier work, Of Human Bondage.
After leaving Hindhead at the end of August, the Maughams spent a couple of months on Chesterfield Street, Maugham’s old friend Walter Payne having moved out at the end of the summer to make room for the family. He and Maugham continued to keep closely in touch, however, and when Payne took a house in Regent’s Park, Maugham gave him some paintings, including one of his portraits by Gerald Kelly. Payne was to marry twice; his first wife was much liked by Maugham, but the second, a Hungarian divorcée, was loathed. The friendship survived nonetheless, and Payne until his death in 1949 continued to advise Maugham on his financial affairs.
IN NOVEMBER MAUGHAM RETURNED for further treatment at Nordrach-on-Dee. Although still under par, he felt invigorated and full of plans for the futur
e. With the war finally over, he could hardly wait once more to go on his travels. “I am making my plans24 to conquer the Far East,” he told Kelly. “How splendid it will be to set off, with adequate funds in one’s pocket & what time one needs, for God knows where.” During his previous stay in the sanatorium he had been too ill to write, but now he could hardly bear to stop, composing four plays in an eighteen-month period, Caesar’s Wife,* Home & Beauty, The Circle, and The Unknown.
By the time the first of these, Caesar’s Wife, went into rehearsal in February 1919, Maugham was back in London and able to attend. His presence in the dimly lit auditorium, however, was found somewhat daunting by the play’s leading lady, Fay Compton, who was having trouble remembering her lines. “He wasn’t nasty about it,”25 she said, “but he would stop and say, ‘We must have the correct words!’” In the end it was Miss Compton, after the piece opened at the Royalty on March 27, who was recognized to be largely responsible for the success of a production that otherwise had few memorable qualities. Inspired by Mme de Lafayette’s famous novel, La Princesse de Clèves, about a married woman’s renunciation of illicit love, Caesar’s Wife is set in contemporary Cairo, where the beautiful young wife of the British consul develops a passion for her husband’s attaché. Everyone concerned behaves with the utmost virtue and nobility and the situation is eventually saved with honor all around. As Maugham explained in his introduction to the published version, he had so often been reproached for concentrating on unpleasant people that he wanted to write a work “in which all the characters26 were estimable.” This is, perhaps predictably, what makes the result so bland.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 26
