The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  Having exposed his wounds so publicly, Walpole had to suffer the further torment of knowing that everyone was talking about it, that there was much gloating, by friend and enemy alike, over his distress. “[Cakes and Ale] contains a most envenomed portrait87 of Hugh Walpole, who is out of his mind with agitation and horror,” wrote Lytton Strachey to his sister, Dorothy Bussy, adding delightedly, “It is a very amusing book”; E. M. Forster in a letter to Maugham himself admitted “your laudable fiendishness88 fascinates me more than I can say”; Eddie Marsh gleefully observed, “I hear poor Hugh says89 it has finished him”; Logan Pearsall Smith, in a wickedly apt metaphor, described the novel as “the red-hot poker90 that killed Hugh Walpole,”* while Arnold Bennett made matters even worse by insisting the portrait was not malicious at all but “thoroughly just, accurate and benevolent.” The general view was that that ass Walpole had had it coming—he “cried aloud to be caricatured,”91 said Beverley Nichols—and few blamed Maugham for succumbing to temptation. In the words of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, “I can see why Maugham, why any sharp toothed person, could not resist the temptation of getting his teeth into flesh so pink & innocent, so obviously made for cannibals.”

  During October, numbers of reviews appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them adulatory, even if several critics claimed to be taken aback by the author’s blatant subjectivity. “No English writer92 is more transparently, more unblushingly autobiographic than Somerset Maugham,” wrote Leslie A. Marchand in The New York Times. In The Graphic, Evelyn Waugh (whose Vile Bodies appeared the same year) praised Maugham for his “supreme adroitness and ease….93 I do not know of any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control … he is a master for creating the appetite for information, of withholding it until the right moment, and then providing it surprisingly.” As time passed, admiration for the novel continued to grow. Desmond MacCarthy, writing in 1934, called Cakes and Ale “a model of construction,”94 while in the second half of the century Gore Vidal described it as a “perfect novel”95 and Anthony Burgess called it simply “superb.”96

  In print no reviewer was so tactless as to notice any possible similarity between Hugh Walpole and Alroy Kear; nearly everyone, however, remarked, mostly with disapproval, on the strong resemblance between Driffield and Hardy. Disgracefully, Ashenden in the novel shows little admiration for Driffield’s oeuvre, which shows some striking similarities with that of Hardy. “[Driffield] gave you the impression97 of writing with the stub of a blunt pencil,” says Ashenden. “[My] heart sank when he led me into the forecastle of a sailing ship or the taproom of a public-house, and I knew I was in for half a dozen pages in dialect of facetious comment on life, ethics, and immortality.” Such unreverent opinion was considered an outrage, and TRAMPLING ON THOMAS HARDY’S GRAVE, HITTING BELOW THE SHROUD, and GRAVE PROFANED BY LITERARY GHOUL were typical of some of the headlines in the press. When Walpole finally got up the courage to write to Maugham, complaining of the cruel treatment he had received at his old friend’s hands, Maugham was able to use Hardy as a decoy. “I am really very unlucky,”98 his letter began.

  As you may have seen I have been attacked in the papers because they think my old man is intended to be a portrait of Hardy. It is absurd. The only grounds are that both died old, received the O.M. & were married twice. You know that for my story I needed this & that there is nothing of Hardy in my character. Now I have your letter. I cannot say I was surprised to receive it because I had heard from Charlie Evans [at Heinemann] … it had never occurred to him that there was any resemblance between the Alroy Kear of my novel & you; and when he spoke to me about it I was able very honestly to assure him that nothing had been further from my thoughts than to describe you….

  … Alroy Kear … is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself. There is more of me in him than of any writer I know. I suggest that if there is anything in him that you recognise it is because to a great or less extent we are all the same….

  In his reply to this deeply disingenuous explanation,* Walpole wrote that of course he accepted Maugham’s word on the matter; although in truth he did nothing of the sort. He continued to agonize over the subject, rehearsing it again and again to anyone who would listen. The following month he went to tea with Virginia Woolf, who described Hugh in her diary as “piteous, writhing & wincing99 & ridiculous.” “Indeed it was a clever piece of torture,” she wrote of his “flaying alive” in Cakes and Ale:

  Hugh palpably exposed as the hypocritical booming thick skinned popular novelist … who is thick fingered & insensitive in every department. But said Hugh, turning round on his bed of thorns again & yet again, & pressing them further & further in, “That’s not what I mind so much. What I mind are a few little things—little things that Willie & I had together—only he and I knew—those he has put into print. That’s what I cant get over…. And he wrote to me & said he could not believe that I could be hurt. He said he had written without a thought of me. But that letter is almost worse than the book.”

  By the end of the year the fuss had largely died down, to the relief of both parties. The relationship between the two men continued to be amicable, at least on the surface: when Hugh’s new novel, Judith Paris, came out the following summer Maugham sent him a jokey telegram of congratulation signed ALROY MAUGHAM. But then the affair threatened to blow up again in May 1931 with the publication in America of a scurrilous piece of fiction, Gin and Bitters, which was an overt attack on Maugham. The author, disguised under the pseudonym, “A. Riposte,” was at first assumed to be Walpole, but in fact was a prolific if little-known writer, Elinor Mordaunt, née Evelyn Clowes. A friend of the second Mrs. Hardy, who had been bitterly hurt by Cakes and Ale,* Mordaunt had decided to retaliate by drawing an instantly recognizable, deeply offensive portrait of Somerset Maugham in the guise of the famous novelist Leverson Hurle. Mordaunt had traveled widely in the Far East, which gave some measure of credibility to an otherwise feeble story, but as she had never met Maugham and clearly knew nothing about him that was not in the public domain, he at first took little interest in the matter. But then it appeared that the book, under the title Full Circle, was now to be published in England, and not only that but by Maugham’s own publisher, Heinemann. Understandably reluctant to offend their bestselling author, Heinemann offered to suppress it; Walpole, too, appalled by the prospect of the whole affair’s being given a new airing, begged Maugham to take out an injunction; but it was not until F. H. Maugham, alarmed by the libelous nature of the text, strongly advised his brother to take action that Maugham decided to issue a writ. By this time, the book had been taken over by another firm, Martin Secker, who found themselves in the unfortunate position of having to withdraw it from circulation shortly after publication following the receipt of a threatening letter from Maugham’s attorneys.

  Within a surprisingly short time Walpole succeeded in convincing himself that after all there was little similarity between himself and Alroy Kear, although of course he could understand how a popular and successful figure such as himself might appear “to a cynic and an uneasy unhappy man like Willie.” Yet despite these consoling arguments his standing in the eyes of the world never recovered from Maugham’s portrayal, and after the publication of Cakes and Ale there were few in literary London who regarded either the man or his work with much respect: when in 1937 Walpole finally received his longed-for knighthood, the wits all said it was a consolation prize for Cakes and Ale. Admiration for the novel itself, however, continued to spread. “[After Cakes and Ale] Maugham’s100 reputation as a novelist had no immediate parallel,” wrote the critic Frank Swinnerton. “Within a few months of its publication all active novel-writers were considerably his juniors.”

  * Avery Hopwood (1882–1928) was a successful playwright of the American jazz age; Sidney Howard (1894–1946) was an English film actor.

  * A similar comparison is made in Proust’s novel by the homosexual Baron de Charlus about the object of h
is infatuation, the violinist Morel: “he has become so beautiful, he looks just like a Bronzino” (Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive, vol. 2, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff [Chatto & Windus, 1941], p. 16).

  * The title is taken from Coleridge’s poem “Love”: “All thoughts, all passions, all delights, / Whatever stirs this mortal frame / All are but ministers of Love / And feed his sacred flame.”

  † “Everyone but Somerset Maugham said that I was a second Somerset Maugham,” wrote Coward in his autobiography, Present Indicative (Methuen, 2004), p. 196.

  * The same happened the following year when the play opened in Rome and was denounced by the Vatican on the front page of its official organ, L’Osservatore Romano.

  † In 1924 Diaghilev created a ballet inspired by the train. Based on a story by Cocteau, Le Train Bleu had a front curtain by Picasso, music by Milhaud, and costumes by Coco Chanel.

  * Britain imposed strict quarantine laws, which made it impracticable to bring animals into the country for short visits.

  * From a speech by Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, Act II, scene iii: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” In a letter to the critic Paul Dottin written on January 1, 1931, shortly after the novel’s publication, Maugham explained, “the title is supposed to suggest the gaiety of life which my heroine’s attitude at all events exemplified. If I had thought of it I might very well have called it ‘Beer and Skittles.’”

  * In 1944 Logan Pearsall Smith, discussing Cakes and Ale with Hugh Trevor-Roper, wrote, “The second Mrs. Driffield is a photo straight from life. Shortly after the book was published I sat by a ‘Mrs. Thomas Hardy’ at a luncheon party in Lady Noble’s palace and this female’s talk about social life in Dorsetshire seemed to come so directly word for word out of Cakes and Ale that I honestly believe that she was a sham Mrs. Hardy acting the part for fun” (A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith, edited by Edwin Tribble [Ticknor & Fields, 1984], p. 86).

  * Mr. F. Kemp and Mr. C. M. Driffield had both been members of the Whitstable parish council under the Reverend Henry Maugham.

  * In Marlowe’s play Edward II, the homosexual monarch is famously put to death impaled on a red-hot spit.

  * “Hugh was a ridiculous creature and I certainly had him in mind when I wrote Cakes and Ale,” Maugham admitted in a letter written to Myrick Land in 1961, long after Walpole’s death. And in a preface to the 1950 edition of Cakes and Ale (Random House), he states, “It was true that I had had Hugh Walpole in mind when I devised the character to whom I gave the name of Alroy Kear.”

  * Maugham had been supplied with quantities of accurate detail about the Hardys and about the social and domestic life at Max Gate by several visitors to the house, among them Desmond MacCarthy and Siegfried Sassoon.

  CHAPTER 12

  MASTER HACKY

  • • •

  CAKES AND ALE WAS PUBLISHED IN 1930, AT THE START OF A decade that was to bring turmoil to the Western world, but for Maugham it was a period of ever-increasing fame and prosperity. On October 25, 1929, subsequently known as Black Thursday, the American stock market crashed, heralding the start of the Great Depression, during which millions lost their livelihoods. Maugham, however, came through relatively unscathed, his investments carefully tended by Bert Alanson. “As what I have was invested1 in gilt-edged securities,” he told Messmore Kendall, “I do not care and am prepared to wait till things right themselves again.” Everywhere there were signs of retrenchment, with theater audiences falling off and book and magazine sales disastrously in decline; and yet Maugham, as though he possessed some magic amulet, remained almost unaffected. His plays continued to be produced not only in Britain and America but globally, and for his stories he was now paid by Cosmopolitan and Nash’s the astronomical sum of a dollar a word. With his publishers, too, he was exceptionally fortunate. The Depression created a crisis in the publishing industry, and yet on both sides of the Atlantic, Maugham’s publishers were among the few who continued to flourish. Heinemann, under the joint directorship of Charles Evans and A. S. Frere, remained profitable and strong, while in the States, the merger in 1927 of Doubleday with George Doran had resulted in the creation of one of the most distinguished imprints in America. Under Nelson Doubleday’s dynamic leadership, Doubleday, Doran by the early 1930s had grown into the largest publishing company in the English-speaking world.

  Both Frere and Nelson Doubleday became personal friends of Maugham’s. Frere, small and energetic, in some ways a mysterious man, evasive about his early years, had great charm as well as a genuine love and wide knowledge of literature; he was sociable and counted many writers among his close acquaintance. “He was warm, affectionate,2 generous and stimulating,” said Frere of his famous author. “All he asked was that one should repay him with a similar loyalty and affection.” On a professional level Frere was a shrewd judge, clear-sighted in assessing his most valuable property. “[Maugham] had an inestimable gift3 of story-telling,” he said once in an interview. “His strength … was integrity [to his art] based on an unshakable humility. He knew he wasn’t a great writer but set out to make a living by whatever ability he had.” Both men understood perfectly the rules and limits of their professional relationship, the writer’s job to deliver a manuscript, the publisher’s to publish it, with no question of editorial interference. “In all the years I was associated with Willie I never had a cross word with him about anything connected with his work,” Frere recalled.

  When I got a manuscript from Willie it went straight to the printer. I’d send him proofs and get them back within ten days and that was that. We didn’t alter a comma. He used to say, when I finish the proofs I don’t want anything more to do with it. He never commented on the jackets.

  Nelson Doubleday enjoyed a similarly untroubled working relationship with Maugham, if in character he was very different from his English counterpart. A big, hearty, cigar-chomping heavy drinker, keen on outdoor sports, Nelson was ill at ease in society, although generous and affectionate toward his family and intimates. A reluctant reader, Nelson was first and foremost a businessman, known to be a tough operator and one of the shrewdest men in the trade. “I don’t read books,”4 he used to boast, “I sell ’em.” He prided himself on driving a hard bargain, “but Willie,” said one of Doubleday’s colleagues, “can back Nelson into a corner5 every time.” It used to amuse the editorial staff when Maugham visited the office on Long Island to watch Nelson towering over the short Englishman, “as a St. Bernard towers over a beagle6 … ‘Of course I know nothing about business,’” Maugham always began, “but before the conversation is over he will have got from Nelson everything he wants—which, incidentally, is plenty.”

  With his enormous sales, Maugham had become one of the most famous authors alive. He was also attracting some serious critical attention, most of it, perhaps surprisingly, away from his home ground. Like his fellow novelists Charles Morgan and Rosamond Lehmann, Maugham came to be held in far greater esteem in France than in England, where it was not done in highbrow circles to take his writing seriously. In France, a professor at the University of Toulouse was one of the first in the field: in 1926, Paul Dottin published an essay on Maugham, “Le Réalisme de Somerset Maugham,” which two years later was expanded into a full-length study, Somerset Maugham et ses romans, followed in 1937 by Le Théâtre de Somerset Maugham. In 1935 Maugham was made an Officier of the Légion d’Honneur for his services to literature. Soon there were other scholars eager to pay their respects, not only in France but in Germany and the United States. In Britain, by contrast, Maugham was largely disregarded by the intelligentsia. His picture was included in the Famous Writers series on the Wills cigarette cards, and yet the three most influential literary surveys published in 1930 almost wholly ignored him: The History of English Literature by Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian hardly mentions his name; A. C. Ward’s Twentieth-Century Literature refers only to the plays, while the same autho
r’s The Nineteen-Twenties does not notice Maugham at all.* Extraordinarily for such a popular and prolific author, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations included not a single entry for Maugham until the 1953 edition, when he was permitted one. It was left to a more renegade group of critics, serious intellectually but ranging outside the walls of academe, to give Maugham his due, critics such as Raymond Mortimer, Richard Aldington, and Cyril Connolly, who in Enemies of Promise categorized him as “last of the great professional writers.”7

  The critique that meant most to Maugham himself was written by his old friend Desmond MacCarthy. Published as a pamphlet by Heinemann in 1934, William Somerset Maugham: The English Maupassant was part critical assessment, part memoir, recalling MacCarthy’s first meeting with Maugham in France in 1914. Of the writer’s similarity to Maupassant, MacCarthy says this: “He has a sense8 of what is widely interesting, because, like Maupassant, he is as much a man of the world as he is an artist … while at his best he can tell a story as well as any man alive or dead.” Such a testimony was gratifying not only because MacCarthy was respected as a critic but also because he was a member of the Bloomsbury group, an élite by whom Maugham felt he had been unfairly cold-shouldered. Typical of their attitude was a remark of David Garnett’s: “I can tell you nothing9 about Maugham’s reputation in the Bloomsbury group,” Garnett loftily told an inquirer, “because I never heard him discussed.” Such dismissiveness rankled. It was not that Maugham was deluded about his professional status: “I know just where I stand,”10 he said more than once, “in the very front row of the second rate”; but it irked him that a writer as successful as he, one moreover who, like Bloomsbury, had consistently defied public attitudes toward religion, class, and sexual morality, should be so ignominiously ignored. And yet as much as his middlebrow reputation it was his success, and the affluence that came with that success, that in the eyes of Bloomsbury placed him beyond the pale. Somerset Maugham with his villa, his swimming pool, his chauffeur-driven limousine, was the ultimate antibohemian, his luxurious style of living organically antipathetic to the high-minded inhabitants of Charleston and Gordon Square.