Despite his sometimes questionable behavior, Maugham was fond of Robin, although it had long been clear that his nephew’s high-flying ambitions for himself were unlikely to be realized. In 1941, when Robin had stayed with his uncle in South Carolina, he had talked a great deal about his plans for the future and his desire to write. Maugham had been supportive, if uneasy about certain facets of Robin’s character, in particular a lack of application and a tendency toward showing off. “Robin’s handicap has always been16 that he was not interested in people for their own sake but only for the impression he was making on them,” he told Kate Bruce. “That’s not the attitude that makes a good writer.” Since the war, Robin had failed to make a success of anything: he had given up the law and had failed at farming, and despite a brief success with a novella, The Servant, later made into a film, his writing remained unremarkable, giving rise to a suspicion that it was not writing per se that attracted Robin so much as the lavish lifestyle with which a few practitioners, notably his uncle, were rewarded. “[Robin] is as frivolous17 & scatter-brained as he was as a boy,” Maugham complained as Robin approached his fortieth birthday:
He has never grown up. He mixes with very disreputable people & throws his money around in the most reckless fashion…. It is all a terrible pity; he was a nice lad [and] might have amounted to something if he hadn’t been so self-satisfied and fond of the bottle.
For Maugham it was Robin’s habitual heavy drinking that gave rise to the greatest anxiety, as he had seen at close quarters how effectively alcohol could wreck a career. “It has been my ill-fortune18 to live much among drunkards,” he was to write in an essay published in 1951, “and for my part I have found them boring at their best and disgusting at their worst.” When in his cups, Robin could be both, and his uncle’s tolerance was wearing thin. On his father’s death Robin had inherited the viscountcy and, as the second Lord Maugham, had immediately begun throwing his weight around, spending heavily to impress his attendant court of rent boys and hangers-on, confident that on his uncle’s death he would become a very rich man. However, his expectations in that direction were less secure than he knew. The trust that Maugham had set up for Robin before the war had increased considerably in value, but Maugham had grown so alarmed by his nephew’s irresponsible behavior that he decided to reduce it, siphoning off a substantial part into the settlement he had made for Liza and her children. Maugham saw no reason to inform his nephew of his action: Robin would still have a capital sum of $50,000, the interest on which, he considered, would yield a more than adequate annual income.
Of all Maugham’s relations, it was only Robin whom Alan regarded as a friend. The two had always been close, Robin lending a sympathetic ear to Searle’s grievances, while Alan acted as an invaluable mediator and informant; he spoke up for him when Robin was in trouble with his uncle and he kept him in touch with what was going on at the Villa. Naturally Alan was privy to all Maugham’s affairs, affairs about which Robin increasingly began to show a lively curiosity. It was Alan one day, while the two of them were sitting by the pool, who indiscreetly revealed that the old man, disapproving of an increasing fecklessness and self-indulgence in Robin’s behavior, had substantially reduced the financial provision he had made for his nephew. Robin, who had long lived with the comforting prospect of inheriting a generous unearned income, had been appalled. “I must tell you that this has come19 as a terrible blow … one of the greatest blows I’ve ever known,” he wrote to Searle after he returned to England.
During all these long years, I have always been able to console myself with the thought that … I had a substantial amount to look forward to when I could no longer make much money from writing…. Please, dear Alan, if you possibly get the chance, do put in a word for me so that I can get the settlement made back to me now.
Alan promised to do what he could, but it would have to wait for the right moment. Meanwhile he expressed his readiness to help forward a more immediately lucrative project, the writing of a full-scale biography, with no holds barred. Robin had first suggested the idea of a biography more than ten years before, but Maugham had rejected the proposal out of hand; now, however, with Alan as his backstage informant, Robin had an immensely profitable proposition in view, and with his financial future suddenly diminished he could hardly be expected to let it go. With a certain amount of trepidation he wrote to Maugham. “Dearest Willie,” his letter began,
I’ve had an offer from the American20 publisher, Victor Weybright, of an advance of 50,000 dollars…. Obviously I can’t afford to turn down such a good offer. But equally obviously I don’t want to write such a book behind your back. As you know, although I earn enough from my writing to keep me going each year, I haven’t a penny of capital…. So what I really need, if you will give it me, is first of all, your blessing that I should accept the offer to write a full-length biography, and secondly as much help as you could possibly give me…. It does seem to me that with my deep admiration and affection for you I am at least likely to produce a better biography of you than anyone else.
Despite the undoubtedly genuine expression of affection, Maugham had no trouble recognizing blackmail when he saw it. He instantly paid up, sending Robin a check for the exact sum he had been offered by Weybright, on the strict understanding that he drop all plans of writing about him. “I promise you here and now21 that I will keep my part of the bargain,” Robin wrote with every appearance of sincerity.
I give you my word that I shall not write any other biography about you—ever…. I can use part of the money to pay off my overdraft and I can use the rest to buy myself an annuity which will make all the difference to my life because it will give me security. I’m really awfully shy about all this, but I’m also very grateful.
When after his eightieth-birthday celebrations Maugham returned to the south of France, he found over a thousand letters of congratulation awaiting him. This was in addition to the normal heavy volume of business and personal correspondence and of fan letters, often amounting to five hundred a week, nearly all of which had to be dealt with by Alan Searle. There were also frequent telephone calls, invitations, and requests for interviews, all filtered through Alan, who as Maugham’s secretary reveled in his position as guardian of the gate, even if it sometimes left him feeling flustered and exhausted. “[Mr. Maugham’s] celebrity in Europe22 has reached its peak, and I am hard put to it to protect him from the Press and all and sundry,” he wrote to Bert Alanson. “I get insulted most days by all the people I keep at bay, but it’s part of the job [and] I rather enjoy the reflected glory.” But even with the stresses and strains, Alan relished the glamour and excitement, especially when staying in London at the Dorchester, where he met numbers of famous people and was constantly petitioned by sycophantic journalists all dependent on Alan for their access to Maugham. Indeed, Searle was usually happier when away from Cap Ferrat, where he had the responsibility of the whole household on his shoulders and where he often felt unwell. Alan suffered from a skin condition, psoriasis, that the heat in summer made worse; he was prone to hemorrhoids and also to frequent liver attacks: the food at the Mauresque was rich, Alan was very greedy, and as a result he frequently had to spend a day in bed overwhelmed by headaches and nausea. Against this, he loved the social life, the luncheon parties, the constant arriving and departing of guests from England and America. With most of Maugham’s friends he quickly adopted a manner of cozy intimacy, and in many cases, because they in return were genial toward him, he came to believe that he was held in much higher regard than was in fact the case.
Generally speaking, visitors to the Mauresque liked Alan well enough. His good humor and desire to please, above all his obvious devotion to his master, won respect; but most people, although naturally they concealed it, also found him silly and a bit of a bore. “[Alan] was not in himself23 very interesting company,” said Glenway Wescott, “a namby-pamby”24 said Jerry Zipkin, “muddle-headed [and] not very bright”25 according to the art critic Douglas
Cooper. High-strung and emotional, Alan was quick to interpret a normal show of friendliness and good manners as a sign of deep and undying affection for himself, and for some it was faintly embarrassing when Searle, after typing a letter of his employer’s, would add an effusive handwritten postscript of his own. On letters of Maugham’s to Lady Clark, for instance, Alan nearly always wrote a sentimental, sometimes rather bold, personal message—“I think you are a darling,26 and I love you. XX [kisses] Get some nice chap to give you these for me”—while Jerry Zipkin was frequently and fervently told, “[You are] such a darling27 … I have few friends I love as much as I love you….”
For Searle, the two greatest pleasures in life were sex and self-pity. He loved to wallow in self-pity, complaining about his health, his nerves, the pressure of work, and above all his anxiety about what was to happen after his employer’s death, when, he claimed, he would be turned out of the house with nothing and left to starve. He talked endlessly about his expectations, or lack of them, his voice breaking as he described the pathos of his situation, the fact that he believed Maugham was going to leave him penniless, that he would be thrown out onto the street when he was too old and frail to make a fresh start. That all this was nonsense, that Maugham had made it clear from the beginning that he had generously provided for him, made not the slightest difference to the burden of Alan’s song. Some of Maugham’s old friends, George Cukor among them, weary of the endless litany, tried to make him see reason, but Alan refused to listen. The truth was, as Jerry Zipkin soon realized, “he enjoyed the complaining.”28 Every summer when Zipkin came to the Mauresque he would be treated yet again to “Alan’s annual speech of complaint about all the objets that were his or that Willie had promised him, and what would happen after Willie died.” Eventually, Zipkin suggested he draw up a list and get Maugham to sign it, which Maugham was perfectly willing to do, “but Alan never would, preferring to complain.”
It was Zipkin who was central, also, to Alan’s other hobby, as he arranged for regular supplies of pornographic material to be sent over from the States. Boxes of photographs and magazines (the parcels carefully disguised to avoid the attention of French Customs) arrived at intervals from a specialist firm in Arizona, from which Alan, alone in his bedroom, derived many hours of vigorous pleasure. “Thank you for all those wonderful picture books!”29 begins one enthusiastic letter. “They’ve nearly driven me mad, and I am in a state of complete exhaustion, and almost too weak to turn the pages.” Any good-looking young man invited to the Mauresque was pounced on, and most nights after dinner, Alan, like Gerald before him, would go over to Villefranche on the prowl. Searle was known along the Riviera for his proclivities; he tipped generously and so was always made welcome, his stout figure a familiar sight in backstreet bars and on the quayside when the American fleet was in.
Yet for all his foolishness and neuroses, it was Alan who made Maugham’s highly structured routine possible, who protected him, cared for him, and showed him infinite kindness and compassion. The two men were largely compatible and understood each other very well; “[Mr. Maugham] was generous to me30 & loved me with all my faults,” wrote Alan in later life. Yet Maugham, irascible in his old age, was frequently impatient with Alan, and, a master of the lethal barb, he would sometimes lash out at him with a ferocity that sent Searle rushing from the room in tears. This could annoy Maugham more, or alternately overwhelm him with guilt so that he would treat Alan with particular tenderness for the following day or two. Guests at the Villa were often shocked at the treatment meted out to Alan. “Alan Searle was a knight,”31 according to Liza, “[and] some of the crushing and cruel things my father said to him were devastating,” a perception shared by Christopher Isherwood, who “said in his entire life32 he’s never known anyone so mistreated as Alan, so pissed on, kicked and shamed and disbelieved.” Yet it was also evident that Alan reveled in the drama of it: he loved to be petted and pitied, and Maugham’s harshness provided him with ever richer material for his grievances.
There were, too, enormous advantages to living with Maugham, and among the most prized by Searle was the opportunity to travel. Every year they journeyed within Europe, to Germany, Austria, Italy, Portugal, and Spain; in 1950 they went to Morocco, in 1953 to Greece and Turkey, and in 1956 to Egypt, where they were sumptuously entertained by the Aga Khan. After the war Maugham went only twice more to the United States, in 1949 and in 1950, when he presented the manuscript of “The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey” to the Library of Congress; but in 1959, at the age of eighty-five, he returned to the Far East, to Japan, where he had long been enormously popular, revisiting en route many of the old ports of call, Singapore, Saigon, Manila, Hong Kong. On their arrival in Yokohama, a crowd of several thousand was waiting to greet the great English novelist, a scene that was repeated in Tokyo, to Alan’s intense excitement. “Mr. M.’s popularity in Japan33 is quite fantastic, and we can’t put our noses outside the door without being instantly recognised … it has been really staggering!” They were escorted during part of their stay by the English novelist Francis King, then living in Kyoto. King was impressed by Maugham’s lively curiosity about Japanese life and culture. “He still felt he had something34 important to learn…. He was often almost dead from exhaustion but he was determined to see all that he could.”
Until well into his eighties, Maugham made little change to the schedule he had established as a young man, every morning retiring to his study to write as he had done all his life, although now he had to wear an elastic brace on his right hand. While no longer producing fiction, Maugham was still an immense bestseller, and naturally enough was much sought after to write introductions to the works of others. He contributed to books about Robbie Ross, Eddie Marsh, Charlie Chaplin, and Gladys Cooper; he wrote a foreword to the autobiography of the Aga Khan and a preface to a translation of The Letters of Madame de Sévigné by his childhood friend from Paris, Violet Hammersley (née Williams-Freeman).
In 1951 Maugham brought out A Choice of Kipling’s Prose, his personal selection of stories by a writer for whom his feelings had always been somewhat ambivalent. Maugham had known Kipling only slightly, meeting him first at a dinner party in the 1890s, during which he remembered thinking that if Kipling said “pukka sahib” one more time he would throw a decanter at him. During the 1930s Kipling was brought to lunch at the Mauresque, and Maugham was amused to find that little had changed. “He’s a white man,”35 Kipling declared of a chap he admired, and Maugham waited for the inevitable phrase to follow. “He’s a pukka sahib all right,” continued Kipling, exactly on cue. The writer’s daughter, Elsie Bambridge, had asked Maugham to do the book, and before making his choice he reread all the short stories, as he reported to Peter Stern. “I have been reading Kipling,36 reading Kipling, reading Kipling (the repetition is designed to express endurance, constancy, perseverance, a will of iron, determination & bull-dog courage) & at his best I think he is grand (Caps); at his worst—O God!” Such facetiousness notwithstanding, Maugham’s admiration was genuine, in particular for the Indian stories, and his appraisal is both generous and judicious. “[Kipling] is our greatest story writer,”37 he concludes, “the only writer of short stories our country has produced who can stand comparison with Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov.”
In his eighties Maugham continued to write because in a sense he had no choice. “The fact is that, like drinking,38 writing is a very easy habit to form & a devilish hard one to break,” as he explained to Bert Alanson. And yet now in old age his inspiration was failing him; his imagination had run dry, and he could no longer inhabit the vivid interior landscape in which he had lived with such intensity and absorption for over half a century. “[My] fertile invention39 … is a thing of the past,” he ruefully admitted, “[and] I am well aware that I have lost any talent I may have had…. Not being a creative writer anymore, is very lonely. Your characters don’t exist with you anymore.” In a newspaper interview Maugham gave in 1958, he said sadly, “Writing
with me40 has been like a disease, but now I must be content with an hour a day, if my hand allows, of writing about books instead of people. It is not the same thing at all.” He sounded, said the reporter,
like a man about to be divorced from a woman he really loves but cannot live with any longer…. As he spoke he kept rubbing the muscle between the thumb and the first finger nervously. Then he said, seeing my interest: “That is where it hurts. The muscle has just given up after all these years.”
Increasingly, memories of the past began to haunt him, memories of his vigorous young manhood, of his childhood, and of his love for his mother, the only fully requited love he had ever known; his mind dwelled on Gerald and of their years together and their travels in the South Pacific and the Far East. To H. E. Bates, who in 1953 dedicated a book of stories to him, Maugham wrote poignantly that “the last one ‘The Delicate Nature’41 took me a long way back & my memory fizzled with all my half-forgotten recollections of the East. I was thrilled & at the same time rather unhappy. Oh, the past!” By comparison Maugham found his daily life colorless, and he grew increasingly restless and dissatisfied. “I could not stand the life42 for a month if I hadn’t got a certain amount of work to do,” he complained to his niece Kate, “but that occupies only my morning & I have the rest of the day to get through.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 59
