The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  The one overwhelmingly significant absence in the account of this long journey is that of Gerald Haxton. From first page to last, both in The Gentleman in the Parlour and in the published notebooks, there is rarely the smallest indication that the author is not traveling alone. Yet Gerald was there every step of the way, his presence a crucial component of Maugham’s emotional and physical well-being. It was Gerald who supervised the details of Maugham’s journeys, Gerald who acted as secretary, typing Maugham’s letters on a machine laboriously lugged all the way from London; and it must have been Gerald who nursed Maugham during his life-threatening attack of malaria in Bangkok. But of what he thought, what he said, how he conducted himself, Maugham made sure there was left no trace. When on the last day of the voyage the Aquitania docked briefly at Cherbourg, the two men took their leave of each other, Gerald disembarking in France while Maugham sailed on to Southampton and his alternate identity as respectable family man. That Haxton was much on his mind, however, is made clear in a letter written while still in mid-Atlantic to Bert Alanson. “Will you invest $5,00077 in the name of Gerald Haxton,” Maugham asked him. “I am making him a present of this…. He has been very faithful & devoted to me for many years. Of course he has not been able to save anything & I should like this to be a nucleus of some provision for him in case I die.”

  * Altered almost beyond recognition, it was released in 1922 under the title The Ordeal.

  † At the time of this writing there have been ninety-eight versions, for film and television, of-works by Somerset Maugham. His nearest rival is Conan Doyle, with ninety-three film adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

  * Immediately after her well-publicized dismissal by Basil Dean the actress was cast in Noël Coward’s play Fallen Angels: on the first night she changed her line, “Oh dear, rain” to “My God, rain!,” which predictably brought the house down. Tallulah did finally get to play Sadie, to great acclaim, in the 1935 revival in New York.

  * Maugham himself dramatized it for a production at the Playhouse in 1927, with Gladys Cooper playing Leslie Crosbie; in 1929 there was a silent-screen version with Jeanne Eagels, and in 1940 the famous Warner Bros. film directed by William Wyler with Bette Davis in the lead.

  * Approximately 10 percent of this sum would go to the playwright.

  * In the account of the dinner party in Nevinson’s diary no first name is given for McEvoy: the probability is that it was Ambrose McEvoy, though it could have been the playwright Charles McEvoy.

  * The title is taken from an essay of William Hazlitt’s, On Going a Journey, in which Hazlitt describes his delight in travel, and particularly in the opportunity it provides “to shake off the trammels of the world and of public opinion—to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties … to be known by no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour!”

  CHAPTER 10

  SEPARATION

  • • •

  IN A 1923 ARTICLE IN VANITY FAIR, MAUGHAM IN HIS FIFTIETH year wrote, “middle age has its compensations1 … you feel no need to do what you do not like. You are no longer ashamed of yourself. You are reconciled to being what you are, and you do not much mind what people think of you.” On his return from the Far East that year he was the epitome of such self-assurance, rich, famous, outwardly confident, and composed. Everyone wanted to know him, and in the relatively small society of 1920s London, almost everyone did. Yet in private the strain of maintaining a double life, of dividing himself between Syrie, who increasingly bored and repelled him, and Gerald Haxton, to whom he was wholly in thrall, was beginning to seem untenable. Maugham still looked on London as his base: it was his home, the center of his social and professional life; and yet it was also where he felt most repressed and confined. Gerald, representing freedom and adventure, was exiled on the other side of the Channel, and it was not possible for Maugham to endure his absence for long.

  Arriving in London at the end of May, Maugham would be gone again by October. The four intervening months were spent in the usual industrious activity, including overseeing rehearsals for Our Betters, the play that had been banned during the war, completing a couple of short stories, writing a new farce, The Camel’s Back, and starting his Chinese novel, The Painted Veil. To add to the pressure, there was the upheaval of moving again, leaving Wyndham Place for a bigger, even grander establishment barely a hundred yards south at 43 Bryanston Square. “It is simply magnif,”2 Arnold Bennett reported after being invited to a dinner party there with Charles Towne, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf, adding enviously, “The fellow’s study is larger than my drawing room.” In the embittered memoir of his old age, Maugham attributed the move to Syrie’s “social aspirations”: yet in fact it was Maugham, not Syrie, who initiated the move, although it was true she found considerable advantages in it, not only for entertaining but as a showcase for her business, a beautiful backdrop for the bibelots and “restored” pieces of furniture that were her stock in trade. It took Maugham some time to realize what was going on, why the sofa he sat on one evening would be gone the following morning, that the price of tables and chairs could be quoted on inquiry. Yet in the beginning Maugham was pleased with the move to Bryanston Square and enjoyed his handsome new house, “so roomy and spacious,”3 as he told Bert Alanson, “and I bless Rain which made it possible.”

  Rain had also helped pay for a small flat in Paris for Gerald, at 65 rue La Fontaine, a nearer and more convenient location than Florence in which to pass the time during the inevitable periods of separation. By now the relationship had lasted almost ten years, and in the homosexual circles in which Maugham moved it was looked upon as something of a model. But there were problems nonetheless, and Maugham was never easy about leaving Gerald to cope on his own.

  Haxton at thirty was fast developing into an accomplished wastrel. In childhood he had been spoiled and adored by his mother, just as now he was spoiled and adored by Maugham. He was an intelligent man, well read in both English and French, yet except briefly during the war he had never worked for his living. Unmotivated and lacking in discipline, left for long periods with nothing to do, it was all too easy for him to slide into dissipation. For a long time now Gerald had been a heavy drinker; he was also dangerously addicted to gambling, regularly running up enormous debts, all silently settled by his patron; as Maugham pragmatically phrased it, “You must expect to pay something4 for the amusement you get out of knowing wrong ’uns.” Sexually, too, Gerald could be wildly irresponsible: “charming but very naughty,”8 according to that old reprobate Norman Douglas, who might be expected to know. When in Paris he was often to be found in the shady bars and clubs of the rue de Lappe, well known as a homosexual marketplace of unusual variety and sophistication. With a natural preference for adolescent boys, Haxton was also more than ready to prey on any available female—housemaids, debutantes, married women—once even attempting to seduce Gerald Kelly’s wife, Jane—and sometimes very young girls: it was one of his boasts that while in Siam he had bought a twelve-year-old girl for a tin of condensed milk. “He was a naughty boy6 and he grew into a wicked man,” said one of Maugham’s homosexual acquaintances, “[and] he took off his trousers far more frequently than most of us, in the most unlikely bedrooms.”

  To Maugham, Gerald was irresistible. With his vitality and daring, he alone had the power “to unlock a door inside Maugham’s shut-away secret wall.” Maugham was charmed by Gerald, invigorated by his company, and he also valued his intelligence, very much relying on the younger man’s critical opinion of his work. According to Rebecca West, who shrewdly observed the couple over a number of years, “[Haxton] was probably the only person7 he really felt at home with, and from that point of view I think Willie had a right to him…. Gerald was exactly … his cup [of tea].” The relationship was complex, and not always clear to the casual witness. Those who saw them together were sometimes shocked by the insolent manner in w
hich the younger man behaved toward the older: Gerald waving his long cigarette holder, imperiously summoning Maugham from across the room to replenish his cocktail: “the handsome young man,8 lolling in his arm-chair, with one bare leg thrown over the arm, holding up his glass, demanding his poison. The aging genius … pouring out the libation, as if he were making a sacrifice to a young god.” Yet what such onlookers failed to grasp was the complicity, the nature of the bond, the elaborate rules of the sexual power games played out between them. And there was more to it than that: while Maugham was frequently exasperated by Gerald’s behavior, there was a protective, paternal element in his feelings, aware as he was of the young man’s vulnerability, a vulnerability that was deeply buried and invisible to most; he was bewitched, too, by his extraordinary charm; and he was touched by an unexpected gentleness that surfaced when Maugham was ill or depressed, when his lover offered those little attentions so often learned by an only child living with an ailing parent. Most of all, though, Maugham was fascinated by Haxton’s dangerous edge, by the bad-boy aura that surrounded him. In a sense, Gerald was the Mr. Hyde to Maugham’s Dr. Jekyll: it was Gerald who let rip, gave full rein to a sensuality and subversiveness that in the older man were in the main strictly held in check.

  Compared to Haxton’s appetite for risk and debauchery, Maugham’s tastes seem almost prim: he liked sex and he liked a lot of it; few good-looking young men who crossed his path were left unpropositioned; but his preferred practice tended toward the straightforward and conventional. “Willie’s sex life was not necessarily9 virtuous but it was extremely simple,” remarked a homosexual friend, the writer Glenway Wescott. Once when he and Maugham were contemplating a nude painting of a man and woman making love in the “missionary” position, Maugham observed that it was a pity two males could not perform like that. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him,” said Wescott. Gerald’s physical presence had a potent effect on Maugham, and if they were no longer, or not often, sexual partners, they continued to be intricately involved in each other’s sexual activities. In the same way that Maugham when abroad relied on Gerald to go out and make contact with strangers in order to discover their stories, so he relied on him to go out and find boys to bring back to his bed. Maugham was fastidious in his tastes, recoiling from the actuality of the decadent and shady, as Haxton well understood. “Gerald Haxton was wonderful for Willie,”10 said the film director George Cukor. “He kept him in touch with the gutter.”

  On August 9, 1923, Haxton’s invalid mother, Sara, died. She had not seen Gerald for nearly ten years, although Maugham, like a dutiful son-in-law, had always kept in touch, visiting her in St. John’s Wood whenever he was in England. The writer Clemence Dane was later to say of “her dear friend Sally Haxton” that she “worshipped” Maugham because of what he had done for her son. “I personally had much affection11 for her,” Maugham told Bert Alanson, “[but] it was a dreadful life she led [and] I am thankful that she is dead at last.” Gerald, overwhelmed by feelings of grief and guilt, was deeply distressed, mourning his mother and wretched at the thought of the miserable existence she had led, permanently deprived of the presence of her adored only child.

  The departure for the United States at the end of September thus came as a timely distraction, and during the two and a half months in New York, Maugham and Haxton enjoyed themselves, despite the fact that Maugham’s new play, The Camel’s Back, was a failure. Maugham remained unperturbed by this minor setback, however, much more interested in the signing of a contract with Ray Long, editor in chief of the Hearst magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country, for a series of short stories for $2,500 each, “a very substantial, comfortable sum,”12 as he remarked. They went several times to the theater, once with Charlie Chaplin, and Maugham was impressed by the enthusiastic reception the star received:

  It was quite an experience13 to see that huge audience get up and applaud him, and when we came out through a side door in order to avoid the mob we had to fight our way through a couple of thousand people…. [Charlie] was frankly delighted, and I could not help thinking it must be an intoxicating experience thus to receive face to face the acclamation of the people.

  Returning to London in the New Year Maugham concentrated on the writing of his novel The Painted Veil, due to be published the following spring. The only fiction of his in book form to appear in 1924 was a short story, “The Princess and the Nightingale.” This was Maugham’s contribution to a collection of two hundred miniature manuscripts by famous writers commissioned to furnish the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and on show that year at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The contents of each little book, an inch and a half high and bound in yellow calf with the queen’s bookplate inside, were transcribed in tiny writing by its author; among the contributors were Thomas Hardy, Barrie, Kipling, Hilaire Belloc, and Conan Doyle. Maugham’s minuscule opus is a pretty fairy tale about a young princess befriended by a nightingale whom she comes to love so much she puts him in a golden cage so he may not fly away; but kept a prisoner the little bird can neither eat nor sing, and the princess realizes that unless she releases him he will die. “Take your freedom,”14 she tells him at last. “I love you enough to let you be happy in your own way,” a message of peculiarly personal relevance to the story’s author.

  With The Painted Veil completed, Maugham, as restless and energetic as ever, now planned a long journey to Central America in search of new material. He wrote to Bert Alanson, who had recently married, congratulating him and also asking for some introductions for Mexico. “I cannot tell you how much15 I am looking forward to breaking into a new hunting ground,” he told him. In the event this particular hunting ground was to prove disappointing, yet it was with high hopes that in September 1924 Maugham and Haxton yet again crossed the Atlantic. On board the Majestic they found a number of friends, among them the young playwright Noël Coward, whom Maugham had first met at the end of the war. Despite a mutual liking and a genuine respect for each other’s work, the two men were never to become close, mainly because Coward was too fond of Syrie ever to be on intimate terms with Maugham. Also among the passengers were Eugene Goossens, who had composed the music for East of Suez, and Basil Dean, who had directed it. In New York, Maugham was introduced to the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who was to remain a friend for life. Van Vechten, a big, burly man only six years younger than Maugham, was a prominent figure in artistic and intellectual social circles. Although twice married, “Carlo,” as he always signed himself, was homosexual, a dandy by nature if not in physique, specializing in a camp jokiness that Maugham found amusing. The two men met the day before Maugham and Haxton left town, and Van Vechten presented Maugham with a copy of his latest novel, The Tattooed Countess. Three days later Van Vechten was thrilled to receive from New Orleans “a perfectly amazing letter”16 from his new friend saying how much he had enjoyed it.

  After a brief stay in New Orleans, Maugham and Haxton crossed the border into Mexico. “I must confess that I am disappointed17 with Mexico,” Maugham wrote to Eddie Knoblock after a couple of cold, rainy weeks in the capital.

  I cannot find very much that’s interesting except the civilisation that the Spaniards brought and if one is willing to be excited about that one is after all better off in Spain…. My chief object of course was to find material for stories and so far as I can see there is not the smallest likelihood of it.

  In fact the time was not entirely wasted, and material was unearthed for a couple of stories, The Man with a Scar and The Closed Shop, although in both the author’s lack of engagement is evident in the telling. Unlike China and Malaya, the country had no dominant expatriate community, and the foreign residents, though numerous, were too internationally varied to provide that particular colonial ambience that so fascinated Maugham.

  The reaction of another English writer in Mexico at exactly this time was different. D. H. Lawrence,
who was to be powerfully inspired by both the country and the people, had recently arrived in Mexico City with his wife, Frieda, and their friend, the painter Dorothy Brett, sister of Sylvia Brett, Ranee of Sarawak. Lawrence had never met Maugham, but hearing he was in town dispatched a civil note from his modest hotel. “Dear Somerset Maugham,” he wrote,

  I feel that two such literary Englishmen18 as you and I ought not to pass as ships in the night, with a piece of wide sea in between. Would you care to come to lunch at this little place? If so, you might ring up, or leave a message.

  Maugham sent a telegram refusing as he was on the point of leaving for Cuernavaca to write, a reply that upset the famously thin-skinned Lawrence, who felt he had been snubbed. “Damn his eyes19 and his work,” he exclaimed crossly on October 25, while four days later, still brooding over the imagined slight, he wrote to a friend that Somerset Maugham, “a narrow-gutted ‘artist’ with a stutter,” was apparently “no loss: a bit sour and full of nerves and fidgets lest he shouldn’t produce a Maughnum opus with a Mexican background before Christmas,” adding enviously, “As if he could fail!!” The following month, when Maugham returned to Mexico City for a few days before leaving for Yucatán, the meeting finally took place. He and Haxton, Dorothy Brett, and the Lawrences were invited to lunch by the distinguished American anthropologist Zelia Nuttall* at Casa Alvarado, her sixteenth-century house in the suburb of Coyoacán. Yet what should have been a pleasurable occasion quickly turned sour. Something Gerald said offended his hostess; Dorothy Brett was predisposed against both Haxton and Maugham, having apparently received unfavorable reports from her sister in Sarawak; Maugham was in a sullen mood; and Lawrence, tense and aggressive, was infuriated by what he took to be the older writer’s lack of interest in himself. As they sat down at table, Frieda Lawrence, placed next to Maugham, asked him how he liked Mexico. “He answered crossly:20 ‘Do you want me to admire men in big hats?’ I said: ‘I don’t care what you admire.’ And then the lunch was drowned in acidity all around.” Afterward Lawrence described Maugham as “sehr unsympatisch”; “I didn’t like him,” he concluded, “a bit rancid,” an adjective that obviously struck him as apposite as he used it again four years later in his carping review of Ashenden, when he wrote in Vogue that “it would be hard to find a bunch of more ill-humoured stories, in which the humour has gone more rancid.” Maugham would return the compliment by describing Lawrence in print as “a sick man of abnormal irritability … warped by poverty and cankered with a rankling envy.”