My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (34 page)

Managers now decided that after all he was not too cynical and sought his wares. He had a number of plays in the drawer—
Mrs Dot, Jack Straw, The Explorer
. Within a few weeks his name was on the boards of four simultaneous successes, and
Punch
had a cartoon showing Shakespeare looking enviously at the playbills. That was in 1908.

Few writers have enjoyed a more sensational success. But it was not the kind of success to impress the
avant-garde
criticism of the day. Popularity is always an object of distrust and 1908 marked the peak of a period that was in violent reaction against the languid eccentricities of the ‘nineties. Art, it was then held, should have a purpose: and it was to the plays of Shaw and Galsworthy and the novels of H. G. Wells that the young turned for authority and guidance. Maugham, in their eyes, had no message. He did not want to improve people or to expose abuses. It was held that ‘he stood for nothing' and that he was
merely ‘an entertainer'. His stock in 1910 stood lower with the intelligentsia than it had in 1900, and for quite a while nothing happened to make the intelligentsia reconsider its verdict.

For the next seven years he wrote exclusively for the stage. Walking past the Comedy Theatre where the ‘House Full' boards were up outside
Mrs Dot
, he thought, at the sight of a sunset above Panton Street, ‘Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it.' He planned never to write another book. But he had reckoned without his temperament. He found himself living in his own past. ‘It became,' he wrote, ‘such a burden to me that I made up my mind that I could only regain my peace by writing it all down in the form of a novel.' That was shortly before World War I and the novel was
Of Human Bondage
.

It was published in 1915 and in England it made little stir. It had no bearing on the war and the very qualities that have given it a capacity to interest the readers of later generations prevented it from succeeding then. It dealt with permanent problems at a time when the public was concerned with the day's events. No, it is not surprising that W. L. George writing in 1918 should have failed to realize on the evidence of a single book that the course of Maugham's career had changed direction. The betting was a hundred to one against any such occurrence. But this happened to be the hundredth time.

‘Success,' he was to write twenty years later in
The Summing Up
, ‘may well cut the author off from the material that is its source,' and this might have been his fate. His plays earned him a great deal of money at a time when income-tax was low; he bought himself a house in Mayfair, and soon after married. Had the marriage proved a happy one he would presumably have
led a fashionable metropolitan life, writing Mayfair comedies, until after a dozen or so years his material wore thin. Luckily for literature that did not happen. His marriage was a failure. Personal unhappiness made him dissatisfied both with the life that he was leading and the work he was producing. ‘I was tired of the man I was,' he wrote, ‘and it seemed to me that by a long journey to some far country I might renew myself.'

He was over forty, and the exigencies of his war-time duties in Intelligence simplified the cutting of his links with England. They gave him a chance of visiting the South Pacific. As soon as the war was over he went to China. The South Seas gave him
Rain
and
The Moon and Sixpence
, but the Far East was to give him more; it brought him back to the material he understood. He had roots in Malaya to an extent that he had never had in Mayfair.

He had been educated at one of the smaller public schools, and it was from this type of school that were recruited the bank clerks, district officers and planters who people his Malayan stories. The lives that were led in England by the cousins and brothers of his characters, in the prim domesticities of suburbia, would have bored him inexpressibly but their own lives against the background of the East were vivid, violent, and dramatic: or perhaps it would be more true to say that he interpreted their lives in terms of violent and vivid drama.

He wrote always about what are called ‘ordinary people', but he showed them under the pressure of unusual circumstance. Many of his Far Eastern stories end with suicide or murder, and adultery is the pivot for a large proportion of them. They are long stories, 15,000 to 20,000 words, roughly the length of a play, and one of them,
The Letter
, like
Rain
, was capable of almost direct transference to the stage. His mind was adjusted to the
types of plot and theme that fitted within this circumference. It is a length that few writers have managed to employ. But it is a very satisfactory length. It takes an hour to read, and it gives scope for the introduction of settings and of minor characters. By writing at this length Maugham was able to keep the background of the East constantly before the reader's eye. He rarely attempted what is called ‘fine writing' but his scenic descriptions are masterpieces of accurate observation. You touch and smell the East. You can understand how in that atmosphere ‘ordinary people' could be driven to desperate remedies.

He re-created himself during a decade of travel and his output during this period was remarkable: two novels—
The Moon and Six-pence
and
The Painted Veil;
two travel books—
On a Chinese Screen
and
The Gentleman in the Parlour;
one of his very best plays,
East of Suez;
the collection of secret service stories which introduced the character of Ashenden, his
alter ego;
the six South Sea stories of
The Trembling of a Leaf;
the six Malayan stories of
The Casuarina Tree
which included
The Letter;
a number of short stories awaiting publication in book form. Nineteen-twenty-two also saw the triumphant, prolonged success of
Our Betters
, written in 1915, while
The Constant Wife
ran for many months in New York though in London it never recovered from an unlucky first night, when the pit was allowed into the back two rows of the stalls and chaos ensued when the owners of the numbered seats arrived. The pit was asked to move back two rows and naturally having waited for several hours declined. I arrived a few minutes before the curtain was due to rise to find ‘God Save the King' being played in order to get people on their feet, and quiet. The curtain eventually went up twenty minutes late. Several dramatic critics were forced to stand throughout and the cast was so upset
that the timing was badly at fault in a play that depended on timing for its success. In New York it was, however, a very great success.

In New York the play of
Rain
ran for two years. In London it was less successful. Tallulah Bankhead had been most anxious to play the lead, but after a few rehearsals the part was given to Olga Lindo. On the other hand the play of
The Letter
with Gladys Cooper as the murderess was a great success in London. By 1930, which saw the publication of
Cakes and Ale
he had become one of the most discussed figures in English letters. Not only was he producing a sequence of exciting and dramatic stories, but he was in tune with the temper of his time. He had had no message for the eager young Fabians of 1908 who had discussed women's suffrage over glasses of Russian tea, but he did have for an exhausted post-war generation that had achieved victory at the cost of immense self-sacrifice only to find that the war that was to end war—H. G. Wells's phrase—was being followed by the peace that would end peace. Maugham was in the same leaking boat. In spite of his wealth and fame he was reputed to be an embittered man. He had won, after long labour, to success, only to find its savour that of dead sea fruit. Disenchanted himself, he offered to his readers the philosophy and pattern of escape. Mystery as well as glamour was about him. There was a sinister undertone to the legend that surrounded him. Where Kipling had presented the British Empire in terms of ‘The White Man's Burden', Maugham presented it as a means of cutting free from the Western ‘rat-race', from the profitless amassing of possessions that moth and dust were waiting to corrupt.
The Moon and Sixpence, The Casuarina Tree
, and
The Fall of Edward Barnard
coloured the outlook of the disillusioned 1920s just as
Ann Veronica
and
Man and Superman
had fired the optimism of the last
Edwardians. Maugham was the mouthpiece of that decade.

For ten years he lived in suitcases. Then he felt the need of a home, a base, and bought high on Cap Ferrat the villa that can be seen white and rectangular against the pines, along the coast from Antibes, and set on its gatepost the sign against the evil eye that is stamped upon all his books.

A great deal had happened indeed during the nine years between that lunch in the St Paneras Hotel and my first visit to the Villa Mauresque in the spring of 1931.

On that first lunch I was the only guest. There were just the three of us, W. S. M., Gerald Haxton and myself. Much has recently appeared in print about Haxton that could never have been printed in Maugham's lifetime. Maugham had a strong homosexual streak; how strong it is futile to conjecture. Robin Maugham reports his uncle as having confessed that one of his major mistakes was having tried to convince not only others but himself that he was only twenty-five instead of seventy-five per cent homosexual. Haxton, an American, had as a young man been arrested in London on a homosexual offence; he was acquitted, but the Judge was convinced of his guilt and he was registered as an ‘undesirable alien' and forced to leave the country. If Maugham wanted to enjoy Haxton's company, he had to enjoy it out of England.

There can be little doubt that Haxton was largely responsible for the break-up of Maugham's marriage. There was a bitter rivalry between him and Syrie Maugham, and Beverley Nichols's
A Case of Human Bondage
has an excruciatingly comic account of an attempt by Syrie Maugham to woo her husband back during a long week-end at St Tropez.

Beverley Nichols regarded Haxton as the evil influence
in Maugham's life. But no matter how reprehensible morally it may all have been, it served the purposes of literature. Haxton may have been a heavy drinker and a reckless gambler, but he was the ideal companion for the travels that were the source of Maugham's development. He was debonair and dashing, good company and a good mixer, everything that Maugham was not. In
The Summing Up
Maugham expresses his debt to him. ‘It was a great help when I was travelling to have someone who made friends quickly with the kind of person whom it was important for me to know.' Nearly everyone liked Gerald Haxton, right away. And I have heard more than one man say that his best times with Maugham were in a trio with Gerald Haxton. Cyril Connolly in his review of Beverley Nichols's exposé wrote, ‘Haxton was probably a bad hat, but I found him charming.'

From 1931 until the end of his life, I saw Maugham regularly in London and in the South of France. I would hesitate to call myself a close friend of his; disparity of age and of position precluded that; inevitably he meant much more to me than I could ever mean to him. But we had, through my travels, much in common. Myself, I felt always close to him.

He had the reputation of being difficult. Many of his friends complained that they could never feel at ease with him. Certainly his stammer made conversation awkward. He wrote of Arnold Bennett that it must have been infuriating for him to think of a witty interpolation and have to refrain from making it for fear that it would be ruined by his stammer. He was thinking of himself, in early days.

By the time I met him he was treated with deference. The table would wait for what he had to say. He had moreover evolved a conversational style that incorporated
his stammer. Even so it was with a sense of conscious effort that a long sentence wound to a full stop. One was left at the end with a feeling both of exhaustion and achievement. One was tempted to applaud as one does when a runner breaks the tape. It was not easy afterwards to pick up the thread of the conversation quickly. There was a danger that each time Maugham began to speak there would be a hiatus when he stopped.

Another reason for uneasiness in his company was the fact that because so many of his stories are told in the first person or through the mouth of his
alter ego
Ashenden, one felt one knew in advance his temperament and tastes. Ashenden was an acute and pitiless observer, judging people by the way they dressed, talked, behaved at table, entertained. It was impossible not to suspect that one was being judged oneself, in just that way; one was on guard.

It was generally held that he did not like to be complimented on his books. In his story,
His Excellency
, he approves the tact of the ambassador who did not mention any of Ashenden's books but indicated by a couple of casual references that he had read them. But I am not certain that he did not appreciate an occasional compliment if it was made at the right time, in the right way. In the spring of 1956, I was escorting along the coast a flamboyant lady of considerable charm but little education. I had qualms about taking her to the Villa, but I wanted to see Maugham, and her feelings would have been deeply hurt had she been left behind. I briefed her carefully. ‘Whatever you do,' I warned her, ‘don't refer to his books.' She followed my instructions, but on the way back, she said, ‘It was ridiculous of you not to let me talk to him about his books. I had something I particularly wanted to say. I know he'd have been pleased. I'm going to write to him.'

She showed me the letter before she posted it. It explained how I had told her that she must not discuss his books with him, but she had to let him know how much his work had meant to her. Mentioning two or three of his short stories, she concluded by saying that she owed her interest in Indian philosophy to him. It seemed to me the kind of routine letter that most professional writers get every now and then. To my astonishment it had on Maugham the effect she had anticipated. Next time I saw Alan Searle, his secretary, almost the first thing he said was, ‘What happened to that wild redhead that you brought up here? I've never seen Willie so much touched by anything as by the letter that she wrote him.' Maugham asked after her at once. Repercussions came back to me through Cyril Connolly. ‘I couldn't think what Alec was doing with that eccentric creature,' Maugham had said, ‘and then from her, of all people, to get that letter.'