Just as clever, if very different, was the infinitely genial H. G. Wells, who had recently built a house for himself at Grasse. Since those early years before the war, when Maugham had first met Wells with Max Beerbohm and Reggie Turner, an agreeable friendship had developed between the two, Maugham fascinated by Wells’s huge intelligence and mesmerizing conversation, if not a wholehearted admirer of his fiction. Now that they were neighbors, the two men saw each other often, Wells initially in the company of his attractive but tiresome mistress Odette Keun. Recently, however, H.G. had fallen in love with a beautiful Russian, Moura Budberg, and was trying to disentangle himself from Odette, while she, ferociously jealous, was doing everything in her power to stymie his new affair. Finding in Maugham a sympathetic listener, Odette poured out her hurt feelings, crucially mistaking his courteous attentiveness for partisanship. In gratitude, she inserted a fulsome dedication “To W. Somerset Maugham” in a little book she had written on England and the English:
My dear William … During a time40 of great bewilderment, you showed me a fearless, wise and steadfast friendship for which I do not cease to be grateful…. I love and admire in you a genuineness of spirit and a sensitive kindness of heart which set you apart from the men and women I have known.
Shortly after the book was published, however, Odette discovered that in her absence Maugham, unforgivably, had entertained H.G. with the hated Moura at the Mauresque, an act that so enraged her that she immediately instructed her publisher to remove the dedication in future editions, writing a bitterly hurt letter to “William darling” telling him what a treacherous brute he had been:
It is not true41 that you are exceptionally kind; it is not true that you are exceptionally sensitive…. I cannot bear what I have written [in the dedication], because it is so extravagantly false…. Oh, William! Oh, William! … Do not answer this letter. I never want to hear from or of you again. Finished, this shallow and brittle friendship….
Needless to say, such an eruption made no difference whatever to relations between the two men, with Maugham growing almost as fond of the mysterious Moura as he was of Wells himself.
The numbers of expatriates enormously increased during the summer, when crowds of exotic imports arrived on the Riviera and there was no shortage of lively company: Eugene O’Neill, for instance, the opera singer Mary Garden, Charlie Chaplin, and Alexander Woollcott, who was found to be a great addition when he rented a villa for the season at Antibes. It was Woollcott who introduced Maugham to the actress Ruth Gordon, and to Harpo Marx, of the Marx Brothers, both of whom became friends. Some years later Maugham was amused to learn that in Harpo’s “library” in his house in California there were only two books, both inscribed by their authors: a copy of Saint Joan given him by Shaw, and Of Human Bondage.
By and large, friends invited to stay at the Villa Mauresque fell into two categories, the first composed mainly of married couples, the other of what one observer later described as “cosmopolitan gay.” In the first group were friends like the Kellys, the Brights, Frere and his wife Pat, Alan and Poppy Pryce-Jones, Desmond MacCarthy, Jacques Raindre, a wealthy financier from Paris, and Nelson Doubleday, who had just divorced his first wife and was shortly to marry his second. Barbara Back, closest to Maugham of all his women friends, was frequently called upon to play the part of hostess, her brassy blond elegance, her love of gossip, and especially her expertise at the bridge table much admired by Maugham: presenting her with one of his novels, he inscribed it, “For Barbara, because she never calls42 on his diamonds to the Queen, from her appreciative partner the author.” Barbara came often to the Mauresque, usually on her own, as her flamboyant and far from faithful husband, Ivor Back, was rarely able to accompany her; this suited Maugham, who liked to have Barbara to himself. She for her part knew exactly how to handle him, with a combination of mischief and respect; he loved her earthiness and her guttersnipe humor, and he relied on her long chatty letters to provide him with all the most indiscreet gossip of the town. “Your letters are a boon43 & a blessing,” he told her. “They bring a whiff of London down to the Riviera.” Another member of the Mauresque inner circle was the novelist G. B. (Gladys Bronwen) Stern, always known as “Peter.” Enormously fat with a round face and Skye-terrier bangs, Peter Stern was no beauty, but her entertaining conversation and general jolliness were considered great assets, even though Maugham was dismayed by her greed at table and not overkeen, aesthetically, on her habit of sunbathing naked. She was, however, a good sort, and he respected her critical opinion. “She is the least self-centred writer44 I know,” he wrote to his niece Kate, “& the more one knows her the more delightful one finds her.” Also included on the regular guest list were Maugham’s nephew and nieces, sometimes accompanied by their father, F.H. “I think they all enjoyed themselves,”45 Maugham wrote to Barbara Back after a family visit in June 1931. “I know the girls did. F.H. as you know would rather die than let a word of appreciation pass his austere lips.”
The second group of visitors were men only, some with partners, some alone, some near Maugham’s generation in age, others considerably younger. There was Osbert Sitwell, who came with his lover, David Horner, an attractive man by whom Maugham for a while was very taken; there were Harold Nicolson (“so nice, gay & easy to please”46), Harold Acton, Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward, Cecil Beaton. (A story that gleefully went the rounds was of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay arriving at the Mauresque to find Maugham sitting on the terrace with Haxton, Beaton, and Coward. “Oh, Mr. Maugham,”47 cried Miss Millay, clapping her hands. “This is fairyland!”) Those two ambitious young men, Godfrey Winn and Beverley Nichols, were regularly invited, Winn recalling with mortification his first visit to the villa when he arrived wearing a gray flannel suit. “This is the South of France48 in August, not Finals Day at Wimbledon,” said Maugham severely, and sent him off in the car with Gerald to buy linen shirts and trousers and a pair of espadrilles. Another good-looking young writer, Keith Winter, was reeled in after being spotted in Villefranche with the Waugh brothers, Alec and Evelyn, who were staying with their parents at the Welcome Hotel. The three young men were asked to dine. Alec with his beautiful manners made an excellent impression, while Evelyn—ingeniously affecting ignorance of Maugham’s literary reputation, addressing him throughout as “Dr.” Maugham—was dismissed as “odious.”49* The Waughs left after dinner but Winter stayed the night, returning to Villefranche the next morning, very pleased with himself, said Alec. “Willie had told him50 how well he used his fingers, which made me think of Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence, who often despised the people he was enjoying.” Later that year Alec saw Maugham with Winter at a cocktail party in London. “Keith was getting a drink and he touched Willie’s hand and I saw a look of real lust cross Willie’s face.”
On a rather different level was the friendship Maugham formed with a brilliant young don from King’s College, Cambridge, George (“Dadie”) Rylands. Rylands with his schoolteacher friend, Arthur Marshall, and another young Cambridge academic, Victor Rothschild, had come on holiday to Monte Carlo, where they encountered Maugham. Invited to the Mauresque, Rothschild, the only heterosexual member of the party, was somewhat taken aback by their reception. “Somerset Maugham,” he wrote, “may have misunderstood51 the purpose of our visit, at least a stroll in the garden with Gerald Haxton led me to that conclusion.” Rylands and Marshall meanwhile were duly propositioned by their host, but once that was out of the way, the pair, and Rylands in particular, soon became part of Maugham’s circle. Blond, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, and enchanting, Dadie Rylands was an ebullient, magnetic personality. A member of the Apostles at Cambridge and a habitué of Bloomsbury, Rylands was already recognized as a leading Shakespearean scholar; he had, too, a passion for theater, for directing and acting (his performance as the Duchess of Malfi was talked about for years); and he was an inspired teacher. Although Rylands was so much younger, Maugham was soon looking to him to correct his writing—“his taste appeared t
o me faultless,”52 Maugham wrote in The Summing Up—and requiring him to give what amounted to a series of tutorials in English literature. These, as Marshall recalled, usually took place over meals:
Lunch would have been going53 for about five minutes when a tentative, stammering voice would say, “D-D-D-Dadie, I have a notion that when George Eliot says in Adam Bede ‘Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds,’ what she really meant to say was …” and there would follow some additional thought or comment of his own. Dadie would pause and cogitate and then reply, but if Willie’s remark was something of a bromide (and bromides from his lips were by no means unknown …), Dadie would just smile and nod and say “Yes, Willie,” upon which Willie would give me a sideways glance and just whisper “I’ve b-b-b-been reproved.”
Maugham grew devoted to the two friends: they were quick-witted, they made him laugh, and, significantly, they were among the few young men who had no ulterior motive: they wanted nothing from him.
Rylands and Marshall were both struck by Maugham’s benevolence and generosity, and also by how “marvellously entertaining”54 he was. They adored his jokes, “which were more frequent and funnier than some may imagine,” and were both perfectly in tune with his astringent sense of humor: “he loved to make one laugh aloud,”55 said Dadie. “He loved to tease.” This is far from the image more commonly purveyed of the formidable figure with a bitingly sarcastic tongue. Maugham could be caustic: as Rebecca West remarked, “it would be idle to deny56 that a great many people feel a certain alarm at the sight and thought of Mr. Maugham”; but he could also be very funny, even if his wit was sometimes so dry it came over as more wounding than witty. Occasionally he was enveloped in a strange melancholy, which inevitably cast a gloom over the company. “It is exasperating57 that with everything to induce content I have not been able to get rid of an almost constant depression,” he wrote to the pianist Harriet Cohen in 1933. “I take it hardly because in general I have high spirits and none of the misfortunes of daily life has power to affect me for more than a day or so.” Maugham’s shyness, too, was scarcely conducive to putting guests at their ease; his stammer was disconcerting, and he flinched from personal contact. “Willie hated to be touched58 except by arrangement,” said the American writer Glenway Wescott. “If you touched him by surprise, he was like a shellfish quivering when you pour lemon juice over it.” When relaxed, however, he could be marvelous company, the gentle malice most seductive and the famous cynicism little more than a writer’s pose. Yet the benevolent mood could disappear very quickly, for Maugham’s temper was largely dependent on the ups and downs of his daily relations with Gerald. This particular fact of life was impressed upon Glenway Wescott, who as a young man was brought to the Villa to meet Maugham. Blond, boyish, bookish, charming, Wescott was all that should have been found appealing, and yet everything he said was snubbed or crossly contradicted by his host, who was “carping at everyone,59 his eyes blazing … [pulling] his mouth down like a snapping turtle’s…. ‘You’re another one of those young Americans who think they know everything because they’ve read Proust,’” Maugham tetchily remarked. The reason for Maugham’s bad temper on this occasion, as Wescott later discovered, was that he had just had a fight with Haxton.
SUCH QUARRELS WERE BECOMING more and more frequent, and were beginning seriously to disrupt the “luxe, calme, et volupté” that had been so carefully created at the Mauresque. For Maugham it was essential that he should be in absolute control of his environment: everything must be regulated, disciplined, running on time, and it was Gerald whose job it was to keep the system in order. This, when sober, he did very well. Gerald animated the household, his vitality and exuberance a welcome counterbalance to his employer’s cautious, sometimes chilly reserve. He provided a much-needed element of fun and frivolity, especially during the morning sessions around the pool, where he loved to show off his athletic figure in graceful dives into the deep end—in all-male company there was a rule at the Mauresque that everyone swam in the nude. After dinner, too, he was always ready for fun. “I lead a peculiarly quiet life,60 having made a vow not to go out in the evening,” Maugham warned Gerald Kelly, who was arriving to stay, “but Gerald tears about from end to end of the Riviera and he will give you all the gaiety you require.”
The balance of the relationship was plain, with Maugham much the more devoted of the two. “The mental domination61 exercised over Somerset Maugham by his friend Gerald Haxton was total and unbreakable,” said Beverley Nichols, an impression also received by Arthur Marshall. “No matter how badly he behaved,62 Willie was always enraptured by him.” Marshall recalled one afternoon when he, Rylands, and Maugham, waiting for Haxton to make up a four at tennis, suddenly saw him sauntering toward them through the trees. “Oh, here’s Master Hacky now,” said Maugham softly, and the expression on his face and his tone of voice showed “such affection and love, as if about a child.” Almost paternal, too, was the way in which Maugham put up with behavior from Gerald that would not have been tolerated for one second from anyone else. But then that, too, was, or had been, part of the appeal, part of the delinquent type, the cocky, handsome rogue with sex appeal and charm, to which Maugham had always been attracted. That canny witness Horace de Carbuccia understood exactly what it was about, having often seen the two together in Paris as well as in the south. In Paris, Carbuccia observed,
[Maugham] venait généralement63 accompagné de son secrétaire, un garçon d’une grande beauté, sportif, intelligent et sympathique…. Ce jeune homme était aussi dissipé, fantaisiste, gaspilleur et intempérant que mon ami paraissait sérieux, économe, sobre et discipliné. Ils s’entendaient parfaitement.*
Was this what was going on between them, an echo of some old playfulness mutually acknowledged, when sometimes Maugham, astonishingly, failed to react to what appeared to be outrageous provocation? One day when Wells, Moura Budberg, and Elizabeth Russell had come to lunch, Maugham inconsequentially remarked that he had just had “a most h-h-h-heavenly hot bath.” “And did you masturbate?”64 demanded Gerald, staring at him challengingly. The others were horror-struck, not knowing what to do or say; but Maugham seemed unperturbed. Taking his time, he continued calmly scooping out his avocado. “As it h-h-happens,” he replied, “n-n-n-n-no.”
There were other old established patterns deeply embedded in the relationship. As during their travels in the Far East and elsewhere when Gerald had acted as pander for Maugham, so now in the south of France he fulfilled much the same role, cruising the sea front, hanging out in bars, picking up young men to be brought back to the Villa. A favorite hunting ground was the Welcome Hotel. Villefranche was a naval base, and when the fleet was in, the quiet family hotel overlooking the harbor was transformed into a noisy bar and brothel, where to the sound of loud jazz sailors danced, drank, fought, and got as much sex as they could before their shore leave expired. Such a location was a magnet to Gerald. One night he brought back to the Mauresque a couple of enlisted men from the American Sixth Fleet, one of whom, while being shown around the house, pocketed a pen from Maugham’s study, and afterward cheekily sent his host a letter telling him it had been written with his own pen. Such goings-on were relatively straightforward and aboveboard: the sailors knew what they were in for and were well paid for their services. But there were rumors that Gerald sometimes went further than this, talk of involvement with a procurer in Nice, of underage boys, which if true was a potentially dangerous situation, and a serious anxiety for Maugham. He knew only too well how fatally attracted Gerald was to trouble: “just this side of being a crook,”65 in the opinion of some.
A further anxiety lay in Gerald’s addiction to gambling. From Cap Ferrat it was only a short drive to the famous casino at Monte Carlo, as well as the casinos at Nice and Beaulieu. Night after night Haxton, far from sober, would take the car and either alone or with a group of guests drive along the coast and install himself at the tables until the small hours, face flushed, cigar in hand, a glas
s of whisky and a pile of chips at his elbow. After a good night’s play, he was wildly generous and would turn up at the Villa laden with gifts; once he came home with a Great Dane, and on another occasion he presented Maugham with a two-seater sports car bought with a single night’s winnings; Maugham loved it and drove it for years. More often than not, however, there were appalling losses, and these inevitably were a cause of contention, although in the end his patron always paid up. “I’m p-p-perfectly aware66 that Gerald is both a drunkard and a gambler,” Maugham would say, “but he does have great qualities.” Yet there were some debts so large, amounting to several thousand pounds, that Gerald dared not confess them, and on more than one occasion he was forced to apply to Bert Alanson for rescue. “Thank you again for your kindness67 in so quickly responding to my signals of distress,” Gerald wrote after a particularly bad run. “I had a most awful winter in the various casinos along the coast never getting a win at all. Fortunately this summer has smiled upon me and I have made nearly ten thousand dollars. I have decided that that is enough and will gamble no more till winter.”
Promises made were easily broken, especially when alcohol played such a large part in driving Gerald’s behavior. He had long been a heavy drinker, but now his drinking was frequently out of control. “He was a bad, bad, loud drunk,68 a big martini drinker,” said one of the regulars at the Mauresque. Habitually now Haxton appeared in the morning with his eyes bloodshot, his face gray beneath his tan, sometimes wearing makeup to give himself better color; his breath reeked of alcohol despite copious quantities of peppermint mouthwash, and his hands shook while holding his cards at the bridge table. By the evening his speech was slurred, his mood on that dangerous edge between gaiety and rage which so easily explodes into violence. “Why do you have to drink69 so much?” Maugham would despairingly ask. “Because it makes life look rosier,” was the defiant reply. Drunken scenes were a frequent occurrence, both depressing and enraging Maugham, who was appalled by the transformation of his beloved companion into a manic Lord of Misrule, set on destroying the balance and control so essential to the writer’s existence. “You do not know what it is like,70 and I hope you never will, to be married to someone who is married to drink,” Maugham remarked feelingly to Godfrey Winn. It had become impossible to conceal Gerald’s condition, and there were some appallingly embarrassing incidents. One such occurred when the Duke of Connaught arrived for an elaborately arranged luncheon, accompanied by his sister, Princess Louise, and an aide-de-camp. To Maugham’s fury, Gerald, who had been out all night, staggered in late, sweating and unshaven, and sat at the table glassy-eyed, unable to eat or speak. Sometimes he would emerge from his disgrace contrite and hungover, promising never to touch a drop again, but as soon as Maugham’s back was turned he was at the drinks tray pouring himself a full tumbler of gin, to be knocked back in a single gulp.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 42
