Maugham: a thread of sympathy for the faith
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith on a biography that reads like that of a stockbroker, not a literary giant

23 October 2009

Somerset Maugham: His lack of personal fulfilment was the source of his literary greatness

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
By Selina Hastings
John Murray, £25

William Somerset Maugham has been the object of a slew of books since his death in 1965. Some of these have been reminiscences by friends, such as Garson Kanin's Remembering Mr Maugham (1966) or the memoir of his nephew Robin Maugham, Somerset and all the Maughams, which came out in the same year. There have been two substantial biographies: Anthony Curtis's Somerset Maugham (1987) and Robert Calder's Willie: The Life of Somerset Maugham (1989). If this were not enough, Maugham himself produced two confessional volumes, The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's Notebook (1949), as well as Looking Back (serialised in the Sunday Express, 1962).

This last is not something that any admirer of Maugham will want to read, being his venomous attack on his late ex-wife, in which he denied his daughter's paternity.

Selina Hastings lays the blame for this family rupture on Alan Searle, Maugham's final secretary-companion, telling us that Searle loathed Liza Maugham and her husband and children, and engineered the breach between father and daughter.

At least one earlier biographer has tried to exculpate Searle, but even though Hastings has had access to the full Maugham archive, she has not really been able to add anything to our understanding of this episode, to which she devotes only a brief final chapter.

Does it matter? Not really. The history of Maugham's two major relationships is well known.

Maugham first met Gerald Haxton in 1914, in Flanders, when they were both involved in Red Cross work. By that time Maugham, at the age of 40, was already a phenomenal success as a playwright. At their first meeting Maugham asked Haxton what he wanted. "From you, or from life?" asked Gerald. They were together until Haxton's death 30 years later, at the age of 52. Maugham's money had made Gerald's career of luxurious self-destruction possible, and on his deathbed he cursed his protector for ruining his life.

Maugham was inconsolable for some months, but by the next year Searle, who he had first met in 1928, had taken Haxton's place as secretary, despite the fact that he was no longer the "Bronzino boy" who had first captured the writer's notice, but rather a middle-aged Cockney with an expanding waistline. But Maugham's life in the Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat, waited on by Haxton and Searle, and regularly entertained by American sailors picked up on the waterfront -none of this is particularly interesting, except perhaps as a morality tale of how money can't buy happiness. Likewise the parties with Sybil Colefax and Emerald Cunard, the friendships with H G Wells and Winston Churchill, and the addiction to bridge, make for dull reading.

Early on Hastings quotes A Writer's Notebook: "One places all one's love, all one's faculty of expansion on one person, making, as it were, a final effort to join one's soul to his... But little by little, one finds that it is all impossible, and however ardently one loves him, however intimately one is connected with him, he is always a stranger..."

Hastings repeats that oft-made assertion that Maugham never found a love that was fully requited, while at the same time making nonsense of it by cataloguing a lengthy series of sexual infatuations which were all too requited. She misses the truth that Maugham describes. It was not the partners that were lacking - it was the experience of love itself. Maugham is interesting, not because of what happened up at the villa, but because, almost alone of English writers, he is an existentialist.

Again, Hastings repeats the now hallowed dictum that Maugham was a first-rate craftsman. This is simply not true. His best novel, Of Human Bondage, is far too long, and, as even she admits, fails to find proper resolution at the end. But this often plotless and episodic ramble has no parallel in English literature as a work about enslavement and autonomy.

The same is true for Cakes and Ale, a rather awkwardly constructed tale told at one remove, but one that gives us the best portrait of amorality in English. Rosie is a driven character, and she shows us that the forces that master us are far beyond the rules of morality or even the law of God.

Hastings pays little attention to Maugham's interest in religion, another important facet of his existential bent. Maugham himself did not believe, saying (though it is not mentioned here) that one could not believe in God if one had seen a child die of meningitis; yet some of the most convincing characters in his work are religious believers.

The nuns in The Painted Veil represent the reality that lies beyond the reach of the heroine, even if Hastings, in a spectacular misjudgment, says "the reader can quickly have enough of the smiling nuns and their pious, aristocratic mother superior". Again, Maugham writes with sincere admiration of the Italian missionary he met in the Shan States, in his travel book The Gentleman in the Parlour. Above all, Elliott Templeton, the ridiculous but amiable American who lives on the Riviera in The Razor's Edge, and who is the only more or less gay character in his fiction, is a devout Catholic.

Contrast this with the persecutor of the prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain, who is a Protestant missionary, along with the unloving vicar in Of Human Bondage, and one begins to see a thread of sympathy for Catholicism in the work of Somerset Maugham.

His last novel, Catalina (which Hastings, like others, dismisses as a feeble work), a historical novel set in the Golden Age of Spain, gives us a remarkable and often amusing picture of Catholicism which will raise a smile even today.

But in the end it is the limits of fiction that we sense when reading Somerset Maugham. There remains in all his work the presence of what lies beyond human knowledge, particularly in his last great novel, The Razor's Edge.

This deals with the search for happiness, something that eluded Maugham, Haxton and Searle. But Maugham's lack of fulfilment, reflected in so many of his characters, may be the source of his greatness.

The present volume announces itself as "the definitive biography of one of the 20th century's greatest writers", but it reads like that of a successful stockbroker; there are some amusing episodes, as there would be in any high-society life, but nothing that tells us why Somerset Maugham, outwardly so middlebrow, manages so well to describe the terror of human existence.