The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

  The “hidden things” so ominously hinted at by Alan was a reference to a sensational revelation he had up his sleeve regarding Liza’s true paternity: the scandal was not that she had been born out of wedlock, which she now knew, but that Maugham was not her father. Taking full advantage of Maugham’s increasing senility, Alan easily convinced him that Syrie had deceived him, that it was not he but any one of half a dozen lovers who might have fathered the child. From there it was a small step to persuade the eighty-nine-year-old Maugham that he should disown Liza and adopt Frank Alan Searle, aged fifty-seven, as his son; and once the adoption had been made official, the obvious next step would be to disinherit Liza and make Alan his heir. On counsel’s advice, and to simplify the paternity case, it was decided not to bring up the subject of several lovers, but to argue that because Syrie was still married to Henry Wellcome when Liza was born, and because Wellcome had never disclaimed her as his daughter, then legally Liza was his child, not Maugham’s. To make doubly sure that Liza would be left with nothing, Maugham, who by now had been worked up into a state of fury against his daughter, intended also to sue for the return of all gifts made to her on the grounds that over the years she and her children had clearly demonstrated “gross ingratitude.”

  This complicated case was complicated further by the fact that with Maugham domiciled in France it involved both French and English law, with the opposing sides each obliged to hire two teams of lawyers. The process was lengthy, distressing, and horrifyingly expensive; inevitably it attracted a great deal of media attention, with the press turning the whole affair into a freak show, a circus of scandal, gossip, and sanctimonious morality, embellished by irreverent jokes and jocular cartoons. The French hearing took place in camera at the Palais de Justice in Nice, at the end of which, on July 3, 1962, the court ruled in Liza’s favor, declaring that there was no evidence to show Lady John Hope was not the daughter of Somerset Maugham; that under British law a child born out of wedlock becomes legitimate when the parents marry, and in France a legitimate child cannot be disinherited; and that the attempted adoption of Alan Searle was invalid. In London, after much wrangling, the quarrel over the ownership of the villa and the proceeds of the Sotheby’s sale was settled out of court: Maugham agreed to pay Liza 50 percent of the money raised by the sale of her nine pictures, as well as her considerable court costs, and she would also retain her right of ownership of the Mauresque. Everything else, the contents of the house, money, royalties, which had always been destined for her and her children, Maugham was now free to leave to whomever he chose.

  The legal hearings and accompanying publicity had imposed an enormous strain on Alan. (“I am peace-loving,68 so you can imagine what a torment all these dreadful law-suits are,” he unblushingly complained. “None of the quarrels are mine, but I seem to get all the knocks and the odium.”) Yet for Maugham it was much worse. Already half demented, he was plunged into a maelstrom of anger and fear, haunted by all the most sulfurous memories of the past and of the torment of his marriage to Syrie. Several of his friends were disturbed by his state of mind, Noël Coward among them. “He is devoured by retrospective hate69 of poor Syrie and it has become an obsession,” Noël noted in his diary. The obsession was now to take a material form, following an innocent suggestion of Glenway Wescott’s that Maugham should write an autobiography. At first dismissive of the idea, Maugham began to consider it, and during the period of the hostilities with Liza he set to work. Naturally enough, the project was vigorously encouraged by his publishers, and also by Maugham’s neighbor, Max Beaverbrook, who scented a richly rewarding subject for serialization in the Sunday Express. When finished, the book was everything Beaverbrook could have hoped, but its content appalled Frere, who was the first to see a typescript of Looking Back. It was quite clear to him that its central theme, a vitriolic account of the author’s marriage, was the product of an unsound mind, that Maugham, in short, had taken leave of his senses, and that he must be protected from having his dotage exposed. Honorably, he refused to publish Looking Back, and he persuaded Doubleday to do the same. But Beaverbrook had no such qualms. Working with the eager cooperation of Alan Searle, the work’s dedicatee, Beaverbrook played his hand cleverly, persuading Maugham to add yet more revelations and organizing a sensational publicity campaign. Alan, to whom the proceeds had been made over, was delighted to have done so well out of the deal, being paid £35,000 for the serialization by the Express newspapers and $250,000 by Show magazine in America. “I am thrilled,”70 he wrote to Beaverbrook. “It is a very pleasant feeling to have something secure for the future.”

  LOOKING BACK IS VISIBLY the product of a failing intelligence. In it Maugham rambles over episodes of his life, describing fairly cursorily his childhood and education, his career as a dramatist, his travels, his work in espionage; he ponders religion and philosophy, and talks a little of the visual arts; he fondly recalls his affair with Sue Jones; but it is the account he gives of his relationship with Syrie, unfettered and envenomed, that in the eyes of the world made the work both so fascinating and so shocking. His description of Syrie’s relentless pursuit of him, of her giving birth in Rome under an assumed name, her attempted suicide in the face of his reluctance to marry her, the frightful quarrels during their time together, her dishonesty in her business dealings—all is retailed in a strangely bland and monotonous tone. At the end of the book, Maugham, describing himself as “a very imperfect and tormented creature,”71 admits that “I cut a very poor figure” before adding his familiar mantra, inscribed so often before: “If I have written it, it is to rid myself of recollections which too often have given me sleepless nights, for I have learned by experience that a sure way to free myself of haunting memories is to set them down in black and white.”

  This time, however, the fail-safe formula failed. During the seven weeks that Looking Back ran in the Sunday Express, in September and October 1962, “All hell,” as Frere remarked, “was let loose.”72 Maugham was inundated by abusive letters, many of them anonymous. “Everyone is fully aware of the stinking, filthy life you have led,” runs one typical example. “You are a perfect disgrace to Britain and the sooner you leave this island of ours, the better, together with that boy-friend of yours.” But far more personally wounding was the reaction of many of his friends, to the fore those who had been also friends of Syrie’s. “Entirely contemptible,”73 said Noël Coward; “a senile and scandalous work,”74 Graham Greene wrote in a letter to the Daily Telegraph; Maugham was “an obscene little toad,”75 according to Rebecca West; Garson Kanin described the work as “shabby, sordid, embarrassing76 [and] a wildly faggoty thing to have done.” In October, Maugham came over to London as usual, and as usual went to the Garrick. As he entered the bar on the first floor, everyone stopped talking, and after a couple of seconds several members ostentatiously walked out. Maugham was devastated. It was borne in upon him that he was to be ostracized, that he had gravely offended, had broken the English gentleman’s code of conduct, a code that no one understood better than he, that he had admired, analyzed, sometimes mocked, and on the outward observance of which he had based his entire existence. With the publication of Looking Back, said Gore Vidal, “the ancient Maugham mined his own monument,77 and blew it up.” Alone with Alan, he wept and wept, tortured by guilt, overcome with remorse. The two of them returned to the Mauresque in December, and Maugham never came to England again.

  FOR A MAN WHO had achieved such success in life as Somerset Maugham, who had shown such wisdom, such perception in his understanding of human nature, few would have predicted an old age of almost unrelieved anguish. He began to have nightmares from which he awoke terrified, and Searle now slept in Maugham’s bedroom so he could comfort him when he awoke, getting up as many as six times in the night; during the day Maugham sat for hours at a time immobilized by despair, crying uncontrollably, refusing to be consoled. Wretchedly unhappy, he was unable to find relief anywhere or in anything. Toward the end of Looking Back he states unc
ompromisingly, “I believe neither in the existence of God78 nor in the immortality of the soul,” yet the subject of religion continued to attract and mystify him while offering neither comfort nor conviction. As he neared his ninetieth year he grew more miserably restless, compelled to travel, as though searching for the safe haven which his own home no longer provided. “The maps are out,”79 Alan would report with a sinking heart. “He is very frail, but longs to be on the move. It is a great anxiety for me.” And indeed, with Maugham confused and increasingly incontinent, it was becoming impossible to cope, even in the grandest hotels. There had been some nightmarish incidents while staying at the Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich in October 1963, leading Alan to swear, “Never again will I stir an inch80 without the valet and a male nurse”; and the following year a trip to Venice was such a disaster that “we had to come home two weeks early. It has finally taught me that our travelling days are over.”

  And yet returning to the Mauresque offered little respite. “Rarely sensible, and in acute misery,”81 as Searle described him, Maugham knew he was dying and he longed to depart. “Poor, poor Willie,”82 Alan wrote to Robin. “He takes his medicines with reluctance. “‘Don’t try to keep me alive’ he begs. ‘Just let me slip away.’” On his ninetieth birthday, January 25, 1964, he was photographed shuffling along the terrace well wrapped up, accompanied by a beloved dachshund, George, a present from the Freres. In a birthday interview published in the Sunday Express, Maugham was quoted as saying that he still grieved for his mother (“even today the pain of her passing83 is as keen as when it happened in our home in Paris”) and that he longed for death: “I am drunk with the thought of it. It seems to me to offer me the final and absolute freedom.” Occasionally old friends dropped in to see him, among them Noël Coward, who was staying nearby. “I called on Willie Maugham,”84 he wrote in his diary on August 25, 1965, “and I am glad I did because he was wretchedly, pathetically grateful. He is living out his last days in a desperate nightmare, poor beast. He barely makes sense and, of course, he knows his mind has gone. I managed to cheer him a bit and certainly helped poor Alan who is going through hell.”

  Alan was indeed going through hell. Having cried wolf for so many years, he now had serious cause for complaint. Maugham, deaf and with failing eyesight, was helpless, hopeless, and entirely dependent on Alan for everything. To make matters worse, the old man was subject to violent changes of mood, sometimes tearful and whimpering for sex, on other occasions seemingly possessed by furies, physically attacking Searle with a strength that hardly seemed possible from such a frail and shrunken body. “I have been shut up with a madman,”85 Alan wrote desperately to Robin. “His beastliness is beyond endurance…. He lives in some terrifying world86 of his own which must be grim if his screams and terror are anything to go by.” It was Robin who came most often to the Villa, an immense comfort to Searle, who, unless there was someone else prepared to sit with Maugham, was literally a prisoner in the house; the servants refused to be left alone with their master and would have nothing to do with any nursing, feeding, washing, or cleaning up. “I have a good many87 very unpleasant chores to perform,” Alan told Glenway Wescott. “Poor old darling, how he would have hated and loathed it all in the old days.” The staff were also afraid of him: as the old man seemed physically to shrivel, so his rages became more ferocious; he was “like a malignant crab,”88 said Robin, and even he had to summon all his courage to face his uncle at his most maniacal. Yet for Robin these last days at the Mauresque yielded their own rewards. During the hours when the old man was in his right mind, Robin questioned him industriously about his life and the people he had known, scurrying upstairs to his room afterward to write down every word of the conversation for future use. He also carefully recorded details of the clothes Maugham wore, his moods, his appearance, and even the dishes that were served at meals:

  [B]lack double-breasted quilted smoking jacket89 with purple design. White silk shirt open at neck. Narrow black trousers. Black velvet shoes with his monogram on toes in gold braid…. Lace table cloth. Pink champagne … pea soup, chicken in aspic and green salad, figs in strawberry sauce, cheese. Dates and nuts.

  And after Maugham had been put to bed, Robin would interrogate Alan, who needed little persuading to reveal the secrets that over the years Maugham had confided in him, as well as the many episodes that he himself had witnessed.

  Robin’s last visit was in July 1965, and it was shortly after this that Alan reached the end of his tether. “Willie is now completely out of his mind90 and is in a constant state of terror and misery,” he wrote to Ellen Doubleday.

  He rarely knows me now and wanders about the house muttering, muttering and muttering. Sometimes he talks for two or three days and nights without ceasing, and his energy is frightening.

  It was now that Alan in desperation decided to make contact with Liza, begging her to come down to the Mauresque. Liza, who had not seen her father in more than four years, arrived on November 3, met at the station by Searle, who warned her that she would find Maugham “absolutely mad” and possibly violent. Despite the warning, Liza was appalled by the sight of her father, a tiny, wizened figure, his face contorted as he constantly bared his teeth and growled at her, sometimes lunging toward her, his hands like claws. It was plain he had no idea who she was. Alan told her he could no longer go on, that he was at breaking point, and they agreed that Maugham should be brought to England, where he could be certified as insane. That evening on the drive back to Beaulieu Alan burst into tears and was still crying as Liza’s train drew out of the station.

  Events moved swiftly after Liza’s departure. At the beginning of December, Maugham, tripping on a corner of carpet, fell and cut his head, and shortly afterward he developed pneumonia. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the Anglo-American Hospital in Nice, where he could be looked after by his personal physician, Dr. Rosanoff. Here Maugham remained for more than a week, lying semicomatose in a ground-floor room whose French windows looked out onto a garden and a distant view of the Mediterranean. Camped outside the main entrance of the hospital was a growing crowd of reporters, photographers, and cameramen, to whom a daily briefing was delivered with considerable élan by the flamboyant Dr. Rosanoff, proud of his sudden celebrity status and enjoying every moment of his performance. Meanwhile in his hospital room Maugham grew restless, disturbed by the strong mistral blowing outside that rattled the windows. A young English nurse who came in to sit with him found her patient anxious and confused, desperately in need of comfort. When she tucked in his blankets, he asked her to get into bed with him. “It wasn’t sexual,”91 she said, “he wanted comfort”; he wanted to be held as his mother had held him when he was a small child, and she fetched a soft bolster and laid it up against his back, which seemed to soothe him. During the early hours of December 16, Maugham died, barely a month short of his ninety-second birthday. The doctor on duty was summoned. “Il est mort,” he confirmed. Alan was telephoned and within the hour arrived from the Mauresque. Quickly and under cover of darkness Maugham’s body was carried into the car and driven back to the villa, from where during the course of the morning it was announced to the world that Somerset Maugham had died in his bed at home, thus avoiding the autopsy that would otherwise have been required by French law.

  The body was laid out, and for several days neighbors came in to pay their respects as the press descended en masse. The cremation took place in Marseilles on December 20, with only Alan present. In a stupor of weariness and grief he sat in a waiting room at the crematorium for what seemed like hours, holding the small urn he had brought to receive the ashes. Eventually a man appeared carrying a tray covered by a linen cloth. Removing the cloth, he revealed several long grayish-white bones, too big to have been consumed in the fire, and asked if he might break them up so that they would fit into the casket. Producing a hammer from his pocket, he went to work with enthusiasm, at which point Searle, overcome, ran out into the street and vomited. Two days later, on
December 22, Maugham’s ashes were interred outside the Maugham Library at the King’s School, Canterbury, the ceremony presided over by the headmaster and by the dean of Canterbury, in the presence of boys from the school and a small group of mourners led by Liza, her husband, and her four children.

  When Maugham’s will was read, Alan Searle learned he was to be a very rich man. The Villa Mauresque went to Liza, who also kept the original financial settlements made for herself and her family. Robin, too, retained his trust fund, the income from which he supplemented by writing a series of memoirs of his uncle; within weeks of Maugham’s death he had outed him as a homosexual in a mass circulation Sunday newspaper, and continued to supply the market with more of the same, in Conversations with Willie, Somerset and All the Maughams, Escape from the Shadows, and so on. There were bequests of £2,000 each for Annette and for Jean the chauffeur, and Maugham’s portrait by Edouard MacAvoy was willed to the city of Nice. Everything else, the contents of the villa, all money, all investments, all royalties, all proceeds from the sale of manuscripts, was left to Alan for his lifetime, the residue after his death to go to the Royal Literary Fund in London for the relief of impoverished writers. Yet despite all his scheming, Alan derived little pleasure from his immense bequest. With a manservant to look after him he moved into an expensive apartment in Monte Carlo, which he filled with treasures from the Mauresque; as he had done with his employer, he continued to travel, staying in luxurious suites at the best hotels in London, Venice, and New York, where he spent extravagantly on boys, clothes, and enormous meals. And yet Alan was not happy: he was lonely, he missed Maugham and the glamorous life they had led together, and he soon succumbed to ill health; he grew enormously fat and suffered painfully from arthritis and later from Parkinson’s disease, which eventually confined him to a wheelchair. Shortly before he died in 1985, aged eighty, he confessed to Ann Fleming, one of the few of Maugham’s friends who kept in touch, that he bitterly regretted having caused such trouble.