My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (35 page)

Clearly she had been right and I was wrong. Perhaps, in our anxiety to avoid mistakes, to spare him irritation, we all went to the other extreme. Perhaps he missed the homage that we would have paid him so readily, so gladly, from such full hearts.

We accepted, all of us, too easily the picture that he presented of himself as ‘I' and ‘Ashenden'. The ‘I' of
The Moon and Sixpence
and of
The Trembling of a Leaf
, the Ashenden who said, ‘You fool, you've murdered the wrong man,' was aloof, detached, sardonic, watching with cynical enjoyment the follies of his fellow mortals. He had a chilling presence. A character in his story
The Pool
quotes Francis Thompson's ‘In No Strange Land'. ‘I've read “The Hound of Heaven”. It's a bit of all right,' he says. ‘It is generally thought so,' Maugham's ‘I' says. What a freezing remark. What a deterrent to anyone young and enthusiastic meeting Maugham for the first
time. Yet behind that mask, there was an affectionate, though watchful person, and it must be remembered that when he was writing
The Moon and Sixpence, The Trembling of a Leaf
, and
Ashenden
—the books that first presented his
persona
to the world—he was passing through a series of harrowing domestic crises. The ‘I' of
The Razor's Edge
is a very much mellower person than the ‘I' of
The Moon and Sixpence
. Ashenden was the screen behind which Maugham protected himself against the facile emotions of a self-deluding world. Some of us are proud enough to feel that at times we broke through that screen, to find on the other side someone whom it was not difficult to love.

Maugham was accused both as a writer and a human being of a lack of sympathy. But he had been trained as a doctor to diagnose complaints and prescribe cures. Michael Arlen's wife said, ‘He will listen quietly as though you were in a consulting room. He will ask one or two pointed questions, then he will say, “If you do this, Atalanta, that will happen. If you do that, this will happen. You must decide for yourself.” I found great comfort in that,' she said.

A few years ago, an ageing actress came to him in high indignation, because her lover had abandoned her for a younger woman. ‘I told her,' he said, ‘that she had had nine years of him, and that she should be grateful for what she had had. She thought me very heartless.'

Myself, I always felt that he was the one person in the world who could completely understand me. If I were to go to him in trouble, very little explanation would be required. Like a doctor, he would resolve my perplexities. I always had to resist an impulse to confide in him. I resisted it successfully. But the confidence that I knew I should be understood added a dimension to my deep fondness for him.

In 1936 he published his autobiography
The Summing Up;
it was a kind of leave-taking. A writer set out to create
un œuvre
, he said, and he had finished his. He compared it to a house: in his remaining years he would go on writing; he might add a gable here, a turret there, he might lay out a rose garden, but the main structure was complete. He had reached the tether of his ambition.

He seemed to have everything a man could need. He had made and was making a very great deal of money. In his early sixties, he was active on the tennis court, the golf course, in the swimming pool. He could entertain his friends under the most congenial conditions, looking out from his high terrace, across the sea, to the outline of the Estéreis. There were his annual visits to London in the autumn; in the winter there was usually a long trip, to India or the Caribbean. As far as he ever could be happy, I would say he was, in the 1930s. ‘All that should accompany old age' was waiting in the wings.

In the preface that he wrote in 1952 to a selected collection of Kipling's stories, he suggested that authors usually reach the full development of their powers between the ages of thirty-five and forty, do their best work for the next fifteen or twenty years then start to decline. He may have thought of himself as being about to enter upon this final stage during those summers of the later ‘thirties. But fate once more intervened. In the spring of 1940, the Germans broke through to the channel ports and Maugham in his sixty-sixth year had to make a snap decision. Should he stay on at the Villa Mauresque or risk a return to England in a coal boat through submarine-infested waters? There was another alternative—a phial of sleeping pills in his bathroom drawer. He never considered the possibility of letting himself be taken prisoner, but he must in that hour of indecision have contrasted the dangers and discomforts of that
journey with the amount of enjoyment life had still to offer him.

It may not have seemed to offer him so very much. A few years back he had retired from the theatre with his last three plays little more than half successes. He had exhausted his Far East material; the South of France had supplied him with one or two amusing plots,
The Three Fat Women of Antibes
in particular: but the issues in that charming playground were less vital, less dramatic. He had made a disappointing trip to the West Indies. I was to remark to him twelve years later on the eve of sailing for the Leeward Islands that although I had spent many months in the Caribbean I had only found two or three plots there. He had had, he said, a similar experience. Kipling had told him that there were plenty of plots there, ‘but that they were mine not his. I went but I found nothing.' The life of the French convicts on Devil's Island gave him two short stories, and a motif in
Christmas Holiday
. But that was all.

In 1937 he had gone to India. He had felt for many years that Kipling had covered the ground too completely for it to be worth his while to go. But Kipling's world no longer existed, and ‘I should be trying,' he said, ‘to see a different India. I found a lot. As soon as the maharajahs realized that I didn't want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poets and philosophers, they were very helpful. I planned to return there in the autumn of 1939; the war prevented that. I think I should have got a great deal from a second visit.'

As he deliberated the alternative to that phial of sleeping pills, he must have suspected that in the cancelling of that trip to India his last chance of re-creating himself had gone. In
A Personal Record
he tells us that he decided to return because he felt that one or two people in England might still need him. He left the pills in his
bathroom. Had he emptied that phial, he would have been spared some bitter hours in his later years, but he would have missed the summit of his career.

In
A Personal Record
he described the discomforts, privations, the farcical situations of that journey back. But he did not tell how a fellow passenger who had deviously acquired an extra ration, offered him a share. Maugham declined. His pride would not allow him, at such a time, to avoid the common lot.

There was nothing for him to do in England. In the First War, he had carried out a number of secret missions but this time he could see no scope for himself. He might as well go to America. Control of currency was strict. He could take no money out of England. His continental income was frozen and he arrived in New York with two dollars in his pocket, to be instructed by the British Treasury authorities in Washington that he must turn over to them all the dollars that he earned, in return for which they would make him what they considered a reasonable allowance. His publisher Nelson Doubleday built him a comfortable eight-room house on his estate in South Carolina, ‘in desolate yet oddly beautiful country', and after a visit to Hollywood he moved there in December 1941.

He relished its peace and quiet; but it was too quiet and peaceful for Gerald Haxton, who now that America was in the war, saw an opportunity of becoming something in his own right, not just ‘Willie's friend'. He took a clerical job in Washington. While Maugham, in exile, driven back upon himself set to work, once again, upon a major novel.

Through 1942 and the early months of 1943 he worked steadily on
The Razor's Edge
. Never had he written so sunnily, with such serenity. As the narrator he was not Willie Ashenden, but Willie Maugham, speaking in
propria persona
and allowing himself to be teased by a heroine who is no less charming than his own fictional favourite Rosie Gann.

While he was turning his enforced solitude to his own advantage, Haxton, without Maugham's watchful care, was working and drinking himself to death. He died in November 1944.

The serialization of
The Razor's Edge
started in 1943 and the book was published in April 1944. It was as lucky in its timing in the Second War as
Of Human Bondage
had been unlucky in the First. War-time conditions, with the blackout and the curtailment of entertainment, had created a demand for reading matter that the publishers could not satisfy. Old books went out of print, and though new books were issued in rationed quantities the standard of contemporary writing was very low. The young writers were in uniform, the elder ones were either too busy or too harassed to write well or had put aside their pens for war work. It was, in 1944, both for the general reader and the critic, an immense relief to be offered a mature, adult novel, the work of a perfected craftsman, working within his powers, with an exact knowledge of those powers and with the sense of reserves behind him.
The Razor's Edge
is told in the first person and nowhere has Maugham deployed that particular technique with more assurance. Never had he been more mellow.

The timing for the theme, too, was lucky. The plot is that of
The Fall of Edward Barnard
. (How often authors rewrite their old stories after twenty-five years from a different angle:
Theatre
is a retelling of
Mrs Craddock.
) Two friends, Americans, fall in love with the same girl. Their friendship is not ruined by her choice between them. The fiancé goes to Europe to make his fortune; but while away he loses his faith in ‘the American way of life',
refuses to return to America and stands aside while the girl marries the other man. It is the same plot as
Edward Barnard
, but the theme is different. For whereas Edward Barnard made an escapist's choice, living on in Tahiti, idly, with a pretty Polynesian, the hero of
The Razor's Edge
refused the conventional pattern out of a discovery in himself of a sense of purpose, a working towards the life of a mystic and ascetic. It was a theme appropriate to the hour. Escapism is sympathetic to a decade of disenchanted lassitude, but it is not sympathetic to an hour of strain and action. In
The Razor's Edge
Maugham offered hope; he had got past bitterness. Yet he was not throwing out his solution as a sop. He wrote as a man with faith.

The last time I lunched with him, I asked him whether, when he wrote
The Summing Up
, he suspected that he had another major book inside him. He had written then that he had completed his
œuvre
, but that
œuvre
would have been incomplete without
The Razor's Edge
. He shrugged when I asked him that. He could be exceedingly evasive when he chose. But he did not insist that he had always had
The Razor's Edge
in mind. I like to think of the episode as another working out of that ‘divinity that shapes our ends'. Fate had decided to give Maugham the opportunity of expending his talent to the full. He took it with both hands.

In theme and content,
The Razor's Edge
is one of his major books. It is a long novel with a number of secondary stories woven into the central plot. Yet ‘the direction of interest', which is his own definition of a plot, is never lost. The book was a great immediate success and it laid the the foundation for the fame he was to enjoy after the war, when he returned to France.

Fame is the proper word to use. During the 1930s he had been sensitive to the lack of recognition that he
had received from the intelligentsia. ‘When clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me.' He said more than once that he considered himself unlucky to have begun writing short stories at a time when Chekhov's stock stood so high and Maupassant's so low, and the preface to his collected edition of short stories,
Altogether
, consists in large part of a comparison between Maupassant and Chekhov. He had also mentioned that the French admire order, pattern, and form, and that his reputation stood higher in France than it did in England. More than once he had felt it necessary to defend the magazine short story. But now he had the highbrows on his side. Time had placed him in perspective.

The ten years after the war marked his apotheosis. He was the Grand Old Man of letters. He stood alone. Many of the pre-war writers were exhausted, the young ones had not yet appeared. His stories and novels were reissued in a succession of editions. His plays were revived. TV gave him a new medium. Three selections of his short stories were put upon the screen, with he himself introducing them. Most years he issued a collection of literary reminiscences or critical studies. The Villa Mauresque was still a social centre. He was accorded at last the critical acclaim that he had been denied between the wars. On his eightieth birthday in January 1954, almost every newspaper in the world paid him lengthy tribute. In the birthday honours list, he was made a C.H. (Companion of Honour), the highest award short of the O.M. (Order of Merit) that can be paid to a British man of letters. He was in good health, he was active and alert. He appeared to be thoroughly enjoying his success. In the fall of 1959 he sailed for the Far East to revisit the scenes of his old stories. Thirty years earlier indignant rubber planters in Malaya had sworn that he would never dare return. He
could never be forgiven for
The Letter
. But he was received everywhere with honour. It was the climax to an Indian summer. It is a pity that the curtain could not have fallen then.