The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  From Chicago, Maugham and Haxton traveled to California, staying with the Alansons in a rain-soaked San Francisco for three weeks, where Maugham dutifully continued his lecturing. Where Chicago had been defiantly isolationist, in California the general attitude was more difficult to define. It was “a jittery population,” Maugham told his brother:

  The vast majority are ready52 to give all aid to Britain, but the vast majority also are very much afraid of being forced into the war [having] been frankly terrified by the stories of the bombing of London & the pictures of destruction that have been sent over….

  [There are also] vast numbers of Republicans who cannot forgive Roosevelt his victory in November & are prepared to oppose any measure, regardless of its merits, merely because he proposes it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they would like a British defeat, but it hasn’t escaped them that it would be a smack in the eye for the President…. Of course this is confidential; I don’t let a hint of this escape me when I talk.

  Exhausted after a bout of influenza, Maugham was beginning to find public speaking a strain, and it was a relief finally to reach Los Angeles, where he and Gerald stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel and could spend at least some of the day relaxing in the sun by the pool. Here on the West Coast he skillfully played up the German threat, not to distant Europe but to territories much nearer home:

  If by any chance we are beaten,53 then your danger will be great. It isn’t a ruined Europe that Hitler wants, it isn’t an unproductive Africa; it’s those great undeveloped territories of South America with their inexhaustible stores of raw material that he hankers after.

  He also made a point of distancing indomitable Britain from her fallen ally, France. Describing the collapse of France as the most tragic event of the war, he laid much of the blame on the climate of corruption that had long permeated the country:

  In France there were many thousands of men of the highest integrity. There were not enough. They were swamped by men who were greedy, dishonest, selfish, and immoral…. The Germans have been saying for years that the French were a decadent people; they were right.*

  Effective as propaganda, this was also a fact of which Maugham himself was bitterly convinced; his awareness of the atmosphere of moral decay seeps onto almost every page of Christmas Holiday, and the degeneracy of the French national character is a subject examined at length in Strictly Personal: “If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.” When Glenway Wescott asked Maugham what he thought France would be like after the war, he replied “in his hardest, narrowest voice54 … ‘They will have eaten so much shit they will stink of it.’”

  Committed to promoting his country’s cause, Maugham in Los Angeles suddenly found himself cornered, faced with an offer he felt honor-bound to accept. Over the years he had persistently turned down all offers of film work, uninterested in the medium and knowing full well he lacked the requisite skills; now, however, he found himself obliged to give in. At the instigation of Brendan Bracken, the dynamic new minister of information in London, Maugham was approached by David O. Selznick with a proposal for a propaganda film about an English family in wartime. Selznick, one of the most successful producers in the business—two of his films, Gone with the Wind and Rebecca, had recently won Best Picture Oscars—was excited at the prospect of at last signing up the world-famous author, so much of whose work was already on celluloid. With this particular new property Selznick was aware that he would have to tread carefully, not wishing to estrange either the film industry itself or potential audiences, for whom any hint of propaganda was something alien and sinister. “Naturally we should keep confidential55 from everybody other than the British authorities the fact that [the film] will have a propaganda value,” he wrote in an internal memo.

  Reluctantly, Maugham agreed to the deal, and by the beginning of March 1941, when he returned to New York, he had already completed the first thirty pages of The Hour Before the Dawn. But then followed several weeks of interruption, with lectures to be given in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Lafayette, Indiana. On March 15, Liza’s baby was born, a daughter, christened Camilla. “So far I have only been allowed56 to see the infant through a sheet of glass,” Maugham reported after visiting mother and child in New York City Hospital. “[She] has bright red hair at present & the most lovely little hands you ever saw.”

  At the beginning of April, Maugham went to Washington for the first night of a dramatized version of Theatre (“poor & poorly acted”57), and in that same month a novella, Up at the Villa, was published by Doubleday. A slight work, with some unusually wooden dialogue, Up at the Villa nonetheless maintains an exciting tension, and the almost universal panning it received—“fictional drivel,”58 his “worst novel,”59 must have been “talking in his sleep”60—is difficult to justify. In later years Maugham came to hate Up at the Villa and flinched when it was mentioned. “I don’t want to hear a word about it!” he would angrily exclaim. “I’m ashamed ever to have done it!”—a curious response from one who was famously impervious to critical censure. But his reaction may have had more to do with a feeling of guilt: in the story, the cad Rowley Flint—“an unscrupulous scamp61 … a waster”—is in all major respects a portrait of Gerald Haxton; and there are telling similarities, too, between Gerald and the heroine’s dead husband, a charmer but a soak. “He had immense vitality.62 He was so kind and gentle and sweet—when he was sober. When he was drunk he was noisy and boastful and vulgar and quarrelsome…. He was a dreadful gambler and when he was drunk he’d lose hundreds of pounds.” “Why didn’t you leave him?”63 Mary is asked. “How could I leave him?” she replies. “He was so dependent on me.” These were portrayals Maugham may have bitterly come to regret, given the harrowing sequence of events that was shortly to unfold.

  By the end of May, despite constant distraction, The Hour Before the Dawn was finally finished, and Maugham and Haxton returned to Hollywood. The story, about an upper-middle-class English family, one son a pacifist and one in intelligence, complete with a beautiful Nazi spy, appeared first in Redbook magazine, for which Maugham was paid $25,000; the plan was then to rework it as a film script before finally processing it into a full-length novel—by which time its author was heartily sick of the whole project: “the most tedious job64 I have ever done in my life.”

  As he had agreed to make himself available during shooting, Maugham rented a house at 732 South Beverly Glen Boulevard, in the leafy residential area of Beverly Hills. “It is two miles from the sea65 & so gets the cool breeze,” he told Ellen Doubleday.

  It has a very nice garden & a swimming pool. It is furnished in Hollywood Italian, but quite unobjectionably & has a studio in the garden for me to work in….

  Relieved to be settled, Maugham started work on the screenplay, for which he had been paid $15,000, with an additional $5,000 for every week he spent on it. He was in a relatively contented frame of mind, following much the same daily routine he had established at the Mauresque: writing all morning, swimming and golf after a sleep in the afternoon, followed by an evening entertaining or being entertained. Gerald, too, was delighted to be back in California, full of good resolutions to curb his drinking while at the same time determined to enjoy himself to the full. Soon after they moved in, Liza, the children, and a nanny arrived for an extended visit. At first Liza had been nervous about accepting the invitation, as she had been frightened of Haxton since her childhood and was apprehensive about staying in the same house, but her father had assured her that Gerald was hardly drinking now and was “so good and sweet.” That this was not entirely the case, Liza immediately realized. “Of course it wasn’t true66 about his not drinking: he just did it secretly,” she said. “There was a bar in the living room and he would have glasses full of drink for himself lined up under there while he served everyone else and kept a soft drink in full view.” Yet there seemed to be a tacit agreement not
to mention the problem. On one occasion when Liza and Maugham went with the Alansons to Lake Tahoe for a few days, they returned to find Haxton in the grip of delirium tremens. “My father seemed to accept even this from him,” she resignedly remarked. Soon, however, she, too, ceased to worry, quickly swept up in a glamorous social life, out most of the day and rarely coming home until the small hours, with a constant stream of handsome young actors calling at the house to take her to parties and screenings.

  Whether drunk or sober, Gerald, too, was loving the life, detailed accounts of which he sent back in affectionate letters to Louis Legrand in France. Gerald painfully missed Loulou, and he worried about his health and situation, whenever possible sending him parcels of provisions through the good offices of a friend in the Red Cross. To Loulou he described the wonderful time he was having, taking advantage of everything Southern California had to offer: sex, swimming, gambling, shopping for clothes, driving a big car, and, rather worryingly given the alcoholic intake, learning to fly. Most exciting of all, as he knew Loulou would appreciate, was actually meeting the stars. “J’étais dans une grande soirée67 hier ou il y avait tout le monde de Hollywood,” he boasted, “Chaplin, [Ronald] Colman, [Herbert] Marshall et toutes les plus jolies femmes de cette terre. Hedy Lamarr était la plus ravissante, mais j’ ai trouvé plus à mon goût Rosalind Russell et Loretta Young.”* In another letter he described a luncheon party Maugham had given where both Douglas Fairbanks and Bette Davis were present, the latter “charmante mais très laide”* in Gerald’s opinion. Under the circumstances, Miss Davis had reason to be charming, as it was the film of Of Human Bondage that in 1934 had turned around what she herself described as a “fast-disappearing career….68 I had been wandering aimlessly until Of Human Bondage came along and brought me out of the fog,” she said in an interview. “We have such reverence for the chance this picture gave [me] that everything in our family dates BB (Before Bondage) and AB (After Bondage).”

  Predictably, Maugham was considerably less enamored of Hollywood than Gerald and Liza, regarding the film colony with much the same weary indifference as he had regarded theater folk in London. “I see something of the stars69; I cannot say they greatly excite me,” he languidly admitted to his niece Kate, while to Osbert Sitwell he complained of the almost total lack of culture of most actors: “one little ray of sunshine70 was when Mr. Cary Grant told me he didn’t really think much of Cézanne,” he added sardonically. To this most disciplined of men, the relaxed atmosphere, the lack of regard for punctuality, was frustrating in the extreme: it maddened him when he arrived for dinner precisely on time to find his hostess had just drifted upstairs to have a bath. The stupidity and self-regard within the acting profession, the suffocating parochialism of the industry, bored him intensely. “I meet few people who interest me,”71 he complained. “They are cordial & hospitable … but I can find no one who is willing to talk to me of the things I like talking about. It is like having nothing to eat but candy.” Typical of this kind of experience was an evening when the well-known actor Errol Flynn called at the house to collect Liza. For once there had been a rare Allied victory widely reported that day in the papers, and Maugham asked the star if he had seen the wonderful news. “You mean about Mickey Rooney?”72 came the guileless response. Occasionally Maugham tried to enliven proceedings for himself, as on the day he was taken to see Spencer Tracy filming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The star came on set costumed as Dr. Jekyll, formally dressed, very elegant and dapper, and began his scene. “Which one is he supposed to be now?”73 asked Maugham in a carrying whisper, provoking a loud guffaw from the camera crew, for which Tracy never forgave him.*

  Much more to Maugham’s taste was the company of fellow writers, Dorothy Parker, for instance, whom he was pleased to find next to him at a dinner party, “demure in black silk,74 but with a demureness fraught with peril to the unwary.” Among the English contingent were Aldous Huxley, the playwright John Van Druten, Gerald Heard, mystic and polymath, and Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood, now living in Los Angeles, was delighted by the reunion. “I was so pleased to see Willie again,”75 he noted in his diary, “that old, old parrot, with his flat black eyes, blinking and attentive, his courtly politeness and his hypnotic stammer.” Maugham was as much a mystery to him as he was to Maugham. In a letter to E. M. Forster, Isherwood compared the sixty-seven-year-old writer to “an old Gladstone bag76 covered with labels. God only knows what is inside,” while Maugham referred to the lively, boyish Christopher as “that delightful, strange man77 whom you could never really know.” The two of them had a good deal in common and relished each other’s company, Maugham finding in Christopher and his compatriots the restless intelligence, the subversive wit and wide culture he had failed to find elsewhere in California. Isherwood one day invited Maugham to visit him at the MGM studios where he was working. The Marx brothers were also there, and Harpo, excited to see his old acquaintance, rushed at Maugham, the whole gang following, “screaming like devils,” Christopher recalled, “[climbing] all over him,78 hugging and kissing him, as Willie submitted to their embraces with shy pleased smiles.” At Isherwood’s house in the Hollywood hills, he, Maugham, and Gerald Heard had long conversations about the Upanishads and the Hindu scriptures, about Vedanta and the ninth-century philosopher Shankara, all of absorbing interest to Isherwood and Heard, both disciples of the influential California guru Swami Prabhavananda. Maugham told them that his great ambition was to return to India and write a serious book about Shankara and his teaching. “I was much moved on hearing this,” Isherwood recorded, “until the news reached us, through van Druten and others, that Willie had made fun of Gerald [Heard], albeit quite affectionately, at a cocktail party next day, and deplored my wasting my time with mysticism when I ought to be writing novels.”

  Expecting at any moment to be called in for the filming of The Hour Before the Dawn, Maugham was beginning to feel frustrated, sick to death of writing propaganda and longing to start on a novel that had nothing to do with the war. As he had told Isherwood, a return to India was uppermost in his mind, his plans yearningly elaborated in letters to Alan Searle. As soon as the war ended and they could travel again, he told Alan, Gerald would return to France to put the house in order, while Alan would come out to California and from there the two of them would sail for India.

  I am afraid this is no more79 than wishful thinking … but how grand it would be if it were so! No more propaganda writing for me & a lovely journey ahead … & peace, peace, peace for a generation at least.

  Maugham was abruptly awakened from these pleasant daydreams by a communication from David O. Selznick Productions: the screenplay of The Hour Before the Dawn had been judged wholly unacceptable. “I have read scripts and reviewed fiction80 since 1932 but never have I felt so speechless,” begins one internal memorandum.

  It is impossible to credit Maugham with this formless, maundering, illiterate rubbish. It is so trite and dead; the characters are stock of the worst novelette type. I just do not know what to say or how to say it, except that for his own sake Mr. Maugham had better just tear this up and forget what must have been a bad dream.

  The author was consequently informed that his services would no longer be required, a dismissal to which he reacted partly with relief and partly with extreme irritation that so much time had been wasted. “I loathe the people81 I am working for,” he told his niece Kate, “[and] I will never again have anything to do with pictures.” A film of The Hour Before the Dawn eventually appeared in 1944, with Veronica Lake and Franchot Tone, and disappeared again shortly afterward, while the novel was brought out only in the United States, Maugham having refused to let it be published in Britain. “I know very well it was poor82 & I was miserable about it,” he confessed to Eddie Marsh. “I tried to console myself by looking upon it as my contribution to the war effort, but that did not help much and I prefer to think now that it will be unread in England and forgotten in America.”

  In mid-September, Liza and the
children left California to return to New York, followed a week later by Maugham and Haxton, who completed the first part of the journey by car, driving through Texas to South Carolina. The purpose of the detour was to visit Bonny Hall, a property near Charleston belonging to Nelson Doubleday, who had offered to build Maugham a bungalow there, to be paid for out of future royalties, where his author could live and work in peace for the duration. Maugham had been delighted by the suggestion, and he was pleased by the look of the little house already almost finished. Arrived in New York, he enjoyed shopping for furniture to fill it, a welcome diversion, as the weeks passed, from the almost ceaseless drudgery of the propaganda treadmill. “Writing, writing, writing83 all the time,” he complained to Searle. “No sooner do I get through with one job than I have to get started on another.” He was gratified to be invited to join the Pulitzer Prize Committee as a judge of the drama section, the first time an Englishman had been asked to take part; however, “the result so far84 is that I have seen as lousy a lot of plays as it has been my misfortune to see for many years … the only halfway good one being Noël’s [Blithe Spirit], [and] he not being American is not eligible.”

  But then suddenly everything changed. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war. Maugham, who had just returned to the South, felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. “Now that America is in the war85 my job has come to an end,” he wrote with relief to Glenway Wescott. “I can’t be any use in further trying to persuade the Americans that the English are not so bad after all since you’ve got to put up with us now if you like us or not.”

  IT WAS AT YEMASSEE in South Carolina that Maugham was to be based for the rest of the war. His little house, Parker’s Ferry, was situated in the middle of marshland, on the banks of the Combahee River, less than an hour’s drive from the Atlantic coast. It was a rural, sparsely populated region, with the nearest town, Beaufort, twenty-six miles away and Charleston, more than fifty. “The countryside [is] wild, lonely,86 monotonous & lovely,” Maugham wrote. “I like it very much indeed & find myself happy here.”