The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  While a few of Maugham’s friends, hoping for personal revelations, were disappointed, by the majority of his readers The Summing Up was respectfully received. After publication in January 1938 (two months later in the United States), most opinion praised the work for its intellectual and emotional honesty, and for its illuminating reflections on the writer and writing, if politely dismissive of the more metaphysical passages. Generally it was perceived to be “immensely readable”81 (V. S. Pritchett) and “continuously entertaining”82 (Graham Greene), and sales figures were excellent, quickly reaching a hundred thousand in the United States, to Nelson Doubleday’s satisfaction.

  MEANWHILE, WITH THE BOOK completed by the end of summer 1937, Maugham returned to planning his expedition to India, arranging to rent out the Mauresque for the four months he and Haxton would be away the following year. As usual, the autumn was spent in London, where he gave a party to celebrate the birth of Liza’s first child—a boy, to Maugham’s delight—Nicolas Vincent Somerset. The reception, at Claridge’s on December 8, was a glamorous occasion. “Never before were so many celebrities83 gathered together under one roof,” Hugh Walpole observed, with Syrie much in evidence among them. “Willie [had] hoped she wouldn’t come”; she was easy enough to avoid, however, as Maugham had taken care to surround himself with old friends including H. G. Wells, Barbara Back, Sibyl Colefax, Osbert Sitwell, Harold Nicolson, Juliet Duff, and Desmond MacCarthy.

  Once this ordeal was over, Maugham concentrated on finalizing the details of his journey, his intention being to leave just before Christmas, embarking from Genoa for the five-week voyage to Bombay. Maugham had already been furnished with letters of introduction from prestigious friends, including his Riviera neighbor, the Aga Khan, and naturally expected while in Delhi to be received by the viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow. But then came an unexpected hitch that threw everything into confusion: the India Office refused to issue a visa to Gerald, who twenty years earlier had been categorized as an “undesirable alien.” Maugham was furious. It was humiliating and outrageous; how could this be happening when his trunks were packed and it was too late to revise his plans, and how could he possibly cope without Gerald, “[who has] been to pretty well84 every British colony with me for the last umpteen years”? Discreet approaches were hastily made, strings pulled, and fortunately at the last minute the ban was rescinded, although it was made clear there would be no official recognition of Mr. Maugham’s presence on the subcontinent. In practical terms this hardly mattered, as it was Maugham’s intention to concentrate not on British but on Hindu India and on the states ruled by the Indian princes;* nonetheless the slight rankled and was not forgotten.

  It may seem curious that Maugham, with his passion for travel and for the Far East, should have waited so long to visit India: by his own account the blame lay with Rudyard Kipling. He had long believed that “so far as stories were concerned85 Kipling had written all the good ones,” a belief he now saw was baseless: in a letter sent to E. M. Forster from Calcutta he wrote, “[I] only regret that the shadow of Kipling86 lurking over the country in my imagination prevented me from coming twenty years ago.” Kipling had died only two years before, but in fact his world had long been gone; the British hold on India, for over a hundred years the jewel in the crown, the symbolic center of the imperial structure, was weakening by the day; the Government of India Act of 1935 was a virtual guarantee of independence in the near future, and movements for nationalization were rapidly, in some states violently, gaining ground. Yet it was not this complex political situation that concerned Maugham, nor was he this time on the prowl for stories; his main objective was to explore Hindu philosophy and religion, to meet religious leaders and teachers, and to learn what he could at first hand of a subject of passionate personal interest, one that he intended to use as the foundation for a novel, eventually to be published as The Razor’s Edge.

  After a calm and comfortable voyage, Maugham and Haxton arrived in Bombay at the beginning of January 1938, and left from there exactly three months later. Their itinerary took them first to Goa, to Trivandrum and Madura on the southernmost tip of India, then north to Madras on the east coast, to Hyderabad, up to Bidar and Nagpur in the interior, then to Calcutta and Benares, and finally to Agra, Jaipur, and Delhi, where Maugham, but not Haxton, was invited by Lord Linlithgow to lunch at Viceregal Lodge; the invitation was declined. From Delhi they returned to Bombay to board a ship bound for Naples on March 31. Despite all he had read and been told, Maugham was unprepared for the impact of India. The endless traveling was exhausting, the trains slow, the heat frequently oppressive, the social demands enervating in the extreme, yet he was fascinated by all of it, by the white beaches and empty churches of Goa, the Black Pagoda in Orissa, sunset on the Ganges at Benares, the noise and bustle of Calcutta, and in Agra by the astonishing beauty of the Taj Mahal, his own reaction to which Maugham observed with interest:

  I can understand that when people say87 something takes their breath away it is not an idle metaphor. I really did feel shortness of breath. I had a queer, delightful feeling in my heart, as though it were dilated. I felt surprise and joy and, I think, a sense of liberation.

  Gerald, on the other hand, was far more excited by the couple of days spent driving through the jungle, where he was able to get in some shooting. He had hoped for a tiger, and they waited for hours up a fifteen-foot bamboo platform in the trees, but none appeared; he shot a crocodile, however, and a peacock, which they ate that same evening for dinner. Maugham was distressed by the incident.

  I have seldom seen a sight more thrilling88 than that peacock threading its solitary way through the jungle. My companion told the driver to stop and seized his gun.

  “I’m going to have a shot at it.”

  My heart stopped still. He fired, and I hoped he’d miss, but he didn’t. The driver jumped out of the car and brought back the dead bird which a moment before had been so exultantly alive. It was a cruel sight.

  There was no question now, as there had been in the past, of roughing it, and wherever they went the two men were entertained in magnificent style. “[We] are living in the lap of luxury,”89 Maugham wrote to Searle from Trivandrum, where he was a guest of the maharajah of Travancore. He and Haxton had been given a house in the palace grounds, “where we have a bed-room, dressing-room & bathroom each, a dining-room & two sitting-rooms; we are looked after by a butler & two footmen, & a large yellow car stands at the door all day with a chauffeur & a footman.” And a few days later from Cochin he wrote to Juliet Duff, “we are on our way to Madras90 & then we go to stay with the Maharajah of Mysore & the Nizam [of Hyderabad]. I am inclined to think that I am getting a little above myself.” The only drawback to this regal level of hospitality was that there was little opportunity for more private activities. “Of course no larks,”91 Maugham regretfully told Searle, “& we are being as good as gold.” Throughout the princely states they visited, Maugham’s Indian hosts were discovered to be infinitely courteous, learned, charming, and generous; “as soon as the maharajas realized92 that I didn’t want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poets and philosophers, they were very helpful.” This was in marked contrast to the British, whom Maugham found philistine and narrow-minded. “Oh the doddering old fools93 who are running this country!” he lamented to Barbara from Bombay. “It is a wonder India hasn’t been lost long ago.” He was repelled by the instances he witnessed of the colonists’ insufferably superior attitude toward Indians, particularly on the part of the women, the memsahibs, few of whom seemed to have any interest in the people, customs, or culture that surrounded them. At a tea party given by the wife of a minor official, his hostess asked him about his trip,

  and when I told her that I had spent94 most of my time in the Indian States, she said: “You know, we don’t have anything more to do with Indians than we can help. One has to keep them at arm’s length.” The rest of the company agreed with her.

  Such an attitude may well
have accounted for Maugham’s grumpy mood while staying at the magnificent British Residency in Hyderabad. Here his fellow guest was M. M. Kaye, then a young woman of thirty, later to become well known for her novel about India, The Far Pavilions. “I was enthralled to meet him,”95 she recalled, “but disappointed to find him a sour and unfriendly old gentleman who stumped off fairly early to bed.” By the next morning, however, Maugham’s mood had improved, and “we got on like a house on fire.” Encouraged, Mollie Kaye mentioned that she had just written a novel,

  but that I was afraid I would never make a writer. He asked why, in a distinctly bored voice, and I said because I wrote much too slowly and would stick for hours on end over a sentence that I couldn’t get right…. The old boy peered at me over the top of his spectacles exactly like an elderly tortoise, and said: “My dear young woman, that is the only thing I have heard you say that makes me think you may be a writer one day.”

  Maugham’s quest in coming to India was to investigate the vast subject of Hindu religion in the hope of gaining an insight into a spiritual side of life that had always intrigued and at the same time eluded him. In preparation he had read widely and, armed with a sheaf of introductions, he had met and talked to numbers of scholars and priests; despite his best efforts, however, he was unable to make very much of what they told him. The experience frustrated and tantalized him. “As for getting any insight96 into the intense spiritual life that one finds here, there & everywhere,” he wrote when halfway through his tour, “well, it is like seeing the Himalayas at night only in one flash of lightning.” Doggedly he persevered. Under instruction from a yogi he tried for himself the benefits of meditation, sitting cross-legged on the floor in a darkened room and making his mind a blank. “I remained in that state for so long97 that I thought I must have by far exceeded the quarter of an hour [the yogi] had prescribed. I looked at my watch. Three minutes had passed.” Traveling the length and breadth of the country he interviewed swamis and sadhus; he watched fakirs gouging out their eyeballs and sticking skewers through their cheeks; in Hyderabad, through the good offices of Sir Akbar Hydari, the finance minister and a friend of E. M. Forster’s, he talked to an immensely distinguished Hindu holy man, but “[he only] said the things I had heard from others twenty times before.” It was the same when he met a Sufi, from whom he hoped to gain some different perspective, only to find that the Muslim mystic “[spoke] of the self and the supreme self in the same strain as the Hindu teachers speak.” To Maugham this was the crux of the problem, that all the Indian thinkers relayed the same doctrines in the same words:

  And though you feel that it should not make you restive, for if they possess the truth, as they are convinced they do, and if the truth is one and indivisible, it is natural enough that they should repeat it like parrots, there is no denying the fact that it is irksome to listen interminably to the same statements. You wish at least they could think of other metaphors, similes, illustrations than those of the Upanishads. Your heart sinks when you hear again the one about the snake and the rope.*

  At Tiruvannamalai, near Madras, Maugham visited the ashram of the famous sage Sri Ramana Maharshi, where he enjoyed the unique opportunity of talking to an English sadhu. Maj. A. W. Chadwick, a retired British army officer, currently incarnated as Sadhu Arunachala, had lived in the ashram for years, and was more than happy to discourse at length about karma and reincarnation and to describe his personal efforts “to realise the self in him in communion with the universal self, to separate the I that thinks from the self, for that is the infinite.” But even with a fellow Englishman, Maugham was left little the wiser, and by the end of the interview still “could not get from him exactly what he meant.” The maharshi received visitors at an audience every afternoon, and Maugham and Haxton having arrived at midday were halfway through their picnic lunch on the veranda outside Chadwick’s room when Maugham suddenly fainted. Chadwick carried him indoors and laid him on his bed, where he stayed for some time, feeling too unwell to join the crowd in the central hall. The maharshi, informed of what had happened, graciously consented to come and see him, and “Bhagavan [the maharshi] and Somerset Maugham sat98 opposite to each other for about half-an-hour without uttering a word,” Chadwick recalled.

  At the end of which Somerset Maugham looked nervously across in my direction and said, “Is there any need to say anything?” “No,” replied Bhagavan. “Silence is best. Silence is itself conversation.”

  He may have failed to achieve enlightenment, but so intrigued was Maugham by this first visit to India that before embarking from Bombay on the voyage home he had already determined to return the following year, a project that events far outside his control were to render impracticable. While still at sea, on board the Conte Biancomano, the gravity of the situation in Europe was forcefully impressed upon the passengers, as news reports arrived daily over the ship’s radio of Franco and the Civil War in Spain, of the Fascist imperialism of Mussolini in Italy, and now, on March 14, of the Anschluss, of Hitler’s invasion of Austria. “We have been much disturbed99 over the Austrian business [and] Gerald has been much in the dumps over it all because so many of his friends are affected,” Maugham wrote to Alan Searle. “For a moment I was terribly afraid that it might mean a general war; but that seems now not to be the case.”

  Docking at Naples, they were met by Jean the chauffeur and by Alan, who was to join them on the leisurely drive back to the south of France. From Naples they went to Rome and then Florence, where the three of them were hospitably received by Harold Acton and his parents at the family villa, La Pietra. During their stay, Harold remembered, “while Gerald painted the town red,100 Willie sat glued to the bridge-table.” Maugham also called on his old friend Reggie Turner, whom he found in a state of deep depression. The city was festooned with Fascist banners in preparation for a triumphal visit by Hitler and Mussolini, and Reggie was appalled by what he saw happening to his beloved Italy. He was also a very sick man, his famous wit and brilliant conversation almost extinguished by a cancer of the tongue, which was shortly to kill him. He was, however, able to accompany the party to Montegufoni, the Sitwells’ massive medieval castle just outside Florence, where Edith was staying with her father.

  Maugham finally arrived back at the Mauresque in May 1938, to enjoy what appeared in prospect another idyllic summer on the Riviera. The weather was flawless, he was at work on a new novel, Gerald was happy planning to sail to Sicily with Loulou, and there were relays of friends coming out from England to stay: Barbara, Robin, Beverley Nichols, Raymond Mortimer and his lover, Paul Hyslop, the Paravicinis, the Actons, and Harold Nicolson. It was Nicolson that summer who captured the essence of the Mauresque magic. “It really is the perfect holiday,”101 he told his wife, Vita Sackville-West; “the heat is intense, the garden lovely, the chair long and cool, the lime-juice at hand, a bathing pool there if one wishes to splash, scenery, books, gramophones, pretty people.” At the end of one day he describes himself alone in the garden after everyone else had gone inside to dress:

  There was a lovely soft warm evening, that marvellous pink light among the pines. I went up and sat alone with Tacitus by the swimming-pool. It is surrounded by great massifs of red and white oleanders. The sun set over Cap d’Antibes. The lighthouses began to wink across a still purple sea. I stayed there until the red oleanders became invisible and only the white oleanders shone in the moon.

  But then he suddenly realized the time, closed his book, descended the steps, and walked across the terrace and into the house to shave, bathe, and put on a black tie, as the newly married Duke and Duchess of Windsor were expected that night to dine. This was a slightly tense occasion, as Wallis, to her husband’s fury, had been denied the title of Royal Highness, and there was thus a slight unease among the group waiting in the drawing room as to how she should be addressed. When the car was heard pulling up on the gravel, Maugham, accompanied by Liza, went into the hall to receive them. A few seconds later the duke walked into the room. “I�
�m sorry we were a little late,” he said cheerfully, “but Her Royal Highness couldn’t drag herself away.” “He had said it,” Nicolson recorded. “The three words fell into the circle like three stones into a pool … and not one eye dared to meet another.”

  The Mauresque may have provided a haven of beauty and tranquillity, yet all around, events were unfolding of the most sinister nature. With the threatened German invasion of Czechoslovakia there was no question of the usual expedition to Salzburg and Badgastein. “I do not think there is any danger of war,”102 Maugham wrote to Bert Alanson, “but the Austrians have a little lost their heads just now and are behaving in such a manner that it is better for foreigners to keep out of the country.” Maugham was already doing what he could to help the flood of Jewish refugees pouring into Britain and France, using his influence to find work and accommodation as well as giving substantial sums of money to Jewish charities. When approached for a donation by Herman Ould, the secretary of PEN, he sent a fairly brisk reply. “I have not waited until I received103 your letter to do what I could for the Austrian Jews of my acquaintance who have had to leave their country,” he wrote, “and so I must ask Mr. Frischauer to be content with a cheque for ten guineas and to look upon it more as a mark of my sympathy than as a reasonable contribution to so worthy a fund.”