* In Book V, there is the story of the gentlewoman from Siena whose husband, suspecting her of adultery, takes her to his castle in the Maremma, hoping that the noxious vapors from the marshes will kill her.
CHAPTER 9
A WORLD OF VERANDA AND PRAHU
• • •
UNLIKE MANY OF HIS PEERS, MAUGHAM FOR MOST OF HIS LONG life retained an unusual ability to move with the times. As a writer of fiction he stayed surprisingly up to date both in his choice of themes and in the sometimes startling modernity of his approach, his short stories in commercial terms becoming a global phenomenon, translated into almost every language. Yet even more remarkable for a writer born in the mid-Victorian era, Maugham early became established as a valuable property in the motion picture industry. His own attempts at writing scenarios were undistinguished, his personal interest in the medium was limited, and he found most of the people involved in the business unlikable, yet it was through film that his work became famous to millions, many of whom knew nothing at all about his books. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s and during the Second World War, Maugham spent considerable time in Hollywood, rarely with pleasure, and although personally involved in the process on a number of occasions, he never cared for the film versions of his fiction. When invited to watch Garbo in The Painted Veil, he recoiled in horror. “I cannot imagine that anything is likely1 to take me to see the film. I cannot bear seeing my works when they are made into pictures.” Nonetheless he was canny enough to realize that here was a fabulous source of income, to be exploited at every opportunity.
The first call to Hollywood came in 1920, from the pioneering film producer Jesse L. Lasky, who during a recent swoop on London had signed up a number of well-known authors, including Maugham, Eddie Knoblock, Henry Arthur Jones (father of Sue Jones), Arnold Bennett, and Elinor Glyn. Lasky had started his company in 1912 in partnership with his brother-in-law Samuel Goldwyn, and their first employee had been Cecil B. DeMille, who was then a little-known stage director. In 1916 Lasky had joined forces with the newly formed Paramount Pictures, the most powerful studio of the silent era. Although the talkies were still some way off (the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, was not released until 1927), Lasky and Goldwyn were convinced that distinguished writers were essential to their enterprise, and they spent vast sums importing eminent authors to California, assuming they could easily be taught how to create plot and delineate character in terms of the silent cinema. The experiment, although costly, was ultimately a failure: the writers, whose skills were verbal, not visual, were baffled by the new medium, and most were wholly unable to adapt. Eddie Knoblock, for example, in a screenplay for DeMille, went down in Hollywood legend for the unhelpful line, “Words fail to describe2 the scene that follows.”
Maugham, although accustomed to writing dialogue for the stage, did little better. He with Gerald Haxton arrived in Hollywood in November 1920, and immediately found himself part of a group effort, obliged to listen to the director, producer, other writers, and even the actors themselves, for none of whom he had much respect: he privately referred to DeMille as “the obscene Cecil.”3 Assuming he would be delivering stories for $15,000 to $20,000 a time, he was disappointed that the only deals he was able to make were the sale of the rights to his 1918 play, Love in a Cottage,* and a $15,000 commission for a script which in the event was never used. “I look back on my connection4 with the cinema world with horror mitigated only by the fifteen thousand dollars,” he would later tell Knoblock. Ironically, during his lifetime Maugham was to have more works adapted for film than any other writer in the language.†
If dealing with the studio was frustrating, outside working hours there were considerable compensations. Even during Prohibition, Southern California was an agreeable place in which to pass a few weeks. In the early 1920s, Hollywood still had something of the atmosphere of a subtropical village, with small farms, lemon and orange groves, and here and there empty plots of land overgrown with sagebrush and wildflowers. Then as now, there was something surreal about the film world, about the illusion and artificiality that pervaded even everyday life, as Maugham discovered when walking down Sunset Boulevard and finding himself suddenly surrounded by cowboys and Indians or ladies of the harem. Even more bizarre was an incident that resulted in his first-ever appearance on celluloid. When out for a stroll one morning he joined a small crowd that had gathered to watch the shooting of a scene for a movie. Suddenly,
I was shoved roughly5 into the front of a crowd by a bullying assistant director, who yelled at me: “Look excited!” A pack of oddly garbed American bobbies were rushing pell-mell down the street. I think they called them “The Keystone Cops.” So I became an actor, but without pay.
Among the many members of the film colony to whom Maugham was introduced was the comedian Charlie Chaplin, a legendary figure in Hollywood and one of the highest paid, and most famous, men in the world. Chaplin was in the process of making his first independent feature, The Kid, a semiautobiographical story drawing on his childhood experience of extreme poverty in the tenements and workhouses of Walworth and Lambeth. This was an area Maugham knew well from his time at St. Thomas’s, and the two men formed an immediate bond, Maugham entranced by Chaplin’s knockabout humor and genius for mimicry; but behind the exuberant clowning Maugham sensed a profound melancholy, a nostalgia for the life of the London slums, for a warmth and liveliness unknown in the affluent avenues of Los Angeles. One night the pair took a long walk together, two short Englishmen, dapper and dark-haired, strolling in a haze of tobacco smoke and talking, talking, as they made their way toward the poorest quarter of the city; here, among squalid row houses and dingy little shops, Chaplin’s face lit up and he exclaimed in a cheerful voice, with its curious half-cockney intonation, “Say, this is the real life,6 isn’t it? All the rest is just sham.” When Sam Goldwyn gave a dinner for the first private screening of The Kid, Maugham was one of the guests, delighted to join in the tremendous ovation that greeted Chaplin’s poignant work.
It was purely by chance that Maugham, before he left Hollywood, struck one of the most lucrative deals of his career. A fellow guest at his hotel was John Colton, a young American playwright, who one evening asked if he might borrow something to read. Maugham offered him the galley proofs of his South Seas story, “Miss Thompson,” as yet unpublished, and the next morning Colton came down to breakfast in a great state of excitement, saying he had been enthralled by the story and might he please adapt it for the stage. As the piece had been rejected by a number of periodicals before its eventual acceptance by The Smart Set, Maugham had no great hopes for it and equably agreed to Colton’s proposal: nothing to be paid for the rights, as Colton was hard up, but a fifty-fifty split on any profit. They shook hands and Maugham thought little more about it, until a few weeks later when the story appeared in the magazine and made an enormous splash, with offers coming in for film and play rights worth thousands of dollars. Whatever his private regrets, Maugham stuck by his agreement, and the following year saw Colton’s play produced in New York, retitled Rain and with the popular star Jeanne Eagels in the lead. Rain was an outstanding success, running for the better part of a year on Broadway, followed by a long tour and further productions throughout the States, eventually grossing more than $3 million. The extraordinary trajectory continued, with film rights sold for $150,000 and the play staged in England in 1925 by Basil Dean at the Garrick Theatre. Dean’s first choice for leading lady had been the beautiful but volatile Tallulah Bankhead, who had pursued the part with some avidity, but when Maugham attended the first two days of rehearsal he was so disappointed by Miss Bankhead’s performance that he insisted she be replaced. Humiliated and furious, the actress threw a volcanic tantrum in Basil Dean’s office, then flounced out of the theater, went straight back to her flat, wrote a histrionic suicide note, and swallowed a very small handful of aspirin. Fortunately she awoke next morning with no ill effects, although she left an exhausted author and director in her wake.
Tallulah caused “more bother than you can imagine,”7 Maugham reported. “She used every scrap of influence she had to sway me and when finally I put my foot down I was the object of the obloquy of all her friends.” The production continued with the less well known Olga Lindo as Sadie, who gave a performance that, if reliable, was fatally lacking in sex appeal, a quality possessed in abundance by the husky-voiced Miss Bankhead. Some years later Maugham admitted that the greatest mistake of his professional life had been preventing Tallulah from appearing in Rain.*
AFTER THEIR STAY IN HOLLYWOOD, Maugham and Gerald Haxton left Los Angeles in February 1921, going first to San Francisco, where they spent a few days with the financier Bert Alanson, whom they had first encountered en route to Hawaii in 1916. On February 21 they sailed for Honolulu and from there to Australia before setting out on the final leg of the voyage to Singapore.
To the vast majority of his readers, Somerset Maugham has come to be associated with the latter days of the British Empire, and in particular with the British Empire in the Far East. Just as Kipling is identified with India and the Raj, so is Maugham identified with the Malayan archipelago. Those famous tales of his set on rubber estates, on remote outstations, in the card rooms of the local club, those stories of incest and adultery, of sex-starved missionaries and alcoholic planters, of footsteps in the jungle and murder on the veranda, are what remain in the minds of many as the very image and epitome of Maugham’s fictional territory. As Cyril Connolly once wrote,
If all else perish, there will remain8 a story-teller’s world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of veranda and prahu which we enter, as we do that of Conan Doyle’s Baker Street, with a sense of happy and eternal homecoming.
In fact Maugham spent relatively little time there, six months in 1921 and four months in 1925; but from these journeys came a couple of short-story collections, The Casuarina Tree and Ah King, which contain some of Maugham’s most accomplished work, written during the years when he was roaming the world with Gerald Haxton and at his most fecund and creative.
The world that Maugham portrays in these two books is that of a still extensive empire, but an empire that had been substantially weakened by the First World War. Up to 1914 the 12 million square miles of the land on which the sun never set seemed almost impregnable, the confidence of the British in their innate superiority by and large accepted as unquestioningly by the ruled as by the rulers. As one colonial administrator put it, “Most English households of the day10 took it for granted that nobody could be always right, or ever quite right, except an Englishman. The Almighty was beyond doubt Anglo-Saxon [and] dominion over palm and pine … was the heaven-conferred privilege of the Bulldog Breed.” The colonial possessions were to be administered first and foremost for the benefit of Britain, but kindly administered, naturally: “nobody but the most frightful bounder could possibly question our sincerity about that—but firmly too, my boy, firmly too, lest the school-children of Empire forget who were the prefects and who the fags.” During the war, however, this image of imperial infallibility was badly cracked, and the fags were treated to the unedifying spectacle of the prefects being killed by the hundreds of thousands, indeed coming close to humiliating defeat. At the same time the prestige of the white man, of paramount importance in governing territories far too extensive to be controlled by force, was further undermined by the arrival of the cinema, revealing to audiences throughout the British-ruled part of the globe a view of the master race as variously licentious, criminal, or clownish. In an attempt to counter these regrettable influences it was decided by the governing élite that a tightening of regulations, with an increased emphasis on moral rectitude, was essential. As George Orwell, employed in the colonial civil service in Burma, wrote of this period, “A sahib has got to act like a sahib11 … it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives.’” Inevitably such a policy resulted in strains and stresses in certain areas of expatriate society. And it was this society that provided such a fertile field for Maugham, who at the end of March 1921 landed in its midst.
At the time of Maugham and Haxton’s arrival in Malaya the country was going through a period of relative prosperity, mainly due to the prewar rubber boom caused by the expansion of the motor industry in America. There was a general air of confidence and stability throughout the region, comprising the three Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, which were directly under British rule, as well as the four Federated Malay States administered by Britain, the sultanates of Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, and Pahang, with Kuala Lumpur the capital. Despite the upheavals caused by the war, there was still a general belief that British rule would last indefinitely, with the daily round continuing much as before and a standard of living improving all the time. Even the poorest planter now ran a car in place of a pony and trap, a cold storage company had opened in Singapore, and two big modern hotels had recently gone up in Kuala Lumpur, where there were a railway station, some good shops, a cinema, tearoom, golf course, polo ground, and racetrack. The British presence was divided into two groups, the Malayan Civil Service on the one hand, and the professional and technical departments on the other, with the former in social terms considering itself a definite cut above the latter: a large proportion of the MCS, which in the upper echelons provided the ruling class of Residents and District Officers, were products of the major public schools and universities, whereas most of the rest, planters, tin miners, doctors, engineers, were not. Maugham in his notebook described the attitude of planters toward government officials as “a combination of awe, envy,12 contempt and petulance.” Such a situation naturally gave rise to a certain amount of divisiveness and insecurity, and there was a good deal of competitive talk about which school one had gone to, one’s regiment, and one’s relations back home; a titled family connection, however distant, was universally accepted as the trump card.
The European settlement of the FMS, predominantly British, was extremely sparse: on some of the more isolated rubber estates a planter could go for months, years even, without seeing another white face. The mail arrived by river once a month, bringing letters and books, as well as magazines and newspapers that were at least six weeks out of date. To some, like Mr. Warburton in The Outstation, it was a matter of vital importance that despite his solitude standards should be rigidly maintained:
Most people living in out-of-the-way places13 when the mail comes tear open impatiently their papers and taking the last ones first glance at the latest news from home. Not so Mr. Warburton. His newsagent had instructions to write on the outside of the wrapper the date of each paper he dispatched…. His head-boy’s orders were to place one on the table every morning in the veranda with the early cup of tea and it was Mr Warburton’s especial delight to break the wrapper as he sipped his tea, and read the morning paper. It gave him the illusion of living at home. Every Monday morning he read the Monday Times of six weeks back, and so went through the week. On Sunday he read the Observer. Like his habit of dressing for dinner it was a tie to civilization.
Even in the towns the expatriate population was small, which intensified the strong sense of community, the conscious desire to stick together and to reproduce as nearly as possible the way of life as it had been lived back home. Nearly every little town boasted its Anglican church, its cricket pitch and mock-Tudor tavern, and the wives, the memsahibs, went to great lengths to teach their Chinese cooks how to make bread sauce, parsley stuffing, Welsh rarebit, and steak-and-kidney pie. However hot and steamy the weather, in bungalows throughout the colony breakfast was tea, porridge, and bacon and eggs or kippers, followed by toast and marmalade; a typical dinner consisted of tomato soup, cold asparagus smothered in bottled salad dressing, roast chicken (invariably overcooked), mashed potatoes, and tinned peas, with tinned fruit salad for dessert.
At the heart of all expatriate social life was the club. It was here that the locals gathered in the coo
l of the evening to talk and play tennis and generally relax among themselves, relieved of the effort of maintaining the dignified demeanor the white man was expected to adopt in his dealings with the native. Offices closed at 4:00 P.M., which allowed for a couple of hours of golf or tennis before the sun set, after which the men, changed out of their sports clothes or their shorts and sun helmets, congregated in the bar. Here, served by white-coated servants in scarlet sashes, they downed a few stiff drinks, a couple of pahits (gin and bitters), or two or three good stengahs (whisky and soda), while on the veranda their mems smoked, gossiped, complained about the heat and their servants, and leafed through newly arrived issues of Punch, The Lady, and The Illustrated London News. A perennial topic was “home” and where to live when the time came to retire. Home leave was granted every five or six years, passionately looked forward to but often a disappointment in the event. For months people excitedly planned what they were going to do: London, with its shops, theaters, restaurants—they were going to have the time of their lives! But frequently after a couple of weeks,
they were more lonely than in the jungle.14 It was a relief when at a theatre they ran across someone they had known in the East … and they could fix up an evening together and have a good laugh and tell one another what a grand time they were having.
No such dissatisfactions would be admitted, of course, once back at the club. In Kuala Lumpur there were three clubs, the biggest, the Selangor, possessing a billiard room, card room (almost everybody played bridge), reading and tiffin (luncheon) rooms, a hairdresser and barber, and two bars, from one of which women were excluded. There were weekly dances to music provided by a windup gramophone, occasional fancy dress balls, and jolly amateur dramatics and smoking concerts, with classical music on the whole avoided but lots of songs from the current West End shows enthusiastically performed by fellows who had recently returned from London on leave. Most evenings the Resident dropped in for a game of cards, and at regular intervals gave an official dinner party at the Residency, where, in tropical temperatures, the men in stiff shirts and tails, the women in long dresses, ate their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding to the strains of a medley from Gilbert and Sullivan played by a regimental band on the veranda. “They are bored with themselves,15 bored with one another,” was Maugham’s impression. “They look forward to their freedom from bondage and yet the future fills them with dismay.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 29
