My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (36 page)

He lived too long for his own happiness and dignity. His last years were marred by his quarrel with his daughter and the ill-advised publication of the story of his marriage. In
The Summing Up
he wrote, ‘Beyond a certain point I do not intend to take the reader into my confidence.' He forgot that promise.

Alan Searle, in an interview, attributed his loss of judgement to the rejuvenation injections that he took in Switzerland. He had three of these operations. He lunched with me in Villefranche on his return from his last visit. It was a mild spring day and we sat in the open at the harbour side. He was allowed to drink only champagne and the gold-foiled bottle in its steaming bucket was an incentive to conviviality. He looked wonderfully well. He had put on weight and the extra flesh on his cheeks had absorbed his wrinkles. It was hard to believe that he was eighty-eight. His appearance seemed to provide an amulet against the approach of age. I asked him about the injections. ‘When should I start having them?'

‘Before you actually need them. In your case fairly soon.'

But I never shall. His example provides a salutary warning. They gave his body a vigour that at that age his mind could not support.

He announced, when he was working on those final memoirs, that they would not be published in his lifetime. Alan Searle said, ‘You had better get yourself buried pretty deep. A lot of people will want to dig you up and hang you.' Maugham knew they should not be published.
But eventually he consented to a serial publication, under the influence of Lord Beaverbrook, so it has been said. The temptation must have been very great. It is difficult for a writer to suppress a piece of work which he believes is good, and
Looking Back
as it appeared in
Show
—in the London
Sunday Express
it was ruthlessly compressed—was a dramatic narrative that could have figured effectively in a fictionalized Willie Ashenden biography. But as a confession purporting to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about his marriage, it clearly told only half the truth. There was no reference to the part that Gerald Haxton played in its break-up. There was no need for Maugham to take the world into his confidence, but when he once decided to put himself under the microscope, he was beholden to reveal everything that showed upon the slide.

The publication of
Looking Back
roused great indignation among many of his late wife's friends. Nobody particularly minded its being said that fifty years back in the hey-day of Edwardian gallantry a number of rich men had contributed to her support, but the allegation that she sold her jewellery and bric-à-brac and then claimed from the insurance companies was profoundly shocking; a letter of protest to the Press was signed by a group of men and women for whom he could not have failed to feel respect. It was rumoured that when he went into the bar of the Garrick Club, a number of members left the room. That was in the late autumn of 1962. He said that he would never go back to London. As far as I know, he never did.

The last eighteen months of his life were sad. He was unhappy in himself. He had his good days but he was very weak. His memory played him tricks; he had trouble with his eyes; he was very deaf. For a long time he refused to buy a hearing aid—it was too expensive, he said. When
at last he agreed to buy one, he lost patience with it and flung it into the sea. Conversation with him was very difficult. One would mention a friend of long standing. ‘Ah, yes,' he would say. ‘Now I must have met him surely, Alan, thirty or forty years ago.' Searle would reply, ‘He spent two weeks here the summer before last.'

Many stories were told about his slips of memory. At a Riviera lunch party he sat next to an old friend, Eric Dunstan. They had a long and cosy talk. Finally Maugham said, ‘I was sorry to hear of Eric Dunstan's death. I liked that man.' There was the occasion when his daughter paid him a visit after their reconciliation. He mistook her for her mother. ‘Syrie, you bitch,' he shouted. ‘You've ruined my whole life. How dare you come into my house? Get out of it at once.'

But I wonder sometimes whether, conscious of his own predicament, he did not often deliberately exploit its possibilities for his own amusement. I recall how at the end of a lunch some months before his death, when I was exhausted by ninety minutes of confusion, a look of schoolboy mischief flickered in his eyes. ‘Tell me now,' he said, ‘what happened to that fellow who wrote all those stories about Malaya. I thought him rather promising.' Perhaps more often than any of us guessed, the old jester whose sallies from the Edwardian stage sent ripples of laughter through the auditorium, was having a final fling for the sake of his own private chuckle.

At the end of
A Writer's Notebook
, Maugham allows himself to wonder what part, if any, of his work will be read a century hence. He is becomingly modest on the issue, but at the same time he is not unconscious of his unique position.
Of Human Bondage
is the most read of his books and the most generally admired. I asked him once if he considered it his best. He said he had no idea, since
he had not read it since he corrected the final proofs. It may seem odd that curiosity should not have sent him back to it, but it is typical of him that he should have resisted the impulse, knowing that he could do nothing now to better it.

In
A Writer's Notebook
he expresses doubt as to whether so long a book can hope to survive the pressure of the future. But it is, it seems to me, on other grounds, that
Of Human Bondage
is less likely to appeal to succeeding generations than many of his short stories. He has said himself that though a writer may set out to draw a picture of life, it can never be more than a partial one, but if he is fortunate he will succeed in doing something else, he will draw a complete picture of himself. And though Maugham has called
Of Human Bondage
an autobiographical novel, there is less of the essential Maugham there than in
Cakes and Ale
and in
The Moon and Sixpence
. Philip in
Of Human Bondage
may have shared many of Maugham's experiences, but he is not Maugham; he is an obscure doctor, not a successful author. A man with Maugham's temperament would never have remained obscure.

In a few years' time, inevitably, Maugham's reputation will undergo a slump. He has been so long supreme, and those who enthrone a new deity will find it necessary to increase the praise of the new god by decrying the qualities of the old. But I cannot believe that the reaction will last for long. Several of his books may go out of print for ever, but there are so few great story-tellers, and few have equalled Maugham's capacity to carry your interest on from one page to the next. You cannot put him down, not only because of the excellence of the plot but for the manner of its telling. It is not chance that led him to put an Arab charm against the evil eye upon the covers of his books. He has a deep affinity with those story-tellers
of the market-place who hold their audience with the power of their eye, the intonation of their voice, the movements of their hands. He lays his individual spell upon you, so that in retrospect you remember not only the tale itself, but the teller of it. The story is a medium, a means to an end, and future generations will, I am very sure, be as fascinated as we ourselves have been by this enigmatic man, the object of so much conjecture, a man at the same time so thwarted and so rewarded, a man who has been offered the sampling of every dish the banquet of life has for offering, yet has been denied on his own admission the very consolations that alone make life tolerable for the vast majority of human beings; a man so disillusioned, so unself-deceived, so ruthless towards himself yet to others so invariably helpful; a man who in the last analysis has always been upon the side of what was true and simple, of what the Greeks called ‘the beautiful and good'.

(Written in 1965)

During the post-war years my links with the U.S.A. grew closer and stronger. Four-fifths of my income was earned there and if you work for magazines, it is as well to be in touch with editors. Moreover I had now more friends in New York than I had in London. Most of the friends that I had made in 1920 had been ten to fifteen years older than myself. None of them had been young enough to serve in the Second War. They had gone six years in one direction, I in another. Several of them were on the brink of retirement. We had only the past in common.

In America, on the other hand, I was meeting my opposite numbers—either my contemporaries or men younger than myself, the equivalents to me of what I had been to my seniors twenty-five years before. You make friends more quickly and more easily in New York than you do in London. I was spending five or six months a year in the U.S.A.

I was happy to be doing so. There was, however, one major problem connected with my change of base. I have never been able to work in cities, and I needed in America some equivalent for the small country inns like the Easton Court Hotel, at Chagford, where I used to go periodically for a month's concentrated writing. Carl Brandt shook his head when I asked him his advice. There was, he said, no equivalent of Easton Court. There were hotels in the country and on the sea but they were only open in the season, when they would be crowded. I would be caught up into the animation of resort existence. There were
farms that let off rooms to lodgers, but there I should have to join the family at meals. I should not get the seclusion that I needed. ‘There is only one kind of place where you could go, one of those artists' colonies. Yaddo or MacDowell.'

The prospect filled me with misgiving. I could not imagine anything worse than the constant company of artists, most of whom presumably would be precious and peevish. Things would have gone wrong with them, personally or professionally, or they would not be at an artists' colony. The old ones would have chips upon their shoulders, the young ones would be superior, disdainful of anyone who wrote for magazines. I should be better off with a family on a farm.

Carl Brandt again shook his head. ‘They aren't that kind of place at all. You can tell that from the people who go to them.' He reeled off a list of MacDowell names—De Bose Heyward, Hervey Allen, Elinor Wylie, William Rose Benét, Carl Carmer, Margaret Widdemere, Thornton Wilder… the names flowed on. It was an impressive list. I let myself be persuaded. Stanley Young, who was at that time a partner in Farrar Straus, was on the board of directors. He forwarded my application for a two months' residence, and on 1 June 1951 I took the train for Boston, my heart heavy with foreboding. Today, fourteen years later, I wonder how I should have managed without the MacDowell Colony.

The Colony is in New Hampshire, a mile and a half from Peterborough, which claims to be the original of Thornton Wilder's play
Our Town
, and probably it is, since Thornton Wilder has been many times a colonist. Early in the century Edward MacDowell, the composer, bought an estate there; he was in retirement, and he built a log cabin in the woods where he could work; he went off to it every morning after breakfast, and he had his
lunch left in a basket outside his door so that the current of his thoughts should not be disturbed. He was visited by a number of his friends, in particular Edward Arlington Robinson. He had studios built for them, and the pattern of the basket outside the studio door was maintained for them. They all agreed that they had never had conditions more congenial for work. When MacDowell died, his widow, in tribute to his memory, decided to enlarge his home, with its log cabins in the woods, into a summer colony for writers, painters and composers.

It opened in 1907, very simply, with three studios; the first colonists were guests, though they contributed a nominal sum to their support. During the winter, Mrs MacDowell was an assiduous fund-raiser; she toured the country, she gave concerts, she organized committees, enrolled benefactors. The funds increased steadily; and as the balance mounted, so did the number of cabins in the woods. There were twenty-four in 1951.

Mrs MacDowell was still alive then, and actively alive. The traditions of her authority were continued. Those traditions have been amusingly described by Margaret Widdermere in
Golden Friends I Had
. Mrs MacDowell was a strict disciplinarian, and she was resolved that the cabins should not be used for any purpose but work. They were unlighted, and there was a rule that no one should go to his or her studio after dinner. A colonist, she explained, might fall and injure himself in the dark and be unable to get assistance; there was also mention of a fire risk. She herself dined with the colonists and expected them to be in attendance until they retired to bed. She did not encourage them to have local friends. The colonist who absented himself with any regularity would not receive a second invitation.

When I paid my first visit to the Colony, Mrs MacDowell was in her late eighties. She played no part in the
life of the Colony, but she was alert, behind the scenes. She lived in her own house, Hillcrest, and one by one the colonists would pay their respects to her. It was a little like the ritual that is observed by a British visitor to a British colony; he signs the book at Government House and awaits from His Excellency an invitation appropriate to his social status, the invitation coming through the A.D.C. At the Colony, on one's fourth or fifth day, one would write a little note to Mrs MacDowell, saying that one was now in residence, that one greatly appreciated the amenities and opportunities one was receiving and hoped that one would be given an occasion of expressing one's gratitude in person. A day or so later, there would be a letter from the secretary, asking one to tea at four o'clock on such and such a day.

She was small and slim and very straight. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead. She was in black; I have retained an impression of lace and taffeta and whalebone; of a head held high, above a stiff high collar. There were rings and necklaces. She had great dignity, but she was not stern, which I had expected her to be. She had had herself briefed before the interview. She knew what kinds of book I wrote. She enquired about her English friends, wondering if I knew any of them. She asked, in particular, about Charles Morgan, with whom she was in correspondence and whose wife, Hilda Vaughan, had been a colonist during the war. She asked if T. S. Eliot's reputation stood as high as ever. She was interested in ‘the new thing'. She was living in the present and in the future rather than in the past. She asked me if I was finding the conditions at the Colony conducive to steady working. I told her that I had been looking all my life for just those conditions.