Shortly before returning home Maugham wrote to his agent, Golding Bright, “I have got a good deal of material45 in one way and another (besides having a very good time).” The material referred to was to provide the basis for three works: a play, East of Suez; a novel, The Painted Veil; and a collection of sketches, On a Chinese Screen. The latter was the first to be ready for publication, and when it was in typescript Maugham sent it for expert appraisal to H. I. Harding, a well-known sinologist and second secretary at the British embassy in Peking. Harding read the typescript with care and made a number of corrections:
p. 124 I am inclined to criticize46 the epithet “familiar.” I do not know that the habit of poisoning relatives one dislikes is commoner in China than in England….
p. 126 may I object to the epithet singular? The Chinese may strike us as singular, weird, funny, curious, strange, mysterious, etc, but at the same time we strike the inexperienced Chinese in just the same way….
Maugham was grateful, even if he did not agree with all the emendations. “Your suggestions are most helpful & of the forty-one you made I am taking thirty-six,” he told Harding. “[But] once or twice I think you have misapprehended my meaning: for instance I did not call the Chinese singular because they are Chinese but because of artistic capacities which do surely distinguish them from other peoples….”
On a Chinese Screen appeared in 1922, received with acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Gerald Gould in the Saturday Review congratulated the author on the subtlety of his observation. “His descriptions are not so much natural47 as psychological … he shows us the actual effect of China on minds with preconceptions similar to ours; and thus we learn the ‘feel’ of that ancient and alien civilization.”
The second work to come out of the Chinese experience was the novel The Painted Veil; although it was not published until 1925, the idea for it, as so often with Maugham, lay maturing in his mind for several years before he felt ready to set it down on paper. The theme was inspired both by an episode from Dante’s Purgatorio,* remembered from his first visit to Italy, and by a notorious scandal concerning an Englishwoman in Hong Kong that he was told while on his travels. It was, he said, “the only novel I have written48 in which I started from a story rather than from a character…. [The characters], constructed from persons I had long known in different circumstances … were chosen to fit the story I gradually evolved.”
The plot concerns the marriage of the ill-matched Walter and Kitty Fane. The couple first meet in London when Walter comes home on leave from his job as a government bacteriologist in China. Shy, scholarly, and introspective, Walter is not at all Kitty’s type, but at twenty-five and still unmarried, pretty, frivolous Kitty is afraid of being left on the shelf and so agrees to marry the besotted Walter, who proudly takes his new wife back to Hong Kong. Here, to Kitty’s relief, life among the British colony turns out to be tremendously good fun. True, her husband is a dull stick, but there are compensations, chief among them the handsome assistant colonial secretary, Charles Townsend, charming, gregarious, and devilishly flirtatious.
Soon Kitty and Townsend are embarked on a thrilling affair, she as obsessed with the vain, charismatic Charlie as she foolishly assumes he is with her. But then one afternoon they are discovered by Walter; in a cold fury he presents Kitty with a murderous ultimatum: either she accompany him upcountry to distant Mei-tan-fu, a town in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic, or he will divorce her, citing Charlie Townsend as corespondent. Initially Kitty seizes on the latter alternative, but in a mortifying scene in Townsend’s office she is made to see that she has been horribly mistaken and that her lover has not the least intention of involving himself in such a damaging scandal. She must be a sensible girl, he tells her, pull herself together and go along with Walter to Mei-tan-fu.
It is during the bleak and terrible weeks spent in the devastated little town that Kitty finally comes to understand the reality of her situation. The love Walter had for her has turned to unrelenting hatred, the love she thought she had from Townsend was worthless, her own existence has been selfish and shallow. Gradually, as she sees Walter’s heroic work to save lives, she begins to look outward, even volunteering to work among the orphans cared for in a convent run by French nuns. Finally Walter succumbs to cholera and dies, apparently unreconciled, leaving Kitty to return a much wiser woman to Hong Kong. Yet Maugham has her measure and is too much of a realist to leave it at that; despite herself, his weak-willed heroine succumbs for a second time to Townsend’s casual seduction, eventually departing for England humiliated and full of self-loathing.
The portrait of Kitty Fane is one of Maugham’s finest fictional achievements. As with Bertha Craddock more than twenty years before, he displays an extraordinary empathy, an ability to create a woman as seen not from a man’s perspective but from that of the woman herself; he completely inhabits and possesses Kitty, knows her from the inside, down to the very nerves and fiber of her being. Apart from her prettiness, she is an ordinary little thing, silly, self-absorbed, and not overendowed with intelligence. And yet Maugham shows sympathy for her, for her loveless upbringing, for her terror at ending up as a penurious spinster, and for her boredom with her husband’s inept bedroom technique. No wonder Townsend’s confident lovemaking overwhelms her; and there is no doubt at all that the author knows precisely what he is talking about when he describes the almost physical pain Kitty suffers in her craving for sex with big, bad Charlie Townsend.
Intriguingly, there is a great deal of the author himself in Walter Fane. Maugham once said that he had based the character largely on that of his brother F.H., and it is true that in appearance and in manner there are strong similarities. But so there are to Maugham. Here is Maugham describing Walter: “He was self-conscious.49 When there was a party and everyone started singing Walter could never bring himself to join in. He sat there smiling to show that he was pleased and amused, but his smile was forced…. You could not help feeling that he thought all those people enjoying themselves a pack of fools.” And here is Maugham on himself: “Convivial amusement has always50 somewhat bored me. When people sit in an ale-house or, drifting down the river in a boat, start singing I am silent…. I do not much like being touched, and I have always to make a slight effort over myself not to draw away when someone links his arm in mine.” There are, too, visible parallels between the home life of the Fanes and that of the Maughams, with both husbands, taciturn by nature, married to chatterboxes. Like Syrie, Kitty was “willing to chatter all day long.”51
[Walter’s] silence disconcerted her. He had a way which exasperated her of returning no answer to some casual remark of hers. It was true that it needed no answer, but an answer all the same would have been pleasant. If it was raining and she said: “It’s raining cats and dogs,” she would have liked him to say: “Yes, isn’t it?” He remained silent.
MAUGHAM ARRIVED HOME ON April 18, 1920, his luggage filled with treasures: porcelain, Ming figures, Chinese silks; for Syrie a gold and jade necklace and a heap of chinchilla to make a cloak; a white squirrel fur coat and little blue coolie suit for five-year-old Liza. But although he was immediately caught up in the busy demands of his London life, Maugham’s overriding desire was to leave again as early as possible. For the previous half year he had been living at close quarters with Gerald, and the abrupt change to marital domesticity was unpalatable in the extreme. Maugham still believed that every effort should be made to retain at least a veneer of harmony, that it was important to keep up appearances, and that he and Syrie should do their utmost to make the relationship work, as much for Liza’s sake as for their own; and while he was at a safe distance of nine thousand miles, he was able to view the prospect of cohabiting with his wife in a mood of relative equanimity. Yet when faced with the reality of life in Wyndham Place, resignation seemed more difficult. Syrie, craving love, yearning for openness and warmth, was made miserable by her husband’s emotional detachment, indeed his apparent inability to show any interest i
n her at all. Inevitably she resorted to tears and reproaches, made scenes, and gave way to wild accusations and bouts of furious temper, to such a degree that sometimes Maugham dreaded coming home. “I seem to live in an atmosphere52 of complaints which I have never been used to and which I cannot think are reasonable,” he wrote to her in a letter.
Do you know that no one in all my life has said the things you have said to me? No one has ever complained of me and nagged me and harassed me as you have. How can you expect me to preserve my affection for you? You have terrorized me…. Just think that at the age of forty-six, a strong, healthy enough man, I should often have to go and have a cocktail in order to face you…. You have lived all your life among people who say the most awful things to one another, but I haven’t. It humiliates me. It makes me miserable.
Syrie felt excluded from her husband’s life, and understandably resented the fact that he went abroad so often, for so long, and chose to travel with a companion other than his wife. She longed to go with him, she told him, longed to explore the remote regions of the world. But here again Maugham was adamant. He was not a globetrotter, he said, moving from one luxury hotel to another. “You are very pleasant to travel with,”53 he conceded, “but I go with a special object … and you unfortunately get between me and the impressions I am gathering. I go to seek ideas and when I am with you I get none. I am very sorry, but that is the brutal fact.”
Behind closed doors the quarrels continued, although as before the two of them put on a good face in public. Syrie was a gifted and imaginative hostess, a quality much appreciated by Maugham, who also enjoyed social life, if on a rather less exuberant level. There were luncheon parties, small dinners for old acquaintances, and big evening receptions notable for their lavishness and glamour, with marvelous food and copious quantities of champagne. Here Syrie was in her element, although not all of Maugham’s friends found her entirely sympathetic: “Syrie had a very heartless side,”54 said one; “it was easy to be fascinated55 by Syrie, less easy to love her,” wrote another; “her sparkling eyes could be sharp, and the pert expression and staccato, high-pitched voice was not to everyone’s liking”; while a third was even critical of her love of entertaining. “Her hospitality did not spring56 from warmth of heart, but from an inability to be long alone,” he wrote, not wholly inaccurately. “Left to herself, she soon grew bad-tempered.”
On August 9, four months after Maugham returned from China, his play The Unknown opened at the Aldwych. A curiously unsatisfactory work, it returns to territory covered in the 1901 novel, The Hero. The characters are the same, but instead of a struggle between sex and duty, here the hero’s struggle is with his religious faith. In spite of a strong cast headed by Basil Rathbone, The Unknown was taken off after less than two months, the general opinion concurring with that of the critic in The Times, who wrote that the argument was shallow and the play itself “a little dull and lacking in drama.”57
Maugham, meanwhile, was absorbed in new projects, his head full of his impressions of China. When his study door was closed, between the hours of nine and twelve, the household knew he was not to be disturbed. This was a frustrating time for Liza, who was excited to have her father home and longed for his attention. “I was a little frightened of him58 as a forbidding father,” she recalled, “but also I always loved his being back.” With his strong sense of the importance of continuing the family line, Maugham had always hoped one day for a son, and in this sense Liza had been a disappointment. Nonetheless Maugham was fond of children, and since his time as a medical student had had a weakness for babies and the very young, with whom he was unusually patient and gentle. He found his daughter to be a touching little figure, small and slight with a sweet, pale face and huge dark eyes; he loved her, wanted to do the best for her, and yet his feelings were painfully complicated by the fact that she was so much her mother’s creature. (Significantly, Maugham for years insisted on referring to his daughter as “Elizabeth,” whereas Syrie, and everybody else, called her “Liza.”) Syrie doted on Liza and spoiled her shamelessly, indulging her with expensive clothes and toys and keeping her with her as much as she could. The little girl naturally enjoyed this cosseting, but whereas she knew she could depend on her mother, her father was the fascinating unknown, and his rare presence in her life was greatly prized. Maugham’s own early life had been singularly lacking a father figure: he had scarcely known his own father, and his uncle the vicar was unloving and remote; without a role model he found himself awkward in that role, well intentioned but not quite knowing what to do. “I think he must have had a picture59 of what fathers should be like,” said Liza later, “[but] it was all a bit studied.” Unlike Syrie, her father was not a great provider of treats, never took her to the pantomime, for instance, or the circus, or even for an ice at Gunter’s in nearby Berkeley Square; but there were trips to the zoo, and sometimes he rode with her, or let her accompany him on a walk, when he would tell her stories. But he never revealed anything about himself or about his own childhood. Most enjoyable to both was the “happy ritual,” as Liza described it, of his coming upstairs in the evening to read aloud to her once she was tucked up in bed. Maugham was charmed by the sight of the little girl in her pajamas, pink from her bath, her hair in two tight plaits, eagerly waiting for his visit. “He never stammered60 when he read,” said Liza, “which was really extraordinary.”
Young though she was, Liza could not but be aware, however subconsciously, of the tensions in the house when her parents were in residence together. Sometimes she heard sounds of fearful rows, sounds which terrified her, and she would creep away afterward to hide so that no one should ask why she was crying. One symptom of anxiety manifested itself in the child’s reluctance to eat: fussy and difficult at mealtimes, she often drove her governess to distraction by refusing to finish whatever was on her plate. During the whole of one cold winter when Maugham was abroad Liza was given her breakfast by herself in his study, the warmest room in the house. Filled with despair at the sight of the sausage and bacon in front of her, she waited until the maid had left the room, then quietly hid every last scrap of the fatty food behind the rows of books on the shelves. This subterfuge continued undetected for weeks, until her father eventually returned to find a disgusting smell and dozens of his precious volumes covered in putrefying grease and ruined beyond repair. Not unnaturally, he was extremely angry.
Throughout the summer of 1920 Maugham had dutifully played the part of husband and father, but now he was planning to escape. The relationship with Syrie had become so wretched that it was imperative he make a serious decision as to the future. The couple were hopelessly incompatible and deeply unhappy. Maugham had recently begun to feel suicidal, and this had shocked him into realizing that something must be done. It was, after all, he who had the upper hand, as was made very clear during the debate he held with his wife on the subject. “There are only two courses61 open to us now,” he told Syrie flatly, when a couple of weeks later he put in writing the points made in their discussion. “You must either accept the claim I made then for freedom and go and come when I like, for as long as I like and as often as I like in peace and without scenes; or else separation … I have said little enough of Elizabeth,” he continued, “but you know how constantly she is in my thoughts…. For her sake, as well as for yours and mine, I should like us to continue to live together if you can only bring yourself to a willing compromise.”
Syrie had little option but to agree, however much she may have disliked the terms. Certainly she had plenty of time to think them over, as shortly after delivering his ultimatum her husband again left to go abroad, this time remaining away for more than a year.
* Previously explored both in “Cupid and the Vicar of Swale” and in The Bishop’s Apron.
* Mackenzie’s book, Greek Memories, was withdrawn after publication in 1932, and he was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.
* Originally entitled The Keys to Heaven.
* In 1933 it was
bought for the Tate by the Chantry Bequest.
* In the States the play was known as Too Many Husbands. The line “England, Home and Beauty,” from which Maugham took his title, came from The Death of Nelson, a popular song commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar, a subject that, it was decided, had rather less resonance in New York than it did in London.
† New Yorkers, on the other hand, less affected by the war and its aftermath, saw little to amuse them in the play, which closed after only two weeks.
* The old scholar’s outburst as recorded in the notebook is given almost word for word to the character Lee Tai Cheng in the 1922 play East of Suez.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 28
