CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In which William Somerset Maugham makes a Delicate Grimace

William Somerset Maugham has no public personality. Although _Lady Frederick_ has been prancing about the stages of the world for nearly twenty years--dear thing--although the ‘leaves’ still ‘tremble,’ and although ‘Rain’ is apparently never going to cease showering golden drops into the pocket of its creator, William Somerset Maugham remains William Somerset Maugham. He does not, like other successful authors, suddenly develop piercing eyes, or a villa in Capri, or a pony, or a rose garden, or any of the usual accompaniments of fame.

Why there are so few tales about him, I can’t imagine, for his life abounds in the sort of ‘copy’ which would bring a flush to the cheeks of even the weariest Press agent. The story of his early struggles, for example. He told it to me on one evening full of hope, when the first adolescent strawberries had been discovered in the Café Royal, and were blushing at the last oysters, the like of which they would never see again, it being the last of April’s days.

I can see him now, one cheek pink by the light of the red lamp by his side, the other pale by the light of nature. His black eyes sparkled like sloes dipped in wine, and, had a hundred others not forestalled me, I should have said that ‘the eyelids were a little weary, as though this were the head upon which all the ends of the world were come.’ Maugham’s eyelids always are a little weary, but his mouth is invariably on the verge of a smile.

‘When I came to London,’ he said, ‘I had £3,000. I was twenty years old, and I made up my mind that I should write for a living. For ten years I wrote, but I hardly lived. Nobody would put on my plays, and though my novels were published, nobody appeared anxious to read them.

‘When I was thirty I had reached my last hundred pounds. I was mildly desperate. And then, somebody suddenly decided, in a moment of aberration, that they would produce a play of mine. The play was _Lady Frederick_.

‘I knew that if _Lady Frederick_ was a failure I should have to give up the idea of writing any more, and should spend the rest of my days in an office. I had no particular hope that it would be anything but a failure, especially as the producer came to me, a few days before the first night, and told me that there weren’t enough epigrams. “We want at least two dozen more epigrams,” he said. I blinked at him, went away to have a cup of tea, and put in the epigrams with a trembling hand, rather as though I were a new cook sticking almonds on to the top of her first cake.

‘Well, I arrived at the theatre on the first night, knowing that I should leave it either as an accomplished dramatist or an embryo bank clerk. I left it as the former. I knew, from the very beginning that the play was a success, because they began to laugh almost as soon as the curtain had risen. I think it’s a great thing to get a laugh in one’s first few lines.’

The adjective which is always used as a sort of sign-post when Maugham is under discussion is the one word in the English language which I thoroughly detest. I mean, of course, ‘cynical.’ It is the sort of word that is used by speckled young women at tennis parties, when one attempts to vary the monotony of the game by making a few gentle reflections to one’s partner on the futility of existence. I once met somebody (this is terrible, but true), who said to me the meaningless, damning words, ‘I’m an awful cynic, you know.’ That person went to prison. I understand the warders were so kind to him that he is now a raving sentimentalist.

We will, therefore, if you please, rule out this epicene adjective from our discussion of William Somerset Maugham. Let us say, rather, that he has the honesty to admit that he finds life quite meaningless, seeing it merely as a procession of grotesque, painted figures winding out of the darkness into a momentary patch of light, and then drifting into a deeper darkness still. But he does not beat his breast, in the manner of Thomas Hardy, and rend the clouds over Bryanston Square with blasphemies. He lies back, lights a cigarette, beckons to a few of the more ridiculous persons in the procession, and sets them dancing on the stage of his own imagination. And I can quite believe that the substantial royalties which result are far more satisfactory than any misty philosophies.

I am not speaking without the book. He summed it all up once by saying to me, ‘I think that life has a great deal of rhyme and absolutely no reason. I entirely fail to see that it means anything whatever. It justifies itself only by the amusement it gives one.’

The occasion on which these bold and bad words issued from his lips was, if I remember rightly, at a party where he, in the velvet smoking-jacket which he wears on all possible occasions, was lying gracefully against the back of a sofa. H. G. Wells was sitting bolt upright in an arm-chair, while I sat most appropriately on the floor. Thus I was at the feet of two masters at the same time. A sensation which, had I been an American tourist, would probably have resulted in apoplexy. H. G. Wells had admitted to a completely open mind on the whole problem of existence, which, I presume, was the cause of Maugham’s confession.

But I don’t wish to give the impression that he strikes one merely as a facile, elegant figure, skating on the surface of things, cutting arabesques on the ice. His polished agnosticism is the result of a deeper thought than the hearty optimism of many tiresome philosophers. He told me once of the lasting emotion he experienced when, in a remote cave in Java, he discovered frescoes, a thousand years old, of peasants, using almost precisely the same instruments as were used in the fields of Devonshire and Cornwall to-day.

For a moment he looked entirely serious. ‘It gave me an overwhelming realization of the changelessness of man,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t so much the fact that they were using the same sorts of spades and hoes. One saw beyond that into the essential sameness of their personalities. Nothing is ever altered.’ And then the smile came back again. ‘I can’t make out whether it depresses me or not.’

His style, in the same way, is no airy stringing of words, no naïve and unstudied grouping of language. Like his philosophy, it has emerged from many experiments. ‘I think I have at last got down to the bare bones of style,’ he said. ‘I try to say what I have to say with the greatest possible economy of language. I used to be terribly elaborate and ornate. Now I write as though I were writing telegrams. And when I have finished, I go over it all again to see what can be deleted.’

Maugham, I think, is eternally surprised that people find him shocking. It is odd, but not so odd as the fact that _The Circle_ (which was regarded in London as so innocent that hardly a single bishop fell out of his pulpit about it) was found so hideously immoral in Paris that the great majority of managers refused to take the responsibility of putting it on. I was even more amazed when he told me that _Lady Frederick_, which the Edwardians so genteelly applauded, caused a great many heads to be shaken in Germany, and apparently provided the Teutonic race with an excellent proof of the decadence of English society.

Speaking of the translations of his plays reminds me of a good story. I once asked him what sort of sensation one had when one heard one’s work played in a foreign language; if it made the author’s breast swell with pride, or if it was merely irritating.

‘I once found myself in Petrograd,’ he said, ‘and I was excessively bored. I hardly understood Russian at all, but I decided that the only way in which to cheer myself up was to go to the theatre. I went to the theatre, choosing the largest and cleanest-looking one I could find, and sat down to watch the play.

‘It was a comedy, and, as far as one could judge, the audience seemed to find it amusing. It did not amuse me in the least, because I couldn’t understand a single word of what it was about. But towards the end of the first Act it seemed to me that there was something vaguely familiar about the situation on the stage. I had a sense of listening to something I had heard in a dream. I looked down at the programme to discover who had written it. The author’s name was Mum. And the name of the play was _Jack Straw_.’

It was at Wembley, strangely enough, that he made the most provocative statement which I have ever heard him make--the sort of statement which sticks uncomfortably in one’s mind, like a burr. It was really my fault, because Wembley, as usual, had depressed me to distraction. To wander through halls of bottled gooseberries, called ‘Canada,’ and bottled peaches, called ‘Australia’; to drag one’s feet past hideous engines, labelled ‘Industry,’ and to listen to the indecent shrieks of young women on toboggans, called ‘Amusement,’ strikes me as one of the grimmest jests which life has to offer.

There was only one thing to do in this sort of environment, and that was, to talk about love. To talk at it, rather. I began to mutter platitudes about love being a condition impossible of attainment, an alchemy that had never been discovered. That no two people ever loved each other with an equal fire. That the only possible love implied the most rigid and exacting fidelity, in thought as well as in deed. And that nobody (except bores and half-wits) ever achieved this condition.

Then suddenly Maugham cut through these gloomy clouds with one shattering sentence. ‘_I don’t see why one shouldn’t love people flippantly_,’ he said.

‘Flippantly!’

There danced before my eyes the ghosts of light ladies on broad terraces, terraces which only knew the moonlight and were always mysterious with the heady scent of dark roses. Flippantly! So many difficulties solved, so many problems blown, like a puff of smoke, over the thick forest in which I was wandering. If only one could recapture the age in which those remarks really expressed a mode of life. Here, in the British Empire Exhibition, the idea of ‘loving anybody flippantly’ sounded almost like treason, as though one had stolen into the Australian pavilion by night, and had extracted one of the bottled gooseberries to see if they really tasted as nasty as they looked.

And yet, I believe it is the right attitude.--No, I don’t. I believe it is the most comfortable attitude. It is neither right nor wrong, it is simply a matter of temperament. If, however, there were a little more flippancy in the world, there might be a few less wars. Swords cannot be unsheathed flippantly. Poison cannot be made with an airy gesture. Notes cannot be flicked across the Channel from one ambassador to another, like blowing kisses. If they could, they might not cause so much trouble.

That is, I think, the tremendously important function that Maugham plays in the world to-day. He says to the world, ‘I know no more about things than you. I have not the faintest idea where I came from, whither I am going. Yes, I quite agree that we are in a very distressful condition. But, just a moment ...’ (and here he takes one by the arm), ‘if you look over in that direction, you will see a man with an extraordinarily amusing face. He is talking to a woman who is pretending to be in love with him. How tragic? Not in the least. If you only realized, it is exceptionally amusing. Now listen, and I will tell you a story....’