The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  The Mexican trip continued to Yucatán, Cuba (“just like Atlantic City”21), Jamaica, British Honduras, where they made an expedition by mule into the bush, and finally Guatemala; from Guatemala City they sailed to Hué in Indochina, continuing from there to Saigon, where they boarded a Messageries Maritimes ship for Marseilles. Shortly before sailing home, Maugham confided to Eddie Knoblock that

  [I have] arrived at the conclusion22 which I think is not without use that I am reaching the end of my exotic material. I have of course notes for a good many stories which I have not yet written but shall write, but I have not the capacity to assimilate much more. I have no doubt there is here and in the East a great deal which another writer could make stories of and plays [but] I have reached the end of the vein…. It will at all events take me four or five years to get finished with the material I now have collected.

  Maugham arrived back in London at the end of March 1925 in time for the publication of The Painted Veil.* This, the story of Walter and Kitty Fane and of Kitty’s affair with the caddish Townsend, had already run into trouble. It had first appeared in Britain serialized in Nash’s magazine, when the two protagonists had been called not Fane, but Lane, with the unfortunate consequence of bringing a libel action from an unknown Mr. Lane, eventually settled for £250. But there was further trouble when The Painted Veil was published in book form, and an objection was made by the Hong Kong government over the adulterous role ascribed to the colony’s assistant colonial secretary; uneasy that awkward conclusions might be drawn, they insisted that the location of the story be altered. Thus Maugham was obliged to turn Hong Kong into the imaginary Tching-Yen, Happy Valley into Pleasant Valley, the Peak into the Mount, and Kowloon into Lushan, with all references to neighboring Canton removed (the original place-names were restored in later editions). As bad luck would have it, by the time these corrections were made, two printings of four thousand copies each had already been run off and a large number distributed to the press, all of which had to be recalled. There was a further annoyance. Despite the book’s immediate jump into the bestseller list in the United States, with sales of over a hundred thousand and a number of good reviews, Maugham felt that his American publisher, George Doran, had been remiss in promoting it. For once it was not a question of finance. As Maugham explained to his agent, Charles Towne, “I am not so anxious23 to make a large sum of money out of a book as to have it as widely read as possible. I seek distinction rather than lucre.” Yet with The Painted Veil Doran seemed to have been culpably inactive. “He just sent it out like a parcel24 of tea and let it sell on its own merits, without anything more than a perfectly mechanical and useless advertising,” he complained. “I do not wish Doran to look upon me as a goose which lays regularly a golden egg,” he continued, suggesting that after his contract expired,

  we go to Doran and unless he is prepared to guarantee success for my next books (which will consist of a volume or two of short stories, a travel book, and, last, a novel) make arrangements elsewhere. There is only one way I know in which a Publisher can guarantee success, and that is by giving so large an advance that it is necessary for him to do everything he can for the book in order to get his money back.

  One element in The Painted Veil recognizable only to Maugham’s inner circle is that of the portrait of his brother. Maugham admitted that he took much of the character of Walter Fane from F.H., his shyness and superciliousness, his coldness and steely self-control; but he is also visible in the person of Kitty’s father, Bernard Garstin. Garstin is a barrister, a KC, a reticent, lonely figure, given to depression who, like F.H., lives at home in a state of self-imposed isolation. Unlike Garstin, however, who is looked down on by his two daughters, F.H. was a figure of fear to his children, cold, captious, and remote. In fact the tragedy of F.H. was that his icy manner hid a craving for affection that within the family he was unable to express. Outside the house he could be lively company, and for some years he conducted a secret love affair with a woman with whom presumably he was more forthcoming than with his wife.* Yet with Nellie he was distant and fractious, and with his children he found it impossible to unbend. Kate, Honor, and Diana had learned early to keep out of their father’s way, their lives centered on their warm hearted mother, who was passionately devoted to her daughters.

  In 1916, when the girls were approaching adulthood, Nellie Maugham, to everyone’s astonishment, gave birth to a boy. As an only son, Robert Cecil Romer, always known as Robin, might have been expected to engender some feeling of affection in his father, but he was treated with an even greater frigidity than his sisters. “My father was fifty years old25 when I was born,” Robin wrote later, “and the half century that separated us was certainly one of the factors that made our relationship difficult.” But it went further than this, and for years the boy received at his father’s hands nothing but callous rejection. He was an unwanted child: even his mother treated him severely, believing that boys, unlike girls, needed to be toughened up and denied any form of indulgence. As a result Robin had a miserable childhood, spending much of his time separated from the rest of the family, looked after by a series of nurses and governesses. He was almost exactly a year younger than his cousin Liza, and sometimes Syrie would bring Liza to have tea with him in the nursery at Cadogan Square while she talked to Nellie downstairs.

  The sisters-in-law had become good friends, and sitting on the drawing room sofa with the door closed they confided in each other, comparing the difficulties both had with their husbands. In each case, the couples were disastrously mismatched, two lively, sociable women married to clever men who were exceptionally controlled and controlling—and whose affections were engaged elsewhere. If Nellie remained in ignorance of her husband’s mistress, Syrie was only too well aware of the danger represented by her long-term rival, Gerald Haxton. For several years before her marriage to Maugham, Haxton had been in the picture, but she had yet to set eyes upon him.

  During the six months that her husband was abroad, Syrie’s career had continued to prosper, so much so that she had been able to move her shop, Syrie Ltd., from Baker Street to fashionable Mayfair premises, 87 Duke Street, at the corner of Grosvenor Square. From here she not only continued to sell her decorative furniture but also ran a successful design business, taking on commissions to decorate rooms, apartments, and even entire houses. Recently she had built herself a house at fashionable Le Touquet on the Normandy coast, a destination that was fast becoming popular with the rich British. The Villa Eliza, surrounded by pine trees and set some way back from the sea, provided a perfect backdrop for Syrie’s modernistic beige-and-white décor as well as giving her easy access to the junk and antiques shops of the Seine valley. The construction had been expensive, however, and with ready money not always available, Syrie had to do what she could to raise it. Thus, shortly before he had sailed from Hué, Maugham, to his extreme annoyance, learned that Syrie had rented out his house in Bryanston Square for the summer; she was planning to move into rented accommodation in Chelsea, he was informed, where a bed-sitting room would be prepared for his use. “Needless to say I could not work26 in a bed-sitting room in the King’s Road,” he exploded to Golding Bright, “& in any case I am too old to pig it!” Fortunately it then transpired that the tenants were postponing their arrival until July, and as Maugham had no intention of staying in London for more than two or three months, there was no reason why his plans should be affected. As the ship neared Marseilles, his thoughts increasingly focused on his homecoming and the reunion with his wife. “I do not of course know,”27 he wrote to Eddie Knoblock, “whether it is to be war or peace; but I shall when I arrive.”

  As it turned out, the summer of 1925 was a combination of the two. As before, husband and wife assumed a convincing appearance of harmony. The artistic young men who had begun to gather around Syrie, such as Glyn Philpot, Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, and Oliver Messel, mixed well with the literary young men, novelists and playwrights, who clustered around Maugham. Once ag
ain the house in Bryanston Square was the location for some glamorous parties, where theater people, writers, publishers, painters, and designers met the more cultured members of high society; George Doran, Eddie Marsh, Jeanne Eagels, Gladys Cooper, Ivor Novello, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Noël Coward, and Michael Arlen mingled with the eccentric Lord Berners, with Sir John and Lady Lavery, with the theatrical peer Ned Lathom, with Sitwells and Guinnesses. On a couple of occasions the gaunt figure of D. H. Lawrence could be seen going up the steps of number 43, a fragile reconciliation between himself and Maugham having been effected by Reggie Turner. “Don’t expect us to be two roses28 on one stem,” Lawrence had warned Turner. “But perhaps he’s nice, I don’t pretend I know him. And if he’d like to see me, I should like to see him. Honi soit etc.” Sometimes friends from abroad came to stay, one of whom was the novelist Theodore Dreiser; it had been Dreiser’s review of Of Human Bondage that had first won the novel serious attention, and Maugham put himself out to entertain his American guest, every evening concocting the martinis fashionable in New York if still something of a novelty in London. When talking about it later, Dreiser said that he had enjoyed everything about his visit except for the awful cocktails.

  But it was when the guests had gone that the rows started. Always, always the figure of Gerald Haxton loomed over their increasingly ferocious fighting. Syrie, still craving her husband’s affection, was venomously jealous, tormented by the reality of Maugham’s sexual relationship with the hated Haxton (“she did desperately mind29 … about the sex part,” said her daughter later). She was unable stop herself from nagging and reproaching him, working herself up into screaming, shouting rages that Maugham countered either by icy withdrawal or, when driven beyond endurance, by shouting back at her himself; more than once he hit her. These frightful quarrels* left Maugham drained and depressed, and usually with a splitting headache. Extremely self-disciplined, a private, undemonstrative man who found it difficult to show emotion, he was profoundly shaken by being provoked to such violent outbursts, bitterly humiliated by his loss of control. Syrie, on the other hand, recovered much more rapidly: quick-tempered by nature, she had always thrived on confrontation—as her employees both at home and in the shop knew only too well—and she relished the daily drama of her volatile emotions. From Maugham’s point of view, the marriage was effectively over. He and Syrie had little in common, her chic, frivolous world was not his, her aggressive acquisitiveness was anathema to him, and only traces remained of the youthful prettiness he had once so admired. Now in her late forties, Syrie, despite rigorous efforts, was growing plump; she retained her flawless complexion but it was heavily powdered, her square chin and big nose were more prominent, and her hair, styled in a modish Eton crop, was cut unbecomingly short.† It was now common knowledge that relations between the Maughams were strained to the breaking point, a topic that Syrie, with a level of vituperation that sometimes shocked her listeners, had little compunction in airing. “I realized,” said one, “that what she was chiefly30 concerned about was doing Willie damage.” Some of the couple’s close friends, including Eddie Knoblock, Noël Coward, and Gladys Cooper, tried to intervene, to lower the temperature between them, but it soon became distressingly clear that nothing could be done. According to H. G. Wells, “[Syrie] was incapable of realising31 Maugham’s distaste for her [and] always expected a reconciliation to take place. This was impossible, as Maugham’s writing about her showed.”

  The one area where the couple might have found some accord was in regard to their daughter; instead, the subject of Liza became one of the bitterest battlegrounds of all, and she herself described her parents’ quarrels over her upbringing as “volcanic.” Although doted on by her mother and in many ways overindulged, the little girl was also neglected, often lonely, and sometimes wretchedly unhappy. Apart from a couple of cousins, Robin Maugham and a little Barnardo cousin, Eilidh, who sometimes came to play, she had few friends of her own age, and now that Syrie was so immersed in her business she often appeared to forget about Liza for days at a time, leaving her in the care of one of the maids. On the first day of a seaside holiday in Dinard, Syrie, anxious to prepare the rented house for the arrival of guests, deposited her daughter on the beach and was astonished when at the end of the day a policeman turned up to deliver her child, weeping and distraught. “‘Did you have a nice day,32 darling?’ she asked, then she saw how upset I was and was very sorry,” Liza recalled. “She had been completely absorbed in what she was doing. And she was very absent-minded.” It was during this same holiday that Liza for the first time witnessed a series of violent fights between her parents, including one that so frightened her she was physically sick; on other occasions their rows reduced her to hysterical crying, once covering her face with greasepaint in an attempt to disguise her tears. “I had a great feeling of insecurity,”33 she said of this period of her life, “quite the reverse of a happy childhood.”

  Liza was now ten, and Syrie wanted to keep her at home, doing her lessons in a relaxed fashion with a series of governesses. At the age of eight Liza had contracted tuberculosis and been forced to spend several months confined to a spinal carriage, and this had made her mother even more determined to keep her closely under her wing; her father, however, was adamant that the child should be sent away to school. He was determined she should be properly educated, and saw it as essential that she should be removed from her mother’s influence and allowed to make friends of her own age. So Syrie was overruled and the child dispatched to a boarding school in the country, a decision that caused great wretchedness to both, with Syrie constantly on the telephone with anxious instructions regarding Liza’s comfort and care. One Sunday evening a group of dinner guests at Bryanston Square were embarrassed to witness their hostess provoked to such exasperation over some matter to do with Liza’s schooling that she threw the receiver on the floor. When she returned to the table, her husband tauntingly remarked, “S-S-Syrie d-d-didn’t really imp-p-prove matters34 by l-losing her t-t-temper with that wretched woman,” at which Syrie, white with rage, retaliated with icy distinctness, “You said you wanted a child, but you lied. You didn’t want a child, you only wanted to be a father.” Rebecca West, a close ally of Syrie’s who was present at this exchange, recalled, “Willie took this without protest.35 It was quite obvious that she was alluding to something which was understood between them.” Meanwhile Liza at school was so miserably homesick that she went on a hunger strike, eventually making herself ill enough to be sent to a sanatorium. From there she ran away, caught a train to London, and turned up at the house, imploring her parents not to send her back. There was an emotional scene, but Maugham refused to be swayed and insisted that she return to school; again Liza escaped, was again returned; but when she escaped a third time Syrie could bear it no longer and resorted to trickery. She took Liza to the oculist and asked the man to put drops in her eyes to obscure her vision temporarily: unable to see, she was unable to go to school.

  At this point Maugham admitted defeat and made little further attempt to influence his daughter’s education other than by opening an account in her name at Bumpus’s bookshop in Oxford Street, where she was allowed to buy as many books as she pleased. Under her mother’s regime, Liza’s schooling remained haphazard, sometimes lessons with a temporary governess, occasionally a few weeks in a school in London, Chicago, Nassau, New York, or wherever else Syrie’s expanding business and peripatetic way of life happened to take her. Even in adulthood Liza’s handwriting remained childish, and she never learned to spell, a fact that exasperated her father, who accused her of “writing like a chambermaid.”36 On the other hand, she was a well-dressed and well-traveled little girl, and accustomed to the company of her mother’s sophisticated social set; in a curious way she appeared much older than her years. “She had a miniature, rather touching dignity,”37 said one of her contemporaries. “She seemed already to have entered into ‘society,’ and to exist there like a waif, waiting to be a few years older.”


  While Maugham admired Syrie’s taste and flair, he loathed her ruthless commercialism. Embarrassed enough by the notion of his wife’s running a shop, he found it abhorrent when she conducted business at home. (After waiting for his guests to be seated at a luncheon party one day, he drily announced, “I think I should warn you,38 l-l-ladies and gentlemen, to hold tight to your chairs. They are almost certainly for s-s-sale.”) Publicly he dealt with it by pretending it was all a great joke, that they were so hard up Syrie had been forced to go to work selling bits of old junk, but inwardly he hated the situation, hated the flow of people in and out of the house and the disruption of his working routine. The actress Cathleen Nesbitt, who stayed for a few days in Bryanston Square, saw for herself the effect it had on him. “[Syrie] for a time39 used her own house as a show place for precious pieces which were always being snapped up and removed by eager clients,” the actress recalled. “I confess I was rather astonished by the courtesy with which he [Maugham] accepted the constant change of surroundings!” But there came a day when Syrie went too far. One evening when Maugham came downstairs before dinner, “he found that his sacred writing desk was gone from his study, and all his papers and manuscripts laid out on a table…. When Syrie said cheerfully, ‘There’s a magnificent new desk coming tomorrow, darling,’ I almost expected him to knock her down but he merely said, ‘I see,’ with a tight face and closed the door.” The writing table was the one Maugham had used for more than twenty years, bought when he moved into his house on Chesterfield Street; an integral part of his working life, it suited him perfectly, and to him Syrie’s removing it was an outrage, a brutal act, insensitive in the extreme. “He appeared to take it calmly,” said Cathleen Nesbitt, “but I sensed a rage of fury coldly controlled.” Later he was to say it was the selling of his desk that finally caused him to end his marriage, and his anger about it remained unassuaged until eventually finding vitriolic expression in his 1930 novel, Cakes and Ale.