III
To read of the final years of Maugham’s life can be a painful affair. His publishers tried to arrange a celebration of him for his 70th birthday–and for his 80th–but almost nobody responded. The money he gave to his old school, King’s Canterbury, to help a working-class student enjoy an education there every year got siphoned towards a physics building. One critic after another–Diana Trilling, Morton Zabel, Edmund Wilson–ridiculed him for his lack of talent. In Wilson’s case, Meyers tells us, this was partly because the American thought that Maugham had dismissed his Memoirs of Hecate County. In fact, Maugham’s enthusiasm for the book had been one reason why Nelson Doubleday published it; years after Wilson’s attack on him, Maugham called his critic “the most brilliant man you have.”
WIth characteristic generosity, the old man set up an award to allow young writers to travel, and its winners, fittingly, include V.S. Naipaul, John le Carre and Doris Lessing. He wrote a six-page handwritten letter urging on a Catholic schoolgirl who wrote him a fan letter (and in later life would become Claire Booth Luce). He left his royalties to the Royal Literary Fund, which managed to generate more than $250,000 a year from them to help needy writers in the ‘80s. Yet as his life drew to an end, he watched his only child, Liza, fight against his longtime companion, Alan Searle, over his money and his paintings. There was more than a touch of Lear in the aging Maugham in his castle, though no one in sight (except himself) to play the Fool.
In the case of writers like Lawrence and Joyce, the demands of genius are often cited as an excuse for their cruelties or peccadilloes; with Maugham, no such exoneration was forthcoming. He belonged to no school or movement; his one successor, his nephew Robin, titled one of his memoirs, Escape from the Shadows. Yet Orwell, famously, called him “the modern writer who has influenced me most,” and Evelyn Waugh, not given to compliments, called him “the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit.” The first published piece V.S. Naipaul ever wrote–Meyers shows us–was a review for his high-school magazine in Trinidad, when he was 16, of Liza of Lambeth. Naipaul, more than anyone, could surely take us deep into an unaffiliated, sometimes haunted traveler who was at once a seeming pillar of the British establishment and a writer most drawn towards the poor. The main character in Naipaul’s last novel, Half a Life, is, quirkily, called “W. Somerset Chandra.”
Maugham approached death with the equanimity and poise he had always maintained, confirming, in some quarters, the image of a wrinkled Chinese sage far above the turmoil of men. He watched J.M. Barrie, John Galsworthy and J.B. Priestley receive the Order of Merit he’d always craved, and saw the same friends who mocked him for being cold mock him for sobbing at Gerald Haxton’s funeral. Self-delusion does not seem to have been his thing. “When people chatter and chatter to me,” he told Godfrey Winn, “saying all the flattering things that they imagine I want them to say, I know what they are really thinking underneath–what a disagreeable old party, and how dull he is in real life! How can he ever write all those clever books and amusing plays?”
Meyers grows warm and even protective towards his subject by the end of his book, though he never begins to explain how this often taciturn and muffled man with the downturned mouth somehow did what all writers long to do, reserving his meanness and cattiness for his life, while getting the best of himself out in his art. Maugham consistently wins our trust by presenting an air of amused discernment and emotional shrewdness; but he takes us even deeper by showing the limits of discernment, and revealing how the rational man is shipwrecked by his reason. To concentrate on the man and all his foibles and divisions is somehow to avoid the deeper question of how he escaped, or even transcended himself on the page.
Towards the end of Cakes and Ale, Maugham’s loyal narrator Ashenden, contemplating some pictures of the writer whose life he has been chronicling, notes, “The real man, to his death unknown or lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the fellow who lived his life, and smiled with ironic detachment at the two puppets that the world took for Edward Driffield.” As so often in Maugham’s work, you substitute “Somerset Maugham” for the proper name in the sentence, and end up with a bitter, poignant truth.