The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  There was no doubt that the relationship between Maugham and Haxton was under severe strain, but it was only years later and in retrospect that Maugham fully confronted the complexities involved. In a number of ways Gerald’s life was full of frustration. A generation younger than Maugham (Gerald turned forty in 1932, Maugham sixty just two years later), he was a man of energy and resource who had very little to do, and no outside interests to keep him amused. Except for a small legacy from his mother, he was dependent on his patron for everything, for his salary of $2,000 a year and for his board and lodging, provided in return for duties as secretary and majordomo; every year he was allowed a holiday on his own, usually spent in Austria or Italy. Yet keeping an eye on the servants and writing letters to dictation were hardly the most rewarding occupations for an intelligent man, and there were long periods when he was by himself while his employer was in London. He could have left, but under Maugham’s protection there was guaranteed security, and by now Gerald was fatally accustomed to a life of wealth and ease, to first-class travel and luxury hotels, to the company of clever, glamorous, famous people. On his own there would be nothing like that; and yet part of him resented his subservient position, perhaps even despised the person he had become. He was fond of Maugham, he enormously admired him, and at the same time he felt rebellious and penned in. “At times when I’m shut up71 there in that great villa all alone with him I feel I could scream,” he confessed to Maugham’s nephew, Robin. There were days and weeks, especially during the winter, when there was little social life, no guests came to stay, it was cold, it rained, an icy mistral blew for days on end, and Maugham was completely wrapped up in his writing. “Gerald couldn’t help resenting72 the fact that he played only a peripheral part in Willie’s life,” said Robin. “Although Willie loved him desperately, he couldn’t give all of himself to Gerald because he felt he had to reserve the most important part for his work.” Sometimes, too, Maugham was submerged in a black melancholy that rendered him silent and remote. “He has moods73 when he gets depressed,” said Gerald, recalling the loneliness of these desolate periods, “but then he’ll say something to make me smile, or to fascinate me, and I’ll forgive him everything.”

  Up to a point, Maugham was sympathetic about Gerald’s situation. “What’s wrong?” he would gently inquire. “I’m getting bored: that’s what’s wrong,” was the sullen response. Occasionally Maugham tried to do something about it: he bought a fast motorboat, for instance, which Haxton loved, roaring out to sea at full throttle and spending hours tinkering with it in the harbor at Villefranche. But there seemed no solution to the drinking, which was fast destroying all signs of the vital, attractive man Maugham had met nearly twenty years before. To Dadie Rylands, Maugham confided his unhappiness. “Gerald now likes the bottle74 more than he likes me,” he told him. And in the Writer’s Notebook of this period there are lines of verse that almost certainly refer to his state of wretchedness over Gerald:

  I could not bear the thought75 that I should ever lose you

  Or that our lives might ever be disjoined,

  But yet I knew that in your wanton heart

  There was for me nor love nor tenderness….

  Humbly I thanked you when you feigned to love me.

  I bought your grudging lips for gold.

  And now the love I thought would last till death is dead….

  … I regret

  My pain, my rapture, my anguish and my bliss.

  The sheer tedium of living with an alcoholic weighed almost as heavily on Maugham as the private misery of his deteriorating relationship; his despair over Gerald’s bad behavior temporarily obscured much deeper feelings, leading him to believe, mistakenly, that his love for Haxton was exhausted. Every day was dominated by Gerald’s drinking and destructiveness, and he refused to consider a cure. But then something happened that seemed to change everything. In the early autumn of 1930 Gerald, drunk, dived into a half-empty swimming pool and broke his neck. The accident took place during a party at the house of a rich American neighbor, Charlotte Boissevain, and Gerald as usual had become quickly inebriated. “I don’t know about you, ducky,”76 he had declared to his hostess, “but I’m going to have a swim.” Tearing off his clothes, he had lurched off to the pool before anyone could stop him. Gerald came very near to death: his life was despaired of; but miraculously he survived. Badly damaged, with cracked vertebrae and a dislocated spine, he was rushed to Paris to be operated on. While there, encased in plaster and immobile in his hospital bed, Gerald for many weeks had no access to drink, and when he finally returned to the Mauresque it looked for quite a while as though the bad times might be over. “[Gerald] is getting more peaceful,77 sleeping without drugs & looking astonishingly well,” Maugham wrote cheerfully to Barbara Back. “He carries his head a bit askew … & he cannot brush his hair yet. But there is no great harm in that. He looks like a rough & there are people who fancy that.” Months passed, and still there was no sign of the bad old ways returning. “It is really very pleasant here,”78 Maugham told Barbara. “For the first time since I bought the house I am leading an entirely peaceful life…. Gerald seems to like it & to be very happy.”

  DURING ALL HIS DIFFICULT dealings with Gerald, Maugham found immense comfort in the soothing contrast of his continuing relationship with Alan Searle. The young man was rarely out of his thoughts, Maugham writing to him from the Mauresque every two or three days, affectionate letters addressed to “Alan my lamb,” “dearest Alan,” “Alan my sweet,” letters full of longing for his presence, of eager anticipation of the next meeting, and of concern for the boy’s health and well-being. If more than a few days passed without a reply, Maugham would dispatch a teasingly reproachful note.

  Wretched creature, Why don’t you write79 to me? Your last note was brief & you sounded ill. Were you? If so, what is the matter with you? Or is it that you just love another? … I’m not going to write to a filthy little beast who doesn’t write to me….

  Alan, much given to hypochondria and self-pity, was frequently under the weather, complaining of a hundred and one minor ailments, from acne to “nerves” and chronic exhaustion, about all of which Maugham sympathized and advised, even offering to pay all Alan’s medical bills. After receiving a letter in which a rare period of good health was reported, Maugham wrote,

  I am so very glad80 to think that you are well & strong & spotless. I hope you will remain so. Has it occurred to you that not a bad way to achieve so desirable an object is not to tear about too much, to get a proper amount of sleep & not to fill your greedy belly with masses of rich food?

  At Christmas and on his birthday Alan received expensive presents, and Alan’s old admirer, Lytton Strachey, reported to a friend it was quite clear Mr. Somerset Maugham was “entiché [besotted]” with Searle, which probably “makes his relations with H[axton81] easier…. Perhaps he will find happiness in that direction—why not? … It would be shattering for me at first, no doubt, but if it was really a solution of his difficulties one couldn’t complain.” Alan had been pressingly invited to stay at the Villa Mauresque, but his occasional visits were inclined to be tense, as he was terrified of Gerald, if needlessly so: Gerald never perceived Alan as a threat, and his manner toward him remained one of benign contempt. Much more rewarding for Alan were Maugham’s sojourns in London, when for the duration of Maugham’s stay Alan moved into rented accommodation with him. By now Alan had left his job at the Mayfair art gallery for employment that his compassionate nature found infinitely more rewarding. Through the good offices of Guy Little, another of his old gentlemen, Alan had been taken on as an official prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville; he was also working for the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society and, on a voluntary basis, for the Salvation Army in his native Bermondsey. He earned a small supplementary income by running errands for Maugham, making travel arrangements, booking theater tickets, and sending over to France parcels of cigarettes and cigars from Dunhill and bottles of Gerald’s fa
vorite White Hyacinth eau de toilette from Floris.

  WHATEVER HIS EMOTIONAL STATE, Maugham allowed nothing to get in the way of his writing. “The artist should never allow82 his happiness to interfere with his work,” he wrote once, “for his work is more important than his happiness.” During the summer of 1931 his main undertaking was an adaptation for Gladys Cooper of The Painted Veil, which opened at the Playhouse on September 19. That same month saw the publication of Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, the first collection to appear since Ashenden in 1928.

  As a compilation, First Person Singular is typically Maugham in style and content, even if a couple (“The Round Dozen” and “The Creative Impulse”) can hardly be considered Maugham at his best. There are two outstanding stories, however, “The Human Element” and “The Alien Corn.” The first tells with sly humor of a beautiful divorcée who abandons her smart social circle in England for the island of Rhodes in order to live, very discreetly, with her chauffeur, a situation familiar to Maugham in the homosexual world and here efficiently transposed. The shocking truth of Betty’s domestic arrangements is discovered by an old suitor of hers, who has come to stay:

  One morning when he had been83 in Rhodes a little over a week, he happened to be coming upstairs as Betty was walking along the passage.

  “You’ve never shown me your room, Betty,” he said.

  “Haven’t I? Come in and have a look now. It’s rather nice.” …

  His eye took in the bed-table … there were two or three books on it, a box of cigarettes, and on an ash-tray a briar pipe. Funny! What on earth had Betty got a pipe by her bed for?

  In “The Alien Corn,”* George Bland is a young man who seems to have everything; he is good-looking, clever, and adored by his wealthy father, who proudly expects him to take over the family estate and eventually stand for parliament. But George wants none of it, his ambition being to make a career as a concert pianist; and when he fails at this, he shoots himself. Here the plot, which, as the title of the collection implies, is told by a first-person narrator, is secondary to context, which is crucial. For George is Jewish. His family name, Bland, was until recently Bleikogel, and his parents, Adolph and Miriam, have determinedly translated themselves into Freddy and Muriel. At heart the struggle between George and his parents is a racial and cultural conflict, the son in order to return to his roots rejecting the hearty philistinism of the English shires so slavishly adopted by his parents.* Finely and with precision, Maugham reveals the infinite complexities of English anti-Semitism: the casual, snobbish prejudice of the upper classes, who regard Jews as somehow, well, slightly common; then the Jewish anti-Semitism of those who, like George’s parents, are desperate to disguise their alien origins; and finally, there is the brilliantly observed portrait of Ferdy Rabenstein, the perfect type of English society’s token Jew. Rich, handsome, scholarly, charming, he is received everywhere, cleverly making himself acceptable by playing up his Jewishness, telling funny Jewish stories, and flashing the big diamond rings on his fingers. “After all, I am an Oriental,”84 says Ferdy. “I can carry a certain barbaric magnificence.” Yet at the same time and at some profound level Ferdy despises the world in which he moves:

  Though he spoke facetiously,85 there was in his tone the faintest possible derision and I felt, hardly felt even, the sensation was so shadowy [that] there was in the depth of his impenetrable heart a cynical contempt for the Gentiles he had conquered.

  Over the next couple of years the high rate of production continued, with more short stories, two plays, and a full-length work of fiction. In the latter, The Narrow Corner, published in November 1932, Maugham returns under full sail to the Pacific, to the islands of the Dutch East Indies in the Malay Archipelago. A remarkable novel, and one that has been consistently underrated by critics, The Narrow Corner* is heavily imbued with mystery, with all the favorite ingredients of lust, guilt, and disillusion; clearly influenced by Conrad, it is cynical and witty, and of all Maugham’s novels it evokes the most powerful sense of place. Here delineated with simplicity and restraint are a series of unforgettable impressions of the heat, the sounds, the squalor, and the lush, numinous beauty of the tropics. Much of the action takes place in and around a dilapidated bungalow in Kanda-Meria† that had once belonged to a Dutch perkenier, a nutmeg planter.

  It was a large, square building86 not on piles, but on a foundation of masonry, covered with an attap [palm leaf] roof and surrounded by a neglected garden…. In the cool of the evening the air was limpid. The kanari trees, in the shade of which grew the portly and profitable nutmeg trees, were enormously tall…. You heard the boom of great pigeons and saw them flying about with a heavy whirr of wings.

  There are, too, several sequences at sea, magnificently conveyed, with a description of a terrifying sunlit storm worthy of Conrad himself. One of the chief protagonists is a medical man, and in the picture of Dr. Saunders as a passenger on board a yacht sailing between the islands there is a clear reflection of Maugham himself in similar circumstances in the past:

  Mainsail and foresail were hoisted,87 the anchor weighed, and they slipped out of the lagoon. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the sun beat down on the shining sea. The monsoon was blowing, but with no great force, and there was a slight swell. Two or three gulls flew round them in wide circles. Now and then a flying-fish pierced the surface of the water, made a long dart over it and dived down with a tiny splash. Dr. Saunders read, smoked cigarettes, and when he was tired of reading looked at the sea and the green islands they passed.

  Of the three main characters, all outcasts, two have made brief appearances in earlier works, Dr. Saunders in On a Chinese Screen and Captain Nichols in The Moon and Sixpence. Dr. Saunders, returning home to China after treating a rich patient on an outlying island, takes passage in Captain Nichols’s shabby old lugger, currently conveying Fred Blake, a beautiful but sullen young Australian whose circumstances are tantalizingly obscure. After several days’ sailing they put in at Kanda-Meria, and it is here, in and around the nutmeg plantation, that the crux of the drama takes place, with sexual passion and betrayal, suicide, and the revelation that Fred is on the run after having murdered a man in Sydney. The plot is taut and heavy with sexual tension, predominantly between Fred and the lovely young daughter of the plantation owner; Fred casually seduces her, whereupon her dull but decent fiancé, Erik, shoots himself. But with characteristic contrariness, Maugham reveals the girl, Louise, to be as unmoved by her deflowering as Fred himself. “She was just aching for it,”88 Fred tells Dr. Saunders, while Louise coolly admits, “I wanted him simply frightfully….89 And afterwards I didn’t regret it…. I didn’t really care if I never saw him again.” There are further, deeper sexual currents covertly running through what Gore Vidal described as “Maugham’s one and only crypto-fag novel.”90 Fred himself, whose girlish beauty is much dwelt upon, develops a strong emotional attachment to Louise’s fiancé, the manly Erik; and Dr. Saunders, through whose eyes the drama is viewed, has a close if unspoken attachment to his Chinese servant, Ah Kay, “a slim, comely youth91 with large black eyes and a skin as smooth as a girl’s….”

  RETURNING FROM LONDON TO the south of France at the end of November 1931, Maugham had immediately begun work on his next project, one to which he had inadvertently drawn a great deal of attention. In a newspaper interview he had casually remarked that he was approaching the end of his career as a dramatist and intended to write only two more plays. “This matter, which I supposed92 of concern only to myself, aroused nearly as much interest as though a well-known prize-fighter had announced his intention of retiring from the ring.” For this reason the atmosphere on the first night of For Services Rendered, on November 1, 1932, was more than usually electric, although the audience that crowded into the Globe full of anticipation was to leave the theater sharply divided on the merits of what it had seen.

  For Services Rendered has its roots in Maugham’s loathing of war, a loathing intensified by an acute awaren
ess of the ominous deterioration in international relations. Although at a distance from the centers of power, Maugham was intensely alert to developments in the political arena and often very perceptive about them. “I live on the Continent,”93 he told a reporter, “and every moment I see the countries of Europe arming themselves to the teeth as hard as they can go, and that is why I wrote my play … to try to protect the new youth of today from dying in the trenches or losing five years of their lives in a war that seems almost imminent.”