I
Jeffrey Meyers, author of 43 books and counting, takes on the conundrum of Maugham a little in the manner of a busy man at his desk who sees a new file arrive in the in-box. He leads us through the well-known facts and interpretations efficiently enough, but there’s no sense of what might have drawn him to Maugham, or what he hopes to illuminate in him. His habit of including long digression after digression on how Maugham compares with Lawrence and Fitzgerald and others on whom he’s written suggests that he’s less interested in Maugham himself than in the scene of which he was a fragment.
Yet hidden within the familiar biography are details that begin to suggest why Maugham was never the person we took him to be. He was born in the British Embassy in Paris, and went to college in Heidelberg; his first letter, according to Meyers, was written in formal French to his parents when he was nearly seven. He was left-wing in his politics and thought it “monstrous” that women should not receive equal pay with men. His work was most often criticized during his life for sexual explicitness and an insistent concern with the poor (rather than the Eaton Square drawing-rooms he knew too well)
Maugham’s beloved mother died a week after his eighth birthday, giving birth to a son who also died soon, and when his father passed away two years later, the ten year-old orphan was sent to England to live with a clergyman uncle. His stammer began, Ted Morgan tells us, when he arrived on British soil. One of his brothers, Frederic, was a lawyer, like their father, who would become Lord Chancellor of Britain, and a viscount somewhat embarrassed about his raffish sibling on the Riviera; another, Henry, was an eccentric homosexual who wrote novels, a travel book and a dramatized life of St. Francis of Assisi, before dying, in front of the young Maugham, after downing a bottle of nitric acid.
It’s easy to note that the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made sodomy in Britian punishable by imprisonment, came into effect the very year after the young Maugham arrived in England, and continued until two years after his death, 82 years later; but what is more significant, surely, is that the man too often explained by his homosexuality had four extensive love affairs with women. In his early, unusually naked book, The Merry-go-round, Maugham divides his narrative alter ego between a 57 year-old spinster, Miss Ley, who believes that “In this world it’s the good who do all the harm” and an ardent, earnest 30 year-old medical student (much like Maugham himself) whose “soul aches for the East” and who exclaims, “I’m sick to death of your upper classes.” Few writers this side of Lawrence or James could seem to understand both sexes so well.
An industrious and disciplined writer, Meyers stresses how hard-working Maugham was, turning out comedies even while sitting in a sanatorium bed with T.B., and publishing 78 books in all. But more important, he shows how physically active and fearless Maugham was. He went to work in an ambulance unit in Ypres while one of his plays was on in the West End; later he was the chief agent for both the American and the British intelligence services in Russia in the weeks leading up to the Bolshevik coup.
Those who saw him in the Villa Mauresque receiving drinks from a white-gloved butler seized upon the image of a wizened mandarin in a smoking jacket (“he belongs,” said Frances Partridge, not untypically, “in a reptile house”); yet Maugham was in most ways much tougher than, for example, his counter-self, the equally rebellious and restless Lawrence, whom tuberculosis took away at 44. When World War II broke out, he was forced to evacuate his villa in Cap Ferrat, armed only with a small suitcase, blanket and food for three days, for a harrowing passage in a coal ship in which 500 people were crammed into a space made for 38, and so many dead bodies were pitched overboard that it was feared the ship’s propellers would jam. He was, one realizes now, 66 at the time.
It’s never hard to see Maugham as a doctor, patiently taking down symptoms and offering diagnoses, but he was also an adventurer, almost compulsively drawn to all those worlds he couldn’t see through. He took himself to Samoa and the Dayak head-hunters of Borneo (whom, characteristically, “We found exceedingly polite and hospitable folk”), he had an affair with the daughter of the anarchist Kropotkin, he was involved in plans for assassinating a king. His famous denunciations of Henry James, which have done such damage to his literary reputation, derived in part from his feeling that James lived too far from the world at large; but they drew even more from his sorrow that James evinced so little interest in the downtrodden, remaining transfixed instead by the very country-house trifles that Maugham could unveil in his sleep.
One of the ironies of all the biographies–Maugham has yet to find his Richard Holmes, or even Richard Ellmann–is that their authors seem intent on seeing him from without, through the many people who passed him briefly, rather than diving into the man himself (perhaps because he is deemed to be cutting, and sexually ambiguous to boot). Yet it was clearly in social settings that a shy man with a stammer was least at ease or himself, and only at his desk, with intimates, or far from the eyes of witnesses (in Borneo, for example) that he could let his deeper side come forth. Were the man as cynical and cold as the biographers would have us believe, it’s even more impressive that 35,000 people were going off to see his plays every week on the London stage.