The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  who will give me, I think,107 a happiness I have not known with Gerald for ten years…. He has neither Gerald’s vitality [nor] energy, but is sober, modest, affectionate & of a great sweetness of nature…. I must expect to grow progressively frailer & less active; I want someone kind, unselfish & considerate who will look after me till my death & that I think my little Alan will be only too glad to do.

  With these plans afoot and Gerald settled contentedly in Washington, Maugham at Yemassee continued his industrious output. His seventieth birthday on January 25, 1944, he spent alone, perfectly serene in his own company. He had decided to prepare his writer’s notebooks for publication, and these had to be carefully perused and edited. There was also a revival of his last play, Sheppey, due to open in New York in April, for which Maugham had made some crucial alterations to the last act. In the event, Sheppey was as great a failure in New York in 1944 as it had been in London eleven years earlier, a fact that left its author relatively unmoved. “I was disappointed, but not distressed,”108 he told Eddie Marsh, “for the play was written long ago & I have long ceased to be interested in the theatre.” And by the time of its opening there was another, far more serious matter on his mind.

  “I HAVE BEEN IN great trouble,”109 Maugham wrote to Barbara Back. At the end of April, Gerald in Washington had suffered an attack of pleurisy so severe that Maugham, alarmed, had brought him to New York where he could be looked after at one of the best nursing homes in the country. Here an X ray revealed that his lungs were badly infected with tuberculosis, the dangerous disease that had haunted Maugham since his mother died of it when he was eight. Now Gerald’s condition began to deteriorate with terrifying rapidity: he was feverish and suffered intense pain that could be controlled only with morphine; he had a racking cough and found it difficult to swallow; he was fast losing weight and every movement hurt him. “It was agonizing to watch him,” Maugham told Barbara. Although he had been told it was unlikely Gerald would survive, Maugham believed that if he could get him out of the heat and humidity of New York and into the dry, pure air of Colorado he just might have a chance. But the doctors refused to allow it, saying that Gerald was far too ill to be moved and was expected to die within weeks, information that was carefully kept from the patient. Maugham, who sat by his bed for hours a day, was distraught. The detachment of a short time earlier, the calm and optimism with which he had been looking forward to a future without Gerald at the Mauresque, vanished in an instant as all his old feelings of love and protectiveness came flooding back. “Though I have long known110 that the life he led must kill him now that he is dying I am shattered,” Maugham confessed to Ellen Doubleday.

  He made life impossible for me & I was thankful when he left me, he brought shame & disgrace on me, but now I can forget all that. I only remember how devoted he was to me & how he trusted me & depended on me & how eager he was to help me. I can only think of those years when his vitality & his gift for making friends were of so much service to me. Without him I should never have written those stories which did so much for my reputation in the world of letters & it was he who helped me to get out of the commonplace life of the ordinary humdrum writer & put me in the way of gaining that wider experience of life which has made me what I am today. I can never forget that he was mixed in with some of my happiest & most fruitful years & now that it is finished, or so nearly, I cannot but weep because his long end has been so miserable & so worthless. I don’t know how much I am to blame. If I had been firmer, if I had not tried to force a kind of life on him for which he was temperamentally unsuited, it may be that he would have made less of a hash of things than he has. Of course I shall get over it, one gets over everything, but just at the moment I am broken.

  At last in July there was a very small improvement in Gerald’s condition, and Maugham was advised that he could after all risk a journey. It was decided not to go as far as Colorado but to take him by ambulance to Saranac in upstate New York, to the famous Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium where Robert Louis Stevenson had been treated. Here in the fresh mountain air, Gerald, to Maugham’s enormous relief, “[began] to breathe a little better111 & is in less pain”; he was still very weak and emaciated but seemed in fairly good spirits on the whole, and remarkably uncomplaining. Maugham had set great hopes on Saranac. “If we can only get through the next two or three weeks it won’t be so bad,” he wrote to Barbara. He was tireless in his attendance on Gerald, could not bear to think of him left to the mercy of strangers, and prepared to stay in Saranac for months if necessary, despite the fact that his hotel was comfortless and the food awful. “I can’t remember that I’ve ever hated a place more.” Morning and afternoon he went to the hospital, where he did his best to keep Gerald’s spirits up. “I think going to see him twice a day112 & encouraging him cheers him & helps him to make a fight for it,” he wrote to Barbara. “The attitude I take is that of course he is very ill, but that lots of people have had T.B., myself included & have completely recovered & I see no reason why he should not be as strong as ever in a year.”

  But after the initial promise, Saranac had little beneficial effect, and every day Gerald grew more frighteningly feeble, although there were occasions when he seemed briefly possessed by a frenzied energy, raging against his dying and hurling obscenities at Maugham, screaming that he had ruined his life, had kept him a prisoner, that he hated him; once while in a drugged delirium he laughed wildly at the thought of the fun he would have after Maugham himself was dead. In desperation Maugham decided to move him once more, this time to the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, where he could be seen by specialists at the Leahy Institute. Here he was told the only chance that remained was a risky operation to remove a couple of ribs, which could best be carried out in New York. The four-hour train journey was undertaken with Gerald, heavily drugged, on a stretcher. “I am afraid he is growing weaker113 & weaker & I am beginning to lose hope,” Maugham wrote to Eddie Knoblock from Manhattan at the beginning of October. “They say as one grows old one feels less; I wish it were true.” By now Gerald was barely conscious, always in pain, on some days too ill to see even Maugham, who was in a state of tormenting indecision. “I have to face the prospect114 that the operation will kill him,” he told his niece Diana; he was unable to make up his mind “whether to let him die by inches or to risk all on this final attempt…. I can hardly help wishing that he would die one night quietly in his sleep without knowing that he was in danger of death.” Finally, on November 2, the operation was carried out. To everyone’s surprise Gerald survived it, and although very weak and in great pain seemed to be holding on. “There is a slight hope115 that he may make a recovery after a fashion,” Maugham reported to Alan, “but will still be very ill for a long, long time.” For three days Gerald remained in a drugged semi-coma, knowing nobody, with Maugham allowed to see him for only a few minutes at a time. Then, on the morning of November 7, at the age of fifty-two, Gerald Haxton died.

  Maugham was inconsolable, beside himself with grief and tormented by remorse. At the funeral on November 9, 1944, at the Episcopal Church of St. James on Madison Avenue, he broke down and wept. In response to the many letters of condolence he poured out his overwhelming unhappiness, his anguish at losing the love of his life. “Gerald’s death has been a bitter blow116 to me & I am finding it very hard to cope with life without him. I am lost & hopeless & lonely,” he told George Cukor, while to Charles Towne he wrote, “Please don’t write & sympathize,117 letters like that just tear me to pieces. You see, I’m too old to cope with so much grief.” Toward the end of December he described to Alan “the tempestuous grief118 that tore me to pieces … the last few weeks have been very hard to get through [and] I have been terribly depressed.” The writer Cecil Roberts, wishing to offer his sympathy in person, was taken aback by the agony in Maugham’s voice when he answered the telephone:

  “I don’t want to see you!119 I don’t want to see anyone! I want to die!” he cried in a distressed voice, and put down the
telephone.

  Another friend, the playwright Sam Behrman, was also shocked to see how near Maugham was to complete breakdown. Behrman, who had been working on a dramatization of one of Maugham’s short stories, had arranged to lunch with him in his suite at the Ritz; he naturally expected to see some sign of distress, but to his surprise there was none. “He had his habitual composed120 and impassive expression,” Behrman recalled, as they chatted about people they knew and Maugham asked Behrman about his latest production. Finally Behrman thought he must mention Gerald. “Willie, you haven’t told me,” he began:

  “How was it with Gerald—at the end?” I was instantly sorry. “Please,” he said in a broken voice, “don’t ask me that.” He began to cry and left the room. It was the sudden demolition of a carefully built image.

  After the funeral, all that remained was for Maugham to carry out the instructions Gerald had made in his will, a simple document in which his personal effects were left to Maugham, his money to Robin, who had become almost an honorary younger brother, and the proceeds from the sale of the flat in Paris, which had been in Gerald’s name, to Louis Legrand. “Mon pauvre Loulou,”121 Maugham wrote sadly, “Sois heureux, mon petit, et tâche de ne pas te tracasser avec des souvenirs tristes. Ça ne sert à rien et tu es trop jeune. Oublies.”* As soon as the will was proved, Maugham left New York for South Carolina. With the end of the war at last in sight, he was faced with returning to France, to the Villa Mauresque, a prospect he now dreaded, he told David Horner:

  I suppose I shall give it a trial,122 but if Gerald dead is all over the place, wandering about the garden, sitting at the card table playing patience, I couldn’t stand it; & so I would sell it for what I could get & buy myself a little house somewhere in the English country, Wiltshire perhaps, & settle down there for the rest of my life. That would not be for very long, for by now I am a very old party.

  * “Beware of that Englishman. He’s in the Intelligence Service. You can be sure that any interesting information he gets out of you will be known in Downing Street the next day.”

  * France at War sold more than a hundred thousand copies between its publication in March 1940 and the fall of France in May and June, when it was withdrawn.

  * The most widely repeated anecdote draws on Maugham’s account of the advice he was given by the doctor on board the Saltersgate. In the most popular version Syrie tells her husband she is planning to cross to the States and is terrified of being torpedoed. “Well, S-S-Syrie,” Maugham is supposed to have replied, “I am assured that when you find yourself in the water, if you open your m-m-mouth wide, it’s all over much more quickly” (The Infirm Glory, p. 253).

  * Farson later became a noted writer, photographer, and television journalist.

  * Needless to say, such sentiments were ill received among the French community in California. When the director René Clair met Maugham in Hollywood, the encounter was frigid in the extreme.

  * “I was at a big party yesterday with the whole of Hollywood, Chaplin, Colman, Marshall and all the prettiest women on this earth. Hedy Lamarr was the loveliest, but I found Rosalind Russell and Loretta Young more to my taste.”

  * “charming but very ugly”

  * Twelve years later, when Spencer Tracy was in the south of France with Maugham’s old friend Garson Kanin, he was adamant in refusing an invitation to dine at the Mauresque.

  * Maugham’s involvement was obliquely acknowledged years later by Sir William Stephenson, code name Intrepid, who was head of British Security Coordination in the United States during the war. “Intrepid had a variety of friends and contacts working for him [and there] were those who subsequently made it plain that they were not opposed to being acknowledged publicly. I don’t think Somerset Maugham ever made this feeling known” (Maugham, Ted Morgan, p. 467).

  * The title refers to a quotation from the Katha Upanishad: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”

  * Princess Novemali is a portrait of Maugham’s Riviera neighbor, the sharp-tongued Princess Ottoboni. “Ottoboni” in Italian means “eight good things,” here changed by Maugham to “Novemali,” “nine evils.” The princess was not pleased by her appearance in The Razor’s Edge, and for some time there was a rift in the relationship.

  * “My poor Loulou, be happy, my little one, and try not to torment yourself with sad memories. There’s no point and you are too young. Forget.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THE BRONZINO BOY

  • • •

  MAUGHAM’S DESOLATION IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING GERALD Haxton’s death was impenetrable and profound. “For thirty years he has been1 my pleasure and my anxiety and without him I am lost and lonely and hopeless,” he wrote to Noël Coward in February 1945. “It is three months since he died now and I cannot get used to it. I try to forget and a dozen times a day something I come across, something I read, a stray word reminds me of him and I am overcome with my first grief…. I am too old to endure so much grief. I have lived too long.”* To Gerald’s beloved Loulou he also wrote most poignantly of his unhappiness: “Tout me le rappelle2 et je le revois souvent, trop souvent pour ma paix, dans mes rêves, ou il est toujours gai et vivace et délicieux.”† Maugham was mourning for his dead lover, but mourning, too, for his own past, for the years of travel and adventure he had shared with Haxton, and, crucially, mourning for his powers as a writer, for the artistic impulse and inspiration that wrought those experiences into novels and stories. “The best years of my life,3 those in which we were wandering about the world, are inextricably connected with him, & in one way & another, however indirectly, all I have written during the last thirty has something to do with him, if only that he typed my manuscripts.” It was almost as if Gerald had possessed some talismanic power and without him he would no longer be able to write. And in a sense that was true: none of the work Maugham produced after Gerald’s death would amount to very much.

  After the funeral, Maugham had been relieved to leave New York and return to Parker’s Ferry, his little house at Yemassee, but once there he was tormented by loneliness and yearned more than ever for the solace of Alan Searle’s company. Yet Alan was in England and unable to leave his army canteen in Yorkshire. Maugham’s plight was desperate, however, and his friends realized he could not be left to continue without companionship. Discreet approaches were made to the Foreign Office, with the result that Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information arranged with his opposite number in Washington to obtain permission for Maugham’s nephew, Robin, to visit the States for a few months, officially to launch a magazine, Convoy, he had just started in Britain. It was an arrangement that was of benefit to both: Maugham was delighted to see his beloved nephew, and Robin, nearly thirty, still very jittery and unwell after his experiences in North Africa, was grateful for a period of convalescence. He arrived just before Christmas 1944, and the two men supported each other through the somewhat rambunctious seasonal celebrations under way at Bonny Hall. “I found Willie overwhelmed4 with misery,” Robin recalled, shocked when Maugham more than once broke down in tears in front of him. He was shocked, too, to see how much his uncle had aged, still physically fit, clean-shaven now, but with his face very lined, his dark eyes hooded, and heavy creases pulling his mouth downward, giving him the appearance of an old and melancholy tortoise.

  Even at his most wretched, Maugham had never stopped working, continuing to fulfill the program he had mapped out for himself. His daily stint of writing was the one reliable escape, the one drug that never failed in its effect. Just as ten years earlier he had decided to bring his career in the theater to an end with four last plays, so now he planned to write four last novels. The first of these had been The Razor’s Edge, to be followed by two historical works of fiction, and finally by a novel about a working-class family in Bermondsey, thus coming full circle with a return to the territory treated in Liza of Lambeth fifty years before. This last was never written, but already by Februar
y 1945, Then and Now, the first of the two historical novels, was completed and sent off to Eddie Marsh for editing.

  Then and Now describes an embassy of Machiavelli to the court of Cesare Borgia, and although it conscientiously conveys the background of Renaissance Italy and the elaborate dealings and counterdealings between the two men, it is a pedestrian work; a few scenes concerning Machiavelli’s attempted seduction of a beautiful young woman flicker briefly into life, but all too clearly the book reflects the despondent state of mind of its author. When it was published in 1946, however, it sold well and won some admiring reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. And there the matter might have rested had it not been for a long article in The New Yorker by America’s most influential critic, Edmund Wilson. Unluckily, Then and Now was the first fiction by Maugham that Wilson had read: he had long been irritated by some of Maugham’s critical judgments, particularly pertaining to Henry James, and he considered Maugham’s reputation as a writer ludicrously overrated; yet by his own admission he knew nothing of any of the novels, plays, or short stories. “It has happened to me from time to time5 to run into some person of taste who tells me that I ought to take Somerset Maugham seriously, yet I have never been able to convince myself that he was anything but second-rate,” he begins.