Does Mr. Maugham realize28 what a huge temptation he is putting before elderly writers? To have £500 of our own—let alone of Mr Maugham’s—to spend abroad is beyond our dreams…. What will we not do to qualify for Mr. Maugham’s munificence? What forging of birth certificates, dyeing of whiskers, and lifting of faces! To what parodies of experimental styles will we not push our experienced pens!
The first year’s judges were V. S. Pritchett, the historian C. V. Wedgwood, and the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who chose as the winner for 1947 A. L. Barker with her short-story collection, Innocents. Although he took no part in the judging, Maugham followed the process and the subsequent careers of the winners with attention, among them, during his lifetime, Doris Lessing (1954), Kingsley Amis (1955), Ted Hughes (1960), V. S. Naipaul (1961), and John le Carré (1964).
Another venture close to his heart was the founding of a national theater, to the planning of which over the years he had contributed both time and money only to see the project postponed again and again, “overcome [by] the indifference29 of governments and the apathy of the public.” But in the postwar period it looked as though the scheme might prove practicable at last, and Maugham redoubled his efforts to involve his fellow playwrights in the cause. “I wish I could enlist your help30 in interesting the British people in a National Theatre,” he wrote to J. B. Priestley in 1948. “It seems to me a scandal that England should be the only European country that does not possess one.” The following year the National Theatre Bill was finally passed by Parliament, a significant step forward that Maugham recognized by giving to the trustees his eighty theatrical paintings. Maugham’s collection was impressive, second in importance only to that owned by the Garrick Club, and it included three oils by Zoffany, fifteen by de Wilde, and a fine version of Reynolds’s famous portrait of David Garrick. The paintings were removed from the Mauresque in 1951, but have been seen only infrequently since in the building for which they were intended.
Of all Maugham’s charitable bequests, that made to his old school, King’s School, Canterbury, might be regarded as the most unexpected, given his wretchedness while a pupil there. And yet Maugham had always felt a nostalgia for the place, for the grounds and the ancient buildings magnificently overshadowed by the great gray cathedral; he had, too, always felt rooted in the Kentish countryside, and on a number of occasions had returned to wander around Whitstable, where more than once he was spotted tending the graves of his uncle and aunt in the churchyard. The notorious account of his school days in Of Human Bondage had hardly endeared him to KSC, but since his day the school had fallen on hard times, and shortly before the war the then headmaster, Canon Shirley, a vigorous and resourceful character, had written a letter to Maugham soliciting a donation, to which Maugham had generously responded. Encouraged, Shirley took pains to cultivate the connection, writing regularly, extending invitations to visit the school, and eventually enrolling Maugham on the governing body. His attentiveness paid off, and over the years Maugham gave thousands of pounds, for new buildings, for tennis courts, for pictures and furniture, and for the construction of a library that would eventually hold a large proportion of his books, eighteen hundred volumes, from the Villa Mauresque. He also presented the school with his portrait, especially commissioned from Gerald Kelly, and with the manuscripts of his first and last novels, Liza of Lambeth and Catalina. In 1952 he surprised Canon Shirley with a request that he should be buried within the precincts of the school.
When Maugham returned to Cap Ferrat from London at the end of 1946, his chief concern was to finish his novel Catalina, begun earlier in the year. It was to be his last full-length work of fiction, and he was particularly anxious that Eddie Marsh should work on it, although he was a little taken aback, when the manuscript was returned to him, by the extent of Marsh’s diabolization. “I think you have been harsher31 than I have ever known you before, but I kiss the rod & I have accepted all your emendations,” Maugham told him gratefully. Ten years earlier, in The Summing Up, Maugham had stated, “The novelist should turn to the historical novel towards the end of his career,” advice that he himself had taken, with his previous work about Machiavelli and now with Catalina. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, the story follows the adventures of a crippled peasant girl cured by a miraculous Virgin, and while it is firmly founded in Maugham’s lifelong study of Spanish history and literature it shows a substantial falling off from the energy and invention of The Razor’s Edge, reading less like the work of an experienced novelist and more like a good school essay written by a diligent pupil who has clearly done all his homework. He himself was not at all sure how Catalina would be received, but both Frere and Nelson Doubleday professed themselves delighted, and with reason, for on publication in 1948 it was chosen as Book of the Month in America and in Britain had sold 93,000 copies by the end of the first week. “I cannot tell you what a relief32 to me it is to think that I have written my last, my very last novel,” Maugham confessed to Glenway Wescott.
BY CHRISTMAS 1946, when Maugham was once more in residence, the Villa Mauresque had been almost completely restored to its luxurious prewar standard. The number of indoor staff had been slightly reduced, but under the sharp eye of Ernest the butler and of Germaine the housekeeper the same high levels of immaculate efficiency were maintained. In the kitchen Annette was once more producing delicious menus, despite the continuing shortages; pictures were rehung, the silver and china unpacked, and the statue of the Chinese goddess Kuan-Yin returned to the hall. The dachshunds, rumored to have been roasted and eaten during the occupation, were replaced by three Pekingese, to which were added a couple of pedigree poodles, Luke and Mark, a present from Lady Kenmare. The garden statues, which had had their ears and noses broken off, were repaired, the lily pond was restocked with goldfish, and the garden itself, badly damaged by shelling and completely overgrown, was carefully replanted; already some of the spring bulbs that Maugham in a moment of optimism had put in just before leaving in 1940 were beginning to show. The cars had been seized by the Italians, but in the garage now were a Citroën and a big new Buick shipped over from America. Altogether, as Maugham wrote to Ellen Doubleday, he was “very much pleased33 with it all. It is on the whole a much more beautiful house than it was before.”
The one great change, of course, was the absence of Gerald. It was now Alan Searle who was running the house, Alan who sat opposite Maugham at the dining table, Alan who typed and telephoned in the little room beneath Maugham’s rooftop study. In no time at all it seemed as if Alan had been there for years, and despite his failure to learn French, his friendly manner and talent for organization ensured the staff were happy and their duties smoothly carried out. With Searle, Maugham had no need to dread rows or to worry that he would be embarrassed in front of his guests: Alan was obedient, even-tempered, and polite, his overwhelming desire at all times to please his employer. And indeed Maugham had soon grown completely dependent on him; he trusted him, and was fond of him, and the two enjoyed a sexual compatibility that was unusually long-lasting, Alan now sleeping in Gerald’s bedroom, divided only by a bathroom from Maugham’s. Not everything was perfect: Alan had none of Gerald’s wit, charm, or sophistication, certainly none of his elegance or style. In summer Searle trotted about the house in garishly patterned shirts, his plump thighs bulging out of a pair of tiny white shorts, and in winter he wore thick double-breasted suits that, with his crinkly dark hair and red face, gave him a curiously aldermanic appearance. Nor was Alan as intelligent as Gerald; he knew something about pictures but little else, and had no interest in reading; he did, however, have a camp sense of humor and a repertoire of comic imitations that Maugham on occasion found amusing. But if Alan’s opinions were of limited interest, Maugham nonetheless needed and relied on him, and if Alan was sometimes irritating and a bore, it was a small price to pay for equanimity and peace of mind.
Although in theory Alan’s position in the household was the same as Gerald’s, in fact it was not: Gerald had been accepte
d everywhere as Maugham’s social equal; Alan was working-class, he spoke with a cockney accent, and his manner was ingratiating, and this inevitably put him on a different footing. But it was not only, or even mainly, the fact that he dropped his aitches: Maugham’s friends took their cue from the master of the house, and because Maugham showed Alan little respect, ordered him about, and sometimes angrily rebuked him in public, he was inevitably regarded more as a favored employee than as a friend. Most visitors to the Mauresque liked Alan, and they were glad to see Maugham so well settled. Searle was clearly the ideal companion for his later years: “as right as rain for William,”34 said Glenway Westcott; “[the perfect] nanny35 of his second childhood,” another friend remarked. But how did Alan regard his situation? His devotion to Maugham was never in question: “I loved him with all my heart36 & being,” he wrote later in a private memorandum. “I didn’t care about his faults & vices, I loved every facet of him.” And yet all was not quite as serene as it appeared on the surface. “I am, I think, very happy,37 sometimes I am not sure,” Alan wrote to Ellen Doubleday as early as December 1946. “Life can be very difficult, and people too.”
This oblique mention of “people,” carefully left unspecified, referred to members of the Maugham family, for whom Alan nursed a covert but profound hostility. Liza, quite unknowingly, was the object of his most intense hatred, and from the very beginning of Alan’s residence at the Mauresque there is expressed in some of his correspondence an undercurrent of venom toward her and her children of which he gave not the smallest hint when in their company. “I’m so glad you’re here,38 dear,” he would say to Liza as she arrived, “give me a little squeeze.” As far as Liza was concerned, Searle seemed perfect for her father, a huge improvement on the terrifying Gerald, and she was grateful to him for his devotion; her children, too, Nicolas and Camilla, loved Alan’s company, loved running up to his office where he would tell them jokes and outrageous stories in funny voices that made them laugh. “The family were all fond of Alan,”39 said Nic. None of them had any inkling of the bitter resentments that lay beneath the surface, for the moment expressed only in letters to a few trusted correspondents. “Liza and the children are here,”40 Alan wrote to Bert Alanson in the summer of 1947. “I find it a very disturbing element and do not like it at all.”
In July 1948 Liza remarried, as her father had predicted she would, her new husband a Conservative member of Parliament, Lord John Hope, younger son of the Marquess of Linlithgow. It was Linlithgow who as viceroy in India in 1938 had snubbed Maugham by refusing to receive Gerald Haxton, a slight neither forgotten nor forgiven by Maugham, and John Hope was regarded with disfavor from the start. “He is a pompous donkey,”41 he told Ellen Doubleday, “but Liza dotes on him.” For the time being, however, he put a good face on it, courteously writing to his future son-in-law to welcome him into the family and sending the couple a check for a hundred thousand francs as a present. He went over to London for the wedding, where with professional ease he acted the part of proud father, managed to be civil to Syrie, and made a creditable speech at the reception at Claridge’s afterward. For the second time Liza spent her honeymoon at the Mauresque, bringing with her a lavish trousseau designed by Mainbocher, which her mother had arranged to have smuggled over from New York. As John was anxious to return to Scotland for the grouse shooting, Liza left Nic and Camilla with their grandfather for the rest of the summer, “which adds greatly to the gaiety42 of the proceedings,” Maugham told Nelson Doubleday. “I must say they are very good, but now and then rather hard work. They eat like wolves, sleep like dormice, swim like fish, and in the interval run helter-skelter about the garden like hares.”
This letter was written partly in response to some ominous news from Ellen about her husband’s health. Nelson had recently been diagnosed with alcoholic neuritis, his prodigious consumption of “phlegm-cutters” having finally caught up with him, although he himself was refusing to acknowledge the problem. The situation grew so bad that eventually Nelson was obliged to relinquish the presidency of Doubleday, his place in the company taken by Douglas M. Black, Nelson’s lawyer and long-serving employee, for whom Maugham had considerable respect. Meanwhile Nelson’s condition continued to deteriorate: he was found to have advanced lung cancer, and despite an apparently successful operation he died on January 11, 1949, five days before his sixtieth birthday. Maugham had been genuinely fond of Nelson, despite his drunkenness; he went to see him before he died, and in his letter of condolence he told Ellen how much he owed both to her husband’s friendship and to his acumen. “I am not so foolish as not to be aware that I should not hold the position I do in America except for his confidence in me & his constant effort to make me better & better known. I shall always be grateful to him for that, but also, even more, for the affection he bestowed upon me.”
As Nelson’s involvement in the business over the last couple of years had been minimal, Maugham experienced little change in his dealings with Doubleday. Somerset Maugham was the firm’s most valuable property and he was treated accordingly. It was disappointing that there were to be no more novels, but there was no question of Maugham’s retiring, and his name on fiction and nonfiction alike was a guarantee of sales often in the hundreds of thousands. The quality may not have been quite what it was, but if the critics were caustic, nobody cared: reviews had long ceased to matter when marketing Maugham. In 1947 a short-story collection, Creatures of Circumstance, was published, which included Maugham’s only Second World War story, a chilling tale set in occupied France describing the tortured relationship between a German soldier and the young French woman he has raped. The following year saw the publication of Great Novelists and Their Novels, introductions to ten world-class novels—among them Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, War and Peace—accompanying shortened versions of the works, abridged by Maugham. The Sunday Times, in the person of the paper’s foreign manager, Ian Fleming, bought the serial rights for £3,000, Fleming flying down to Nice to negotiate personally with the author; the serialization ran for fifteen weeks, resulting in a weekly increase of up to fifty thousand copies, 10 percent of the paper’s circulation. In 1949 Maugham published A Writer’s Notebook, a selection from the fifteen volumes of notes and memoranda he had kept since he was eighteen, including descriptive accounts of his travels, with the dedication, “In Loving Memory of My Friend Frederick Gerald Haxton.” And in the 1950s there were two collections of essays, The Vagrant Mood (1952) and Points of View (1958).
Far from trailing off during his seventies and eighties, Maugham’s career grew ever more phenomenally successful. In his old age he was regarded even in Britain as one of the Grand Old Men of English Letters, every birthday marked by newspaper articles and interviews and the arrival of literally hundreds of letters and telegrams at the Mauresque. He was the recipient of honors both at home and abroad, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Heidelberg, and Toulouse. In 1954, at Winston Churchill’s suggestion, he was appointed a Companion of Honour by the Queen, who received him in a private audience at Buckingham Palace. “[The Queen] was very nicely dressed43 & looked extremely pretty,” Maugham told Bert Alanson. “She asked me to sit down & we sat & talked for a quarter of an hour, after which she said, It’s been very nice to see you, Mr. Maugham; so I got up & she got up, we shook hands again, I bowed & retreated backwards for about three steps, then turned to reach for the door & walked out. It was all very easy & cosy.” In 1961 the Royal Society of Literature elected Maugham a Companion of Literature, his fellow CLs that year being Churchill, E. M. Forster, John Masefield, and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. Such recognition was gratifying, if late in arriving and in Maugham’s view inadequate. After going to Buckingham Palace to receive his CH, Maugham had lunched at the Garrick with Dadie Rylands and Arthur Marshall, who congratulated him warmly on his award. “But don’t you see44 what the C.H. means for somebody like me?” he asked them. “It means ‘well done, but ….’” In Maugham’s inner circle it was
understood that he had refused a knighthood, hoping instead for one of the most distinguished awards of all, the Order of Merit: it rankled that both Hardy and Galsworthy, inferior novelists in his opinion, had been awarded the OM, “[and as] I am the greatest living writer45 of English, they ought to give it to me.” Undeniably there was a tacit understanding in establishment circles that Maugham’s homosexuality had damaged his reputation. The nature of the relationship with Gerald Haxton had been widely known, whereas other homosexual writers, Hugh Walpole, for instance, had been far more successful in keeping their private lives private: Walpole had been knighted as long ago as 1937.
Astonishingly, Maugham, who was born in the year Disraeli succeeded Gladstone as prime minister, now found a large new audience through the medium of television. In 1948 four stories were filmed, “The Facts of Life,” “The Alien Corn,” “The Kite,” and “The Colonel’s Lady,” all scripted by R. C. Sherriff, author of Journey’s End, the famous play about the First World War. Maugham himself appears on-screen to introduce Quartet, his study at the Villa Mauresque painstakingly recreated at J. Arthur Rank’s Gainsborough Studios in Shepherd’s Bush. “You will remember how astonished46 I was to find the set an exact reproduction of my writing-room on Cap Ferrat,” he told the director, Antony Darnborough. “When I sat down at the desk & noticed the paper knife … I said to myself: ‘the dirty dogs, they’ve sneaked my paper-knife’ & when I took it up I was staggered to find by its weight that it was made of, I suppose, papier maché.” By today’s more naturalistic standards, Maugham gives a stilted performance. With his gentle Edwardian enunciation (“looking beck”), he is plainly struggling to remember his lines and there is some frantic fiddling with the said paper knife. Nevertheless, he claimed to have enjoyed the experience of “being a movie star for a couple of days,” and Quartet was such a success that it was followed by Trio (“The Verger,” “Mr. Know-All,” and “Sanatorium”) and then by Encore (“The Ant and the Grasshopper,” “Winter Cruise,” and “Gigolo and Gigolette”), the latter nominated for the Grand Prix at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 56
