The Doubledays’ handsome house, Bonny Hall, recently rebuilt but on the old plantation pattern, was at the center of an estate now turned over to the cultivation of azaleas and camellias. Two miles from the Hall and set in its own garden was Maugham’s white-painted bungalow, simple in design yet spacious and comfortable, with three bedrooms and a large living room, hung with reproductions of pictures from the Villa Mauresque, that led out onto a veranda. A short distance from the house were servants’ quarters and a separate small cottage that served as Maugham’s study. To look after him there were a black cook and housemaid, Nora and Mary, and a gardener, Sunday, who was helped out on an irregular basis by his nephew, Religious. Maugham’s innate courtesy impressed the two women, and he in turn was very taken by them. “[They] have captured my sympathy87 because they find me the funniest man they have ever known,” he reported. “They simply bellow with laughter at my smallest joke.” Nora was an excellent cook, with a repertoire of southern dishes that Maugham found much to his taste—gumbo, fried chicken, corn fritters—though she refused to cook any Yankee food, such as his favorite, Boston baked beans. As he had done with Annette at the Mauresque, Maugham immediately began to teach Nora some basic French cuisine. The Doubledays, invited to dinner shortly after his arrival, were astonished to be offered soupe à l’oignon, truite au bleu, canard à l’orange, and a perfect almond soufflé, all expertly served, under their host’s watchful eye, by Mary and Sunday.
During the winter Nelson ran his publishing business from Bonny Hall, returning to Oyster Bay in the spring when it began to grow hot. While the Doubledays were in residence there was a great deal of coming and going of editorial staff and their wives from Garden City, resulting in a busy social program of bridge, cocktails, and dinner parties, in which Maugham on occasion joined. On the whole, however, he preferred it when the couple were on their own, when he could go up for a game of cards with Ellen in the afternoon and in the evening join Nelson for a drink before returning to his own house for dinner. Husband and wife could hardly have been more different. Nelson was a buccaneer, a big, beefy man, moody and flamboyant, an outdoorsman who loved duck shooting and churning down the river in his powerful motorboat; he was also a prodigious drinker, rarely without a glass of bourbon in his hand, unattractively referred to as his “phlegm-cutter.” Ellen, by contrast, was a sweet, nervous woman, completely overwhelmed by her noisy, dominating husband, hopelessly untidy and disorganized, her domestic affairs always on the brink of chaos. “Ellen ran the worst household in America,”88 said Jerry Zipkin, a New York friend of Maugham’s who visited him at Parker’s Ferry. “The roast never went round, [and] if you were sitting on her left you starved. Nelson roared about what a rotten housekeeper she was, and she’d come in tears to see Willie and ask him how to run a house, since his cottage was so well organised.”
As fuel was severely rationed, there was little opportunity for driving about the countryside, and when calling at Bonny Hall, Maugham and Haxton usually walked the couple of miles up to the house; otherwise they rode nearly every day, exploring the area on a couple of horses provided by Nelson, a form of exercise that Maugham had always enjoyed. “I have grand gallops89 through the country,” he wrote in April 1942. “The woods just now are lovely, all the young green of the green trees very gay against the dark green of the live oaks & the gray of the Spanish moss; and here and there, in great patches, white lilies, & on the canal banks, iris.” For Gerald this was all very well, and for a while he amused himself fishing from the river and shooting ducks, but the nearest tavern, the Golden Eagle in Beaufort, was miles away, and with Maugham as usual absorbed in his writing he soon grew restless and bored. He was also unwell—he had recently had a bout of heart trouble—and so he decided to return to New York for treatment. Here his condition turned out to be more serious than anticipated, necessitating a three-week stay in the hospital followed by a month’s convalescence in Florida.
With the United States’ entry into the war, Maugham had assumed that his usefulness would end and he could devote himself to the novel that he had had in mind for over three years. But in this he was mistaken, and to his dismay he found his services constantly called upon, “roped in,” as he put it, “to do stuff for America.” Again he was asked to broadcast and write articles, to promote Defense Bonds and report on the local leisure facilities provided by the USO (United Services Organization) for the armed forces; one of his lowest points was reached when he was faced with having to come up with an inspiring article to encourage Americans to send vegetable seeds to Britain. “It’s no good your telling me90 that Dean Swift wrote a very pretty piece about a broomstick,” he grumbled to Eddie Marsh. “I know he did.” Briefly there was even talk of sending him on a propaganda tour of Brazil, a country honeycombed with pro-German organizations, but after a brief flurry this particular project was abandoned.
Once the Doubledays had left, Maugham spent a great deal of time on his own at Yemassee, very contentedly for the most part. Except for the occasional weekend, Gerald did not return after his convalescence in Florida, having decided to go to Washington to try to find some war work of his own, a plan of which Maugham wholeheartedly approved, even though it would leave him without a secretary. “Of course I should miss him,”91 he told Alan, “but I think he will be happier doing some such work & I think it will keep him out of mischief.” Sometimes friends visited, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler among the most welcome. Maugham was impressed by Monroe’s standing and scholarship, his knowledge of the art world, but he was closest to Glenway, who often came on his own and with whom Maugham felt he could talk about anything—writing, philosophy, psychology, literature, life—and with whom he relished dissecting their mutual friends. It was Glenway who picked up on the fact that Maugham was still involved in some way with “government business”: “I know that people used to come92 to see him in Yemassee and I’d have to go out of the room,” Wescott recalled, and once Maugham told him, “The day doesn’t pass that I don’t send some poor [pro-German] Englishman back home.”*
Dorothy Parker was another visitor. She came for three weeks, “three long, long, long weeks,”93 during which she suffered hours of tedium. Expecting to join an amusing house party, she was dismayed to find herself alone with Maugham, who offered little in the way of entertainment except endless games of bridge. “That old lady,” as she described her host, “is a crashing bore.” Occasionally people were asked over for cocktails, but they turned out for the most part to be “various handsome young men who were not interested in ladies but who were interested in Mr. Maugham” and thus of no use to Mrs. Parker. Presumably she managed to conceal her ennui, however, as a couple of years later Maugham contributed an admiring preface to a collected edition of her stories and verse.
A far more appreciative guest was Eleanor Roosevelt, who stayed at Yemassee after visiting the State University in North Carolina. Mrs. Roosevelt had been a fan of Maugham’s since the late 1920s; they had met more recently on one of Maugham’s visits to Washington and had taken a great liking to each other, Maugham admiring the remarkable First Lady for her courage, tenacity, and strong social conscience. In 1941, when Maugham was in Washington for a production of Theatre, Mrs. Roosevelt had given a dinner in his honor, which was followed by a party thrown for him by her niece, Alice Longworth. The two also shared an interest in food, and the small correspondence that survives is mainly on this subject. “Dear Eleanor,” begins a jocular note from Maugham, “Thank you very much for the recipe.94 We are going to try it immediately and if you see that my whole household has died suddenly, you will know the reason.” Mrs. Roosevelt also sent Maugham the photographs she had taken during her stay at Parker’s Ferry. “What a distinguished profile95 you have given me,” he wrote appreciatively. “You are indeed a marvellous photographer & I feel that you have wasted your time being a wife & mother. You should have been a great artist & led a life of sin.”
In May, when the heat in South Carolina became u
nbearable, Maugham went to New York, but as the temperature there was hardly less ferocious—“too hot to do anything,”96 he complained to Alan from his suite at the Ritz, “too hot to work, too hot to play”—he moved to Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, and stayed at the Colonial Inn in Edgartown. Here he was able to be quiet and cool and, most important, to work undisturbed on his novel. His sole appearance in public was at a showing of the film version of The Moon and Sixpence, which, as Maugham’s presence on the island had become known, was given its premiere at the local movie house in Edgartown. After a couple of months he felt much restored, able to face the demanding schedule of broadcasts and lectures that awaited him during the coming autumn.
The war was constantly weighing on Maugham’s mind. As an Englishman, he could not but be aware how disastrous in effect throughout 1942 was the decline of Britain’s prestige, defeat following defeat, the fall of Singapore, the loss of Malaya and Burma, and the fiasco of the Eighth Army’s performance in Libya. “Our stock is falling lower97 & lower in this country,” he told Searle. “At present you hear nothing but that the English are stupid & incompetent & that all Winston has to offer is fine speeches. It is terribly discouraging & one doesn’t know what to answer.” Since the previous winter, both Robin and Vincent had been fighting in North Africa. Terrible reports were coming through of casualties in the Western Desert as the Eighth Army engaged with the panzer divisions of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Then in July came the news that Captain the Honourable Robin Maugham had been wounded and shipped out to a hospital in Egypt. His recovery was slow, but eventually he returned to England and was invalided out of the army, registered unfit for active service.
After an autumn in New York Maugham returned to South Carolina for the winter and spring. From there at the beginning of May 1943 he finally finished the first draft of his novel The Razor’s Edge. “The book has been a great pleasure98 to me to write & I do not care if people on the whole think it good or poor. I have got it off my chest & that is all that matters to me.” From the moment of its publication, nearly a year later, The Razor’s Edge made an enormous impact. There were many adulatory reviews, and sales were immense; in the States, over a half a million copies sold by the end of the first month. Maugham expressed himself gratified by such an appreciative response to a work that was of tremendous personal importance to him. “I will not pretend99 that I am not staggered,” he admitted to Eddie Marsh, while in October he wrote to his niece Diana, “It has given me a lot of satisfaction100 to have produced a novel in my old age which has had such a great success.”
The Razor’s Edge* is undoubtedly one of the most interesting of all Maugham’s fictional works. In it he engages the three topics that always most fascinated him: sexual passion, the mores of society, and the nature of goodness, in this case as illustrated in the division between the material and spiritual worlds. The novel opens in Chicago in 1919, with the narrator, “Maugham,” spending a few weeks in the city on his way to the Far East, just as the real Maugham had done that same year on his way to China. A wealthy acquaintance from Paris, Elliott Templeton, telephones out of the blue, explaining that he is staying with his widowed sister and inviting him to luncheon at her house. Here, as well as his hostess, Mrs. Bradley, “Maugham” meets her daughter, Isabel, and Isabel’s fiancé, Larry Darrell. It is clear that Isabel, a bouncy, self-confident young woman, is passionately in love with handsome Larry, although to Maugham’s experienced eye Larry seems curiously uninvolved, a quiet, smiling figure, amiable but remote. It transpires that Larry, an aviator in the war, had been badly shaken when his best friend was killed, leaving him obscurely troubled ever since. Reluctantly, Isabel agrees to his suggestion that he go on his own to Paris, on the understanding that he will use the time to pull himself together so that they may begin on the richly upholstered married life to which she avidly looks forward. Elliott Templeton, an exquisite, snobbish old queen who lives for his rarefied social life, generously offers to launch Larry in Paris—“Believe me, my dear fellow,101 the average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain”—but to Elliott’s astonishment Larry rebuffs him, instead disappearing to a shabby hotel room to pursue some mysterious course of study of his own. When eventually Mrs. Bradley and Isabel, alarmed at the absence of news, follow Larry to Paris, he in as kind a way as possible breaks off the engagement.
Ten years pass before Maugham runs into any of them again. By this time Isabel has married a prosperous banker, Gray Maturin, with whom she leads a lavishly materialistic life in Chicago, while Larry in Paris is encountered one day in the street, dressed like a tramp. Invited by Maugham to tell his story, he launches into a lengthy description of his journey toward spiritual enlightenment, from working in a coal mine to spending five years at an ashram in India. At the same time the Maturins, too, return to Paris. They have suffered badly in the crash of 1929, Gray’s business completely wiped out, and are now living entirely off Isabel’s uncle Elliott, who has given them his splendid apartment on the Left Bank, while he spends most of the year on the Riviera. It is Maugham who brings Larry back into their lives, to Isabel’s particular delight—until she learns that he is about to be married to a girlfriend of hers from Chicago. Sophie is a drug-addicted dipsomaniac who will sleep with anyone for the price of a drink, and Larry, hooked on sacrifice and salvation, believes he can save her by making her his wife. This Isabel cannot allow: passionately possessive of Larry, she ruthlessly determines to scuttle his plan, which she does by means of a cruel trick.
Elliott, meanwhile, having magnificently held court on the Côte d’Azur, is now beginning to fail, to find himself out of date, no longer in demand. Though he is old and ill, his passion for society is yet undimmed, and thus it is a near mortal blow when he finds he is not invited to the great ball of the season, given by the Princess Novemali, a rich American.* Maugham, realizing his old friend is dying, schemes to purloin the longed-for card, his description of his encounter with the odious Edna Novemali providing an effective counterpoint to the genuinely moving scenes surrounding Elliott’s death. By this time, the end of the story is in sight: Larry, divested of all earthly possessions, is happy at last and leaves for America where he plans to earn his living as a taxi driver; Isabel, well provided for by her uncle Elliott’s bequest, goes back to Chicago with Gray, who is rejuvenated by the prospect of returning to work. In the final paragraph the author writes that to his surprise,
I had written nothing more102 or less than a success story. For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: Elliott social eminence, Isabel an assured position backed by a substantial fortune … Gray a steady and lucrative job … and Larry happiness.
In answer to a question put to him about The Razor’s Edge, Maugham said that he had had the character of Larry Darrell in his mind for more than twenty years, and that it was the experience of India in 1938 that revived his interest and inspired him to write his story. In fact Maugham had already used a version of the theme twice before, in The Road Uphill, an unpublished play, now lost, written in 1920, which has close similarities to the novel, and in the short story The Fall of Edward Barnard, written in 1921. Ironically, in The Razor’s Edge it is Larry, vacuous, dull, and a little smug, who constitutes the book’s flaw, while everything else, construction, characterization, setting, narrative tone, shows Maugham at his most supremely accomplished. He knows from the inside out the society he portrays, that of the nouveaux-riches Americans, intelligent, ambitious, Europeanized; and thus it is not saintly Larry who holds our attention but the ultrasophisticated figure of Elliott Templeton. In vain, snobbish, kindhearted Elliott, Maugham achieves one of his most brilliant creations, so vital and ridiculous with all his fuss and furbelows that he comes near to stealing the novel. Inevitably, after the book came out, there was much busy speculation about Elliott’s original, but in the end it was Maugham’s publisher who revealed that the prototype
was one Henry Chalmers Roberts, a retired American diplomat. Roberts had made his first appearance in Our Betters as Thornton Clay, “[who] calls more countesses103 by their Christian names than any other man in London.” “[Willie] was fascinated by him,” said Frere. “[Roberts] was a pederast, knew Henry James, and was as crashing a snob as an expatriate American could be.”
Maugham was in New York when The Razor’s Edge came out, its success providing him with a brief respite from a long period of anxiety—as usual, over Gerald. In the autumn of 1943, Gerald, tired of working for almost nothing at a local radio station in Washington, had accepted instead an offer of employment from Nelson Doubleday, overseeing a staff of nearly fifty in the firm’s commissary on Long Island. “Gerald is working very hard104 providing food for three thousand people,” Maugham reported to Robin. “It is a marvel to see him getting up at six thirty to go to work and getting home just before eight…. He is happier than he has been for many years.” But shortly afterward, a more interesting prospect came Haxton’s way, which led to his returning to Washington to take up a minor post in intelligence, at the Office for Strategic Services in the State Department.
This was work Gerald thoroughly enjoyed, and he had been in the highest spirits when he came up to New York on business in November, full of talk about his new job. Maugham was struck by the extraordinary change in him. Poignantly he saw for the first time the man Gerald might have been had he not been tied all those years to his dependency on Maugham: in a way, Maugham had made Gerald’s life, and in a way had ruined it, too. Once and for all Maugham made up his mind that there must be no question of Haxton’s returning to his old employment and that he must be persuaded to remain in America for good. “[He] is delighted really105 to be on his own & absolutely independent of me,” Maugham told Alan, “[and] it is a wonderful relief106 to me to be free of that responsibility & of the constant worry & anxiety.” Now within weeks of his seventieth birthday, Maugham was anxious about the future: he wanted to write at least one more novel and had several nonfiction projects in mind, but he felt he had become an old man. He had begun to refer to himself as “the old party,” and believed he might not have very much longer to live. He needed calm and routine, needed to be sure that what remained of his life should be free of the constant crises created by Gerald. Thus, after thirty years together, the two men agreed to separate, Maugham arranging with Bert Alanson for a sum of $35,000 to be settled on Haxton, which would provide him with a generous annual income. As soon as the war was over, Maugham would return to France, and Gerald’s place as secretary and factotum at the Mauresque would be taken by Alan, dear Alan,
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 53
