The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  You seem now to have bound me hand and foot61 for the rest of my career as a novelist [nor] is the contract you have signed so good as the offer which Doran made me himself by letter several months ago…. I do not know exactly what advantage I get in receiving an advance of five thousand dollars on a novel. It is to be presumed that with such a reputation as I have any novel I write will earn that sum in royalties without any effort on the part of the publishers; and what I particularly aimed at was to force the publisher to do a little more than his best for me.

  Within months, however, the cause of the quarrel became academic: Doran’s firm was absorbed by Doubleday, and Towne resigned his agency to take on the editorship of Harper’s Bazaar, a move regarded by Maugham with approval. “I am sure you will make an excellent editor62 and bring the greatest possible success to the magazine,” he told Towne. “Though I consider you too arbitrary to be an agent I continue to think you a charming and an amiable companion.”

  With the house in Bryanston Square up for sale, Maugham felt disinclined to remain in London, going first to Brides-les-Bains, then to Capri, then to Salzburg for the Festival. He returned to London in August, but only for a brief interval, leaving at the end of September for the States in order to be present at the opening of The Constant Wife. On arrival in New York he wrote to Bert Alanson with some exciting news. After looking at a number of houses on the Riviera he had finally found one that he liked on Cap Ferrat, a rather dilapidated property that had long been left vacant as so much money was needed for its restoration. An early twentieth-century house near the top of the Cap, it had been curiously embellished by a series of pseudo-Moorish architectural features, thus accounting for its name, the Villa Mauresque. “Twenty minutes before starting63 for the station to take the train to Southampton and the ship for New York,” Alanson was told, “the agents of the owner of the house I have been haggling over for the last six months came to see me and accepted my last offer; so that I am now the possessor of nine acres of land and a villa half way between Nice and Monte Carlo.”

  * The model for Mrs. Norris in Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent.

  * The title is taken from a sonnet by Shelley beginning,

  Lift not the painted veil which those who live

  Call Life …

  * According to admittedly sketchy evidence in F.H.’s pocket appointment diary, this affair seems to have come to an end in 1923.

  * To be vividly described a few years later in The Constant Wife.

  † In his short story “A Man with a Conscience,” Maugham describes a husband’s feelings of revulsion toward the wife he is about to murder: “Marie-Louise had started a little while before having her hair cut differently, quite short, and I thought it repulsive … the stubble of cropped hair on her neck made me feel rather sick” (Collected Short Stories, vol. 4, p. 239).

  * “It seems you need a match, my friend.”

  * Ah King makes a further appearance as the devoted servant in the 1932 novel, The Narrow Corner.

  * The Casuarina Tree was listed under “The Twenties,” with Ulysses, A Passage to India, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, To the Lighthouse, and Decline and Fall.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE VILLA MAURESQUE

  • • •

  THE VILLA MAURESQUE AND SOMERSET MAUGHAM, SOMERSET MAUGHAM and the Villa Mauresque: for nearly forty years the two were inextricably linked, the house the richest thread in the fabric of the legend, visited, photographed, filmed, described in countless articles, regarded with awe as the glamorous and exotic backdrop for one of the most famous writers in the world. The villa itself was of no great architectural merit, but its location was superb, overlooking the sea and hidden among trees at the top of Cap Ferrat, a thickly wooded promontory jutting out into the Mediterranean. To the west are Nice, Cannes, and the wide sweep of the Baie des Anges, while to the east lie Beaulieu, Monte Carlo, and the Italian Riviera; behind are the snow-covered peaks of the Alpes Maritimes, while before stretches the wide blue expanse of the ocean, where on a clear day the misty outline of Corsica can be glimpsed on the horizon. Here was the south, here were warmth, light, vibrant color, white houses with terra-cotta roofs and a luxuriant vegetation reminiscent of the tropics, mimosa and oleander, yucca and bougainvillea, olive and palm trees. Most of the land on Cap Ferrat had been bought in the early years of the century by King Leopold II of the Belgians, who had built himself a palace there, in 1906 adding a house nearby for his elderly confessor. This gentleman, a Monseigneur Charmeton, had spent much of his life in Algeria and understandably wished to end his days in the Moorish style to which he had become accustomed; thus, the square, whitewashed villa had had imposed upon it horseshoe windows, a Moorish archway, a large cupola on the roof, and tacked onto one side a grandiose Venetian portico.

  Maugham was entranced by his new acquisition, and considered the £7,000 he paid for it a very fair price. “I have at last found a place1 that pleases me more than Capri,” he wrote to Gerald Kelly. “Of course at present everything is upside down and one requires the eye of faith to see what the house and garden will be like when the place is shipshape.” A local architect, Henri Delmotte, was engaged to restore the house to its original shape. Indoors, a courtyard was constructed, spacious and quiet, and leading from it were a dining room and a long, high-ceilinged drawing room, in summer its tall windows kept cool and shuttered from the glare outside. From the large hall a white marble staircase ascended to a gallery around which were the bedrooms and bathrooms: as well as apartments for Maugham and Haxton, there were big double bedrooms with dressing rooms for guests, with two bachelor bedrooms on the ground floor. At the very top of the building, reached by a wooden stairway leading onto the flat roof, was Maugham’s study, a private chamber apart from the rest of the house; entered through French windows, the room was airy and spacious, with wide views over the tops of pine trees to mountains and the sea. Alone in his aerie on days when the mistral was blowing, Maugham used to say it was like being on the deck of a ship.

  While the builders were painting and hammering in the house, Maugham turned his attention to the steep, overgrown hillside on which it stood. He had never had a plot of his own to cultivate before, he wrote, and “I hadn’t reckoned on the temptation2 that is afforded by a great neglected garden.” When he first saw it, the land was a dense jungle of foliage, pine trees, mimosa, and aloes, with the ground beneath a tangle of wild rosemary and thyme. Once this had been cleared and cut back, the garden was properly stepped and leveled, flowering shrubs were planted, camellias, hibiscus, and bougainvillea, a lily pond was scooped out, and orange and lemon trees were set in a formal pattern on the terraces immediately outside the house. Thousands of spring bulbs were dug in, and, extremely rare for the Mediterranean, turf was laid for a grass lawn, readily admitted by Maugham to be a rich man’s folly. “The great luxury on the Riviera3 is grass, for it will not bear the long heat of summer and must be dug up at the end of every spring and replanted every fall”; yet he had an inextinguishable nostalgia for the smooth green swards of English country houses and wished to have something of the same himself. Away from and above the house were greenhouses and a kitchen garden, and just below these a tennis court, reached by a flight of stone steps and hidden by a hedge; a long marble swimming pool was installed, with at one end a diving board and at the other, gushing water, a magnificent mask of Neptune carved by Bernini that Maugham had found in Florence. With the arrival of his furniture and other possessions from Bryanston Square, his books, theatrical pictures, and the various ornaments and objets d’art collected in the East, the Villa Mauresque soon began to feel very much like home.

  There was little time to enjoy his new property, however, as Maugham’s professional commitments required his presence in London, where he was involved in the preparation of two new dramatic works, The Constant Wife and The Letter, the second an adaptation he had made of his Malayan short story about Mrs. Crosbie’s shooting of her lover and her subse
quent trial. From the first Maugham had been determined that Gladys Cooper should take the lead part of Leslie Crosbie, and her performance more than fulfilled his expectation, so impressing him that he offered her the option on his next three plays.

  Maugham had the highest regard for Gladys Cooper: he admired her beauty, her professionalism, and her no-nonsense attitude toward life in general, while she for her part had the greatest esteem for him. “I place Somerset Maugham4 as our finest writer for the stage,” she stated in her autobiography. It was during rehearsals for The Letter, of which she was also coproducer, that Gladys properly came to appreciate Maugham’s method, impressed by how accommodating he was with regard to making changes to his text. “The majority of authors,”5 she wrote, “are terribly sensitive and jealous of their work, regarding every word they have written as almost a pearl beyond price…. Not so Somerset Maugham.” He would sit in the stalls, ready with his blue pencil to cross out or rewrite whatever she or the director Gerald du Maurier wished. In large part this relaxed attitude derived from the detached view Maugham took of his dramatic work: it was the private process of composition that engaged him, not the play’s evolution onstage; once the work was in the hands of the actors and director, it became something else, with which he no longer felt closely concerned. For this reason the theater was ultimately regarded as an unsatisfactory medium for a writer, as Maugham explained in a letter to Noël Coward:

  [We] have to content ourselves6 with at the best an approximation of what we see in the mind’s eye. After one has got over the glamour of the stage and the excitement, I do not myself think the theatre has much to offer the writer compared with the other mediums in which he has complete independence and need consider no one.

  For Maugham, rehearsing had become dull work, attended to more from a sense of duty than because he felt crucially involved in the interpretation of his script. This attitude, verging almost on indifference, had been noted by the director Basil Dean, who during preparations for East of Suez had concluded, rightly, that it sprang from the fact that “Maugham lacked genuine enthusiasm7 for the theatre…. Throughout the rehearsals,” Dean recalled,

  he remained withdrawn, neither helpful nor obstructive, never offering advice unless it was asked for. I think he found the whole business tiresome and the actors’ arguments rather petty. Yet, when appealed to, he was always ready with the unconvincing response: “Oh, ex-excellent!” Once I asked him whether I might cut certain lines: “Wh-wh-why not?” he spluttered. “The st-st-stage is a w-w-workshop.”

  With The Letter doing so well on both sides of the Atlantic, and with a sellout production of Pluie (Rain) at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris, Maugham’s theatrical reputation had never been higher, and much was expected of the new work, due to open in London in April 1927. But with The Constant Wife almost everything went wrong from the start.

  In the guise of a smart little comedy of manners, The Constant Wife is in fact ablaze with anger, anger about the injustices and constraints of the married state, with Maugham’s bitterness about Syrie just below the surface. “I’m tired of being the modern wife,”8 says Constance. “What do you mean by the modern wife?” her sister asks, to which Constance bleakly replies, “A prostitute who doesn’t deliver the goods.” It is for this reason that Constance makes up her mind to earn her own money—by working as an interior decorator, interestingly enough. She harangues her husband on the subject of the meretriciousness of her previous position:

  CONSTANCE: Are you as great a fool9 as the average man, who falls for the average woman’s stupendous bluff that just because he’s married her he must provide for her wants and her luxuries, sacrifice his pleasures and comfort and convenience, and that he must look upon it as a privilege that she allows him to be her slave and bondman? …

  JOHN: You were the mother of my child.

  CONSTANCE: Let us not exaggerate the importance of that, John. I performed a natural and healthy function of my sex…. Let us face it, I was only a parasite in your house….

  Even more venomous is the advice Constance gives a woman friend on how to punish her husband, in words that derive directly from the author’s own miserable experience:

  Refuse to speak to him,10 but never let him get a word of defence in edgeways. Cry enough to make him feel what a brute he is, but not enough to make your eyes swell. Say you’ll leave him and run sobbing to the door, but take care to let him stop you before you open it. Repeat yourself. Say the same thing over and over again … and if he answers you take no notice, but just say it again [until] at last … you’ve reduced him to desperation, when his head is aching as though it would split, when he’s sweating at every pore, when he’s harassed and miserable and haggard and broken….

  The Constant Wife was produced in 1926 in America, with Ethel Barrymore in the lead, the first time she had played in a piece by Maugham since Lady Frederick twenty years before. Opening in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 1, the play suffered a bad start because the actress, stricken with stage fright, repeatedly forgot her lines, obliging the assistant stage manager, George Cukor, to hide in the fireplace onstage in order to prompt her. Maugham was in the audience. “I suffered agonies,”11 he later admitted to Cukor.

  When the curtain came down for the last time I went on to the stage. Ethel flung her arms round my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. “Darling,” she said. “I’ve ruined your play, but don’t worry; it’ll run for two years.” And it did.

  But if the play recovered after its poor beginning in the States, it was given no such chance in London. The production was booked to go into the handsome Theatre Royal, Haymarket, with a cast led by Leon Quartermaine and Fay Compton. The director, Basil Dean, was unhappy with the choice of the two stars. “Quite early in rehearsals12 I discovered they were not well suited to their parts,” he recalled. “Maugham’s cynical comedy called for the lightest of treatment. Fay’s comedy style was too arch and Leo was too pedantic.” Then came the news that the Haymarket was no longer available and the Strand was taken instead, a much smaller theater with a stage unsuited for any but the broadest effects. But most damaging of all was the disastrous opening on April 6, 1927, when a managerial blunder over tickets succeeded in totally disrupting the performance. The fashionably dressed gentry arrived to find their seats in the stalls occupied by cheap-ticket holders who refused to budge; violent rows broke out and order was restored only when the theater manager went up onstage to appeal for calm. “Maugham and his wife13 sat in a stage-box, dismayed, while the argument was going on,” Dean recalled. “[And] the effect on the actors can well be imagined. Already suffering from the usual first-night nerves they were put completely out of countenance by the fracas.” More disruption was to follow when at the end of the play Fay Compton came forward to make the traditional speech of thanks, and mistaking a cry of “Shut up!” from the gallery as intended for her, pointedly thanked the “civil” members of the audience, which immediately provoked loud booing from the upper regions. Unsurprisingly, the production never recovered, and the critical consensus, that “Mr. Maugham was out of form14 when he wrote The Constant Wife,” kept audiences away.

  Maugham had already left the theater by the time Miss Compton made her speech, as Syrie was giving a combined first-night and housewarming party at her new address, 213 King’s Road, Chelsea. The property comprised a four-story early Georgian house of great beauty, with a smaller house linked by a wide indoor passage around the corner on Glebe Place. On the first floor of the King’s Road house Syrie had made a large and spectacular drawing room decorated wholly in white, with white sofas, off-white satin curtains, white velvet lamp shades, and a white carpet by Marion Dorn; behind a white brocade sofa a huge folding screen made of narrow pieces of mirror reflected great sprays of white flowers, roses, lilies, peonies, and lilac, supplied on a regular basis by a recent associate of Syrie’s, the florist Constance Spry. On the floor above were apartments for herself and Liza, and on the top floor a bedroom for her hus
band, “nice enough,” he granted, “but it had the disadvantage15 of being also the ‘gentlemen’s cloakroom,’ so that when there was a party I had to put away my writing materials.” Displeased by such a constraint, Maugham soon moved his quarters from the main house to the Glebe Place annex, which was quieter and more private; with this arrangement he and Syrie were in effect living apart while still appearing to be under one roof. Certainly they were regarded as joint hosts for the glamorous first-night party for The Constant Wife, attended by almost everyone who was anyone in theatrical and literary circles. “Crowds and crowds at the party,”16 Arnold Bennett reported, with major stars such as Marie Tempest and Tallulah Bankhead much in evidence; altogether the evening was deemed “a great success…. Only Maugham and wife were a bit gloomy…. I hear the play is rotten.”

  IF IT WAS HARDLY surprising that Maugham was gloomy following the débâcle earlier in the evening, nonetheless at this point it was Syrie whose state was the more precarious. With her husband’s purchase of the Villa Mauresque she had finally been forced to accept that he had chosen a way of life in which she would have little part. Unable to conceal her despair, she poured out her misery to any sympathetic friend who would listen; Rebecca West was one who spent several long afternoons sitting in a darkened room while Syrie wept over what she considered her cruel desertion; she shocked another friend, Cecil Beaton, by telling him that during a visit to New York she had been so distraught over the prospect of her marriage ending that she had “spent three whole nights in Central Park17 too miserable to go home.” Despite a likely element of exaggeration, there is no doubt that Syrie was wretchedly unhappy and on the point of collapse. “My mother had a very bad nervous breakdown,”18 Liza recalled of this period, a breakdown that reached its nadir during a business trip to the States. While in New York, Syrie became so frantic that she decided to go to Bermuda to try and find peace, but once there could hardly wait to leave, insisting on boarding the first ship out of the harbor, a tramp steamer with no passenger accommodation, she and Liza sleeping in chairs on the open deck as far as Nassau. The two of them stayed for several weeks in the Bahamas and here at last Syrie began to recover, Liza attending a little open-air school run by nuns, “the nicest of my collection of schools,” as she remembered it.