Between 1913 and 1915, three part-autobiographical novels were published in
London which would eventually be translated all over the world. In each, a
clever, emotionally turbulent boy grows up, struggles with his family
background and his sexuality, is attracted by the idea of being an artist
and sets out into adult life. The writers had very different receptions but
by the 1920s all were famous and, as late as 1940, Orwell, in “Inside the
Whale”, named them together as among the lasting modern authors. They were
D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and W. Somerset Maugham and the novels which,
sooner or later, attracted so much attention were Sons and Lovers, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Of Human Bondage.
To say that Maugham is the odd man out may seem to play down the others’
oddity, but he is. Born in 1874, he was the eldest of the three and had
already made a considerable name as a writer with the Zolaesque Liza of
Lambeth (1897), based on his experiences as a medical student, and with some
plays, four of which were running simultaneously in the West End in 1907. As
far as the life of a modern artist was concerned, he knew it at first hand,
having lived in Paris and become friendly there with a young painter, Gerald
Kelly, who worked as an assistant to Rodin and knew Monet, Degas and
Cézanne. Kelly, Maugham and one of the first of Maugham’s many unreliable,
exploitative young lovers, Harry Philips, ate regularly at Le Chat Blanc,
where they were part of a group that included Rodin, Clive Bell and the
Irish painter Roderic O’Conor. When Philip Carey, the central character in
Of Human Bondage, rejects art for medicine, he is not only making a symbolic
statement which – like his subsequently opting for marriage rather than
travel – separates him from Paul Morel and Stephen Dedalus, he is also
reflecting his author’s experience.
Biographically, there are other important differences. Alone among the three
novelists, Maugham took part in the First World War: with skill and
sangfroid both as a medical orderly and, later, though not without some
failures, as a senior intelligence agent. (The preface to his collection of
innovative, influential spy stories, Ashenden, confesses, “In 1917 I went to
Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in
the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success”.)
He was also the only one of them who lived to be an old man. But while Joyce
and Lawrence saw their reputations grow steadily, if never enough to satisfy
them, Maugham’s celebrity – he was probably the richest writer in the world,
his story “Rain” alone making more than a million dollars mainly from screen
and stage adaptations – shrank before his reptilian eyes.
The long final chapter of Selina Hastings’s absorbing biography is called
“Betrayal”. She might have used the plural; there are more betrayals here,
by more people and of more kinds, than deaths in a Jacobean tragedy. The one
she starts with, though, isn’t the lover-nurse of Maugham’s old age, Alan
Searle, setting his employer against his daughter Liza Maugham by making him
doubt his paternity, or Robin Maugham blackmailing his uncle out of $50,000
– say half a million in today’s terms – by threatening to write a biography,
but the fate of a festschrift. To honour its author on his eightieth
birthday, Heinemann planned a literary tribute to be edited by Jocelyn
Brooke. “One after the other”, writes Hastings, “the polite excuses came
flowing in”:
“not a great fan of his . . . obliged to decline” (William Plomer), “don’t
think I’m at all the person to write about [him]” (Angus Wilson), “May I be
excused?” (William Sansom), “[cannot] because of a novel which I MUST
finish” (Elizabeth Bowen), “truly and deeply sorry to say that I cannot
contribute” (Noël Coward), “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” (Raymond Mortimer).
Hastings makes clear that Mortimer was nonetheless prepared to write
something; she doesn’t explain, however, that there was no special reason
why Bowen, Plomer, Sansom or Wilson should have been expected to contribute:
they weren’t friends of Maugham’s and their ambitions as writers could not
have been more different from, indeed opposed to, the plain-style middlebrow
populism he to some extent disingenuously espoused. The situation was surely
not one of backstabbing but of the ancient artistic divisions between salon
(or, now, university) and marketplace, innovation and tradition, the long
term and the short term. But Maugham’s relation to these antitheses is more
complex than it might seem. Although his work will never regain its
contemporary status, it is interesting in ways that have been too little
acknowledged.
Like Arnold Bennett, whom he saw often in Paris and whose dealings with
Modernism Margaret Drabble discussed recently in these pages (TLS, April
21), Maugham found much to value in contemporary art, building a notable
collection including a Gauguin painting on glass which he bought for 200
francs in Tahiti in 1917. He knew, though, that the values ascribed to
Modernism were not doctrinally absolute: they represented one set of views
among others and audiences could enjoy work of very different kinds. As far
as literature and theatre were concerned, he admired Chekhov but not all of
his imitators, and insisted that “it is quite unnecessary to treat as
axiomatic the assertion that fiction should imitate life . . . . There is in
fact a second theory that is just as plausible, and this is that fiction
should use life merely as raw material which it arranges in ingenious
patterns”. Predictably, critics have focused on what is “traditional” in
Maugham’s writing – his handling of plot, surprise and suspense, his
depiction of an exceptionally international, socially wide range of
characters – and in the process have tended to miss what is original about
it.
As Selina Hastings brings out very well, Maugham wrote with outstanding
clarity and frankness about heterosexual relations but in ways contemporary
readers on the whole found easier to assimilate than in the work of Lawrence
or Joyce. Most of his fiction involves sexual obsession, promiscuity and
infidelity, but also sheer appetite and pleasure, women’s at least as much
as men’s. True, it can be hard to get past some of the period- and
class-based language he falls into: the word “slut” too often stands between
us and Mildred, a waitress turned prostitute on whom Philip Carey is
fixated. The element of repugnance in Philip’s addiction is part of the
novel’s point, though, just as it was part of Maugham’s own emotional
masochism, and Mildred’s feelings about her situation, as well as some
shifts in the balance of power in the relationship, are sensitively if
uncompromisingly portrayed. More rewarding to a modern reader is the
well-conveyed physical as well as emotional mutuality between Philip and
Sally, the intelligent, plain-speaking daughter of an indulgent utopian.
Sally’s ease with herself anticipates that of the still more emancipated
Rosie in Cakes and Ale (1930), and if there is something contrived in
Sally’s pregnancy turning out to have been false just at the point when
Philip, at first reluctantly, decides to give up the idea of travelling, do
his duty and marry her, it would be hard to begrudge him and the novel their
happy ending.
A quite different tone characterizes Kitty and her infidelity in The Painted
Veil (1925). Once again, the reader has to do some silent editing: in the
default settings on which he somewhat over-relied, Maugham remained a
fin-de-siècle writer. Kitty’s situation, though – married to an honourable,
dull doctor in colonial China, liberated from domestic boredom by an affair
but trapped again when her husband Walter learns about it – is not exclusive
to its time, and if you focus on the gap between feeling and dialogue, you
begin to see what seemed new about the novel, as well as how much Maugham
influenced Noël Coward. Here, Walter returns from work and she expects him
to say something about the situation:
'He knew everything.
“You’re back early,” she remarked.
Her lips trembled . . . . She was afraid she would faint.
“I think it’s about the usual time.”
His voice sounded strange to her . . . . She wondered if he saw that she was
shaking in every limb. It was only by an effort that she did not scream. He
dropped his eyes . . . .
“The Empress didn’t come in today,” he said. “I wonder if she’s been delayed
by a storm.”
“Was she due today?”
“Yes.” She looked at him now and saw that his eyes were fixed on his plate.'
And so the scene goes on through dinner, until Walter finally gets up from the
table:
'She clenched her hands and she felt herself grow pale. Now!
“I have some work to do,” he said in that quiet, toneless voice, his eyes
averted. “If you don’t mind I’ll go into my study. I daresay you’ll have
gone to bed by the time I’ve finished.”
“I am rather tired tonight.”
“Well, good-night.”
“Good-night.”
He left the room.'
Something still less often commented on in Maugham’s work is his way of
putting storytellers and the power of narrative into the foreground,
repeatedly framing texts within texts. If he isn’t a modernist, he is, at
least in this respect, a proto-postmodernist. In a highly worked episode in
Ashenden, for example, the Maugham-like central character dines à deux with
a coldly correct ambassador who is offended by not being allowed to know
what the spy is up to. As if to get around this awkwardness, the ambassador
tells a very long story, itself, he says, told to him by a friend, about a
brilliant young diplomat who almost ruined his career and his imminent
“good” marriage by an infatuation with a circus performer. Ashenden soon
realizes that his host is describing himself. Both the story and the
story-within-the-story end when the ambassador’s wife returns from a
concert. “What have you been talking about?” she asks, more perceptively
than she realizes. “Art and Literature?”
Among the patterns here – Ashenden’s blank secrecy balancing the ambassador’s
oblique openness, an orderly marriage made tolerable by a memory of sexual
and emotional recklessness – is the idea, important to Maugham, of narrative
as an emotional safety valve. (Could it be, too, that there’s a link between
the man so often silenced in everyday life by his stammer and the more
flamboyantly loquacious of his fictional and dramatic characters?) He said
that Of Human Bondage
"did for me what I wanted, and when it was issued to the world (a world
in the throes of a dreadful war and too much concerned with its own
sufferings and fears to bother itself with a creature of fiction) I found
myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me."
The first consequence of that freedom was that, having delivered the
long-gestated novel to Heinemann in the autumn of 1914, the forty-year-old
Maugham immediately volunteered for the Red Cross in France.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham focuses, naturally, on the connections
and otherwise between Maugham’s work and his hectic, to him thrilling but
increasingly wretched sexuality. His heterosexual relationships – with
Violet Hunt, with the beautiful Sue Jones to whom he postponed committing
himself until it was too late, and with Syrie Wellcome (née Barnardo of the
orphanages), who locked him into a desperate marriage – are sensitively
described, though once or twice Hastings seems over-influenced by the
savagely hostile view of Syrie communicated by Maugham to, and through, his
male lovers. His simultaneous and increasingly dominant homosexual life is
treated with the same balance: despite its title, this is a markedly
unprurient book, Maugham-like in its refusal of sensation when recounting
the alcoholic odyssey of the tough, clever Gerald Haxton with whom his
relationship lasted from 1914 until Haxton’s death thirty years later, or
“the Bronzino Boy” Alan Searle’s mix of tenderness and duplicity, or the
roles of both as procurers for Maugham and his friends, whether on his
travels – themselves richly described – or at the Villa Mauresque at Cap
Ferrat, so handy for the naval port of Villefranche-sur-Mer. Maugham’s
dealings with his family are another complex thread: his devotion to his
mother; her early death and that of his father; Maugham’s repressive
religious upbringing in Whitstable, painfully described in Of Human Bondage;
the suicide of one of his elder brothers, also homosexual and an aspiring
writer; the rise of another to become Lord Chancellor – an awkward position
for the brother of a famous homosexual to hold in those days; Maugham’s
dutiful yet increasingly affectionate relationship with his daughter Liza
and, later, with his grandchildren.
All this is confidently set out on the basis of thorough research, some of
which must have been difficult to do. The materials are vast and widely
scattered: Maugham’s friendships were almost as many as his writings and few
of those he knew, especially once he became famous, failed to record their
own versions of him in letters and journals as well as published books. On
the other hand, in a series of bonfires at Cap Ferrat, he destroyed all the
evidence about himself that he could find while persuading many others to
cooperate in the process and imposing strict terms on his literary
executors. So although the story Hastings tells is often based on reliable
sources, it inevitably also sometimes derives from third-hand anecdotes or
from fiction, especially Maugham’s own. The reader is not alerted to the
differences, and, while some of them can be identified from the book’s
endnotes, these references are patchy and incomplete. What reads like a
thoroughly traditional, archive-based, cradle-to-grave biography in fact
includes a good deal of gossip and speculation.
Could the job have been done differently? There’s a case for saying that,
given Maugham’s hostility to the idea of his life’s being written about at
all, Hastings’s is the kind of book he would have found least unacceptable.
While, in part for legal reasons, he could be evasive about the specific
ways in which his fiction used real life – especially, and often to their
cost, real people (Hugh Walpole and Mette Sophie Gauguin were among the most
vociferous in their complaints) – he was always open about how this operated
in general terms. Among expatriates in the South Pacific in 1916, he wrote,
"I was like a naturalist who comes into a country where the fauna are of
an unimaginable variety . . . . They had learnt life in a different school
from mine and had come to different conclusions . . . . They had their own
narrownesses. They had their prejudices. I did not care . . . . They seemed
to me nearer to the elementals of human nature than any of the people I had
been living with for so long, and my heart leapt towards them as it had done
years before to the people who filed into the out-patients’ room at St
Thomas’s [Hospital]."
For Maugham, Hastings shows, writing was the life he lived. Punctilious in
ensuring that his guests at Cap Ferrat were well looked after, he was rich
enough not to have to look after them himself and, having satisfied himself
that each day had begun as everyone wanted, went up to the rooftop workroom
which was the most important of his worlds. In the character of Edward
Driffield in Cakes and Ale he movingly anatomized how some novelists,
himself among them, not only make but are sustained by their fiction.
Driffield’s promiscuous wife Rosie has a baby who dies. That night, she goes
out, picks up an old friend and sleeps with him. When she gets home,
Driffield is having breakfast. All he says is “You’ve just come in time . .
. . I was going to eat your sausage”. It isn’t until he puts the episode
into a novel that Rosie realizes how much he knew. This story in itself,
told by Rosie at the end of the novel, may remind us of an earlier scene in
which the narrator sleeps with her for the first time. As he starts to
recount what turns out on his side to be an embarrassingly tearful
encounter, he suddenly – prevaricatingly – says “I wish now that I had not
started to write this book in the first person singular” and embarks on a
two-page digression into current literary arguments about narrative point of
view.
Another biography of Maugham, then, rather than simply using his fictions as
evidence about his life, might make something of his almost theatrical
negotiations between the two. There are other areas where Selina Hastings
could have given us more. Her idea that Maugham was uninterested in the
moral and political issues of empire and race misses a lot: his story “The
Pool”, for example, in which a white man in the South Pacific marries a
half-caste and takes her back to Aberdeenshire, is one of many in which
those questions can’t be ignored. She is excellent, however, on the effects
of the more cosmopolitan aspects of his upbringing – his early childhood in
Paris, his escape to Heidelberg at the age of sixteen. She does justice,
too, to his dry humour, quoting enjoyably from some of the letters that
survive. (Soon after the First World War, the tubercular Maugham spent a
year at a famous nursing home in Banchory. When one of his fellow patients
died within four days of arriving there, he observed that it seemed hardly
worthwhile to come to Scotland for such a short time.) Above all, this
steady-eyed biography of an extraordinary, extravagant, generous and bitter
artist will not only fascinate its readers but encourage some to go to his
work for the first time.
Selina Hastings
THE SECRET LIVES OF SOMERSET MAUGHAM
614pp. John Murray. £25.
978 0 7195 6554 0
Jeremy Treglown’s most recent biography is of V. S. Pritchett. He is
writing a book about the legacy of the Franco regime in Spanish culture.
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