Three years before MacCarthy’s article was published, the first bibliographical record of Maugham’s work appeared, from a somewhat surprising quarter. Fred Bason was a working-class lad from Walworth who in 1931 brought out A Bibliography of the Writings of William Somerset Maugham,* with a preface contributed by Maugham himself. An avid reader but from a very poor family, Bason from boyhood had pursued his literary heroes with vigor, hanging around outside theaters and fashionable restaurants in the hope of collecting an autograph. With Maugham he went further, and when only nineteen wrote to propose compiling a bibliography. Maugham was intrigued. “If you have a snap-shot11 of yourself you might send me that … so that I may know to what sort of boy I am writing,” he told him, adding, “I hope we shall meet when next I come to London.” They did meet, and the friendship flourished, despite Bason’s making clear from the start that sex was not on offer (after receiving some expensive presents from Maugham, Fred wrote in a private memorandum, “We Cockneys try to repay.12 But not in the way he really wants—that Never Never”). At the older man’s request, Bason showed him around Walworth, the neighboring borough to Lambeth and thus a nostalgic experience for Maugham; they went greyhound racing, to a boxing match, for tea with Bason’s parents (Mrs. Bason knitted Maugham a cardigan for Christmas), and to the music hall at the Elephant and Castle, Maugham conspicuous in his expensive black overcoat that he was too cold to take off. He was touched by this young man from the slums with a passion for books and the theater, and over the next few years sent him tickets for his plays, as well as occasional sums of money when times were hard, and for a while gave advice on Bason’s own attempts at writing, until the prolific young author grew too exigent. “No, I do not think13 I want to read your new play,” Maugham told him in November 1931.
I read one of yours earlier in the year. Remember that there are a great many people who want my opinion on their unpublished works and in the last fortnight I have had to cope with no less than five different authors. I think you have had your fair share for the present.
Bason’s ambition was to set up his own antiquarian book business, and it was Maugham who made this possible by giving him manuscripts and signed first editions to sell on a 10 percent commission. At first all went well, until Bason overstepped the mark. First, there was a “misunderstanding” over money that should have been paid to Maugham but was spent by Fred. “You know quite well14 that you should not have done this,” Maugham wrote in a tone of paternal reproof. “I daresay it was a temptation to you to make use of this money which did not belong to you … but it was not the right thing to do.” No sooner was this mishap behind them than Fred earned himself a more serious rebuke, discovered selling for inflated prices to American dealers signed copies that he had assured Maugham were for personal customers only. The final break came after one of Maugham’s visits to Bason’s mother: here he was made to spend the entire time not only signing dozens of books but inscribing in them fulsome messages at Fred’s dictation, solely to enhance their value. It was at this point that Maugham brought the association to an end: there would be no more autographed copies, the young man was told, although “you are at perfect liberty15 to sell the postcards I sent you or my letters to you if you can find anybody silly enough to buy them.”
APPROACHING SIXTY, MAUGHAM SHOWED no sign of slowing down, with a planned schedule of work stretching far into the future. It was now that he set himself to complete what he had determined would be his four last plays, with The Sacred Flame the first of the quartet. As all four treated “difficult” subjects—euthanasia, for instance, in The Sacred Flame—Maugham suspected they were unlikely to be popular; the success of The Sacred Flame had come as a surprise. But at this stage he was unconcerned with writing to please: having spent nearly thirty years in the theater and written more than thirty plays, he felt that he had almost exhausted the medium and that there was no longer any enjoyment to be had out of any of it. Describing in an interview the sheer effort, “the toil and struggle”16 of writing a play, he went on to complain of the “awful” business of having to cooperate with actors and director. “I haven’t the desire,17 the time, nor the physical ability to watch rehearsals, to quarrel with performers, and to cut and rewrite,” he said. “[With a play] you cannot have18 that intimate relation there is between the writer of a book and his reader.” There was also a growing conviction that he was beginning to be out of touch. “Play-writing is a young man’s job,” he stated in the preface to the final volume of his collected plays. “Fashions change in the theatre19 much more radically and more swiftly than they do in other forms of art,” and younger writers, “led by the brisk but determined form20 of Mr. Noël Coward,” were now in vogue. To underline this last point he sent Coward a photograph of himself under which he had written “a picture of a gentleman on the shelf.”21
At the end of March 1930 Maugham delivered the script of a new play, The Breadwinner, that began a five-month run at the Vaudeville on September 30, with Ronald Squire, Marie Löhr, Jack Hawkins, and Peggy Ashcroft. The Breadwinner, a lively if ultimately unsatisfactory piece, tells the story of Charles Battle, a stockbroker, who suddenly decides he is tired of his job and bored by his family. In a somewhat pallid replay of Charles Strickland’s dramatic exit in The Moon and Sixpence, he walks out on the lot of them, not, like Strickland, to dedicate himself to his art but simply to start an unspecified new life on his own. Dutifully, Maugham put in time at rehearsals, and he also attended the out-of-town previews prior to the play’s coming into the West End. Yet if he found the companionship of actors unrewarding, he was by no means inattentive to his cast, as an incident during the run of The Breadwinner shows. After the first night’s performance in Eastbourne the leading man, Ronald Squire, lost his temper with a young actress whom he successfully reduced to tears. When the company assembled at the restaurant where Maugham was buying them dinner, the playwright immediately noticed Miss Hood’s absence and dispatched his chauffeur to collect her, insisting he be told exactly what had happened. Somewhat shamefacedly, Squire admitted he had “given her a roasting,” as he put it, whereupon Maugham coldly made clear that if the actor bullied any member of the cast again the management would lose the performing rights to the play. Nineteen-year-old Jack Hawkins, who with the others had been watching the scene open-mouthed, recalled that when Maggie Hood finally arrived, she was “red-eyed and miserable,22 but Willie placed her on his right at the dinner table, and spent the rest of the evening treating her as though she was the leading lady.”
Since the divorce from Syrie, Maugham when in London stayed in lodgings at various locations in or near the West End. His first rented apartment was at 18 Half Moon Street, off Piccadilly, where he had rooms on the ground floor, the parlor decorated with potted ferns, with antimacassars on the chairs and romantic scenes of knights and ladies hung on the walls. One journalist who came to interview him was struck how odd it was “to see the brilliant castigator23 of modern morals against a background of Victorian plush and lace curtains.” As always Maugham enjoyed his London life. “I dote really on the smell24 & the crowds & the colour of London,” he wrote to Osbert Sitwell’s companion, David Horner. “I know no place where I feel more myself; & then, it’s one of the few places in the world in which you can idle with complete satisfaction.” On Half Moon Street he was within walking distance of everything he needed, including his club, the Garrick, where he called in often for a drink and a hand of cards. Sundays he always kept free for a round of golf, usually followed by an evening of bridge with Barbara Back and her husband at their house near Regent’s Park. Here Maugham was completely content, sitting bespectacled in a cloud of cigarette smoke at the card table, with the Backs and whoever else had been invited to play, H. G. Wells sometimes, or Gerald Kelly, or Basil Bartlett, a good-looking young actor who lived nearby. A large part of his pleasure lay in the lack of social effort required, minimal conversation, the company of old friends, and a simple supper of cold beef and baked pot
atoes.
Since he was a young man Maugham had had a passion for bridge, which he considered “the most entertaining game25 that the art of man has devised.” Inevitably his stammer was a handicap: “I’ve lost hundreds26 because of that stammer,” he complained. “I may have a perfectly legitimate slam in my hand, but I can’t bid it—the ‘s’ just won’t come out.” Nonetheless he loved the intellectual exercise of the game, the ruthlessness, the quick decisions and need for intuition and balanced judgment; and he relished the opportunity it gave him to study his partner and opponents. “The student of human nature27 can find endless matter for observation in the behaviour of his fellow card-players,” he once wrote. “Few are so deep that you do not know the essential facts about them after a few rubbers of bridge.” Just as he rated himself as a writer in the top rank of the second class, so he judged himself as a bridge player. “I do not flatter myself28 that I am in the first flight,” he wrote to a fellow enthusiast, “although I think, without any undue vanity, that I might describe myself as fairly well-up in the second class.” Maugham’s hero was the American world champion, Charles Goren, and he collected all Goren’s books on the subject, regarding his Better Bridge for Better Players as his bible. “I wish I could make a novel29 as absorbing as you make your books on bridge,” he told Goren, with whom he occasionally played when in New York, once, to his incredulous delight, winning $12 from him at the end of an evening’s play.
With his time in London limited, Maugham rarely found himself with a free evening. He entertained generously, usually at the Caprice, the Savoy, or the Café Royal, and was much sought after by fashionable hostesses, among them those two forceful leaders of the pack, Sibyl Colefax and Emerald Cunard. Lady Colefax and her husband lived at Argyll House on the King’s Road, next door to Syrie; the two women disliked each other, both professionally—Sibyl Colefax was also an interior decorator—and as neighbors, since the Colefaxes’ dog drove Syrie mad with its barking, and the late-night slamming of taxi doors after Syrie’s parties annoyed Lady Colefax. Naturally this was of no consequence to Maugham, who liked the celebrity-chasing “Coalbox.” He saw her for the good-hearted woman she was and enjoyed being one of her “lions,” enjoyed mixing with the other celebrities at her salon. Here he met the Cole Porters, the Gershwins, Artur Rubinstein, H. G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, and Noël Coward, as well as figures from public life, including Winston Churchill, Chips Channon, Harold Nicolson, and the more glamorous members of the aristocracy such as Lady Diana Cooper and the Prince of Wales. Sibyl Colefax had a famous birthday book in which she asked favored friends to write, Maugham contributing a typically quizzical quotation from the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier: “Qu’importe sa vie30 a qui peut par son rêve / Disposer de l’espace et disposer du temps?”*
Many of the same people were also regular guests of Lady Cunard in Grosvenor Square, but here the atmosphere was very different. Emerald Cunard, the American widow of the shipping magnate Sir Bache Cunard, was small, exquisite, clever, and extremely chic. “Birdlike” was an adjective often applied—“she was like a little parrot,”31 said one of her friends. Yet although Emerald might appear featherheaded, in fact she was widely read, profoundly musical, and politically astute. Her intricately orchestrated luncheon and dinner parties were brilliantly entertaining, with the hostess acting as conductor, rapping her tiny talons on the table before pointing to one of her guests—Anna Pavlova, it might be, or Sir Thomas Beecham, or the Duke of Westminster, or some promising young playwright—with the announcement that he or she was going to address the company on a subject of Emerald’s choosing. Not unnaturally, some participants found the prospect daunting, but the results could be enthralling. “The talk goes rocketing round,”32 as one friend described it, “and Emerald herself [with her] shock-tactics manages to get something out of everyone.” Maugham became extremely fond of Emerald; it was a real friendship, and she was one of the few who could tease him with impunity. Once when he got up to leave an evening party unusually early, he jokingly proffered the excuse, “I have to keep my youth.”33 “Then why don’t you bring him with you?” Emerald archly inquired.
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DURING THESE LONDON VISITS Maugham maintained minimal contact with his ex-wife, whose recently expanded business had been badly hit by the slump. Syrie had opened branches in Chicago, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles as well as her showroom in New York, but she had been forced to close down almost all her American operations. A timely exit, perhaps, as there had been some awkward confrontations with United States Customs regarding the bringing in and taking out of the country items that turned out to be not quite as they were described on the manifest. There was also a U.S. Treasury investigation that uncovered two sets of books and some highly creative accounting. Fortunately for Maugham, such embarrassments were no longer his concern: his sole reason for communicating with Syrie was to arrange a couple of times a year, when he was in England, to see his daughter. Liza, now in her mid-teens, was prettier than ever but painfully ill at ease, and these rather formal encounters—lunch or dinner in Claridge’s restaurant—were difficult for both: years later, when an American friend invited Maugham to dine at Claridge’s he begged off on the grounds that it would bring back too many painful memories. Maugham, unused to the company of adolescent girls, was not always tactful with his choice of topic, as Liza recalled. “I remember being terribly hurt34 when he said to me when I was about fourteen that he had been bitterly disappointed that I was born a girl … I was frightfully upset.” On a couple of occasions Maugham took Liza to the theater, which made the time pass more easily, but both were relieved when the ordeal was over and Maugham could tip Liza half a crown and put her in a taxi home. In 1931, when she was sixteen, he gave her a car, which thrilled her, enabling her for the first time in her life to have some independence from her mother. It was around this time that Liza found out about her father’s homosexuality, of which until then she had known nothing. “It was the most terrible shock,”35 she recalled.
Lord Wharncliffe, a horrible man, said to me one day, point blank, “Did you know your father’s a queer?” And my father always, always believed that it was my mother who had told me. She never did but he couldn’t believe it, and it was another source of great bitterness between them.
ON RETURNING FROM LONDON to the south of France, Maugham was returning to his vocation, his writing, and yet the pace of his social life hardly abated. Despite being in his late fifties Maugham had the energy and physique of a much younger man. Although his face, with its neatly trimmed mustache, was beginning to look lined and his dark eyes had shadows under them, his hair, brushed straight back, was thick and without a trace of gray, and his figure was slim. He took vigorous physical exercise every day, went for long walks over the Cap, swam, water-skied, played golf and tennis. He was invited everywhere and entertained lavishly himself, his guests ranging from the raffish to the extremely grand. Maugham was not a snob in the sense of rating people solely by social status, yet he did love dining with a duke: he was impressed by titles and by the old established aristocracy, discreetly thrilled when in the presence of royalty. At a luncheon party, Chips Channon, possessor of the most sensitive social antennae in Europe, observed Maugham’s attitude toward that grand old courtier Sir Harry Stonor, noting “There was a trace of subservience36 in Maugham’s manner to the supercilious Stonor … and a touch of contempt in Sir Harry’s condescension to Somerset Maugham.” Soon after moving to the south of France, Maugham was a guest of the Duke of Connaught, one of the sons of Queen Victoria, at a dinner given by His Royal Highness at his villa on Cap Ferrat. On another occasion the thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, arriving at the Mauresque for tea, found to his surprise Maugham in smart white ducks and Gerald in his best pale pink entertaining the king and queen of Siam. “A strange little gathering,”37 Oppenheim remarked. “Our host was chiefly occupied with the Queen, a circumstance not to be wondered at, for Her Majesty, although diminutive, is charming in face, figure
and conversation.”
Within his own rules of engagement Maugham was hospitable, and he thrived on intelligent talk, not always easily available in the expatriate circles of the Côte d’Azur. There were some interesting local residents, however, writers such as F. Tennyson Jesse, whose Burmese novel, The Lacquer Lady, naturally appealed to Maugham; there was the amusing and malicious Elizabeth Russell, author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden; and Michael Arlen, who after making a fortune from his bestseller, The Green Hat, had bought a property outside Cannes. Among Maugham’s French friends one of the cleverest and most entertaining was Horace de Carbuccia, a fat, jolly, bald-headed Corsican who had a house along the coast at Sainte Maxime. Founder of the publishing house Éditions de France and editor of the violently right-wing journal Gringoire, Carbuccia was a brilliant, intemperate, charming, and unscrupulous man with a profound knowledge and love of literature. He and Maugham had first met in London after the war and had become friends, Carbuccia publishing a number of Maugham’s stories in Gringoire; more important, he was instrumental in promoting Maugham on the Paris stage, arranging for the translation of four of the plays, Rain, The Circle, The Letter, and The Sacred Flame. The translator, Mme Blanchet, was a girlfriend of Carbuccia’s, and as Maugham had no need of the money and Carbuccia wished to do something for his petite amie, it was arranged that the royalties should be divided between her and Gerald: “J’ai un secrétaire38 que j’aime beaucoup,”* Maugham had told him. Carbuccia was delighted when Maugham moved to France, relishing the dryness of the Englishman’s wit. “Et puis, vous aimez bien la France,” Carbuccia said to him one day. “‘J’aime vivre en France,’ répliqua-t-il avec son sens exquis des nuances.”† Maugham for his part respected Carbuccia as an editor and was enormously entertained by him, while disliking his politics and knowing perfectly well that the man was a rogue. “He was a gangster39 who had the gangster’s code of honour [but] he was a wonderful raconteur of droll, bitter stories [with] a cynical effrontery that I could not but find fascinating.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 41
