William Somerset Maugham
"Willie" Maugham, one of England's great writers and storytellers,
a shy man, got most of his stories from his secretary, Gerald Haxton,
a social butterfly he had met in WWI when they were ambulance drivers
on the Western front, and who travelled the world with him; and he was
also fortunate enough to meet the grammarian Eddie Marsh when he was correcting
Churchill's proofs, and Marsh volunteered to do the same for Maugham.
Between 1935 and 1953 Marsh corrected 14 of Maugham's books, and an examination
of Maugham's books before and after Eddie shows clearly how Maugham was
mobbed by students worldwide as a great prose writer of the English language.
Maugham's first language was French. To ensure that his son would not be used
by the French as future "cannon fodder" in a war, his father, a lawyer,
persuaded the British Ambassador in Paris to open a maternity ward in the Embassy,
where Willie was born British in 1874. But young William's boyhood was traumatic:
his mother died of consumption when he was eight, and he had a stammer which
doctors in England, where he had been sent to school, threatened to cure by slicing
a piece out of his tongue, the accepted medical cure in those days. His life
in the vicarage and his schooldays have been well recorded by Maugham in his
books, but he did not record the terrible death of his brother Harry, aged 36
in 1904, a financially unsuccessful writer, who died in agony prolonged over
three days after he drank a bottle of nitric acid.
Maugham had been accused by his jealous brother of being "in the market
place" because his plays were making money, but Harry's tragic death in "Grub
Street" made Maugham even more conscious of the commercial value of his
work. He did not, however become rich from his writings. Bertram Alanson, a financial
genius, played the American stock market with the money Maugham sent him over
the years, and he made Maugham a millionaire. Alanson was returning a favour
from the days when Maugham was in Moscow (His spy Ashenden comes from this period)
and sent a coded telegram warning him of the coming crash:
Maugham had worked as a young doctor in the terrible slums of London's East End
("Liza of Lambeth" was the result of this) which determined him to
write stories that would sell to a worldwide readership. The result was his purchase
of the Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, in 1927, staffed
by six servants, seven gardeners, a cook, and Haxton, an American, who had been
deported from England by the Home Office. His deportation was not because he
was caught "in flagrante" with a soldier in a sordid hotel room, but
because he had been giving information for payment to Belgian intelligence (Maugham
had worked in Scotland Yard during the 1926 general strike, and was recruited
into the Secret Intelligence Service to work on the Continent). On their travels
it was Haxton, the bar-fly and socialiser who picked up the stories which he
recounted to Maugham who turned them into literature, and Maugham was devastated
when Haxton died in America in 1944, aged 52.
I met Maugham and his new secretary, Alan Searle, a gossipy former
prison visitor from Bermondsey, London, at the villa Mauresque which
had been built for King Leopold of Belgium after he had bought Cap Ferrat,
built a palace and three houses for his three mistreses and the Mauresque
for Monsignor Charmeton. The monstrous Leopold the second, who beat
slaves and had their hands chopped off, was a staunch Roman Catholic
and feared death without absolution if God struck him down while embracing
one of his harem, so he wanted the Monsignor on hand in the Mauresque
in case of emergency. As the Monsignor had spent his life in Algeria,
the house was built in the Moorish style, with domes and minarets, to
make him feel at home.
There was no doorbell. Maugham's servants were now reduced to half the original number, but the door was opened by an immaculate butler and his gardeners still took in the lawn during the heat of summer, stored it, and laid it out again in the autumn.
Maugham was sleeping but Searle showed me the master's writing room and the famous Gauguin. On the desk was his writing glove to cover worn muscle from his lifetime of 1,000 words a day; in the recess the painted glass panel which Maugham had bought for two hundred francs from the owner of Gauguin's little house in the Marquesas. The magnificent view was ignored, the writer turning his back to it and facing instead a row of his own leather bound books, so that, in a moment of weakness he could look up and say to himself: "I've done it before and I can do it again"
"You wanted to see the Gauguin, didn't you?" said Searle
"No. I didn't know it was here. But I can boast that I've seen it. I wanted to see how a professional writer works."
"Facing the books, you mean? Oh, yes, he's always advising people to do that. Godfrey Winn was told that before the war, and Ian Fleming recently."
When Maugham joined us in the drawing room, he greeted me with a civil
handshake, saying: "Alan told me you were here. Our Far East trip was
very hectic, you know. We were mobbed outside our hotels everywhere. It appears
that all these students learn English by reading my books, which is very
flattering. Please call again when I'm feeling more lively," said Maugham,
rising from the sofa, holding his cigarette the way he would hold a cigar,
all four fingers along the top and the thumb underneath. "You're always
welcome," he added. "Although some people aren't" he added,
giving Searle a look of malice.
"Oh, yes. A German girl called here the other day wearing a scruffy shirt and jeans. She said she was a journalist and wanted an interview."
"She had long hair down to her waist" said Maugham
"Long dirty hair down to her waist" Searle added.
"We sent her packing" said Maugham.
Some months later there was a telephone call from Alan Searle to say that Mr. Maugham had an announcement to make.
Maugham sat near the Arles stone fireplace, arose as I walked in, shook hands and said: "Sarah Churchill pisses the bed."
"That's right, she does," said Searle. "She's staying with neighbours and they have to change the sheets every morning."
"Did you see that photograph of Evelyn Waugh with a bakelite ear trumper in the newspapers?" Maugham asked. "Poor Evelyn. He tries so hard playing at being a gentleman."
"When he put that thing up to Lucien Freud at a cocktail party, he spat in it," said Searle.
Was Maugham getting his own back for Evelyn Waugh once presenting him with a piggy bank, denoting Maugham's meanness, I wondered. Sarah Churchill's incontinence and Evelyn Waugh's affectation were surely not the "announcement" I had been called to hear. Maugham then began to talk of Hemingway, saying that he had been shocked to find that Hemingway had not been an eye witness to the men being thrown into a ravine in Ronda during the Spanish civil war, but that it was hearsay. Then he added that he and Alan were convinced the macho Hem. changed into black nylon underclothes, lace panties and girdle in the evenings.
Maugham then said he had been shocked to see in the Daily Express some film reviews by John Braine, because he had admired his first novel Room at the Top, and wanted to start a fund to help young writers (apart from the already extant Somerset Maugham Award) to stay out of journalism and write their novels. Then he came to the reason for my visit: he would sell his paintings in Sotheby's to found the new fund.
"Aren't some of the paintings owned by your daughter, Lady John Hope?" I asked.
It was as if I had shattered my crystal glass in the fireplace. Maugham's thin lips tightened and Searle became flustered.
"She's not his daughter," said Searle
"That's right. She's not my daughter," said Maugham. "I wasn't even in the country when she was conceived."
Why were they lying, I wondered. Maugham had always acknowledged paternity of Liza and had given her paintings as presents over the years. Had Searle twisted him? Was he after the house, contents and the royalties?
"What about the Somerset Maugham award?" I asked.
"That's for travel," said Maugham. "Much good it does. That feller Kingsley Amis won it. And do you know what he did with the money? Went on holiday to Portugal. Portugal! he emphasized, snorting. And he took his mother-in-law with him" snapped Maugham. His mother-in-law, he repeated with unveiled scorn. "And then had the effrontery to write a book about it."
"I Like It Here" I said.
"That's it. About Cardiff or Swansea or somewhere.
I knew there was animosity between them because Maugham, breaking his rule never to review books, had been scornful of the characters in Lucky Jim when he reviewed it in The Sunday Times in 1956, calling them the white-collar proletariat who went to Universty on government grants, not to acquire culture but to get a job.
"They have no manners...they are mean, malicious and envious. They will write anonymous letters to harass a fellow undergraduate and listen in to a telephone conversation that is no business of theirs. Charity, kindness, generosity are qualities which they hold in contempt. They are scum."
(In 1961 Kingsley Amis, by way of reply, made a rather pathetic attempt to knock Of Human Bondage in The Spectator, and when his son, Martin, won the Maugham award for travel, spent it on a visit to his mother in Malaga)
"Talking of writing and travelling," I said, to break the silence that followed, "If you were starting all over again, where would you go?"
"Spain," said Maugham without hesitation. "That is the country where you will find the strangest stories."
"Would you care for another drink?" Searle asked.
"Have a whisky," said Maugham.
"No thanks. It's a bit too early for me. I usually wait until the sun is over the yardarm."
"Oh come along, young man. " said Maugham. Do have a whisky. I won't seduce you."
Maugham smiled his old villain's smile and Searle shot off to order the drinks from a servant, who appeared with more crystal goblets and a bottle of Johnny Walker.
"There's a question I've asked several people on the coast," I said when the whisky was poured. "and no-one seems to be able to answer it, and that is why Winston Churchill goes aboard Onassis's yacht for holidays."
"Do you know I asked the same question, as I'd often wondered why, and no one had a reply, so I asked Winston: 'Why do you go aboard that dreadful man Onassis's boat? I asked him at dinner, and Winston said 'Because no-one else invited me'" Maugham said, slapping his thigh.
"Yes," said Searle, "I suppose he'd have gone on anyone's yacht for a free holiday. Onassis was the only one with the cheek to invite him."
The Foreign Editor said Lucas Lime had filed a good piece when William Somerset Maugham died. We were having lunch in the Savoy Grill.
"It could have been better," I said, "He nearly scooped the pool."
Quote from DON'T TELL MY MOTHER I'M A NEWSPAPERMAN, Memoirs Vol II (Chapter 14):
"When Willie was taken into the British-American hospital in Nice, Lucas broke his ankle stepping out of his car, and was carried into the wards. The French newsmen yelled blue murder, thinking it was a British trick, but it was genuine. They put him in the room next to Maugham, took away all his clothes, leaving him wearing a skimpy vest that reached just below his navel, and nursing a plastered foot. He could hear Maugham breathing. Suddenly, the death rattle. Unmistakable. Then silence. The door opened and a nurse went in, ran out, returned with a doctor and Lucas heard them say, "Il est mort" and go off to report his death.
'Blimey,' said the foreign editor, ' what a scoop'.
The intrepid newsman dragged himself out of bed, limped out into the corridor, and got to a wall telephone where he asked the international operator for a transfer charge call to the Daily Express, Fleet Street 8000. Just as it started to ring, the nurse leap on him from behind and dragged him to the floor. The doctor hung up the phone and they got him back to bed in his little short shirt, and locked him in. Then he heard them move the body, and, the day afterwards, Searle announced that Willie had died "at home" in the Mauresque. The theory is that the estate could have been taxed by the British, as the hospital was on British and American soil, a present for war help from the French state. In Cap Ferrat he was "off-shore", and the French do not tax creative artists resident in France. Searle, the Bronzino boy from Bermondsehy, got rich. He even inherited the permanent suite at the Dorchester, and he gave twelve identical sets of pyjamas to twelve Italian room service waiters."