Bitter sweet legacy of a quintessential English playwright
Maughan’s work still thrills theatre fans
In 1896, when he was 22, W. Somerset Maugham wrote in A Writer’s Notebook that few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother. His own adored mother died when he was only eight. Into his nineties Maugham, known to his friends as Willie, kept her picture by his bedside at his Villa La Mauresque on the French Riviera, where he once hosted hedonistic all-male nude bathing parties.
Having given up the practice of medicine, he became one of the wealthiest writers in the world. His novels and short stories have never been out of print and The Constant Wife, his most enduring play, is now doing great business at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, 90 years after it was first produced.
He got more than 300 fan letters a week even when he was 90, yet in his old age, living in his luxurious villa with a large staff of servants, he seemed haunted by the past, was cantankerous and incapable of enjoying life.
‘I’m one of the most horrible old men alive today. I’ve been so wicked. My whole life has been a failure. Everyone who’s got to know me has ended up hating me,’ he told his nephew, the writer Robin Maugham, who wrote an account of their relationship in the book Conversations with Willie. Robin, who was guardedly affectionate towards him, refused to write a full biography of him because he didn’t want to unearth all the unpleasant details of his uncle’s life.
Maugham blamed his mistakes on vanity and stupidity. ‘I was quarter normal and three-quarters queer, but I tried to persuade myself it was the other way round.’
It was that mistake that led him to have an affair with, and marry, Syrie Well come, the already-marrieddaughter of the philanthropist Thomas John Barnardo, in 1917. The marriage was a hopeless mismatch but a useful camouflage for his preferred sexual activities, and they divorced in 1928.
On his 80th birthday in 1954, he arrived late for a dinner, apologised and said: ‘When I was crossing the hotel lobby I was stopped by a woman. And do you know, for some reason that now escapes me, she was once my wife.’
By the time Syrie had had a child by him and he had married her, he was already besotted with the love of his life, Gerald Haxton, an American he met during World War One in France, where Maugham was working for the Red Cross.
Haxton, a promiscuous charmer, reckless gambler and heavy drinker, would collect gossip for Maugham to work into stories during their travels in southeast Asia. Maugham, with his life-long stammer, was never relaxed in company he didn’t know well.
His comments about his wickedness might have concerned his behaviour towards Syrie and his daughter Liza.
Late in life he tried to disown Liza legally, claiming she was not his daughter. He even tried to adopt his new secretary/lover Alan Searle and have him declared his sole heir. It became a celebrated courtroom saga in 1962, which Liza won. That case and an autobiography serialised in the Sunday Express, in which he vilified Syrie, lost him the respect of many acquaintances. He might also have been thinking of his brother Harry, who felt Willie had insulted him, and shortly after killed himself by drinking nitric acid.
As a child Maugham hated life in the King’s School, Canterbury. Born in Paris, where his father was a lawyer, he had been brought up to speak French, and he was mocked for his English pronunciation and his stammer. Yet he donated generously to the school, and wanted his ashes buried in the precincts of the cathedral.
Robin, himself a homosexual, who had given the fiercely agnostic Maugham a large-print Bible, found him reading it one day, pondering the quotation: ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’
‘It’s a lot of bunk, of course,’ Maugham said, ‘but it’s quite interesting all the same.’ Then he added: ‘I can’t pray for my soul. I gave up praying when I was a small boy. But you will pray for me, won’t you? I wish I could think that I would meet my darling mother again.’
‘You will pray for me, won’t you? I wish I could think that I would meet my mother again’