The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  It was a representative Riviera party.13 There was an English Lord and his Lady … who were prepared to dine with anyone who would give them a free meal…. There was an Italian countess who was neither Italian nor a countess … and there was a Russian prince who was ready to make Mrs. Barrett a princess and in the meantime sold champagne, motorcars and Old Masters on commission.

  While they were standing at the bar Paco Espinel passed through and stopped to shake hands with Eva Barrett…. It was his duty to be civil to the rich and the great….

  “Got a good table for me, Paco?” said Eva Barrett.

  “The best.” His eyes, fine, dark Argentine eyes, expressed his admiration of Mrs. Barrett’s opulent, ageing charms. This also was business.

  A more charitable picture is given in “The Three Fat Women of Antibes,” an affectionate sendup of feminine silliness and rivalry among a trio of middle-aged ladies who take a villa together one summer in order to diet and play bridge. “It was their fat that had brought them together14 and bridge that had cemented their alliance.” Beatrice, Arrow, and Frances (known as Frank) are very much at home on the coast, either on the beach or at the Monkey House at Eden Roc,* “an enclosure covered with glass15 overlooking the sea, with a bar at the back … it was crowded with chattering people in bathing costumes, pyjamas, or dressing-gowns, who were seated at the tables having drinks.” It is here that the friends finally face defeat: after nobly supporting each other through a tormenting fortnight of nothing but rusks, tomatoes, and hard-boiled eggs, their resolve is fatally undermined by the delicious breakfasts served every morning at the Monkey House:

  In front of Beatrice16 was a plate of croissants and a plate of butter, a pot of strawberry jam, coffee, and a jug of cream….

  “You’ll kill yourself,” said Frank.

  “I don’t care,” mumbled Beatrice with her mouth full.

  Never able to stay in one place for long, Maugham had established a pleasant annual routine, spending several weeks in London every autumn and spring,† and traveling with Gerald on the Continent for part of the summer. Venice and Florence were favorite destinations, as were Munich and Vienna, but the two unchanging fixtures each year were Salzburg in August for the music festival and Badgastein for its spa. Maugham always took care of his health, and over the years he had been a frequent visitor to spas in France and Italy, to Vichy, Abano, and Brides-les-Bains, taking Gerald with him as often as possible in order to dry him out for a few weeks. But it was Badgastein in the Austrian Tyrol that became the favorite. Lodged at the luxurious Kaiserhof the two of them ate sparingly, submerged themselves in the thermal waters, and took long walks along the Gastein valley. Maugham liked the discipline of the spa routine, enjoyed the fresh air and bracing hikes through the mountains, and as long as he could play bridge in the evening was perfectly prepared to put up with the monotony. “The cure at Bad Gastein17 … is amazing,” he told Sibyl Colefax. “The place is unbelievably dull & staggeringly expensive [but] I never felt so well in my life.”

  From Badgastein to Salzburg was an easy drive, but here the pace was very different, the town thronged with a fashionable international society for whom the Festival was an unmissable event. Under its two leading conductors, Toscanini and Bruno Walter, the Salzburg Festival during the 1930s was at its most brilliant, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera performing throughout the day, from morning until late at night. Music meant a great deal to Maugham; he was not trained and had never played an instrument, and to professional friends, such as the pianist Harriet Cohen, he described himself as “very ignorant,” yet he derived enormous pleasure from listening to music, his tastes were catholic, and he was always interested in exploring new experience. When in Paris or London, Munich or Vienna, he went regularly to concerts and the opera, but Salzburg was the great highlight in his calendar. “We went to a lovely performance18 of Rosenkavalier,” he reported to Alan Searle in August 1934. “I have never heard the trio in the last act more beautifully sung; & last night The Magic Flute…. We leave here tomorrow immediately after the Verdi Requiem.” In between performances there was a demanding social schedule, with English, French, Germans, Italians—many of them dolled up in peasant costume, the women in dirndls, the men in shorts and feathered hats—meeting in restaurants and cafés, for picnics and for excursions on the lakes. “I am pretty well tired out,” Alan was told. “Four or five hours of music every day since we arrived, lunch parties & supper parties…. [But] for a wonder the weather is quite lovely & all the bits & pieces are strutting about in their new Tyrolean costumes.” Even Gerald had succumbed and bought a pair of lederhosen, and “expects to make a great sensation with them on the Riviera.”

  Gerald of course had to be left behind when Maugham went to England, and in London it was Alan Searle in whose company the writer was most often seen. The young man was generally popular with Maugham’s old friends: Barbara Back was fond of him, as was Peter Stern, who invited him to dine in her chambers in Albany. When in October 1934 Maugham was asked for the first time to stay at Renishaw, Osbert Sitwell’s family seat in Derbyshire, Searle was included in the invitation, welcomed by Osbert and David Horner and cosseted by Osbert’s sister, Edith. Yet Maugham was careful never to cross the line by taking his lover into company that was likely to be censorious. With Gerald it was different: socially he was of the same class, he spoke with an educated accent, and his position as Maugham’s secretary provided the perfect cover. But Alan was a cockney straight out of the East End. There was no question, for instance, of introducing him into the family, toward whose members Maugham had always behaved with the utmost decorum, looked up to by his nephew and nieces as an eminently respectable figure.

  Of the three surviving brothers, William, the youngest, was by far the richest and most famous, a fact resolutely unacknowledged by his nearest in age, F.H., who rarely referred to any of Willie’s books or plays. This was despite the fact that he himself was near the top in his own profession: in 1928 F.H. had been knighted, and in 1935 he was honored further when he was appointed a lord of appeal as Baron Maugham. The eldest brother, Charles, had been much less fortunate in life. A quiet, modest man, with “easily the nicest character19 of the four of us,” according to Maugham, Charles had retired from his lawyer’s practice in Paris and moved to London with his wife and only son, Ormond, who had been paralyzed in a childhood accident. In January 1935, Ormond died, at only twenty-five, followed six months later by his father, at seventy. In the British press Charles Maugham’s death was only briefly reported, of interest solely on account of his family connections. JUDGE AND AUTHOR BEREAVED20 was the heading over three very short paragraphs in the Daily Telegraph. “Charley’s death was expected,”21 Maugham told Gerald Kelly, “but was nevertheless a shock to me since it brought back to me recollections of my earliest childhood & youth. He was a very good man, I think the best I have ever known, & wonderfully kind & unselfish & unenvious.”

  Charles’s death made little change to the barbed relationship between the two remaining brothers; there was an unspoken mutual respect but the wariness and hostility remained, although it never had any bearing on Maugham’s feelings for F.H.’s children. All three girls were married, and Kate and Diana had both published novels, their uncle taking trouble to comment helpfully on their work, if privately he had little opinion of their gifts. The third sister, Honor Earl, was a painter, and for some reason she and Maugham never hit it off, he dismissing her work as “quite negligible” and making no secret of the fact that she bored him. The only time she got his attention, Honor recalled, was when she became a visitor at Holloway women’s prison. One of the inmates there was Ruby, a prostitute, who specialized in “‘kinky clients’ … the only time22 I ever managed to interest my uncle, Somerset Maugham, in anything I said was when I told him of some of Ruby’s experiences.”

  But of all F.H.’s children, the one to whom Maugham became most attached was the youngest, Robin. Born in 1916, with almost a g
eneration between himself and his sisters, Robin had endured a miserable childhood, frightened of his father and badly bullied at Eton. During those early years he retained only vague recollections of his uncle, “a well-dressed attractive man23 with a skin the colour of parchment, who came to visit my mother”; but from the time Robin left school at seventeen, Maugham began to take an interest in him. He was a well-mannered boy, eager to please, and despite a short upper lip and a long, pointy nose like a shrew’s, nice-looking. Maugham had always wanted a son, and until now his paternal instincts, so wretchedly warped in his relations with Liza, had emerged mainly in the protective feelings he showed toward his male lovers, not only Haxton and Searle but also young men such as Beverley Nichols and Godfrey Winn. Now there was Robin, and for this nephew Maugham began to feel a strong fatherly affection, an affection, however, in which there was a strong, if subliminal, element of sexuality. This undercurrent of erotic attraction was remarked upon over the years by a number of Maugham’s homosexual friends, among them Harold Nicolson and Glenway Wescott. “I’m not saying I think there was incest,”24 said Wescott, who saw both men at close quarters, “but Willie was infatuated with Robin, and told everyone how extraordinary he was.” There was so much in Robin’s situation to provoke Maugham’s sympathy: he pitied his position at home, which reminded him of his own unhappy childhood, and he understood very well the boy’s problems with his father. F.H. was determined his son should read for the bar, but Robin wanted to be a writer, and on this he naturally turned to his uncle for advice. And there was another, more sensitive subject on which Maugham was able to help. Robin was struggling with the problem of his sexual identity, desperately trying to persuade himself he was “normal,” terrified of his father’s reaction should he admit to being queer.

  In the summer of 1934, after Robin’s last term at school, F.H. arranged for him to go to Vienna for a couple of weeks, chaperoned by his sister Kate. Hearing of this, Maugham wrote Robin a letter that any youth might dream of receiving from a rich and worldly uncle:

  This is only to say25 that if you find yourself in straitened circumstances, for I imagine that life in the great city may prove a little more expensive than your sainted parents imagine, you can write to me & I will come to the rescue. Also if you get into any hole, trouble or jamb [sic], I recommend you to communicate with me rather than with the above-mentioned sainted parents. Having led a vicious but not unpleasant life for a vast number of years I am conscious that there are difficulties which even the best brought-up young men cannot always avoid and being as you know a hardened cynic I have a great tolerance for the follies of the human race.

  Maugham mischievously let drop to F.H. that as it happened Gerald was going to be in Vienna at the same time and would be pleased to keep an eye on the young people. F.H. was furious—“the man’s a drunkard and worse”—and forbade either of his children to have any contact with the infamous Haxton. “But, of course, we did—quite by chance,” said Robin.

  We met him the first night26 we went to the opera, and I was extremely disappointed, for he didn’t look wicked at all: he was a smart, dapper, lean man of forty with a small moustache, a cheerful laugh and an innocent smile…. But a week later, when Gerald got blind drunk in a weinstube, I began to appreciate that he wasn’t quite as innocent as he seemed.

  Nor, by the time he returned home, was Robin. “I learned many things in Vienna27 at the age of seventeen,” he wrote later. Gerald offered to take him to Venice for a couple of days on his own, driving there and back in Maugham’s big Voisin coupé. They shared a twin-bedded room at the Danieli, and it was here that Gerald made his intentions plain. Robin, shocked, pushed him off, whereupon Gerald crossly returned to his own bed. “I should have known,” he grumbled, before turning out the light and falling asleep. The next day, to the boy’s relief, no reference was made to the previous night; on the contrary, “he was very kind to me [and] took me sightseeing around Venice.”

  Robin was only a year younger than Liza, but since the Maughams’ divorce the cousins, close in childhood, had been kept apart. When Liza was seventeen, Syrie arranged for her to be presented at court, and during her first season had thrown a memorable dance, paid for by Maugham, at the house on the King’s Road. The ballroom was banked with white flowers, a parquet floor had been laid in the garden, and a coffee stall set up in Glebe Place. “I had a lovely party28 and enjoyed everything very, very much,” said Liza, who had looked ravishing in pink and white tulle. “It was a very happy time.” From the moment of Liza’s début, Syrie focused on her daughter with a new intensity. To all intents and purposes Liza was an only child, her half brother, Mounteney, having been consigned to the past. (Judged to be backward after leaving school, he had been put in the care of a farming couple in Essex, and his mother was either denied access or of her own volition gave up trying to see him.) Liza was now the center of her life, and the socially ambitious Syrie was determined not only that Liza should marry soon but that she should marry well. Nothing was considered too good for Liza, and her mother with her formidable energy oversaw every detail, every moment of her day. “She was wrapped up in cotton-wool,”29 said one of Liza’s friends. “She and Syrie were very, very close … far too much so.”

  Needless to say, Maugham had not attended his daughter’s dance, and he continued to keep as much distance between himself and his ex-wife as possible. From time to time, however, he was reluctantly involved in her affairs, as when Syrie, up to her old tricks, was again found to be engaging in some fancy footwork with the Inland Revenue. “What do you think,”30 he wrote to Barbara Back in March 1934,

  I have to appear before the income tax authorities who are claiming two thousand pounds from me for Syrie’s income tax: she is swearing that during the first four years I was at the Villa Mauresque she & I were living together. A bit thick, eh?

  This letter was written from Spain, from the Alhambra Palace Hotel in Granada. For some time Maugham had felt drawn to return to the subject of Spain, which since his year in Seville in the 1890s had continued to exert a powerful fascination. At ease in the language and widely read, especially in the writers of the Golden Age, his first idea had been a novel set in the sixteenth century, but now this was put aside in favor of a highly personal travel book. In February 1934 he and Gerald set off on a six-week tour in the Voisin, taking in Barcelona, Granada, Málaga, Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, and Madrid. In Córdoba they were pleased to run into Alan Pryce-Jones, who joined them on a couple of expeditions into the spectacular mountains above Granada. Pryce-Jones was surprised by Maugham’s practicality: after stopping for lunch at a small inn, he was impressed to see Maugham go into the kitchen and in fluent Spanish order an excellent luncheon of raw ham, a tortilla, fish, and a good bottle of manzanilla sherry. Nonetheless the older man’s company proved something of a strain, and returning to their hotel in the evening Alan found it a relief to have a cocktail alone in the bar with Gerald, that “odious charmer,” as he referred to him, who regaled him with a funny story about taking the writer J. B. Priestley to a brothel in Nice.

  Don Fernando, the work resulting from the expedition, is an agreeable ramble through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, an idiosyncratic introduction to Spanish history and culture interspersed with recollections of Maugham’s own travels in the country as a young man. In an easy, discursive manner he considers the work of the great novelists and dramatists, of Cervantes, Calderón, and Lope de Vega, as well as the religious writers and mystics such as Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and Fray Luis de León. Interspersed with these reflections are descriptions of the Spanish character and way of life, and an account of the work of the great Spanish painters, Velázquez, El Greco, and Zurbarán. From an autobiographical point of view the most interesting section is on El Greco, in which Maugham in discussing the painter’s putative homosexuality revealingly sets out his own view of the characteristics of the homosexual artist:

  [A] distinctive trait of the homosexual31
is a lack of deep seriousness over certain things that normal men take seriously. This ranges from an inane flippancy to a sardonic humour. He has a wilfulness that attaches importance to things that most men find trivial and on the other hand regards cynically the subjects which the common opinion of mankind has held essential to its spiritual welfare…. He has small power of invention, but a wonderful gift for delightful embroidery…. He stands on the bank, aloof and ironical, and watches the river of life flow on.

  Published in 1935, Don Fernando received on the whole an indifferent reception, most critics treating it with little more than polite interest. “St. John of the Cross32 is not everyone’s cup of tea,” as Raymond Mortimer remarked in the New Statesman.

  THE TRIP TO SPAIN had been a success, and Gerald, since recovering from his accident, had been much more like his charming old self, “kind, very considerate33 & easy to get on with,” Maugham told Barbara. He was drinking less and concentrating more on his duties toward his employer, and as a result the quality of domestic life at the Mauresque had greatly improved. “I have been playing golf today,34 a lovely day, & came back very tired,” Maugham wrote one evening to Alan Searle.