The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
by Selena Hastings
Random House. 626 pages, $35.
THE PROBLEM with biographies of Somerset Maugham is that the last ten years of his life have always overwhelmed what went before them. Indeed, the man Maugham chose as his literary executor allowed Ted Morgan to write his excellent biography in 1980 in order to dispel the myths that had built up over Maugham’s “final tragic years” in his villa in the south of France. To do this he had to override Maugham’s prohibition against biographers. Maugham, like Henry James, burned his personal correspondence and asked everyone who had letters from him to throw them out, though few did.
The story of Maugham’s last decade—half King Lear, half Othello—has never made for pleasant reading; it was hard to go through it again in Selena Hastings’ new and very readable biography. The picture of the old writer’s secretary scheming to alienate Maugham from his daughter in a battle over his fortune and art collection, while Maugham became increasingly paranoid, demented, and incontinent, is not a pretty one—far more depressing, in fact, than what his French servants and the occupying Italian and German soldiers did to the villa itself during World War II (which Maugham spent mostly in a cottage built for him by his publisher, Nelson Doubleday, in the woods of South Carolina). The Villa Mauresque could be, and was, repaired; but the lurid images of a senile Maugham pooping on the carpet or clawing at his daughter were harder to erase.
But aside from the main problem—that these last years tend to obliterate everything that went before—reading Hastings’ smooth-as-silk rendition of Maugham’s life, one is reminded of how crowded and fascinating that life was. Maugham was born in 1874 in the British Embassy in Paris, just after the Franco–Prussian War, but he lived until 1965—almost a century. His first language was French, but his Parisian childhood ended after his mother died when Maugham was only eight, and his father—legal counsel for the British Embassy—died two years later, at which point Maugham was shipped to England to live in a vicarage with an uncle and aunt who did not really want a child around. Maugham, who claimed to have never gotten over the loss of his mother, was eventually sent to boarding school, after which, instead of going on to a university, he enrolled in a medical college in London where, working with patients from the London slums, he was first exposed to what would become the fuel for the career he really wanted: people telling him their stories.
Maugham distinguished between invention and imagination, claiming he had none of the latter. His first novel, 1897’s Liza of Lambeth, was about the inhabitants of the sort of urban slum we tend to forget existed in places like New York and London right up to the turn of the last century. Maugham had gone into medicine because he had a bad stammer, so the Church and the Law were ruled out; but as soon as he had his first book published, he abandoned medicine altogether. About writing Maugham said: “I have never been able to persuade myself that anything else mattered.” Liza of Lambeth made him part of the literary intelligentsia. Unhappy after nine years of novels and poverty, however, Maugham began writing plays for the London stage and got rich that way—thereby losing face with the Bloomsbury set, he claimed. Maugham loved fine clothes, food, hotels, and all the things money can buy—including Cartier cigarette cases for tricks. And after having three hit plays running at the same time, he never looked back.
When World War I began, Maugham joined the Red Cross and exhibited the same sang-froid under fire that he had shown cutting up cadavers and delivering babies in the slums. It was at a makeshift hospital in a chateau near Boulogne that Maugham met a handsome young man eighteen years his junior who was to be the love of his life—Gerald Haxton, the son of an American newspaper editor from San Francisco who’d moved abroad, which is why Haxton spoke fluent French, like Maugham, and grew up partly in England, too. The two men stayed together till Haxton died of tuberculosis at 52. He and Maugham made a remarkable team. Maugham’s great passion was travel, so the pair set out in the early 1920’s on several journeys to the Far East that gave Maugham the material for many of his most famous tales.
To read about these trips in Hastings is to weep. It was the sort of travel no one can experience anymore because the world has become so touristed. But in 1921, traveling by donkey and foot and sampan and litter and steamship, Maugham came upon a world that no one had ever described—the world he made famous in stories like “The Outstation” and “The Letter.” Maugham was so formal that he never spoke to anyone on board a ship if that person did not speak to him first. Haxton, on the other hand, loved to sit in the bar talking to his fellow passengers. That was how Maugham got the story that became “Rain” (which was so frequently dramatized and filmed that it eventually earned Maugham over a million dollars). After he’d mined Asia and the South Seas, leaving resentment in his wake after the originals read his books, he and Haxton tried the same method in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America; but there it didn’t work—because, Maugham said, the people were not isolated enough.
Maugham used these journeys not only to gather material but to escape his wife Syrie, who had trapped him into a marriage that he did not want by becoming pregnant. Maugham—obsessed with respectability—“did the right thing” while having no intention of sharing his life with her. Nor did he. Not long after the birth of their only child, Liza, Maugham began taking his long voyages with Haxton and eventually set up separate households, moving himself to the south of France while his wife remained in London, an interior decorator famous for her all-white rooms. Years later, Maugham’s response to her death was to tap his fingers on the card table while playing bridge and sing: “Tra la la, no more alimony, tra la la.” By that time Maugham was living in Cap Ferrat in the house he called the Villa Mauresque, a setting that became part of his persona as the rich and worldly author, a villa where dining was so fine that Hastings cannot resist reporting the menu for a typical lunch or dinner—if you were so lucky as to be a guest. At least you were lucky when Haxton was running the place and Maugham was happily writing (first thing every day for three hours), though not so much toward the end, when Haxton’s drinking had gotten out of hand and he had to be replaced by Alan Searle, and Maugham had become senile (despite “rejuvenation therapy” at a famous Swiss clinic shortly before his 80th birthday that consisted of injections with cells taken from the fetus of a freshly killed sheep).
According to his nephew Robin, Maugham said: “I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer—whereas really it was the other way around.” Whatever the ratio, Maugham was sexually active to the end of his life, “whimpering” at the age of ninety to have sex with his caretaker Searle. But Maugham the writer and Edwardian gentleman felt that to be exposed as a homosexual would have been ruinous. Maugham was only 21 when Oscar Wilde was tried; and while he may have been in Capri at the time with his first lover, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 left Englishmen like Maugham subject to “blackmail, exposure, public scandal, and arrest” for years afterward. As late as 1954, sixty years after Wilde’s conviction, Maugham refused to sign a petition in support of Edward Montagu, a peer accused of gross indecency.
But nowhere did the cry “Fleet’s in!” have more meaning than at the Villa Mauresque, which was so close to the port of Villefranche that Haxton would run to the bars the minute the sailors arrived. Haxton, said Maugham’s friend, film director George Cukor, “kept him in touch with the gutter.” One of the most striking photographs in Hastings’ biography shows a house party of naked young men lounging around Maugham’s marble swimming pool, arranged like the figures in a painting by Alma Tadema. (When all his guests were male, they swam nude at the Villa.) But this side of himself Maugham was so determined to keep secret that, like Henry James, he not only burned his personal papers but had to buy off his gay nephew when Robin told him an American publisher had offered him $50,000 for a biography of his uncle. Maugham simply sent Robin a check for that amount—because, as Hastings puts it, “Maugham had no trouble recognizing blackmail when he saw it.”
The title of Hastings’ book presumably refers to Maugham’s secret sex life—secret from the public, that is; everyone in their social set treated Maugham and Haxton as partners, though Searle, with his Cockney accent, they considered a servant. But the title might be construed to pertain to other aspects of Maugham’s career—as a British spy, for instance, in both World Wars (an experience that produced the Ashenden stories, the first series to treat the spy business as a mundane activity in the way that John le Carré would later). His experience with Hollywood was as interesting. Maugham surpasses even Conan Doyle in the number of works converted to celluloid. Bette Davis, who claimed that her career was saved by her role in the film of Maugham’s somber autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage (1934), divided her career into “Before Maugham” and “After Maugham.” Then, too, there is Maugham’s later work as an anthologist. Maugham called reading an addiction. Once famous, he was asked to assemble anthologies of other writers’ works. The resulting collections are still wonderful, with prefaces that are very useful to anyone who wishes to write. Detractors accused Maugham of being “middlebrow,” but to read the introductions to these anthologies is to be reminded of a world as lost as the British Raj in south Asia—an audience whose chief leisure activity was reading.
Maugham was not a stylist, however, in the way that James and Conrad were. His sentences are plain, direct, simple, and clear; they follow one upon the other with a kind of dry flatness. It’s hard to decide whether this was the French realism of the late 19th century that he had absorbed as a young man or his training in medicine, but he tells a story the way a medical student might describe a cadaver. “I do not write as I want to,” he claimed. “I write as I can. … I have had small power of imagination … no lyrical quality … little gift of metaphor … (but) I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed.” This latter faculty eventually produced a narrator indistinguishable from Maugham himself: the worldly observer, tolerant, civilized, betraying not the slightest shock at anything human. It also had to do with being homosexual. The homosexual artist, Maugham wrote apropos of El Greco, “stands on the bank, aloof and ironical, and watches the river of life flow on.” This detached character is actually called Somerset Maugham in the movie of The Razor’s Edge and played to perfection by Herbert Marshall. In fact, there is one uncanny scene in which Marshall is talking in close-up to Clifton Webb, who plays Elliott Templeton, the snobbish queen who steals the picture, and it’s as if we’re watching the persona Maugham wished his public to accept, the civilized onlooker, as he listens to the private Maugham that we know from the biographies, the acid-tongued queen.
Maugham, in other words, was perhaps his own greatest character: the worldly, if not world-weary, author—a role played by Gore Vidal in our own time. (The parallels are tempting: best-selling writers, glamorous house overlooking the Mediterranean, male partner, sharp tongue, cynical persona, and now longevity—though Vidal’s career is post-World War II and Maugham was an Edwardian who snapped at Glenway Wescott when they first met: “You’re another one of those young Americans who think they know everything because they’ve read Proust.”) Maugham, whose portrait by Graham Sutherland made him look like the madam in a Chinese whorehouse, as one friend said, was the public’s cicerone into the seamy, shocking places where the bourgeoisie did not go—when there was still a bourgeoisie that could be shocked. (Like the world Maugham traveled through in the Far East, that too is probably gone.)
Hasting writes so well that reading her biography is like taking the Amtrak Acela; you rush forward without a bump or jostle. She allots just the right amount of space to each aspect of Maugham’s career, no more, no less, in a prose style that is as unobtrusive as it is skilled—until the last paragraph, when she feels obligated, I guess, to sum Maugham up, whereupon we find her groping for words. How to “rate” Maugham as a writer is the perennial problem. Hastings resolves the issue by concluding that Maugham’s “place is assured” as “the great teller of tales.” (Curiously, the last three words are how Ted Morgan ends his biography.) She does not say “the great writer.” Why? Because even admirers may not be willing to go that far. So what is a “great teller of tales”? Desmond McCarthy, a critic who took Maugham as seriously as Maugham wanted to be taken, subtitled his book about Maugham “the English Maupassant,” which seems about right. If Henry James was put off by Maupassant’s emphasis on sex, Maugham made the most of it. Maugham’s work, in the eyes of his admirers, was a reaction against Victorian hypocrisy; surely that is what “Rain” is about.
So where do we place him now? There is a whole sub-culture of writers whom other writers consider under-rated (for Vidal it’s Louis Auchincloss and Dawn Powell), and Somerset Maugham still resides in a sort of literary limbo—depending on your point of view, a commercial populist or a master of the short story. Maugham himself observed his reputation with the same cool eye he brought to all his characters, “I know just where I stand, in the very front row of the second rate,” though one wonders if he really meant this, since at the end of his life he also called himself “the greatest living writer of English” and was certain he’d been snubbed by the intelligentsia because of his commercial success. (Others thought that certain honors from the Queen had been withheld because of his homosexuality.) When on Maugham’s eightieth birthday his English publisher solicited contributions to a book of essays honoring him, all but two invitees declined (even his friend and frequent house guest Noël Coward was “truly and deeply sorry to say I cannot contribute”); and one of the two writers who agreed to contribute warned that “a devastating paper could be written on the limitations of his taste.” In other words, they were willing to stay at the Villa Mauresque but would not say in public what they thought of his writing.
So it’s ironic to read, in an introduction Maugham wrote for one of his anthologies, the line, “John Galsworthy was a very popular writer in his day, but perhaps he lived too long and wrote too much; at the present time I seldom hear him spoken of but with derision,” because in a sense that’s what happened to Maugham. But it’s not quite that; it’s more that his work is so uneven. The best is very, very good. The less good is still enjoyable. The worst—some of the historical novels, a form Maugham felt writers should turn to when they got old—he himself dismissed. But there’s something about his work: it’s almost always engaging, and sometimes magical. Maugham stopped producing novels after Haxton died, though he kept writing nonfiction, like E. M. Forster. Part of the frustration and loneliness of his last years, he said, was that his characters had left him. But he lived on—at the Villa Mauresque. One night in 1958 Noël Coward took him to a gala dinner in Monte Carlo at which Frank Sinatra sang, and when Coward brought the Chairman of the Board over to meet the octogenarian author, Sinatra said, “Hiya, baby!” and Maugham replied: “Very well, indeed, but hardly a b-b-baby.”
Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath
