II
This insistence on ignoring the testimony of the one witness (himself) who could take us beneath the surface is especially vexing because Maugham revealed himself to his readers with the openness of a man who feels very much alone. His early heroine Miss Ley is “a student of men who could observe with interest the most diverse tendencies (for to her sceptical mind no way of life nor method of thought was intrinsically more valuable than another).” She outlines, over and over, a policy of pleasure and agnosticism strikingly similar to her maker’s, and admits that “curiosity is my besetting sin.” In Of Human Bondage, Maugham wrote so close to his wounds–outlining his philosophy of emotional Darwinism, in which a gentleman, by trying to save a waitress, almost destroys them both, and the weak always prey on the strong–that when he was asked, thirty years after publication, to read from it, for a recording for the blind, he broke down, and could not continue.
Frank Hurrell, his other displaced self in The Merry-go-round, looks like an “extremely reserved man,” but only because “his deliberate placidity of expression masked a very emotional temperament.” Maugham seldom tries to mask himself. Yet one reason he so eludes his trackers is that his concern, after the early works, is nearly always with others’ lives, not his own. Almost all his books begin with a somewhat awkward setting of the scene in which a narrator–sometimes called Ashenden, sometimes Maugham–clears his throat with a few heavy-handed observations on society and literature. They come to life only at the moment when the narrator disappears, getting swept up in the dramas of those around him to the point where he seems as unsure of what’s happening next as we are. Few novelists had such a gift for self-erasure.
One of Maugham’s great talents was for giving us the impression that his characters were running away from him, had a life of their own; in The Moon and Sixpence, he even halts the action midway in order to include a cumbersome digression in which he says he wishes he could shape his characters’ ends, wishes he were a novelist who could ascribe motive and see what was really going on. This was, of course, a literary device–an artful protesting of artlessness–and yet it catches something of what gives the stories their rare sense of excitement and spontaneity. They tremble with a contained man’s fascination with disorder.
In life, Maugham gave the impression of being prudent to a fault. “I have never met anyone,” said S.N. Behrman, “who had greater will-power, greater self-control than W.S. Maugham”; Evelyn Waugh said, “I do not know of any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control.” {itals on last two words). Yet the singular fact of Maugham’s characters is that they are nearly always out of control. They tear through canvases, turn their lives round in an instant, seem ready to commit suicide or even murder for love. The interesting thing about the amused narrator who takes this all in is not how often he is right in his assessments, but how often he is wrong.
A man who could see through so much was clearly drawn to what he could not see to the end of, and so Maugham was always seeking out new societies, or creatures of passion. Biographers, hungry for explanations, assess this hidden life in terms of his mostly covert homosexuality. Yet the real secret Maugham was covering up, one feels, was not that that he was gay, but that he was romantic, hungry for abandon. Release, not repression, is his theme. Nearly all his characters harbor unacceptable desires, but these have little to do with their sexual inclinations, and much to do with their longings to be artists, or lovers, or saints.
Maugham lived, you could say, on the edge of wildness, and the excitement of the books arises partly from our sense that the man who is so calmly appraising all the delusions of love is, in fact, in thrall to them himself (or wants to be). The men in his books are generally trying to rescue women (as if they were gods), and then confining the objects of their affections in expectations (as if they were goddesses). But beneath the comedy of high-mindedness, the stories describe the irrelevance of all intention: people are constantly being swept away, by sexual magnetism, by inexplicable impulses, by spells.
One way to put this is that Maugham may not have believed in God, but he seems to have had a due reverence for the devil. His travels, like Graham Greene’s, appear to have left him with a shaking sense of superstition; he had an occult symbol placed on the cover of all his later books, and painted on the outside walls of his house, to repel the evil eye. When his novels go too far, it is not in the direction of caution.
A critic may tell you that The Moon and Sixpence is about a “dull, honest, plain” stockbroker who throws over all convention to become a Bohemian. But Charles Strickland’s story is more unsettling because it is reflected in that of Dirk Stroeve, the painfully good-natured Dutch painter who adores, to a fault, both his wife and Strickland (he “had the passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch”). It is refracted by the wife, who knows she is powerless against Strickland’s “demon.” And it is registered by a narrator who confesses to a “fever in my blood” that “asked for a wilder course” (someone could write a thesis on images of burning in Maugham). Where Woolf and Joyce wove stylistic experiments around very ordinary lives, Maugham did the opposite, using a neutral, highly self-effacing style to highlight quite extraordinary lives.
The very stiffness of his persona enhances the quiet rebellion of the books; were a Henry Miller to write about a businessman running off to become an artist in Paris, there would be no charge of unexpectedness. Maugham used a stodgy bourgeois prose to overturn stodgy bourgeois assumptions, and to give a new urgency to the dialogue of public skepticism and private romanticism that is an evergreen theme in English writing. He helped to open up the story of the white man in the East by including the white women who seldom feature in Conrad or Kipling, and the sexual passions that complicate the encounter with the unknown. It is typical of Maugham’s fortunes that E.M. Forster, having taken this device from him in A Passage to India, released no novels for the last 46 years of his life, while Maugham wrote and wrote. With each new Maugham best-seller, Forster’s reputation seemed to inch up a little, and Maugham’s to sink.
There was, of course, a private component to these investigations of passion: Maugham seems to have had a rare gift for loving not wisely but too well. His first longtime secretary-companion, Gerald Haxton, was an inveterate gambler who kept a French boy on the side who used Maugham’s apartment in Paris for servicing his clients. Yet Maugham’s strength was to make of his own follies and heartaches art. “Though I have been in love a good many times,” he reports matter-of-factly in The Summing Up, “I have never experienced the bliss of requited love…I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me, I have been embarrassed.”
The matter-of-factness stings. Maugham took from his model Wilde a sense of the distance between the man and the mask, but where Wilde (until De Profundis) concentrated on the mask, Maugham opened up the suffering man. The biographers dutifully tell us that Dorothy Parker found him a “crashing bore,” but fail to explain why one of his lovers (on the very next page of Morgan’s biography) said, “When we were alone he could be the world’s most enchanting conversationalist.” They explain that Alroy Kear in Cakes and Ale (“a snob and a fraud,” in Meyers’s mellifluous words, “a time-server and bum-sucker”) was based on Hugh Walpole, but do not tell us why the book holds readers who know nothing about Hugh Walpole, and care less. For a biographer, every secret is a dirty one; for a gentleman, which is what Maugham, sometimes fatally, tried to be, the parts one hides may be one’s more generous or selfless parts (he refused to take payment for his often life-threatening work for the British government).
The curious thing about Maugham was that he was almost embarrassingly eager to tell his readers, if not his acquaintances, who he was. The Summing Up is often criticized for its lack of personal revelation, and it certainly spends little time on gossip or biographical incident; yet what is most shocking about it may be its honesty. The man who prided himself on not believing in God describes feeling himself almost “in the presence of God” in Cairo. He tells us, without fuss, that he was “rather precocious, harsh and somewhat unpleasant” in his early years, though also that “I have not been afraid of excess.” It is as if he confided to the page what he couldn’t say in life.
The other unexpected feature of the book is that, in taking the measure of 60 often exotic and event-filled years, it chooses to dwell for page after page on issues of good and evil, on Spinoza, Plato and the Upanishads. This may not make Maugham a philosopher, but it does suggest he was painfully eager to see his life in a philosophical light. Biographers tend to link him to Ian Fleming, but he has at least as much in common with Iris Murdoch, watching, with a sympathetic eye, the madnesses and illusions of love, and holding his impulsive characters up against some Platonic notion of the good, or beautiful. One of the few times he challenged his stammer to deliver a speech, his theme was, of all things, Kant.
This genuine philosophical restlessness, a readiness to try out every position with no agenda or doctrine in mind (the only moral in Maugham is a distrust of all moralism), gets his biographers twisting themselves into knots. On page 287 of Meyers’s biography, Maugham is “remarkably free of egoism”; by page 341, he is “egoistic.” On page 230, we read that he “didn’t have a mystical bone in his body”; only twelve lines later, we are blandly assured that “Maugham shared an interest in Indian mysticism with Christopher Isherwood.” Maugham was an explorer all his life, not settling, as Greene did, for a belief he couldn’t entirely hold; at one point in The Summing Up he gives a long and persuasive defense of solipsism, and then says that, alas, it isn’t true. He does the same, a little later, with the doctrine of transmigration of souls. In The Gentleman in the Parlour, he offers the most convincing six-page account of Buddhism, and its notions of impermanence and karma, I’ve read, only to add, in a coda, that, unfortunately, he doesn’t believe in them.
It is as if he didn’t want to be an ironist, but could never quite find the certainty that would console him (a theme that haunts such successors as le Carre). When The Razor’s Edge came out–selling 507,000 copies in its first month, and reminding us that Maugham was the one British writer to link the age of Hardy to what we now call the Sixties–the critics hastened to assure us that Larry Darrell, the eager seeker of truth in the Himalayas (and committer of various blundering acts of rescue on a prostitute) was based on Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood was always pained by the claim, not least because, as he tells us in his journals, Maugham, aged 67, remarked that his only wish in life was to go back to India and write a final book on Shankara before retiring to a monastery. The biographers tend not to point out that Larry Darrell sounds suspiciously close to Frank Hurrell, the early alter ego whose “chief endeavour was the search for truth.”