During the 1940s and ’50s Maugham added substantially to his picture collection. “It has always been an ambition69 of mine … to make a small collection of Impressionist pictures,” he wrote to Bert Alanson while on a postwar shopping spree in New York. It was here that he bought some of his most important works, the Femme assise dans un fauteuil jaune by Matisse,* Bateaux à Argenteuil by Renoir, and Rouault’s powerful Christ crucifié, as well as a small Pissarro, a Bonnard, a Monet, and a Utrillo. Maugham has been condemned by much of the art establishment for his pedestrian taste in painting, marked down for his primarily literary approach to the visual arts. “He liked a picture70 for what he could read into it and write out of it rather than for any aesthetic reason,” commented Harold Acton, an opinion that Maugham’s own writing on the subject undeniably supports. “I do not think Utrillo71 is a great painter,” he stated in a magazine article in 1941, “but I have occasionally seen a picture of what is called his white period that has wrung my heart. To someone who knows Paris, those street scenes of sordid suburbs, with their air of desolation and their hostile silence, are of an infinite sadness.” During this same period further purchases were made in Paris and London, La neige à Louveciennes by Camille Pissarro, Femme à l’ombrelle verte by Matisse, Sisley’s Le Loing à Moret, and a luscious nude by Renoir, “rather buxom & a bright tomato colour, not very big, but very beautiful,” as Maugham delightedly described it. The last painting Maugham bought was a river scene, La Seine à Paris, by Lépine. He and Alan were passing a well-known gallery in Bond Street when they saw two men carrying in a picture covered by a sheet. Following them, they watched while the canvas, dirty and unframed, was unwrapped. “It was the picture72 I had been looking for in vain for years,” Maugham wrote. He asked the price, and a formidable sum was named. “‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy it.’” Another favorite work was by Toulouse-Lautrec, Le polisseur, a painting of a naked man on his hands and knees polishing a stone floor. The dealer told Maugham he could have asked three times the price had it been a nude woman, “[but] buyers jibbed at a male nude and I was able to buy it for a very reasonable sum.” Raw, brutal, and disturbing, Le polisseur is untypical Lautrec, far removed from his courtesans and can-can dancers, and it amused Maugham to ask visitors to the Villa to guess the artist: only once was the correct answer given.
Much as he loved the visual arts, Maugham knew he was an amateur with a comparatively uninformed taste, and when spending large sums of money he looked to others to advise him. In the early days he had been guided by Gerald Kelly and Hugh Lane; he had also consulted the great Parisian collector and connoisseur Alphonse Kahn. It was Kahn who introduced him to Fernand Léger, from whom he bought the abstract Les toits de Paris, which Léger had painted in homage to Cézanne. Subsequently Maugham turned for advice to Monroe Wheeler, to Jean Cocteau, and to one of the greatest of British art historians, Sir Kenneth Clark. Before the war a pupil of Bernard Berenson’s, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, director of the National Gallery, “K” Clark was recognized in his field as one of the foremost scholars of the age, admired as much for his lucid, lapidary style of writing as for his formidable intellect. He and Maugham formed a firm friendship, Maugham much appreciating Clark’s dry wit, fastidiousness, and urbanity, and becoming fond, too, of his elegant wife, Jane. The first time the Clarks came to the Mauresque, Maugham, as usual, challenged his guest to name the painter of Le polisseur. “Toulouse-Lautrec,” Clark replied with barely a moment’s hesitation. Unlike his mentor, Berenson, Clark respected Maugham’s response to painting. Berenson, on the one occasion on which Maugham visited him at I Tatti, remarked afterward that the writer had displayed “a fantastic absence of feeling73 for visual art. In so far as he praised anything here, it was the poorest stopgap paintings.” “K” Clark, on the other hand, thought that Maugham “was remarkably perceptive74 of excellence in all the arts,” including painting.
In the big sitting-room were pictures by Renoir and Monet in richly carved frames; on the staircase pictures by Matisse; but if one showed him reproductions of work by a painter unknown to him, like Paul Klee, his response was surprisingly quick and just. I once tried him to the limit with a Mondrian. To my astonishment he said “Yes, it is very fine.”
It was through an introduction from Monroe Wheeler that Maugham met a protégé of “K” Clark’s, the painter Graham Sutherland. In 1947 Sutherland and his wife while staying in the south of France were invited to the Mauresque, where Sutherland, like many before him, was immediately struck by the “paintability” of Maugham. He had never attempted a portrait before, but Maugham agreed to sit, and the Sutherlands moved into the villa for a week so that the painter could give himself over to his work, making pencil studies of his sitter’s head, sketching his arms, hands, and legs, and making notes about his clothes, a brown velvet smoking jacket, a rose-colored silk foulard, gray flannels, a pair of suede slippers. On a tall, narrow canvas, the now famous picture, creating the image by which Maugham is most widely identified, shows the subject seated on a bamboo stool, the figure set against a thickly painted yellow background, with a few palm fronds above his head making a delicate reference to the Orient. The posture is slightly hunched, the eyes are melancholy, the mouth downturned, and yet there is a glimmer of sardonic amusement, the impression of a detached observer quietly enjoying the spectacle of human frailty. “The first time I saw it75 I was shocked,” Maugham said in an interview, “and then I began to realize that here was far more of me than I ever saw myself.” Others, too, claimed to see in the portrait a different side to the man they thought they knew. Gerald Kelly joked that Sutherland had made his old friend look like the madam of a brothel in Shanghai, while Max Beerbohm was revolted by the painting and thought the subject appeared to have been tortured. Maugham himself, however, was so taken with the work that he offered to buy it, agreeing with Sutherland on a price of £500. The next day Alan turned up with £300 in his hand, explaining that as the payment was in cash a £200 discount was expected, a cut that the disgruntled artist felt forced to accept. Sutherland did well from the portrait nevertheless: Time magazine carried a photograph of it, with other publications quickly following suit, and the picture was exhibited at the Tate, with the result that the painter found himself much in demand, commissioned to portray, among others, the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill.
As became widely known, when Churchill saw his portrait, which had been commissioned by Parliament to hang in the House of Commons, he was appalled by the image represented, by the sadness and sense of defeat, and the canvas was destroyed on his wife’s orders. Interestingly, Maugham, too, grew to dislike his Sutherland portrait, and before long found an excuse to have it moved out of the villa. “Although I wouldn’t like Graham to know76 it for worlds, I found it a terribly difficult picture to hang,” he explained to “K” Clark. “It is a museum picture rather than a picture for a private house.” But the truth was that he came to be haunted by it, haunted by its merciless vision and by the terrifying vista it revealed of an inexorably approaching and miserable old age.
* It was this letter that gave Coward the idea for his 1966 play, Song at Twilight.
† “Everything reminds me of him, and I see him often, too often for my peace of mind, in my dreams, where he is always cheerful and lively and delightful.”
* It was Maugham’s recommendation that persuaded Nelson Doubleday in 1946 to publish Edmund Wilson’s short-story collection, Memoirs of Hecate County.
* “Here’s your American Colonel, your great friend … VERY SAD—because his Louis is in Paris so far from England….”
* Posner later added W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, and André Gide, among others, to his literary conquests. He studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, published seven books of poetry, and taught at New York State University and the University of California. He married, fathered two sons, and died of AIDS in Florida in 1985.
* Charlotte Shaw directed that the bulk of her fortune b
e employed in improving the manners and deportment of the Irish people, a scheme described by Shaw’s biographer Michael Holroyd as “Charlotte’s version of the Pygmalion experiment” (Bernard Shaw, Vol. III, 1918–1950: The Lure of Fantasy [Chatto & Windus, 1991] p. 499).
* Maugham’s French doctor, Georges Rosanoff, strongly disapproved of the Niehans treatment, which he believed had had a deleterious effect on his patient. “Une cure de cellules fraîches, très à la mode, qu’il avait suivie en Suisse … avait été très mal supportée,” he wrote in his memoirs. “J’eus beaucoup de difficultés à réparer les dégâts.” (“He had not reacted well to a fresh-cell treatment, very fashionable, that he had undertaken in Switzerland. I had much difficulty in repairing the damage.”) (Rosanoff, Racontez Docteur [Guy le Prat, 1977], p. 142).
* Maugham used occasionally to visit Matisse, a neighbor of his on the Riviera. “J’achète des tableaux pour fleurir ma maison [I buy pictures to make my house blossom],” he once told Matisse. In response Matisse gave a snort of disgust. “Ça, c’est la decoration! [That’s mere decoration!],” Purely for My Pleasure, p. 6
CHAPTER 16
BETRAYAL
• • •
ON THE DAY AFTER HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY IN JANUARY 1944, Maugham had written in his notebook, “On the continent of Europe1 they have an amiable custom when a man who has achieved some distinction reaches that age. His friends, his colleagues, his disciples … join together to write a volume of essays in his honour.” But when Maugham turned seventy the war was on and he was in America, and there was no opportunity for any such act of homage; and so it was not until ten years later, when he reached the age of eighty, that just such a plan was put into action. Heinemann commissioned the novelist Jocelyn Brooke to put together a Festschrift, a collection of essays on Maugham by fellow writers to be presented to him as a birthday tribute. Brooke solicited contributions from many of the most distinguished literary figures of the day, from poets, publishers, novelists, critics, from Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, Rosamond Lehmann, Anthony Powell, William Plomer, Rose Macaulay, Rupert Hart-Davis, William Sansom, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell, J. R. Ackerley, Noël Coward. But to Brooke’s dismay, one after the other the polite excuses came flowing in: “not a great fan of his2 … obliged to decline” (William Plomer), “don’t think I’m at all3 the person to write about [him]” (Angus Wilson), “May I be excused?”4 (William Sansom), “[cannot] because of the novel5 which I MUST finish” (Elizabeth Bowen), “truly and deeply sorry6 to say that I cannot contribute” (Noël Coward). The only two acceptances came from Anthony Powell and Raymond Mortimer. “[I] shall produce 2000 words7 for you if I possibly can,” wrote Mortimer, “[but] I don’t myself think that there is a great variety of things to say about Maugham [and] a devastating paper could be written on the limitations of his taste…. I am the last person, however, to emphasise such deficiencies … for he is a very old friend whom I regard with grateful affection.” But two contributions were not enough, and in the face of this fastidious flinching, of this general lack of respect for Maugham’s work, Brooke had no option but to abandon the project.
The birthday did not pass unnoticed, however: it was given extensive coverage in the press, and Punch ran a caricature of the writer by Ronald Searle accompanying a ditty by the magazine’s assistant editor, B. A. Young:
I bask in Antibes8 and in honour, and consider the works of my pen
That have made me in one full lifetime all things to all literate men:
The rich man’s MARIE CORELLI, the poor man’s ANDRÉ GIDE,
A STEVENSON told of the facts of life, a KIPLING shorn of his creed.
O, I was TERENCE RATTIGAN when TERENCE was still in his cot,
And the films and TV will call on me when USTINOV’s long forgot.
Though the Ale I brewed was bitter, my Cakes were as sweet as sin,
And they brought me the Moon I sighed for, with a bit over Sixpence thrown in.
The world’s most delectable secrets turned to Ashenden in my mouth,
And the fetters of Human Bondage hold me fast in the suns of the south.
Among the most generous accolades was one from Maugham’s old friend Compton Mackenzie, who wrote an open letter in The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, speaking not only on behalf of Maugham’s fellow writers but also for “those thousands of readers9 and playgoers all over the world whom you are still entertaining as you entertained their fathers [and] grandfathers.” Mackenzie referred to his lifelong admiration for Maugham, which, he said, dated back to 1897 and his first reading of Liza of Lambeth, when “I regarded you with reverence as one of those fearless spirits who were liberating us from the shackles of Victorianism.” As well as this, there was an exhibition of Maugham’s manuscripts and first editions at the Times Bookshop in Wigmore Street, and a dinner given for him at the Garrick, during which a toast was proposed by the playwright St. John Ervine, followed by a speech from Maugham himself. This turned out to be a harrowing experience. Maugham gave a most impressive performance, Ervine recalled, his speech, which he had learned by heart, “full of wit, humour, well-turned phrases, and, surprisingly to some people, but not to me, full of feeling.” But then toward the end he suddenly dried up:
Anybody else would have sat down10 in confusion…. But Maugham stood perfectly still, though his fingers were trembling. After a few moments, he said, “I’m just thinking of what I shall say next!” Then he lapsed into silence again. A little later, he said, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting!” and became silent once more. Then, suddenly the machine of his mind moved again, and he finished the speech finely. He must have had a dry-up for about a couple of minutes, rather more than that, I should say, but remained imperturbable apparently, throughout what must have been a dreadful ordeal. And the company sat absolutely still.
Inevitably with such a world-renowned writer, Maugham had long been targeted by would-be biographers. Since the late 1920s there had appeared a number of critical studies of his work, and to those who wrote to him for information he was unfailingly helpful and courteous; for such a reticent man he answered questions with surprising frankness and often at length: as Sam Behrman remarked, “he will tell you everything,11 up to a point.” Maugham nevertheless made it clear to these authors that they must not expect him to read the results of their research. “I really cannot stand12 reading about myself unless I am absolutely forced to do so,” he explained to an American academic, Richard Cordell, who published a critical study in 1961. “It is a pathological defect [but] it is as uncomfortable for me to read praise … as it is to read censure.” On biography, however, Maugham took a tougher stance, implacably opposed to any revelations about his personal life. In 1959 there had been one biographical work, W. Somerset Maugham: A Candid Portrait, by Maugham’s old acquaintance Karl G. Pfeiffer, then a professor of English at New York University; it was gossipy, inaccurate, mildly malicious, and on the whole harmless, but Maugham had disliked it exceedingly, not only because of the invasion of privacy but because he felt betrayed: he had known Pfeiffer, had even had him to stay at the Mauresque, and had had no idea that their conversations were being secretly recorded for a book.
Now in his old age there were frequent requests from writers known and unknown hoping that he would agree to cooperate in, or at the very least not oppose the writing of, the big biography. Such a man, such a life presented an irresistible subject, but Maugham was determined to allow none of it, and he went to great lengths to protect himself. He instructed his literary executors (Frere, until he retired from Heinemann in 1961, when his place was taken by the literary agent Spencer Curtis Brown) that after his death they should continue to refuse information and access to all applicants, deny permission for the publication of letters, and where possible urge any person in possession of letters to destroy them. Further to cover his tracks, Maugham burned every scrap of documentary evidence he could lay his hands on. For years he had been ruthless with his own corresponden
ce; Glenway Wescott remembered watching him answering letters at Yemassee, how “he tears everything13 into small scraps with a kind of spiteful haste and energy,” and how, in a series of great bonfires at the Mauresque, Maugham threw into the flames every morsel he could find, including letters he had overlooked from long ago, letters from Sue Jones, from Arnold Bennett, Ada Leverson, H. G. Wells, Gerald Kelly, Desmond MacCarthy. Into the bonfire, too, at Maugham’s insistence, went almost everything of Alan Searle’s, including, to Alan’s dismay, his love letters from Lytton Strachey. “I had held on to those letters,”14 he pathetically recalled, “[because] I thought if something happened to Willie I might sell them.”*
In the last years of Maugham’s life, attitudes in England toward homosexuality were beginning to grow more tolerant, although the homosexual law reform bill was not to be passed until two years after his death. Yet Maugham was very much a product of his age, and his deviant sexuality, as it was then regarded, was an aspect of his life he strongly felt should be kept concealed. The outward appearance of respectability had always been of the utmost importance to him: when in 1954 Terence Rattigan asked for signatures on a petition supporting the young peer Edward Montagu, on trial for homosexual offenses, Maugham and Noël Coward were the only two who refused. With the gate firmly barred against bona fide biographers, Maugham might have felt relatively secure, but he still had to deal with the threat of blackmail. The first such approach was fairly easy to brush off, from Gerald’s boyfriend, Louis Legrand, who in middle age had gone out to Australia to seek his fortune. When he failed to prosper, it occurred to Loulou that he was in possession of some valuable property in the form of letters not only from Haxton and Maugham, but also from a number of distinguished gentlemen whose acquaintance Loulou had made at the Mauresque and who might not be entirely overjoyed if the nature of that relationship were to be revealed. Loulou sent a series of misspelled letters to Maugham himself, to Alan, to Robin and to Liza (“Your kids of Paravicini15 & Lord Hope, will not be pleased when I shall give my memoires at the public [sic]”), but fortunately he was found to be open to reason and the matter was satisfactorily settled by a lawyer’s letter and a check. But then a far more insidious threat materialized, this time from within the family, from none other than Maugham’s nephew, Robin.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 58
