The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  For the first day or two Maugham and Haxton felt so happy at their escape that nothing else seemed to matter. But soon they began to fret for all those personal possessions that had gone to the bottom of the river and decided to return to Singapore to refit. From here in mid-August they set out again, this time to Java, where the intention was to stay for a few weeks before starting on the long voyage home. But weeks turned into months, for it was on Java that Gerald, still weak after his near-drowning, fell seriously ill with typhoid and had to be moved to a sanatorium at Garoet on the south coast. Maugham, too, was unwell, with an attack of colitis, and so they remained in the pleasant little hill town while Gerald underwent his treatment, Maugham perfectly happy as long as he could spend hours a day reading. Throughout his life Maugham referred to his love of reading as an addiction; it was, he explained “a necessity, and if I am deprived33 of it for a little while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of his drug”; wherever he was he took care to be well supplied with books, on his travels always taking a trunkful with him. But now, staying on so much longer than planned, he found to his dismay that he had nothing left, and that the only literature locally available that was not in Dutch was school textbook editions of Goethe, La Fontaine, and Racine. “I have the greatest admiration for Racine,”34 he wrote later, “but I admit that to read his plays one after the other requires a certain effort.” It was as a result of this experience that Maugham resolved never again to risk running out: he purchased a bookbag, a large canvas sack with a leather base, cumbersome but capacious, that from then on, filled to the brim, accompanied him on all his travels.

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  IT WAS WHILE STILL on Java that in October 1921 Maugham received some bad news. His broker in New York, Trippe & Co., had suddenly failed, with the loss of a considerable portion of his savings. “I am dreadfully put out35 about it,” he complained, “because I had been saving all I could so as to put myself in such a position that I would never write for money again.” He turned to his friend Bert Alanson, asking if he could recommend a reliable stockbroking firm in the United States, and Alanson at once offered to manage the portfolio himself: he had already made a few investments on Maugham’s behalf and now suggested that he should take on the rest, working without commission as an expression of his admiration and affection. Alanson was also glad to repay a favor Maugham had done him while he was in Russia in 1917, cabling a coded warning about the fall of the rouble (AUNTIE RACHEL VERY ILL) which had saved Alanson a small fortune. Maugham for his part was grateful for Alanson’s offer, although he had little idea how grateful he would have cause to be. For the next thirty-six years, from 1922 until his death in 1958, Alanson made Maugham a very rich man, turning the dividend checks that were regularly sent him into a substantial fortune. For Maugham as he grew older, money, and amassing vast quantities of it, was to become increasingly important on a number of levels: it gave him personal and artistic freedom, it allowed him to be generous when he chose and to buy silence when necessary; and the knowledge that he could afford the best of everything compensated him, up to a point, for other, less material deprivations in his youth. Money was a highly emotive area of his life in which Bert Alanson was intimately involved, giving their friendship a depth and texture it might not otherwise have possessed. Alanson was one of the few people in whom Maugham had complete trust, and his gratitude and reliance never wavered. “You are a wonderful friend,”36 he told him in February 1921 after staying with him on his way to the Far East, and nearly thirty years later the theme was much the same. “You were as ever wonderfully good37 to me,” Maugham wrote in 1949, “& I can never hope to repay all the care you have taken of me for so many years except by giving you my deep & sincere affection.”

  In the event, the failure of Trippe & Co. was not as disastrous as first appeared, and by the following year Maugham had recovered about two-thirds of his original losses. In addition, during his absence abroad a new comedy had been produced that was proving an impressive money-spinner. The Circle, opening on March 3, 1921, at the Haymarket, had run for nearly six months, doing excellent business, before being staged in New York in September, where it was bringing in $20,000* a week and collecting a sheaf of adulatory reviews from some highly influential critics. Well received at the time, its popularity continued to grow on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the playwright’s lifetime, the American Louis Kronenberger in 1952 describing The Circle as “one of the very few38 creditable high comedies written in English in the twentieth century,” while the British James Agate wrote of “this brilliant playwright” that “his technique is flawless39 and The Circle is his best play.”

  The Circle is a highly polished, expertly structured piece that deals with the difficulties of the survival of love within marriage, with the pressures of society, and with the triumph of character over circumstance. The action takes place in a large house in Dorset, where Arnold Champion-Cheney and his pretty young wife, Elizabeth, are expecting the arrival of Arnold’s mother and her lover. Thirty years ago Lady Kitty scandalized society by running off to Italy with Lord Porteous, a married man, with whom she has been living in sin ever since. Arnold is apprehensive, still resentful at his mother’s abandoning him, but Elizabeth is thrilled by the romantic love story of lovely Lady Kitty and the glamorous peer and can hardly wait to meet them. All are taken aback when the couple walk in, she an idiotic chatterbox with heavily painted face and dyed hair, he a bald, bad-tempered old man complaining about his rheumatism; it is quite clear the two are badly on each other’s nerves and hardly able to exchange a civil word. Their example is not lost on Elizabeth, who had herself been intending to leave her husband and run off with a lover. Lady Kitty, when she learns of the plan, makes an impassioned speech imploring Elizabeth to stay, describing her own unhappy experience of life outside the pale. “One sacrifices one’s life40 for love and then one finds that love doesn’t last. The tragedy of love isn’t death or separation…. The tragedy of love is indifference.” In the end, however, the young lovers remain resolute and succeed in making their escape, aided in a surprising reversal by Kitty and Porteous, who underneath all the snapping and snarling are shown still to have a true fondness for each other.

  In many ways The Circle offers a curious premise for a comedy, a fusion of romance and reality, with a bleak message underneath the frequently very funny dialogue. There is real cruelty, particularly in the exchanges between Porteous and Kitty, and little comfort to be found in any of it. When the young lovers go off together in the final scene the audience is left not knowing whether they are looking at a happy ending, a lack of resolution that on the first night attracted some boos from the gallery and that encouraged several critics to accuse the author of cynicism, an accusation with which Maugham was to grow wearily familiar. In reviewing the play both Frank Swinnerton and St. John Ervine described the cynical tendency as a flaw, although the more perceptive Desmond MacCarthy recognized it as the vital driving force behind Maugham’s comedic gift, “[a] gift [that] sprang from a clear-sighted,41 hard-edged cynicism, rare in English writers…. The Circle is one of the best42 plays he has yet written [and] it is one of the most cynical.”

  Despite a few critical reservations, the play was a huge hit, and Maugham was relieved to be able to tell Golding Bright that The Circle’s popularity had restored his financial independence. Maugham’s reputation had been further enhanced while abroad by the publication in Britain and America of his short-story collection The Trembling of a Leaf. Predictably, “Rain” was singled out as the most remarkable, but as the Saturday Review put it, “each separate tale is begun43 by inspiration and completed by artistic perfection.” It was an age in which the form was popular, and the author was gratified by his enormous sales. “My short stories have been a very great success44 here & everyone is being very nice to me,” he wrote to Bert Alanson, admitting that he was enjoying being lionized. Maugham found it a strange experience to return after such a long absence, away from England
for over a year, and find everyone doing and saying much the same as when he had left. The first time he dropped in at the Garrick one of the members greeted him with, “‘Hulloa, Maugham, have you been away?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve been to Brighton for the week-end.’ ‘Ah,’ he answered, ‘I thought I hadn’t seen you about lately.’”

  Not everything had stayed the same, however, and Maugham had been grieved to learn of the death of his publisher, William Heinemann. Heinemann at only fifty-seven had died of a heart attack in October 1920, less than three weeks after Maugham had left England. With no obvious successor in line, the firm had been stranded until Heinemann’s associate director had managed to do a deal with the New York publisher F. N. Doubleday, persuading him to buy a controlling interest in the business while leaving the English company intact. Doubleday, a powerful, charismatic figure, with many prominent English writers on his list, Kipling among them, had taken his son, Nelson, into the company, and it was Nelson Doubleday, a big, energetic, sporty young man, who was to form not only a close professional connection but a lifetime’s friendship with Maugham.

  Within a few months of Maugham’s return from abroad his agent, J. B. Pinker, had also died unexpectedly, in February 1922 while on a business trip to the States. The two men had always enjoyed cordial relations and Maugham had been grateful to Pinker, who had done well for his client in the early days of their association; however, as Maugham by now was at least as well known in America as in Britain, he decided to put his business into the hands of an American agent, Charles Hanson Towne. Towne, regarded by Maugham as “one of the most agreeable persons45 I know in New York,” was a very different type, an engaging, sophisticated man of letters, a novelist, poet, magazine editor, and columnist, a considerable celebrity in bookish circles in Manhattan.

  With the success of The Circle and The Trembling of a Leaf, Maugham was very much in the public eye, immediately swept up in an energetic round of entertaining and being entertained. He was also eager to catch up with old friends such as Walpole, Knoblock, and Kelly. Gerald Kelly, who by this period was making a good living in fashionable portraiture, had recently married, his wife, Lilian (always known as Jane), a blond and beautiful working-class girl who had been one of his models. Maugham had been delighted by the match. “I think you have done a very clever thing46 & I am sure you will make a great success of it, & be very happy,” he had told him, recognizing that Jane’s gentleness and calm would provide the necessary counterbalance to Kelly’s high-strung, restless nature. Next to Kelly, Knoblock and Walpole were the friends to whom Maugham was closest. Eddie Knoblock, sweet-natured and gregarious, led a somewhat precarious professional existence, and when penury threatened, as it frequently did, he returned to Hollywood to write film scripts and recoup. Walpole, on the other hand, was going from strength to strength, popular as a novelist, a distinguished member of the literary establishment, living in an expensive flat in Piccadilly, and reveling in a glamorous if frustrating affair with the Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior. While nervous of his friend’s slightly barbed teasing, Hugh nevertheless admired Maugham and craved his good opinion. The two met frequently, with Hugh eagerly noting in his diary any words of praise let drop by the older man.

  A new acquaintance made at this time was with the American novelist Sinclair Lewis, over from the States on a visit to London. Lewis had become famous with the publication two years earlier of his novel Main Street, a work that had fascinated Maugham, with its detailed depiction of small-town life in the Middle West. During his frequent train journeys across America, Maugham had seen men of exactly this background lounging about the smoking car, “in their ill-fitting, ready-made clothes,47 gaudy shirts and showy ties … they were as strange to me as the Chinese and more impenetrable.” Now having read Main Street he felt he understood something about them and was eager to talk to the author, inviting him to dinner at Wyndham Place. The occasion turned out to be somewhat uncomfortable. To meet Lewis, Maugham had asked Eddie Knoblock, the painters Ambrose McEvoy* and Christopher Nevinson, the playwright and critic St. John Ervine, Osbert Sitwell, Hugh Walpole, and that exquisitely refined connoisseur and patron of the arts, Eddie Marsh. Syrie as hostess was the only woman, but even her presence failed to restrain Lewis, the guest of honor, from becoming wildly overexcited, in the words of Nevinson,

  restless, clownish, and intense….48 Never have I met a man so sensitive and yet with such a gift of putting his foot in it…. After dinner, Sinclair Lewis took Eddie Marsh’s monocle, stuck it in his own eye, and began parading up and down with Eddie Marsh following like a dog on a string. Then, to amuse himself, he parodied high-brow conversation in the best Oxford manner, at times imitating McEvoy’s cracked voice…. All of us were embarrassed, as the parody was grotesquely realistic.

  Eventually, to Maugham’s relief, Nevinson rescued the situation by taking Lewis off to a nightclub.

  The monocled Eddie Marsh was a relative newcomer in the group that evening at Wyndham Place, but in years to come he would play a unique role in Maugham’s career. Only two years older than Maugham, Marsh, once described as a cross between Puck and Mme de Maintenon, was a man of impressive erudition, with a double first in classics at Cambridge and an extraordinarily retentive memory, particularly for poetry, of which given the slightest encouragement he would recite reams in his thin, slightly squeaky voice. Editor of the much-admired five-volume anthology Georgian Poetry, he was also a connoisseur of contemporary painting, and although of modest means had assembled an important collection of works by artists such as Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, Stanley Spencer, and Paul Nash. By profession Marsh was a civil servant and for nearly twenty years held the post of private secretary to Winston Churchill. The first letter extant from Maugham to Marsh, written in 1919, is a note of thanks for services unspecified—“My dear Marsh,” Maugham had written, “Thank you very much indeed.49 I am very grateful indeed for what you have done for me”—most probably a reference to Marsh’s using his influence with Churchill in obtaining an imprimatur for the Ashenden stories. Nattily dressed and insatiably social, Marsh led an impeccable bachelor existence, much given to romantic attachments to gifted and beautiful young men, Rupert Brooke being one, the actor and composer Ivor Novello another. It was through following Novello’s career that Marsh had developed a passion for the theater, present at every first night, madly enthusiastic no matter how terrible the play. “Heavens!” exclaimed James Agate one evening when Marsh had loudly clapped a player’s exit only minutes after the rise of the curtain, “you can’t be enjoying it already!”50 With his scholar’s mind and sharp eye for error, Marsh as a hobby had started correcting proofs for writer friends, most notably for Churchill himself, as well as for Desmond MacCarthy, Harold Nicolson, Walter de la Mare, Dorothy L. Sayers, A. A. Milne, and eventually Somerset Maugham.

  AT HOME MAUGHAM WAS relieved to find that relations with Syrie were calmer and more amicable than at any time during the marriage so far. There was good reason for this: Syrie had found something to do. Bored and restless while her husband was away, she had decided to follow a bent for interior decoration, with the aim of eventually establishing herself in business. She was fortunate in her timing: up until 1914 it was almost unheard of for a respectable lady to go into retail, with interior design the preserve of the big stores such as Fortnum & Mason, Liberty’s, Whiteley’s, and Waring & Gillow. But with the postwar economic decline a number of ladies had set up in trade, opening smart little shops selling hats or dresses or ornamental knickknacks, thus bringing about an important change in attitude. (An article in Vogue commenting on this trend began, “Someone once said that a woman is either happily married or an Interior Decorator….”) When installed by Gordon Selfridge in York Terrace, Syrie had employed a designer, Ernest Thornton-Smith, head of the antiques department at Fortnum’s, and it was Thornton-Smith to whom she now turned, asking him to take her on as an unpaid apprentice to teach her about furniture and restoration, how to deal with customers, and
all the invaluable little tricks of the trade. It quickly became apparent that Syrie had found her vocation, not only in décor but as a businesswoman, tough, tenacious, and with a keen eye for a bargain; and in 1922 with borrowed capital of £400 she opened a shop, Syrie Ltd., at 85 Baker Street. Stocked initially with the contents of the house in Regent’s Park, Syrie Ltd. was an immediate success, its proprietor delighting in the process of buying and selling, of attending auctions and picking up cheaply pieces that could be cleaned up, cleverly embellished, and sold at a handsome profit.